Chapter Twenty-One
Elliot
“Elliot? Are you okay in there?”
Drew knocked on the door. Elliot looked up from where he was sitting naked on the side of the bathtub with his phone in his hands. “Yeah, all good. Did you need to get in here?”
“Eventually. Just checking in. You’ve…been in there a while. Sorry. That’s awkward. Um…”
“No worries. I’ll be right out.”
Her footsteps retreated and Elliot went back to the phone. He was looking at the Body Count app. When he’d logged Drew three weeks ago, drunk, it had felt like a win. Getting back at Dustin for stealing Katie from him, maybe — or just proving he could get through sex with someone without crying.
Tonight, it didn’t feel like a win.
Drew was great. She was funny and smart and drank beer like a champ.
She was good at bowling and pool. They had a good time.
Elliot thought about her when he wasn’t with her sometimes.
It was how he’d thought falling in love with someone should feel…
until they got to the sex and everything kind of died.
For him, at least. He was pretty sure he was doing a good enough job that she was having a good time.
He deleted the entry, looked at himself in the mirror, and said, in Spanish, what his mother would have said if she could see him right now, and flushed the toilet and went out.
They were at his hotel, and Drew was naked on the balcony, looking over the rail at the moon. He went out behind her and slipped his arms around her waist.
“This view is insane,” she said, as he put his lips to her ear and kissed it. “I don’t think I would ever get tired of it.”
“Mm. I haven’t yet.” He braced his hands either side of her and looked over her shoulder at the restaurant patio six stories down. It was early enough that people were still there. “You wanna go down for a drink?”
Drew didn’t answer, and he got the feeling she was thinking about something. Her face was thoughtful as she watched the crowd on the patio, and when she turned around, she had a serious expression on that made him slightly nervous.
He hesitated, waiting. “What?”
“What’s going on here, exactly?” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, like, this.” She gestured between them.
“We’re hanging out? Having a nice time?” His stomach dipped with momentary panic. “Are you not?”
“No, I am. I just…” She sighed. “I guess I’m confused.
Because to me, it feels like we go out, and we have a great time, and you’re funny and I’m funny, and we do bits and get along, and everything clicks.
And then…” She searched his face like she was looking for words there.
“And then we get back here, and… maybe we’re both nervous?
Because maybe this is more than just a hookup?
But I feel like…something’s not there. In the sex.
Specifically. And I don’t know if it’s me, or you, or both of us, or what, but–” She chewed her lip, searching his face again.
“Right? Are you getting that? Is it just me?”
Okay. So maybe he hadn’t been doing a good enough job.
He tipped up her chin with his knuckle. “Okay, Mami. Sounds like maybe you wanna try it again tonight–”
“You’re being weird,” she said. “Stop it.” She pushed his finger away with the back of her hand.
“You do this, too. This like…I don’t even know what to call it.
This Casanova thing. It’s cute – I like it, but I’m trying to have a conversation with you.
We’re not doing bits right now. Can we just talk like normal people? ”
He blinked and stood there. “Sure.”
“Great.” She folded her arms and waited. “So can you talk to me? Because I really like you, and I would rather figure this out than just keep having sex that’s like…kind of weird.”
He scoffed and turned around to go back inside. Weird. Que joyita.
She followed him. “Come on, don’t walk away.”
“Pichea.” He waved over his shoulder.
“What? Hello? I don’t know what that means.”
“I said forget it!” He went to the mini bar and flung open the door. They were out of beer. She stood behind him while he squatted there and dug around inside to see if anything else was left.
“I don’t want to forget it,” she was saying. “I want to know why it feels like you don’t–”
Ay, puneta, ya. Wasn’t this girl supposed to be different from the other ones? Wasn’t she cool and knew how to bowl and didn’t nag him and talk his ear off?
He found a single beer in the back of the fridge and pulled it out. When he stood up and turned around with it, she was still standing there.
“–because, to be honest, Elliot, it’s not super fun to fuck someone when it feels like they’re just getting through it because they have to.”
“I’m not doing that,” he said, cracking open the beer and going back to the balcony. He snagged his boxers off the floor as he went and put them on outside.
She came out a few minutes later. He felt her standing behind him and remained with his forearms on the rail, smoking the cigarette he’d lit. Eventually she said, “I guess I’m gonna go.”
“Great.” He pulled on the cigarette and blew the smoke at the people down on the patio.
Behind him, she did a little scoff of disbelief, and he turned around.
