5. Elias
FIVE
Elias
“One, two, three,” I scream at Mia.
“Eyes on me,” she yells back.
“Three, two, one!”
“Down and done!”
We down our shots. We’re both pretty tipsy at a bar in our neighborhood. Our neighborhood is filled with young twenty- and thirty-somethings, and Mia dragged me here to get our first round of ‘practice’ in.
Not before spending an hour at our apartment grilling me on what kind of clothes guys found attractive.
I mean, unclothed is the correct answer, but I wasn’t about to say that to Mia.
“I don’t know,” I told her, one hundred times. “Something tight,” I finally relented. “Or something that shows a little skin. But not too much. Trashy is bad.” I pause. “Trashy is bad, sometimes ,” I amend.
After an hour, she finally decided that it was all a waste of time and dragged me out sans make up, in the clothes she’d been wearing all day. And now here we are.
Honestly, whatever, at this point. Free drinks for me, and maybe if she asks me for a demo, then I’ll end up taking someone home. Sounds grand.
Mia’s blue eyes have spent the last hour or so flitting around the bar, but she hasn’t done anything about it. I can tell she’s nervous. “How are your sessions at the gym going?”
“Fine.”
She frowns, now focusing on me. “That’s it? Fine?”
I shrug. “Nothing new to report.”
“It’s going well, though?”
“As well as it could be.”
She looks at me for a second with her scary X-ray eyes. I shift in my chair. “You know the most annoying thing about you?”
“That I leave toothpaste splashes on the bathroom mirror? That I used to put dead bugs in your shoes? That?—”
“That you sell yourself short,” she cuts in. “You’re, like, annoyingly competent at existing.”
I narrow my eyes at her. “I think there’s a compliment buried in there?—”
She waves me away. “Your gym is huge. You’re a real life small business owner and didn’t go to business school. You also have a full time teaching job. Everyone very annoyingly loves you. Family, friends, coworkers, clients. Women. Blondes. It’s annoying. Everything about it is annoying.”
Despite the number of “annoying”s she’s dropped, I find myself grinning, thrilled to be taken seriously for once. “Thanks, Meems.”
“Whatever.”
We both sip on our drinks. After a minute, her leg starts bouncing. It seems she’s set her eyes on a target. I follow her eyes across the room.
I frown. “Him?” I ask. “Really?” I feel prickly, have felt this way since getting here.
She sighs dreamily. “Fuck. Yes,” she all but moans.
I take another gulp of my beer. The guy looks like a douchebag. Like another finance bro. But whatever.
“So go get him,” I tell her.
She swallows, frozen to her seat. I don’t push.
“How do you do it?” she asks eventually.
“Do what?”
“I don’t know, be all you . When you’re out. Besides being hot and irresistible.”
This makes me feel marginally better. “I just am pretty hot and irresistible,” I grin down at her, inexplicably staring at her exposed collarbone.
She rolls her eyes. “What are you attracted to when you go out? Besides blondes,” she adds on. “How do I do it? What do I do?”
I scrub my face, feeling weird answering but knowing, after earlier, that she won’t relent. I may as well give in. “I don’t know, Mia… I like it when… or what I try to do…” I sigh again. This is so fucking weird . “Confidence,” I manage. “And even if you don’t feel it, fake it. Chin up. Shoulders back. Tits out. Look at him like you want to eat him alive, but also play it cool.”
“Those sound like opposite things,” she retorts.
“There’s a balance you have to strike. But that’s where you should start.”
She nods, mulling it over. “Okay,” she says firmly. “I’m going.” She takes a huge sip of her drink, then sets it on the bar. Her chin goes up. Her shoulders go back. Her tits… go out.
I cough.
She strides over. My dick twitches. Chill, dude. I notice her ass again, and I’m impressed at her dedication and the confidence she’s clearly faking. That is, until she detours, maybe two feet before reaching the guy, and makes a beeline for the bathroom instead.
