Chapter Eighteen
Elliot
“Two point nine seven.” Marisol clicked off the stopwatch. “Good.”
“It’s not good.” Scowling, Elliot shook out his shoulders and cracked his neck. “It’s worse than the last one.”
“Elliot, we’ve been running these for ten minutes. You passed the point that you were going to make gains a long time ago. I don’t even know what we’re doing anymore.”
“We’re training.”
“No: you’re grinding.” She tucked away the watch and knelt to roll up the ladder. “Go get on the elliptical and then ice in the recovery room if you need to.”
Elliot glared at the end of the ladder as it jerked away across the floor; he was no closer to hitting Bennet’s PR than he had been a month ago. How the fuck had Bennet done it? There was no way he was the only guy in the league who could put up that number.
As he scooped up his water bottle and went across the room to the elliptical, he saw the owner of the gym watching from his office. Elliot ignored him and got on the machine, and as he traipsed toward the recovery room afterward, the guy appeared in the doorway.
“Rodriguez,” he said, and waved him over.
Mildly suspicious, Elliot went.
“Pretty impressive numbers you’re putting up out there,” the guy said, pushing his glasses to the top of his bald head and settling into a chair at his desk.
“I guess.” Elliot leaned one shoulder on the doorframe.
“Reminds me of someone. What’s his name? Dustin Somebody.”
“Uh huh.”
“That’s his number you wear on your jersey, isn’t it?”
Elliot held his gaze. “Is it?”
The bald guy studied him a moment longer. Then unfolded his arms, returned the glasses to his nose, and went back to his computer. “You’re good, Rodriguez. You have a lot of talent. But it takes more than that to be Dustin Bennet.”
“I know what it takes,” said Elliot. He watched the guy clicking around. The thing he’d said yesterday popped into his head, and he thought about saying it again. It was good practice for the press. He took his shoulder off the door jamb.
“I’m not trying to be Dustin Bennet,” he said. “I’m trying to be Elliot Rodriguez.”
He got back to the hotel around eleven AM and found a notification from Dustin when he tossed his phone on the bed. A picture of something – the preview didn’t show what. Elliot tapped it open to a plate of scrambled eggs, and underneath, Brunch?
Frowning, he sat on the edge of the bed. what is that
Denver omelet. I think?
I thought you didn’t cook
I don’t. This is my first attempt. A break. Well, second: last night’s stuck to the pan
Elliot checked the time. You don’t have physio today?
Not til this afternoon.
He lowered the phone, chewing his lip. He felt bad about running away after practice last night. Bennet could obviously see there was something he wasn’t telling him. He still didn’t want to. But it’s not like Dustin could force him.
He checked the time; he needed to be back at Force that afternoon, too. But he had a couple of hours.
Okay. let me shower
A moment with nothing, then three dots, then a devil emoji, then, Shower here.
The shower took about four times longer than it needed to, because Dustin kept finding places where Elliot ‘still wasn’t clean’. Elliot had never actually washed behind his ears before. Or had his cock so thoroughly polished.
“Diablo,” he moaned, as Dustin locked his hips to the wall with his forearm, tonguing his slit while he palmed his balls like he was weighing a bag of oranges or something. “Holy shit, have you been – ah, God – have you been practicing on someone?”
Dustin smiled around him, flicking up his eyes. “Just researching.”
“Researching where?”
Dustin answered by slipping his finger into Elliot’s ass. Elliot jolted and clutched his hair.
“You’re gonna make me come. Ay – fuck, Dustin…
” He tried to push him off, but Dustin grabbed his wrist and pinned it to the wall behind him as he took him all the way down, and before he could stop it, Elliot was spilling down his throat and Dustin was swallowing it, which was sort of terrifying because they’d never done that before, but also so so hot.
Dustin sat back on his heels and wiped his mouth and blinked up through the water.
Elliot looked back, skeptical. “How was that?”
“Kind of weird.” Dustin ran his tongue around his teeth. “But this way we don’t have to keep dumping it all over my rental car. Plus, I just had to see if I could get it all – so much comes out of you.”
Elliot blushed. “Is it a lot?”
“I think so.”
“Someone else told me that once. She was pretty mad.”
“Mad?”
“She had all her clothes on still, it kind of got everywhere.”
Dustin stood, lining his whole wet, naked body up with Elliot’s and flattening him to the wall. He kissed him, and Elliot tasted himself in Dustin’s mouth as he slid his hand to his erection. “I’m not mad,” said Dustin. “I think it’s crazy hot.”
When they got out, Dustin wrapped him in a towel and they stood face to face in the clearing steam while he dried him. The way he was looking at Elliot made a big, weird feeling swell and pop inside Elliot’s chest, and he looked away and said, “What?”
Dustin shrugged. “Just happy you’re here.”
Elliot rolled his eyes. “Gay.”
He drew the line at Dustin toweling his hair, because there was no way this white man was going to get that right, and Dustin went out to the kitchen to make another round of eggs. Elliot stood in front of the mirror, carefully scrunching his curls.
This big, weird feeling made him very nervous.
Not because it felt bad – exactly the opposite.
He really liked it. But he couldn’t stop thinking about Sal now – because it’s not like getting a dick in his ass the other night was the only thing he’d been doing with Dustin.
It’s not like Sal would approve of what they’d just done in the shower, or anything they’d done in the car.
He finished his hair and shook out the towel, looking around for a place to hang it. There was a metal rail on the wall beside the sink, and as he draped the damp towel over it, his eye fell on a bottle beside the soap dish.
