He sits on the arm of the couch, perched on the edge, tensed as if waiting for impact.His voice is quiet as he asks,“What does this look on your face mean?”
Yeah, no. He doesn’t need my angst and self-loathing. “No, it’s… it doesn’t matter. It’s okay.”
“What’sokay?”His voice is louder, and his defenses are all the way up.
Jesus Christ,I just want to go back to holding him.“It’s nothing. Let’s drop it. Let’s go to bed. We can talk about it in the morning.”
His hands start to shake, and he jumps up, standing over me. “No, I’m not going to drop it.Somethingjust changed on you, and I want to know what it is. Ideserveto know what it is.”
I drag my eyes up to his and hold out my hands in a calming gesture. “This one’s on me, baby. You don’t deserve the fucked-up shit in my head.”
He shakes his head, almost violently. “I deserve the truth.Out with it.”Elijah’s eyes are darting between me and the door, and a small kind of panic grips my heart. He’s slipping away from me and… I don’t know what to say to get us back tous, but I need to fix this, now.
"You didn't have to start sleeping with me just so you'd have a place to stay." I gesture between the two of us. “This isn’t some kind of quid pro quo thing so that I… I’d let you sleep here.”
I know as the words are leaving my mouth that they are the wrong ones. The shock and pain on his face are a knife, twisting my guts.
“Thefuck? Isthatwhat you think of me?Go fuck yourself.”He moves farther away from me as if he can’t stand to be in my presence a second longer.
I tug on his wrist, horrified with how that came out. “No, I didn’t mean it like that. I just—”
He cuts me off, yanking his wrist from my grasp. “You just,what?Just thought I was just getting you off so that I could have a soft bed? Maybe this hasn’t occurred to you, but maybe it felt nice to feelsafe enough,” he says, punctuating his words with a bitter laugh, “to have feelings for someone. So no,fucking no. I did not pour myself out to you and give you my body in exchange for a warm bed, andfuck youfor thinking that.”
Shit, that is so not what I meant.He’s at the front door before I’m even on my feet, and he races down the steps, reckless, hitting the sidewalk at full speed, running from me, from this thing we almost had between us. In comparison, it takes me forever to get down the steps because running down them requires two fully functioning knees, which I don’t fucking have. I see him duck down a side street, and I try to keep up, but I’ve got my foot on, not the blade, and the man that I love is getting farther and farther away from me.
Oh, fuck… I love him. And this slowness is a fucking agony, and I’m yelling for him and walk-jogging as fast as I can on this goddamn fake leg until I’m so turned around that I’ve lost him completely. I stand in the middle of an intersection, looking in all directions, no clue as to where he’s gone. I crouch down into a scream of curses, every muscle contracted in fury and frustration. I look up to see the startled faces of an old lesbian couple walking their dogs.
“Sorry, ladies. Sorry.” I walk away from them quickly, hoping they don’t call the police on my brown ass.
I gotta call Roly. He’ll know what to do.
* * *
Elijah
I duck into an open garage, letting him go past me before heading in another direction. I hear him calling my name for several moments until I’m far enough away that all I hear are the crickets and the highway.
I’m on my own again.
At least I know how to do this.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Nick
He’s been gone for two nights.
The two coldest nights of the year.
He’s too smart to stay at ARCH because he would have to know that we would wait for him there. Even though we knew it was a waste of time, we did wait for him and got an eyeful of the “roommates” he was always talking about. It’s easy just to dismiss the homeless guy talking to himself as crazy, but the fact of the matter is most of the people we talked to had clear and present mental health issues, making it difficult for society to accept them and impossible for them to get jobs. Because, you know, fuck someone if they can’t be productive.
The thing is, Elijah doesn’t have a major mental health issue. God, the work he did on that dinner for the HVA. The loving care he put into it, the amount of pressure he put on himself…. It was a charity event aimed right at his heart. It must’ve hurt to have to come up with the plans for that, knowing… I can’t stand to think about it. Penny’s words about the Sisyphean task of coming back from homelessness once you’d lost your connections to society hit me particularly hard. Fuck, he was trying. He was trying so hard, and I’d shit all over his hard work by indicating that he’d whored himself out to me.
As I get lost in my own guilt and shame, Roly’s eyes perk up. “That’s her—that’s the person he was talking to the night of the dinner. The one who deals meth.”
I approach the very tall person bedecked with very sharp talons rather gingerly. “Hi, I’m—”
“I know who you are. Sugar, he’s not going to come back here again. He’s in the wind, and the likelihood of you finding him is slim at best. Maybe you should have thought of that before running him off like you did.”
