I’m flustered. I’m touch-starved. I’m fucking my couch in my sleep and dreaming about Elliot grabbing me, holding me, making me come. I’ve never thought of myself as anything but straight before, but there is nothing heterosexual about the way I feel around Elliot Baker.
Like I have a real, true, bonafide crush on the man.
I follow him inside and we hit the buffet line, loading up our plates with turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing—basically everything brown and delicious with little to no nutritional value and lots of butter. When we sit, I scoop up a forkful of mashed potatoes and hold it out across the table.
“Cheers, to our very first Thanksgiving together,” I say, and Elliot chuckles, meeting my mashed potatoes with the turkey on his fork.
“And to many more in the future,” he says, and I smile as I dig in. Sitting in the cafeteria of a downtown convention center surrounded by strangersmay not be the kind of holiday I’m used to, but it's certainly much warmer than the gala-like events packed with rich, stuffed shirts and the women who marry them that my parents throw every year.
“This is nice,” I say as I gather a metric fuck-ton of stuffing onto my fork and shove it in my mouth. I groan when it hits my tongue, the herb-y, onion-y, salty goodness exploding on my taste buds. It's a shame that stuffing gets back-burnered to Thanksgiving and the other winter holidays. It's so clearly the perfect food, it should be eaten all year round, served with every meal.
“Yeah, I guess,” Elliot says, not looking up from his plate.
“Your team does this every year, right? All the volunteering?”
“Pretty much, yeah. Adler is a stickler for giving back to the community, and even though he says that these things aren’t mandatory, you’ll definitely get thrown some major shade if you don’t show your face and do the work.”
“I like that. I mean, I’d do this stuff anyway, but it’s nice to have someone with some actual power trying to make the world a better place instead of shitting all over it for once, you know? My parents wouldn’t be caught dead volunteering at an event like this, unless they knew they’d be photographed. Idon’t think I knew that a person could give a dollar to another person if I wasn’t dressed to the nines and drinking the finest champagne from Baccarat flutes until well into my teen years. Donating anything without throwing an over-the-top gala that costs more than any money you’re intending to raise? That’s not possible! What’s the point of doing good if you can’t flaunt your wealth and show off for the world to see? That’s the Holmes way.”
“And would you show up at these galas dressed in your finest butterfly clips and paper hats?” Elliot asks, waggling his eyebrows at me. My hand goes to my head, running over one of the pink, plastic clips.
“Yeah, right,” I scoff. “Trust me when I say that my affinity for bright accessories and body glitter is a direct result of being told by my father that I was a disappointment and would never grow up to be the real man he wanted in a son. Though his version of being a “real man” meant drinking his weight in Irish whiskey, throwing shit at my mom, and fucking his assistant. As far as I’m concerned, he can take his expectations for me and shove them where the sun don’t shine.”
My skin heats as I realize I’ve been rambling again. Elliot asked me a simple question and I went and dumped my “poor little rich boy” backstory all over him. My family is only on my mind becauseDad called again this week. Not to wish me a happy holiday or inquire about my plans, of course. His drunken voicemail was all about the inferior way I held my stick in the third period of our last game. I really should just block his number, but the soft, squishy part of my heart stops me every time I go to pull the trigger.
I’m about to apologize and explain to Elliot why I keep going off at the mouth when he cocks a brow in my direction, his eyes roaming up and down my chest.
“Body glitter, huh? Are you wearing body glitter now?”
“Of course,” I say, pulling at the collar of my t-shirt to show off my sparkly, iridescent chest. “I can’t grow chest hair, so I gotta do something to decorate my pecs for special occasions, right?”
Elliot eyes the specks of glitter on my chest, eyes roaming back and forth and making me feel exposed in a way that I can’t decide if I like or not. Embarrassment starts to seep in, unfamiliar and a little alarming. I know I’m a little unusual in the way I express myself, and typically I don’t care what people have to say about it.
But I really, really care what this particular man thinks of me.
“If your dad can’t appreciate you for exactly whoyou are, he never deserved you.” Elliot says, his eyes melting into something warm as he looks at me. The air between us starts to feel charged, heavy, buzzing just like the other night outside my front door. I can feel that string between us being pulled taut, like it's going to snap and send us ricocheting towards each other. He licks his lips again, and my breath catches in my throat. I feel hot and unsteady, like I want to crawl out of my skin, so I steer the conversation away from myself.
“Did you do any volunteering when you were growing up? Or was the fraternity volunteer week in college a culture shock for you, too?”
Elliot sighs, then looks around the room. I follow his gaze to where it settles on a woman sitting alone with her toddler, cutting food on her plate with a sleeping baby attached to her chest.
“I came to a lot of things like this when I was a kid, but not as a volunteer. My mom…she did her best. She worked harder than anyone I know. But she was a kid when she had me. She didn’t have the support of her parents, the dude who knocked her up disappeared when the stick turned blue. She couldn’t finish high school, and with no education and baby on her hip…she did her best. So, yeah. I’m no stranger to soup kitchens and holiday food drives.”
I cock my head, sympathy and a touch of shameflooding my veins. Here I am, complaining that my parents couldn’t donate a dollar without a full catering team on staff, and Elliot is telling me that while I was resenting the family fortune and my parents from my bedroom with a full belly and every luxury I could ever ask for, he was coming to food banks on holidays and relying on the kindness of strangers to feed him and his mom.
“Don’t do that,” he says as I reach across the table to take his hand, but he doesn’t bat me away. He laces his fingers in mine, squeezing gently. “Don’t do the pity thing. I don’t need it, I was a happy kid. I had my mom, I had football, and yeah, it sucked when I was old enough to realize that I was the poor kid in class, but it doesn’t matter now. I’ve got money, Mom is back in Minnesota enjoying the house I bought for her and running up my credit card on designer sneakers and food delivery apps, and I’ve got a great job and great friends. There’s not much else I could ask for.”
“Am I included in that list of great friends?” I ask with a smirk. Elliot’s head tilts, his green eyes sparkling as he squeezes my hand again.
“Oh, you sweet little goat. You’re at the very top of the list.”
9
YOU WANT TO RUB YOUR X’S AND O’S ALL OVER HIS…
Alex
Alex