He smoothed the towel along the rail and picked it up. It was a prescription for something, and it looked disturbingly familiar. But all prescriptions looked the same until you read the label. He turned it over and did that.
He had to read it three times, because the gut punch that hit him on the first read-through was so viscerally awful it made him feel temporarily blind. The second and third time through, the words were the same.
It was the same thing they’d given to Sal.
Elliot stood naked at the sink with the bottle in his hands while stuff he’d been suppressing for a year came gurgling up inside him. Without Dustin’s dick even forcing it out.
His mom getting the call that Uncle Sal had broken his hip.
A trip to Miami to visit him. Then a few months of recovery, which seemed to be going fine.
No one knew he’d never finished the painkillers he’d been given right after surgery.
No one knew he’d started taking them again.
They didn’t find out until later, when he tried to buy them on the street.
Elliot was at a billet family’s house in Michigan when he got the call that Sal had overdosed.
He put the bottle back on the sink. He felt sick.
Dustin was at the stove with his back to the door as Elliot came out of the bedroom in a pair of sweats and Dustin’s Rush shirt from the basketball game. He sat at the kitchen island and stared at the plate that had been set out for him.
“I think I’m getting better at this?” Dustin was pushing eggs around with a spatula in the pan. “They’re still sticking, but…I think you just have to keep it moving?” He looked over his shoulder. “Do you want coffee?”
Elliot shook his head. He stared at the plate as Dustin deposited an omelet onto it. He stared at it as Dustin set a knife and fork on either side of it. He picked up the fork as Dustin came around the island and sat beside him.
“How is it?” said Dustin, when they’d eaten maybe three bites in silence.
“It’s good.”
“Actually good?”
Elliot looked at him. His face was so transparently eager for approval it made Elliot’s chest burn. He nodded and went back to his plate. “Actually good.”
He felt Dustin watching as he took another bite in silence. “Something wrong? You can tell me if it’s not good. I can handle it.”
Elliot wondered if that was even true. The Great Bendito probably needed to be the best, even at making eggs.
They finished and Dustin took the plates to the sink.
Elliot watched him washing up and thought about all the ways he was probably misunderstanding the situation.
Dustin wasn’t Uncle Sal. Those pills might be sitting on the sink for any reason.
Maybe he found them while he was cleaning and got them out to throw them away.
Eventually, he said, “Hey…”
Dustin looked up.
Elliot shifted, tucking his hands in his pockets. He watched Dustin scrubbing the plate, and said, in what he hoped was a casual voice, “So there’s a bottle on the sink in the bathroom…”
Dustin looked down and kept scrubbing. After a moment, he said, “What about it?”
“Just wondered what it was.”
Dustin turned on the tap to rinse the plate. “Just painkillers.”
Elliot watched him tilt the plate under the water, set it in a rack beside the sink, and pick up the next one. “Is your knee getting worse?”
“I don’t think so. Just not getting better as fast as it should be.”
“So did they tell you to take those?”
Dustin didn’t answer right away, watching the water as it ran over the plate. “The doctors? No. They have me on ibuprofen.”
“Okay. Because those are – pretty strong, aren’t they?”
The last of the suds rinsed away, and Dustin looked up as he set the plate in the rack. “That’s what they tell me.”
He turned around to pull a paper towel off the roll and stood with his back to Elliot, looking down at his hands as he dried them, and as he finished, he took a deep breath, then looked up and tossed the balled-up paper towel basketball-style at a trash can in the corner.
“Okay.” He turned to Elliot, leaning on the counter behind him.
“I had to take one last night because I ran out of the other stuff.” He said this firmly, like he hoped Elliot could see that he was leveling with him.
Then he went to his pocket for his phone.
“Which reminds me. I need to pick up some more of that.”
The phone wasn’t in his pocket. He looked around the room for it and went to the coffee table. Elliot watched him pick it up and enter something into it. “So you just took one,” he said, as Dustin put the phone back on the coffee table.
“Correct.”
“And you’re not gonna take any more.”
“Correct.”
Elliot nodded. His scalp was prickling like he’d been caught in a lie, which was ridiculous, because he wasn’t the one with a bottle of prescription opioids sitting on the sink in his bathroom.
“I just heard those are pretty dangerous,” he said. “So it freaked me out. But sounds like it’s fine.”
That was a lie: he hadn’t heard anything – he’d witnessed it. And it wasn’t fine. It was a year of horrible feelings he didn’t know what to do with.
“Are you okay?” said Dustin.
Elliot stared at him across the room and thought about telling him. But just thinking about that made a knot come up in his throat that was so big he wasn’t sure he could even get the words out. He did his best to swallow that, and nodded.
“Sorry I freaked you out.”
“It’s fine.” Elliot slid off the stool. He was having the very scary feeling like he might cry again. Dustin watched him cross to the bedroom.
“Are you leaving?”
“Yeah, I should probably get going. I need to get back to Force.”
“Can I drive you?”
“No. Thanks. It’s fine. I’m just gonna take an Uber.”
He could feel Dustin watching him as he went into the bedroom to change. He wondered if he could tell he was running away again.
As he pushed the button for the elevator at the hotel when he got home that night, his phone buzzed in his pocket.
Come over and I’ll make you something for dinner, said the text when he swiped it open. Full disclosure: it’s just gonna be an omelet.
He read it a few times as the elevator took him up to his room. He buzzed himself in and put the phone on the nightstand. He looked at the laundry all over the floor – it really did need doing, he hadn’t been lying about that – then put on the Golden Girls and got into bed.
Bennet texted two more times that night. Elliot didn’t respond.