Chapter Fifteen Optics #2
Eli packed up efficiently after sessions and left without lingering. When Lucas spoke, Eli listened—but he didn’t lean in. Didn’t soften. Didn’t offer more than what was required.
At first, Lucas told himself he was imagining it.
By the third day, he knew he wasn’t.
There was space where something used to be.
And worse—Eli wasn’t angry.
He wasn’t sulking. Wasn’t cold.
Careful.
Lucas understood then, in a quiet, sinking way, that Eli was protecting himself.
That night, his phone buzzed.
Eli: Some family in town from NZ. Thought I’d cook. You want to come over tomorrow?
Lucas stared at the message longer than he should have. He wanted to say yes. Wanted to fix the distance with presence alone.
But his calendar was already full of holds and obligations he’d convinced himself were temporary.
Lucas: I’m sorry. PR booked me for an evening show. Can’t cancel.
The reply didn’t come right away.
When it did, it was brief.
Eli: Right. No worries.
No emoji. No joke.
Lucas set the phone down and told himself it was fine. Necessary. Temporary.
Just a little longer.
The realization came too late.
Lucas returned to the training facility after hours, intending to grab forgotten notes. The building was quiet, lights dimmed, the air heavy with disinfectant and old sweat.
Voices drifted from the lounge.
Eli’s voice.
Lucas stopped short, unseen.
“…do you think he’s just grown too big for us?” someone asked, half-joking, half-not.
There was a pause.
“I don’t know anymore,” Eli said.
No bitterness. No accusation.
Just fact.
Lucas stood there, heart hammering, and understood—with a clarity that felt like grief—that silence wasn’t patience.
It was erosion.
He had mistaken careful for kind.
And waiting hadn’t protected them.
It had hollowed something out.
Lucas stayed where he was, listening to nothing, feeling the weight of the choice he’d been postponing settle fully into his hands.
He had assumed he could hang on.
He hadn’t realized Eli was already letting go.
Lucas found Eli in the weights room.
It wasn’t locked—nothing ever was for them—but the rest of the facility had gone dim and echoing, lights reduced to a handful of fluorescents that hummed like they were tired of their own existence. The place smelled faintly of disinfectant and iron and old sweat. Familiar. Safe, once.
Eli sat on a bench near the squat rack, elbows braced on his knees, phone face-down beside him. He wasn’t lifting. Wasn’t stretching. Just… sitting there, staring at the floor like he was waiting for something to finish passing through him.
Lucas stopped a few feet away.
“Hey,” he said.
Eli looked up. His expression softened automatically—habit, not feeling—and that hurt more than if he’d stayed blank.
“Hey,” Eli replied.
They stood in the quiet for a moment that stretched too long.
Lucas cleared his throat. “Can we talk?”
Eli nodded once. “Yeah.”
Lucas waited for him to say more. To joke. To fill the space.
Eli didn’t.
Lucas exhaled slowly and stepped closer, leaning back against the rack across from him. He crossed his arms, uncrossed them, settled for resting his hands on his hips like he was bracing for impact.
“I heard you earlier,” Lucas said carefully. “In the lounge.”
Eli’s gaze flicked away—not guilty, just tired. “Ah.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Lucas added, because it felt important to say. “I wasn’t listening on purpose.”
“I know,” Eli said. He picked up his phone, turned it over in his hands without unlocking it. “You don’t strike me as the eavesdropping type.”
The words weren’t sharp.
That somehow made them worse.
Lucas swallowed. “You said you don’t know anymore.”
Eli nodded. “Yeah.”
“About me,” Lucas pressed.
Another nod. Slower this time.
Lucas waited for anger. For frustration. For something that would let him argue, defend, explain.
What he got instead was honesty.
“I don’t know where I fit,” Eli said quietly. “And before you say anything—I know. I know why. I know the reasons. I’m not pretending they don’t exist.”
Lucas opened his mouth.
Eli lifted a hand—not cutting him off, just… pausing him.
“Let me finish,” he said gently. “Please.”
Lucas closed his mouth and nodded.
Eli stared at the floor again, choosing his words with care. “I thought I could do this. I really did. Be careful. Be quiet. Be patient. I told myself it was temporary. That it meant something because you were choosing me at all.”
Lucas’s chest tightened.
“But then,” Eli went on, “I watch you on television smiling about not kissing and telling, and I hear people talk about you like you’re… available. Like you’re an idea they can all project onto. And I realize I don’t actually exist in that version of your life.”