I bark out a laugh. A memory pops into my head, a time in high school, when she did almost the same thing. Our parents made us all do Band (Leo and I stuck to percussion) and Mia had a flute solo for one of our performances. She marched right up to the front of the stage, turned on her heel, and walked off stage left. I followed her and gave her the pep talk of all pep talks, forcing her to get back out there. She did it. It was terrible, but she did it. I chuckle to myself, feeling a little lighter.
“Hey,” a new voice says, somewhere to my left.
I look over to see a beautiful woman filling in the spot Mia just vacated. Long, silky, black hair, dark eyes. Nice.
I turn my whole body around, bracketing hers with my legs. She’s wearing a tiny, stretchy dress that barely contains her gorgeous body. This is one of those times when trashy is, in fact, not bad. In fact, it’s?—
Some drunk asshole trips into the two of us. Her drink gets knocked off the bar.
I catch it.
She smiles, eyebrows high. “Fast hands.”
“Thanks,” I grin at her. “They go slow, too.”
She likes that. A lot. She takes a step closer.
The bar area is weird in that it’s a big oval in the center of the room. As this girl opens her mouth to say something, across the way, on the other side of the bar, I see Mia. She’s watching us, watching me, with a strange look on her face.
It’s like I hear a record scratch in my brain.
Five minutes later, I’m walking out of the bar. Not with the hot woman from the bar, though. Because I found that she paled in comparison to the woman currently next to me.
“But I don’t wanna go home,” Mia is grumbling.
I don’t answer.
I barge into Mia’s room at eight the next morning.
“Morning, sunshine! We’re going to breakfast. A fancy one in the city. Leo’s paying. Let’s go.” I tell her sleeping corpse.
She’s lying on her stomach, face mashed into the pillow, her giant fluffy comforter draped over her body. I rip all the covers off her bed, something I used to do all the time when we were kids, but this time, I am pleasantly surprised by the sight of Mia’s slender, naked, very adult body, clad only in a pair of sensible cotton panties.
I only have a half second to take it all in, so I start from the top, at her shoulders, moving down the elegantly pale curve of her back, the long lines of her legs. To her gorgeous, lush ass covered by those panties. To the two dimples on top. I have the sudden and distinct urge to press my thumbs into them. What?
She is in the middle of screaming when I reluctantly throw the comforter back over her body.
“You were right,” I mumble. “We should probably revisit our Privacy Policy.”
“WE?!” Mia’s head pokes out from under the comforter pile, outraged. “I’ve never just barged into your room, ever, especially after Bathroom Incident?—”
“For someone who never wants to discuss Bathroom Incident, you sure like to bring it up a lot,” I tell her cheerfully. I walk back out the door, not thinking about how badly I want the image of her ass to be burned into my retinas. Trying like hell to stop thinking of Leo’s little sister and one of my oldest friends and my roommate as a sexual being. “I made coffee. We’re leaving in like forty-five minutes. Look nice. It’s one of those nice places downtown.”
“I can’t go. I told you I have to work today,” she says, voice muffled by the comforter that’s been piled over her head.
“Don’t you dare go back to sleep. Leo wants to see you, and you can be back home by eleven. Plenty of time to work. I have to be back, too—I have some sessions later.”
“Why do we have to go into the city?” she moans.
“Because then Leo will pay,” I grin.
Sitting at the same tiny table with Leo to my right and Mia to my left really puts things into perspective.
Now, with our knees all mashed together under the table, I am feeling the distinct impression that helping Mia get laid, seeing Mia in various states of undress in her bed, and maybe napping together under the most romantic fucking weeping willow tree in Brooklyn, are all events and activities that may have crossed some sort of line.
“This isn’t nice,” Mia scoffs at us. “This is just trendy and expensive. They just have, like, regular-degular eggs and avocado toast for thirty dollars a pop.”