“I thought you were different,” he said.
“But you’re the same as all the other girls.
You act like you’re cool with everything, but really you just wanna stand there and tell me what I’m doing wrong. ”
“Excuse me?”
He turned back to the rail and dragged on the cigarette, and they stood in silence while he blew the smoke and inspected the glowing orange tip.
“Okay,” said Drew. “Well, I’m leaving. And you know–”
She stopped. He looked over his shoulder and she was standing at the sliding door, looking like she was about to say something huge, and trying to decide if she wanted to say it.
Elliot felt his stomach sink. Oh God, she was pregnant. Virgen fucking Santa, he’d gotten her pregnant and this was his life now.
“Never mind,” she said. She turned to go and he said, “What?” but she didn’t stop.
“No – wait.” He stubbed the cigarette out on the rail and went after her. “What were you gonna say?”
“It doesn’t matter! I’m just gonna go.”
“Are you pregnant?”
“Pregnant?” She halted and turned around.
“Just tell me,” he said. “So I can do the right thing. Because I have money, at least, so–”
“No, Elliot.” She shook her head, frowning in disbelief as she looked around for her underwear. “I am definitely not pregnant. We used condoms. I told you I was on birth control.” She located the underwear and snatched it up, snapped it on, then looked around for her shirt.
“Okay…” Elliot frowned across the room. “So what were you gonna say?”
She got the shirt on and looked for her jeans.
“I’m going back to Carolina,” she said, after she’d shaken them open and put one leg in. “But it doesn’t matter. Just forget it, I don’t even know why I’m telling you. Because I’m never gonna see you again, I guess, so I figured I should let you know why.”
“Never gonna see me again?”
“I’m getting booted from this internship.” She hopped the other leg in. “Like this week.”
He watched her. “Why?”
She looked embarrassed and kept her eyes on her fingers as they zipped up her fly. “I don’t wanna talk about it. It doesn’t matter.”
“You’re leaving?”
“Yes, Elliot. I’m pretty sure the internship’s gonna rescind my stipend. So I can’t make rent on that apartment.”
He caught her arm as she finished the jeans and went for her jacket. “They’re kicking you out?”
The sigh she uttered was exasperated this time, but she stopped and let him turn her around. He positioned her by the shoulders and held onto them and looked at her.
“No, they’re not kicking me out,” she said. “But I have a living stipend through the internship, and it’s dependent on performance. And I can’t afford to stay here without that, so…” She tried to shrug her shoulders out of his hands. “God, why am I telling you this? I haven’t told anyone.”
The weight of that sank into him as he watched her eyes looking anywhere that wasn’t him. “Why haven’t you told anyone?”
“Because it’s fucking embarrassing!” She tried to get his hands off her shoulders and he didn’t let go, and eventually she sighed and stopped trying to escape. They stood there in silence while she fiddled with her nails. Elliot let go of her and stepped back.
“But you love clams.”
She laughed, bitterly. “Yeah, well unfortunately loving clams doesn’t help you with spatial analysis operations.
You need a harder science background than I have.
It’s fine. I should’ve been better prepared.
I got in on a good application and enthusiasm, and I’ve been, like, pretending I know GIS mapping, but there’s all this SQL querying that I don’t actually know how to do, and I don’t really understand the coordinate reference systems, and I’m too scared to ask, because then they’ll know I don’t know how to do it, so I’ve been trying to learn on my own in the evenings, but it’s so complicated – if I had a tutor, maybe, but that’s just more money and the stipend definitely won’t cover that–” She caught her breath and met his eye, looking suddenly, openly lost. “So I don’t know.
Maybe leaving is the right thing to do anyway.
I don’t belong there. I feel like a fraud. And I’m fucking exhausted.”
The silence that settled between them this time was different. They sat in it together, rather than on opposite sides of it. It seemed to grow as they stared at each other in the wake of Drew’s revelation, getting louder and more unignorable, until eventually, Elliot said, “I think I’m gay?”
Drew’s eyebrows shot up. She looked like she was about to laugh…but then stared at him and said, “Oh my God. You are.”
He laughed, and felt relieved, and then dizzy, and went to sit on the bed. “It’s exhausting,” he said.
She watched him from the middle of the room. “Being gay?”
“No.” He looked at her. “Pretending I’m not.”
She sighed and nodded. “How long have you known?”
“Officially? Like six weeks. Actually?” He sighed. “Always.”