34. Elias
THIRTY-FOUR
Elias
We manage to peel apart for long enough so that we can go to work the next day, but I’m inside of her for most of Friday evening and Saturday morning and afternoon.
Even if we’re not fucking or making love, because we’re doing a bit of both, I’m glued to her. I can’t leave. She’s my home, and she’s mine, and I can’t believe how lucky I am. We have to make up for weeks or maybe years of lost time.
She falls asleep Saturday afternoon on top of me, her body resting on my chest, my dick still inside her. I refuse to leave. I fall asleep, too.
When I wake up an hour later, she’s still on top of me, but I’ve slipped out. It takes me half a second to get hard again and slide back in, her pussy still wet from my come from earlier.
She moans.
It’s slow and soft and gentle, both of us barely moving, half asleep and just enjoying the feeling of closeness and intimacy.
It’s insane, this feeling.
I end up crushing her into the bed, after, still not pulling out.
“I live here, now,” I tell her.
“Don’t ever move,” her muffled voice says, her arms attempting to wrap around my torso.
“I still have to talk to Leo,” I say, after several minutes.
“I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t talk about my brother while inside me,” she says from underneath me.
I roll over. “I feel like a piece of shit for what I did to him,” I admit.
“What exactly did you do to him?”
I rub my eyes. “I fucked his little sister. I made her cry,” I attempt weakly.
“That’s incredibly disparaging,” she says, poking me in the side. “Try that again, but this time, pretend that I’m the love of your life.”
I laugh feebly, taking her hand and kissing the tip of each finger. Observing and appreciating every detail of the hand of the love of my life. I think about it. “He asked me to stay away from his sister. I ended up falling in love with her instead. But then I pushed her away, because I’m a giant fuck-head himbo, and I had to beg for her forgiveness. And now we are in love and together forever and for all eternity.”
“Better,” she says, snuggling into my side. “But I don’t think you need to apologize for the first part of that.”
“What part?”
“The part about not listening to him when he asked you to stay away from me. That’s ridiculous. I’m an adult.”
I fix my arm so she lies on my shoulder. “I know you are. But I’m in a weird spot here. I feel like it’s worth a conversation with him. At least before we both show up in love at Thanksgiving or something. Holding hands and making out in front of the turkey.”
She hums. “True. A conversation is probably necessary. Especially after he rocked you in the face.”
I wince, the skin of my cheek tingling when I remember the feeling. “Right.”
Mia rolls over to reach for her phone on her bedside table. She fiddles around on it for a moment. “He texted me,” she says.
“Leo?”
“Yeah. He said, ‘you’re not here so I’m assuming you went back to the dickhead. I’m cleaning up the mourning nest for now.’”
“You’ve been with Leo the entire time?” I say, my body filling with a warmth and a sick satisfaction that I definitely don’t deserve. “Not with the guy you brought to the bar?”
“Adam? No. He was kind of skeezy. He wouldn’t stop touching my ass that night.”
I reach down to grip hers possessively in response, squeezing a little too hard, definitely not deserving to be feeling this way.
“I can feel you stewing in rage,” she tells me. “But I kind of like it,” she says, pulling her leg up and resting it across my body. “Yeah, I’ve been staying with Leo. I made a Mourning Nest on his couch.”
“I’m sorry,” I murmur, not able to say it enough times.
She looks at her phone again. “He says he’s going to be home all day in case I need to go back. So if you really want to talk to him, you could just go there. I could come with you if you want. We could do it together.”
I consider this for a moment. “I think that would be kind of a cop-out. I need to talk to him myself. He’s been my other half my entire life. He deserves a one-on-one.”
“Okay,” she says simply. “I think you should call him out, though. Use your Hot Girl energy.”
“For what?”
“For not taking you seriously. For making you believe that you weren’t good enough for me. Or at least for punching you in the face like a child.”
“Yeah.”
Neither of us makes any effort to move, instead gluing closer together.
Mia sighs, content. “Sometimes I wish I could unzip your body and live inside. Because I’m an unhinged psychopath.”
“Wow,” I say, pulling her on top of me and wrapping my arms around her, the closest we’ll get to doing so. “I’ve literally never thought that. That’s truly unhinged.”
A few hours later, I find myself in the lobby of Leo’s fancy ass Tribeca high-rise.
“Hey, man,” I say to his doorman.
“Hey,” he says. He signs me in without checking for my identification. He knows me well. “Sixteenth floor, right?”
“Yep.” I walk over to the elevator and punch the button.
“He know you’re coming up?”
