11. 11 #2
I shook my head. “No, I’ve got a lot of information I need to go through.”
“Can I come in?” He asked. He stared at me without blinking.
I stared back at him, perplexed. “No, I’m sorry, I really need to get to work.”
“Your boyfriend would not like that, would he?” He asked.
Maybe Elias was right. “Elias, my escort, I think would be pretty confused as to why you are in our room. I don’t think he would necessarily dislike it, but he’d have questions. Why do you want to come into our room?”
His eyebrows pulled together. “You’re sharing a room?”
“Doesn’t everyone?” I asked. “Isn’t space limited here?”
“I have my own room.” He gave me a small smile. “I want to discuss what we are working on.”
“Why don’t we speak tomorrow? I will be back in the lab in the morning.”
“If you change your mind, come find me.”
Weird.
Misha stood there, waiting for me to either follow him or open my door. I opened the door a crack, sliding in and locking it behind me. Elias was in the bed, laughing into a pillow.
“Were you going to let him abduct me?” I asked, my voice hushed.
Elias rolled out of bed, stumbling as he stood up.
I walked to him and he picked me up as I got close, surprising me.
Elias lost his footing, backing up into the wall to catch his balance.
He kissed me sloppily, and I gently pushed away from him to get my feet on the ground. I could taste the liquor on his breath.
“I told you he was checking you out.” Elias’s words were slurred. Heavily. I glanced around the room, looking for what could’ve gotten Elias this drunk. A bottle of vodka was more than half empty, discarded to the side of the bed.
I stepped back, retrieving the bottle from the floor. “Did you drink all of this?” I asked, holding up the bottle for him to see.
He giggled. “That’s not mine.”
“Where did you even find this?”
“The pantry.” He shrugged, not bothered by his petty theft. He walked to me, taking the bottle from my hands and setting it down. “I missed you.”
Leaning a little too much of his weight onto me, he hugged me, resting his head on mine.
“I missed you, too,” I said, patting his back.
Unable to stay still, his hands roamed my back, moving up and down, sliding along the curves of my waist. “I’m sorry for being mean today.”
“I don’t think that you were mean.” He had been mean on this trip, and it wasn’t today.
“I didn’t want to talk about Julia but you deserve to know. Anything you want to know about her, you can ask me,” he said. “Go ahead, I’ll tell you.”
“We don’t need to talk about her right now, it doesn’t matter.
” Sober Elias would not be happy about this conversation, no matter how freely drunk Elias was giving the information.
I could take advantage of him like this, ask him whatever I liked, but I respected him.
It would be invasive. Beyond gathering enough information to know if he was going to up and leave one day, I had no business asking about his previous relationships, and I needed to remind myself of that.
His hands crept around to my front, and he worked them under my shirt, touching the soft skin of my waist. “I don’t care that other men look at you. Everyone should. I like looking at you, too.”
“I think I got a good idea of what you like from the photos I saw today.”
Elias laughed, but I knew if I’d said something like that when he was sober he’d be disappointed, a little shut down.
He’d retreat to the sad corner of his mind where he stored his guilt.
“I’m a man. We are visual creatures.” A hand abandoned its post under my clothing, and dragged down to the gun on my hip.
Elias’s finger stroked the grip. “Wearing this makes you look badass,” he said, moving to kiss my neck. “It’s sexy.”
“Is that why you want me to carry it?” There wasn’t a reason to entertain him like this, but I doubted he’d let me read in peace. Better to tire him out. He was more fun drunk than I was.
“No, I want you to be safe. How you look is just a bonus.”
“If you say so.”
“Are you sure you don’t have questions?” He asked. “You don’t want to know if I made her come over and over again?”
“That’s not something I’ve given much thought to.” It was a given a blush creeped onto my cheeks. “I prefer not to think about that, like at all.”
“I didn’t.”
“Is that a special privilege reserved for me, then?” I asked. I knew that I needed to stop encouraging him, but I obliged regardless.
“Mhm,” he hummed against my shoulder. “I didn’t even make her come twice.”
“That’s surprising. I find you to be quite generous.” Generous was an understatement. He was selfless, entirely devoted to me enjoying myself.
“Do you wanna know why?” His hands roamed to my belt.
I tried to tell myself it didn’t matter, but my lips betrayed me. “Sure, why?”
He popped the button on my pants. “Because I didn’t love her like I love you.”
Elias was drunk, beyond drunk. Wasted. Sloshed.
Smashed. He wasn’t himself, and yet my heart pounded out of my chest at his admission.
This was the least romantic moment of my life, but the one I had been waiting for.
I was overjoyed, but even more so, I was disappointed. This wasn’t him saying it, not really.
I had stilled at his outburst, giving him enough time to pull my zipper down.
I was shocked back to my senses. “No,” I said, zipping my pants back up.
Elias pulled back. “But this is what I’m good at.” He looked so hurt, let down in a way that had nothing to do with me saying no to his advances. He was sullen in a way that was much deeper, like I was saying no to him, all of him.
“You’re good at a lot of things, Eli.” He was good at everything that mattered, and then some.
“This is what I’m best at.”
“I just don’t want to right now, okay?” It wasn’t just that he was drunk, it was that it was so upsetting to see him this way. He was desperate and sad and lonely, and it hurt me.
He backed up, stumbling, and ultimately collapsed into the bunk.
I removed the gun from my hip, setting it near our luggage on the opposite side of the room.
Not wanting to encourage him, I sat on the floor next to the bed and rested my elbows on the mattress, propping up my chin.
Enough space to keep his hands to himself, but not so far that I sent him into a spiral. I knew how I acted when I was rejected.
“You don’t have to love me back, it doesn’t bother me,” he blurted out. “I like making you feel good.”
“I don’t think sober you is going to appreciate this conversation,” I said, ignoring his implication.
“Fuck that guy, he’s a prick.”
“I’m pretty fond of him.”
“He’s fond of you, too.”
Elias shifted on the bed and his face scrunched up in discomfort. He reached under himself to pull out my cell phone and placed it further away on the bed.
“Why’d you have my phone in bed with you?” I asked. I’d left it abandoned near our luggage, turned off.
“I was looking at your pictures.” He sighed. “You’re so pretty.”
I laughed. “You were looking through my camera roll?”
He nodded, and I could tell he regretted moving his head like that. “I sent a bunch to my phone.”
“You used the special government satellite-internet to text yourself photos?” I couldn’t help but smile.
Drunk Elias might have made me a little sad, but he was still sweet.
All those pictures of him and Julia today had him thinking about us, how we wanted to replace those photos with memories we had made.
He wanted to forget. That wasn’t a new feeling for him.
“What are they gonna do? Fire me?”
I patted his hand in response, unsure what to say. I couldn’t imagine a scenario where they fired him.
“There weren’t very many of us together,” he pouted.
“I don’t take a lot of photos, I’m sorry. We can take more.”
“Naked ones, too.” He was flat on his back, wrapped up in the old blankets. He held my hand, playing with the fingers on my left. He turned his head to look at me and gave me a devilish grin. “I’ll get you another ring for this hand, if you want. Something shiny.”
My mouth fell open. “You are so drunk. I’ve never seen you like this.”
He sighed. “It’s nice to not care about anything.” He drew out the last word, waving his hand in the air. “Except you. I love the fuck out of you.”
Another laugh slipped out, and I nearly choked on it. “I think you should go to sleep. You’re going to need twelve hours to sleep this off. Maybe an entire day.”