“You pay for the ambiance, too, Meems,” Leo tells her.
“What ambiance? To feel like a swamp troll amidst the sea of supermodels here?”
I personally think she is the most gorgeous person sitting in this room, but I decide to keep that tidbit of information to myself.
“Well, I think it’s amazing,” I announce.
“That’s because half this room qualifies for the Blonde Brigade,” she shoots at me.
I frown.
Leo laughs. “She’s right, Elias.”
“Whatever,” I grumble.
“What’s up with you, Mia?” Leo asks his sister. “I didn’t get to talk to you much at the bar. How’s school?”
She thinks for a moment. I knee her knee under the table. Don’t talk about it.
“School is fine so far. Our principal isn’t great?—”
“She might actually be the worst,” I cut in.
“—but my kids this year are really great.” Her entire being brightens up. “There’s Sean, who’s a teddy bear, and Kyle, who’s a big lovable weirdo?—”
“Isn’t that the kid who always has his hands down his pants?” I cut in.
“Yes, but we’re working on it,” she says happily. “There’s Amaya, who’s really fucking smart, and?—”
“Okay,” Leo laughs, “you don’t need to go through your entire roster.”
“She would, if you let her,” I chime in. Mia beams at me, and I feel a little piece of me die.
“Elias tells me you two are heading off to New Orleans this week.”
She nods. “Yeah. I’m going to do a bunch of learning ,” she says, giving me the most unsubtle wink in the universe.
Leo frowns. “What was that for?”
I freeze.
“What was what for?” Mia blinks at her brother.
“The wink you just gave Elias,” he says.
“What wink I just gave Elias?”
“Meems.”
“Yes?”
Leo turns to me, and I start shoveling eggs into my mouth. “What’s going on?” he asks me.
“Elias is helping me get laid,” Mia decides to chime in from my left.
Fortunately, an egg takes that opportunity to get caught at the top of my windpipe, so I am unable to answer when Leo roars, “What?!”
“Don’t get mad at him, Leo. I was the one who asked him to help me,” Mia says, in between my hacking coughs. She looks at me. “Do I need to give you the Heimlich?”
I shake my head.
Leo has completely ignored Mia and is still staring at me, waiting for me to stop coughing. I throw in a few more to delay the inevitable.
Mia goes on. “He’s helping me snag Adam, too.”
Finally, Leo looks at Mia. “Who’s Adam?”
“Adam’s the guy from the Wildwood bar.”
“The soft, emo looking one?” Leo asks incredulously.
“That’s what I said,” I rasp.
Undeterred, Mia nods. “That’s him. I need Elias to help me flirt with him and maybe date him and eventually fuck him. And then lots of other people, after that.”
“Well, that’s not going to work,” Leo shoots back. “For several reasons. The first? He’s not helping you because that’s fucking weird.”
“Told you,” I mutter to Mia.
“Secondly, I don’t think Elias has ever been on a date his entire life, so he’d be no help.”
“I’ve been on dates—” I say, at the same time that Mia says, “Well, he could help with the fucking part—”, and then Leo loses his mind. Unfairly, I have to say, at me.
“You will not, under any circumstances, help Mia with any of this,” he growls at me, in a dangerous tone that I’ve only heard him take a handful of times in my life. One of those times being towards Mia’s ex-boyfriend, right before we beat the shit out of him for cheating on her. “Do you understand me, Elias?”
“Hey, this is between me and Elias,” Mia is saying somewhere in the background, but we barely hear her. “Hello?! Everyone’s always fucking brushing me off… Judging my fucking life… a fucking adult …”
But I’m staring at my best friend, my brother, the man who has been my other half for thirty-two years.
“…or else that is the end of our friendship. Do you understand?” Leo continues.
I nod. “Got it.”
Mia picks up her things and storms out of the restaurant.
She isn’t at the apartment when I get back, and I have to get to my gym, anyway.
