Chapter 24
Twenty-Four
ADDIE
Rock climbing was evil.
I mean, it was fine, and all things considered, I had a nice time.
But also, it was evil.
Because once Eli got over his initial hesitance, he wasn’t half-bad at the climbing thing, and that did nothing to douse the flames that last night had set alight.
Black fabric stuck to his back and showcased the muscles that lived there as he climbed.
The tense corded muscle of his forearms as he held onto the wall.
The frankly oddly arousing discovery that he had a lot of prominent veins in his hands that really made themselves known the more he worked his way up walls.
It was enough for me to declare rock climbing evil.
But I couldn’t think about how evil rock climbing was, and how it made me want to climb something else, because Eli and I were still out in public at a homeware shop that we hoped was going to fix our flat.
“Do you have a favourite Cluedo character?” I asked as we walked down an aisle, silently judging all the cushions that we passed. There wasn’t anything wrong with them, but they didn’t feel right.
The shopping wasn’t proving a good enough distraction from the whirlwind of inappropriate thoughts, so I pivoted to trying to find something about him that was so incredibly off-putting, it would put the world to rights again.
The fact that he was my former enemy wasn’t enough to banish him from my mind, so random questions were bound to bring something up.
“Professor Plum. Not that I’ve played Cluedo in years. You?” Eli answered without hesitation.
Strong start. Not.
“Same. Insufferable know-it-all, you know?”
He came to a stop in front of some acceptable cushions. “You’re not insufferable about it. Not anymore, at least.”
I had no idea what to say to that.
I grabbed two dark-patterned cushions and threw them into the still-empty trolley that I was pushing.
“Just wait until the school year starts. If you could be any supernatural being, what would you be?”
There was a right answer.
“Werewolf seems the least stressful. Although I guess it would depend on what lore you’re abiding by. Warlock might be the best, actually. Yes, you would probably have to conceal it, but you can still see the sun and then also not be at the whims of the moon.”
Annoyingly, magic was the right answer. At least to me. This plan was going swimmingly…
“You can only watch one film for the rest of your life, what is it?” he asked as he held up an orange blanket. The colour was hideous, but I reached out to touch it anyway.
It was the softest thing I’d touched in a while. My appreciation must have been obvious on my face because Eli chucked it into the trolley, and we moved on to look at rugs.
“Chicago. Very few movie musicals have got it as right as that one,” I answered.
He rolled his lips together before releasing his lower lip with a pop.
For fuck’s sake.
“That’s a good choice,” he said slowly.
I shook my shoulders out. “The best book-to-movie adaptation is…?”
There wasn’t a glaringly obvious answer to the question that would put me off, but I would know it if I heard it, and I mentally crossed my fingers that he would say one that would raise alarm bells.
“The entire Hunger Games trilogy.”
That’s a bust.
“Fair. I would go with Wicked.”
Not technically my actual answer, but maybe his response to that would give me an in. And by in, I meant an out. A release from the ridiculous crush was something that I desperately needed.
Eli came to a stop and looked at me. “That’s…you know what? You can have that.” He carried on walking. I carried on trying.
“Greatest song of all time?”
“‘I Will Always Love You’, Whitney’s version.”
“Wrong, it’s ‘Never Too Much’ by Luther. But your choice is acceptable.”
“Always have to skateboard everywhere or travel everywhere by scooter?”
I paused. “A push scooter?”
Eli nodded.
“Skateboard. Less judgement. And less likely to favour one side and lead to an imbalance.”
A soft breath of a laugh escaped him. My mind ran through some of the ways I could maybe get him to make that noise in a different context. “Of course, you thought about it in those terms.”
“Do you think we should have sex?”
I brought the trolley to a stop. My feet rooted to the ground. Embarrassment flooded my veins, and a prickly heat followed. I hadn’t meant to say it out loud. But the pressure of not addressing the elephant in the room meant that it was right there at the front of my mind.
And now it was out there, and I couldn’t take it back.
“I didn’t—”
“Yes,” he cut me off. My mouth closed. My brows furrowed.
“What?”
“I think we should have sex. Just once. It will get it out of our systems, and then we can go back to how it was before the menu tasting. Friends. Flatmates. Whatever. No more weird, sexually-charged hallway rendezvous because the mystery will be unveiled, and therefore it becomes boring.”
I nodded, running my fingers over a white rug that looked nice, but I knew the moment it was on the floor, I’d spill something that would stain it.
“Just once,” I said.
Eli reached behind the white rug I was fondling and pulled out a dark red one that matched one of the colours in the cushions already in our trolley.
He threw it in.
“Just once.”