Lucas shook his head. “That’s not true.”
Eli looked up then. Met his eyes.
“It is,” he said. “Not because you don’t care. But because you’ve made room for everything except me.”
The words landed heavy and final.
Lucas ran a hand over his face. “I just need time.”
Eli’s mouth curved, faint and sad. “That’s what I keep hearing.”
“I’m not asking forever,” Lucas said quickly. “Just—until the season ends. Until things settle. This is a bad time.”
“For you,” Eli said softly.
Lucas stilled.
Eli continued, voice steady. “I wake up sore and smiling because I was with you. And then I go to work and listen to people speculate about your love life like I didn’t fall asleep with you still inside me. And I can’t say anything. I can’t even look like I belong to you.”
Lucas flinched.
“I don’t need public declarations,” Eli said. “I’m not asking you to blow up your life. I just—” He stopped, breath hitching once before he smoothed it away. “I don’t want to feel like I disappear every time you step into the light.”
Silence pressed in around them.
Lucas searched for the right words, the responsible words. The ones that had always served him before.
“I’m trying to protect us,” he said.
Eli nodded. “I know.”
“And it won’t always be like this.”
“Maybe not,” Eli agreed. “But this is what it is now.”
Lucas frowned. “What are you saying?”
Eli stood, slow and deliberate. He didn’t move closer. Didn’t move away.
“I’m saying I can’t keep doing this halfway,” he said. “Not quietly. Not invisibly. Not while everyone else gets a version of you that looks whole.”
Lucas’s heart began to pound. “Are you ending this?”
Eli hesitated. Just long enough to be devastating.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t want to. But I can feel myself shrinking to fit into the space you’ve left me. And I don’t like who I am when I do that.”
Lucas stepped forward without thinking. “Eli—”
Eli didn’t step back.
But he didn’t lean in either.
“I need you to understand something,” Eli said. “I’m not angry. I’m not trying to make you choose. I just need you to see that this costs me something every day. It’s killing me.”
Lucas’s throat burned. “I never wanted that.”
“I know,” Eli said again. “That’s the problem.”
They stood there, close enough to feel each other’s warmth, divided by something that wasn’t distance but timing and fear and all the words Lucas hadn’t said soon enough.
“I care about you,” Lucas said hoarsely.
Eli’s eyes softened, just a fraction. “I know. I wouldn’t be standing here if you didn’t.”
Then, quietly: “But caring isn’t the same as choosing.”
The truth of it rang between them like a bell.
Eli reached out then—not to touch Lucas, but to squeeze his shoulder once. Brief. Grounding. Final in a way that made Lucas’s chest ache.
“I’m not walking away,” Eli said. “I just can’t keep pretending I don’t want more.”
He stepped back.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he added.
Lucas nodded, unable to trust his voice.
Eli picked up his phone and headed for the door, pausing only once to glance back.
“Just—don’t ask me to be patient forever,” he said.
Then he was gone.
Lucas stood alone in the weights room, the hum of the lights suddenly too loud, the future he’d been postponing no longer waiting politely.
Eli didn’t turn the lights on.
He dropped his keys in the bowl by the door, kicked his trainers off without lining them up, and walked straight through to the bathroom – he stripped his clothes off and tossed them in the bin and wrapped himself in a towel.
The thought of showering made him just feel more tired and he wandered out into the living room.
The windows reflected him back at himself—bare skin, towel slung low around his hips, shoulders tight like he’d braced for impact and never come down from it.
He sat.
Just sat there on the edge of the couch, elbows on his knees, phone heavy in his hand.
He knew what was on it.
The knowledge sat in him like a pulse.
He told himself not to open it.
That he was tired. That this was a bad idea. That he’d regret it.
He unlocked the screen and navigated to the gallery anyway.
The image filled the phone, bright and unavoidable. Lucas—unguarded, offered, careless in the way men got when they believed themselves wanted without question. It wasn’t obscene. It didn’t need to be. The familiarity of it did the work. The knowledge of what that body could do. What it had done.
Eli’s breath caught.
Heat moved through him fast, traitorous and practiced. His body knew this path. It had walked it before—late nights, short messages, proof of want delivered without the risk of words.
He shifted back against the couch, towel slipping as his attention narrowed, the room falling away until there was only the glow of the screen and the thrum under his skin.
He dragged a hand down his chest, slow at first, then less so, eyes fixed on the photo like it might change if he looked hard enough.
For a few seconds, it worked.
That was the part that made him feel sick.