Before I left the restaurant, I tried to argue to Leo that maybe it would be good for me to keep an eye on her, that she’s an adult woman, for fuck’s sake, but he was hearing none of of it.
“Didn’t you explicitly tell me that you and Mia don’t talk about this kind of stuff? After I asked you if she was talking to that kid from the Shore?” he raged.
“I didn’t lie to you, I swear. Mia asked me for help with all the stuff literally the morning after that.”
“Just… step back, man. It makes me really fucking uncomfortable.”
“Why does it make you so uncomfortable?” I press.
“Because you’re a man-whore whose fucked half the women in New York City exactly one time each, before disposing of every single one of them?—”
“I’m not an asshole, Leo. It’s always mutually agreed upon?—”
“—and Mia is not about to be one of those women. Are you serious? Why do I need to explain this to you? Plus, who knows what kind of STDs you have floating around the expanse of your dick?—”
“ Whoa —” I try to cut in, alarmed for many, many different reasons, ranging from outrage that he thinks I’m not regularly tested and horror that he thinks I’m going to sleep with Mia and give her an STD, for fucking fuck’s sake .
“Just, stay back, Elias. Please.”
I’m annoyed I’ve been dragged into this. I don’t know where the hell this all came from, or how it dropped into my lap. All I know is that I can’t do this to my best friend.
Leo has been right next to me for every single thing I’ve ever done in my life. Every major moment, every victory, every failure, every high, every low. We shared a nanny. We went to the same elementary, middle, and high school. Always played on the same sports teams. The only time we’ve ever technically been apart was for the four years we went to different colleges. But even then, we would visit each other at least once a month. It was easy, since I was going to state school for jocks in Connecticut, and he was at a hippy private school for kids who didn’t get into Ivies, just outside Boston. We’d go to one another’s games, we’d go to one another’s frats. We moved to the city together, and we lived together until Leo made a fuckton of money and wanted to live his own one percent life.
All I know is, I can’t get roped back into this, no matter how fucking sad and doe-eyed and needy Mia may look at me. Regardless of how much she is ‘ aching for it’. But I do have to apologize to her. It wasn’t cool of me to agree to it in the first place. I also don’t think it’s necessarily cool of Leo to be so crazy overbearing towards his twenty-nine-year-old ‘little’ sister, or to be such a dick to me and my dick, but it’s not my place. I hate hurting Mia’s feelings, but Leo will always come first.
My first session of the day is with that guy from the Brooklyn Nets, Jordan O’Neal. His season doesn’t start until October, so he sees me on the weekends he isn’t training with his team. He pays me way more than my usual rates, because I have to go above and beyond what I usually do. He shares his team trainers’ plans, both diet and training, and I have to work around them, making sure to craft something that simultaneously pushes him yet slots in nicely with his existing plans.
My next and only other session of the day is with a Park Slope stay-at-home-mom in her late forties, and I’m pretty sure she only works with me because I’ll adjust her positioning while we’re strength training, physically prompting her body into a safe arrangement. And I’m almost positive her stance is incorrect on purpose, which really rubs me the wrong fucking way after my conversation with Leo.
When I get home, I expect to find Mia in the living room, surrounded by an explosion of papers covering the couch and coffee table like every other Sunday. The lights are all off in the common spaces in the apartment, though, and I only know she’s home because of the light shining through the crack under her door.
I flip on the lights of the living room and walk down the hall to her room. I stand outside and lean my head on the doorframe, closing my eyes, gathering myself.
Then, for the first time in maybe five years of living together, I knock. And when I don’t get an answer, but hear the squeak of her moving on her bed frame, I knock again.
“Mia, can I come in?”
Some more shifting around inside.
“I know you’re in there. I hear you moving around.”
Nothing.
I sigh. “I just wanted to apologize for letting you down, but I want to tell you face-to-face and not through a closed door. Can I please come in?”
I leave after a full minute of waiting.