“Nah. It’s a surprise,” I say, staring at the elevator when it opens into the lobby, my anxiety ratcheting up.
“You good?”
I blink. “Yeah,” I answer, stepping through the doors and pressing the 16 button.
I look at myself in the mirror on the elevator walls. The color on my face is starting to fade to a glorious canvas of lavender, yellow, and green. I can’t decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing for the conversation we’re about to have. Will it make him feel bad? Or will it make him feel like he didn’t hit me hard enough?
The elevator opens, and I walk down the hall to his apartment. I rest my forehead on the door before going in, trying to get my shit together. I can hear him playing this video game we play together all the time. Well, used to, at least before I started spending every moment of my life with Mia.
I sigh and knock on the door.
I hear him pause the game.
“Who is it?” he yells through the door. “Meems?”
“It’s Elias,” I say.
Silence.
Then, the door swings open, and my best friend of my entire life stands in the doorway, looking at me with a resigned sort of resentment. He doesn’t say anything.
“…Hey,” I try. “Can I come in?”
Wordlessly, he steps aside.
I walk over and sit on his couch, which is new and looks like a nicer, more expensive version of the one he had before. “Wow. No longer slumming it, I see,” I joke.
“I could say the same about you with my sister,” he says.
I groan. “Dude.”
He looks at me unflinchingly.
“I was gonna come here and apologize, but Mia was right. I should call you out.”
“Me?” he asks, outraged. “You?—”
“—you told me I wasn’t good enough for her, Leo. Me. Your best friend. You know me better than anyone in my entire life, and even then, you didn’t think I was good enough for her. You thought I would hurt her?—”
“You did hurt her, you fucking asshole?—”
“I did hurt her, and I’ve apologized to her, and we’ve worked through it and we’re working through it together, because we’ve known each other our entire lives, and we owed it to one another. Will you work through it with me, here, now, too?”
He sighs, scrubbing his face.
I take that as a cue to continue. “Leo, I love you, man, but you didn’t believe in me or trust me or take me seriously with her, and honestly, it’s not just with Mia. It’s kind of become a new pattern with things—with her, and my job, and my gym, my relationships. You never let it go. Never let me live things down. What the fuck happened?”
He’s silent for a long moment, thinking, and I’m really fucking grateful for it, for his giving me the time I’m due.
“I think it started when we moved apart. It kind of felt like… I was moving forward in life. In adulthood. I was becoming successful, and you were still kind of doing the same thing we’d been doing since college.”
I digest this. “I think it’s kind of messed up that you’re imposing your definition of success on me. Just because I wasn’t making even half of what you were making doesn’t mean that I’m not successful. I had two full-time jobs. I started my own business. It’s taken off.”
“I get that. I’m sorry about that. I know that and see that now,” he concedes. “But with all the women you were fucking around with?—”
“But I was happy doing that! At least until I wasn’t. I didn’t have any fucking time to hold anything serious down. And even if I did, I didn’t want to! Not until Mia, at least. Why couldn’t you just respect that? And I’ve said this to you before. I was always very clear with my partners before anything ever happened. We always set the ground rules before doing anything, and the rules were never broken, and no one was ever unhappy.”
“They were never broken until Mia.”
I sigh. “Yeah. But I love her and I trust her more than anyone I’ve ever been with before. And she’s an adult woman who can make her own decisions, and if that includes breaking our ground rules, and we both agree to breaking them, then who are you to say that I’m some sort of man-whore fucking women over all over the city?”
He reverts back to silence, looking at the coffee table in front of us.
“Listen. I’m sorry that I wasn’t honest with you. I’m sorry that I made Mia cry, but that’s between me and her. But that’s about all that I’m going to be fucking sorry for,” I say, wearing my Hot Girl pants. “I’m not sorry that I fell in love with your sister. I’m not sorry we’re together now. I’m upset and sad and disappointed that you’re upset with me, but I’m not going to apologize for that.”
He looks at me, his eyes the same exact blue as his sister’s, a twenty-year-old scar through his eyebrow from a particularly exuberant soccer tackle. “I’m sorry, too,” he finally mumbles.
“What was that?”
“I’m sorry, too,” he says, a decibel louder.
I grin. “For what?”
“For not being a good friend. For not taking you seriously.”
“How about for resorting to violence in your anger?”
“I’m not sorry for punching you in the face, no.”
“That’s not very successful adult of you.”
“Fuck you, man.”
“I love you, too.”
“Loveyou,” he mumbles. He stands up and gets me the other controller for the video game system. “Want us to go back to where we last left off?”
I pick up the controller. “Please.”