Julian #2
Luca gives him a look and then shrugs, clearly deciding it’s not worth the effort right now. He pulls on his shirt and starts stuffing his practice gear into his bag. “I’m heading out. Sage wants food from that café by Greek Row, and apparently, I’m a delivery service now.”
“You say that like you don’t love it,” I tell him.
“I do love it,” he says, disgustingly honest. “That’s beside the point.”
He leaves a minute later with a muttered, “Don’t be late for film tomorrow, assholes.”
And then it’s just me and Eli and the low hum of the mostly empty locker room.
That should feel normal too.
It doesn’t.
I go back to toweling off because standing there watching him would definitely cross a line, but all my attention is tuned toward him anyway. I can hear the rustle of fabric, the metallic click of his locker, and the too-careful way he’s moving now.
When I speak again, I keep my tone light on purpose. “You okay?”
He startles a little. Actually startles. “Yeah,” he says, and his voice does not sound like yes. “Why?”
I shrug one shoulder and hang the towel around my neck. “You’re acting weird.”
He laughs, but there’s no ease in it. “That’s vague as hell.”
“You want specifics?”
“No,” he says immediately.
That almost makes me smile because it’s honest in a way he probably didn’t mean to be. “Thought so.”
He finally looks at me then, full on for a second, and whatever I was expecting, it isn’t this. There’s too much in his expression. Not anger or embarrassment, exactly. Something hotter and more alive than I know what to do with.
Then his eyes drop again. I follow the movement without meaning to, and this time I catch it clearly. His gaze slides over my chest, lower for one dangerous second to my stomach and the towel hanging loose at my hips, and there is absolutely nothing neutral about it.
No. No fucking way.
He looks back up so fast it’s almost violent, and whatever’s on his face now is worse because it confirms he knows I saw.
His mouth parts slightly, then shuts. The flush in his neck spreads higher.
For one suspended beat, we just stare at each other across the locker room. Both too still., Both too aware.
I have to be seeing things. That is the only sane explanation.
I’m overtired and projecting. Eli is my best friend.
He is the straightest, most internally conflicted, catastrophically Catholic-adjacent man I’ve ever met.
He is also the guy who pushed me away for a woman and only recently stopped treating any emotional intimacy between us like a live grenade.
There is no universe where he was just looking at me with heat in the middle of a football locker room.
And yet, that’s exactly what it looked like.
“Eli,” I say, and my voice comes out lower than I intended.
He grabs the rest of his clothes in one fast motion and starts shoving them into his bag. “I should get home,” he mutters. “Mrs. Alvarez said Mila was fussy after her second nap, and I told her I’d be back as soon as I could.”
The words trip over each other enough to be obvious. Even he seems to know it because he winces slightly halfway through the sentence.
I don’t stop him. I don’t know if I even could without blowing whatever this is wide open in a way neither of us can survive right now. I just stand there in a towel, still damp, still staring, and say the only thing that feels possible.
“Okay.”
He nods too many times, slings the bag over one shoulder, and reaches for his keys. His movements are all wrong now. Jerky and careful in the wrong places—he’s one second from bolting and knows it.
Eli’s halfway turned away when I catch myself and say, “Hey,” and he freezes.
I don’t know why I say it. I don’t have a plan past the word. I just know I can’t let him leave with whatever the hell that was hanging between us.
He turns back around slowly, his face calmer now by sheer force, but not enough to fool me.
His eyes won’t stay on mine for more than a second, and his mouth is set too tightly.
He looks guilty. Mortified, maybe. And underneath all of that, still a little heated in a way that makes my pulse kick stupidly hard again.
I have no idea what to do with it. So, I do what I always do when I’m scared about having seen something too precious to name: I back off.
“You need me to grab anything before I come home?” I ask.
Relief flashes across his face so quickly it almost hurts me. “Uh—no,” he says, voice still a little rough.
Then he’s gone.
The locker room door swings shut behind him, and I’m left standing there alone with my towel hanging loose and my heart beating far too rapidly for a conversation that technically never even happened.
I stare at the place where he was and try to make sense of what I saw.
Maybe I imagined it, and he was spacing out, so my ego—starved and pathetic—made it into something else.
Maybe all of this is a trick of bad timing and my own stupid hope.
That would be the safest answer. The smartest one.
The one least likely to wreck what little balance we’ve clawed back together between us.
The problem is that I know what it looked like and what it did to me when I caught him looking.
I lean back against the locker and drag both hands through my damp hair, breathing out slowly through my nose. The air in the room feels charged now and won’t settle no matter how hard I tell it to.
I think about the past few weeks. The way Eli’s been around me lately.
The subtle weirdness. The almost-questions on his face.
The day at the pediatrician when he didn’t correct the doctor for calling me his partner.
I chalked it up to stress and now, suddenly, revisit each moment with a lot more interest.
That does not help. If anything, it makes everything more dangerous.
Because if I’m right, if what I saw just now was real, then this thing I’ve spent years burying under friendship and silence and self-loathing just shifted in a way I don’t know how to survive.
And if I’m wrong, if I read heat into a glance because I wanted to, then I’m exactly the bastard I’ve always been afraid of becoming—someone who mistakes kindness and closeness for invitation because wanting has made him stupid.
Either way, I’m fucked.
I should let it go—that’s the smart move. But my touch-starved brain won’t let me.