Eri glanced over at Elias, who was still setting up his station. She debated talking to him, trying to explain herself, but she knew the words wouldn’t come to her, and it wasn’t a conversation that she could cram into a few minutes before his client, or with Javier there to hear it.
That awkward silence set in again, and just as she was about to go wait in the car, where she wished she had stayed, Avian came down the hall.
“You ready?” her friend asked, and Eri nodded. “Bye, guys,” Avian said as they headed out the door.
“Bye, ladies,” Javier responded. At the same time, Elias replied, “Bye, Avian.”
That feeling in her chest reared its head again, and she didn’t miss the way Avian looked at her. She hadn’t told her friend what had happened between her and Elias, and while she knew she could tell her, she wasn’t ready to talk about it when she asked, but she knew the other woman would not forget.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
“You want to talk about whatever that was about?” Javier asked.
Elias looked up as he finished setting up for his client. “No,” he told him.
Where most people probably would have played dumb and pretended they didn’t know what Javier was asking about, he wasn’t one of them. But he was also under no obligation to talk to anyone about it. She’d made her decision, and Elias would respect it, but it didn’t mean he had to put on an act. He wouldn’t pretend that things were fine between them, not even to her.
She wanted to pretend he didn’t exist by ignoring his attempts to reach out, then he could do the same. He would give what she seemed to want. Elias was well-versed in ignoring people when he needed to. Hell, he’d grown up with Vince. He was also a firm believer in reciprocal treatment, and he would give her what she was asking for.
He could reach out again, but why would he? He’d asked her to talk to him the last time she put distance between them, and she couldn’t do that. Elias was a firm believer in communication, and he refused to be in a relationship without it. He liked Eri. Enough to move at her pace to make sure she was comfortable, but he didn’t want to be the only one trying. He wouldn’t keep chasing her.
A relationship took two people to make it work. True, they hadn’t put a label on it, but for Elias, the principle was the same. In hindsight, maybe that was a good thing. Breaking off something with no label should be easier than if they’d put one on it.
It didn’t matter at this point. He’d done his part and reached out. His text and call had gone unanswered, and really, that was all the answer he needed from her.
The door opened, and he looked up to find his client walking in. He shook the thought of Eri from his mind. There were other things he needed to focus on.
Elias looked over the finished bike. His client was coming to pick it up the following day, and he’d wanted to give everything one last check, even though he’d done that at least three times already. The bike was perfect, right down to the last detail the client had asked for. It was one of his best works, something he thought of all his bikes, because he put two hundred percent of himself into each one.
After one final review, he covered the bike and turned to the next one he planned to work on. Right now, the only thing he had was the frame, but he wasn’t under a strict timeframe. True, Elias liked to deliver to his clients within a specific window, but it was always clear in his contracts that he didn’t do rush orders. If someone wanted something like that, they were more than welcome to try one of the large motorcycle companies that allowed customization on their website.
Elias believed a motorcycle was an extension of the person riding it, and he created his with that in mind, with every client he worked with. The personal touches, the extra care that he put into it, were things they wouldn’t get from a motorcycle that came off an assembly line.
He didn’t have anything planned for the rest of the day. Hell, the rest of the weekend, really. He had one tattoo session the following afternoon and dinner at his aunt and uncle’s house Sunday evening, but outside of that, his weekend was free. Elias knew he could get a good bit of work done on the bike and decided that would be his focus for the weekend.
Staying busy was how he’d kept his mind off a frustrating woman who’d decided it was easier to run from him for the second time instead of talking to him. He’d honestly thought they were past that, but he should have known. When he’d asked her to communicate with him after the first time, she hadn’t sounded too confident in her ability to do so, and he’d heardit. Knew that she might have trouble with it, and he still let it go. The same way he had that night when he knew he shouldn’t have, when he knew she was trying to distract him and allowed it.
Their current situation was partially his fault because he’d known something was wrong, and had been naïve enough to think he’d be able to talk to her about it the following day. However, he’d done his part, he’d reached out, she’d ignored him, and that was that. Thinking about what he could have done differently hadn’t helped him over the past week; it wouldn’t shed new light, and it didn’t matter either way. It was what it was, and he’d leave it at that because there was only so much that he could do. They’d been here before, but this time he would let sleeping dogs lie.
For the next several hours, Elias focused on the bike in front of him, clearing his mind of anything else.
18
Eri could hear the motorcycle’s engine as it pulled into the driveway, and she took a deep breath as she rearranged the food on Avian’s island for the third time. There was only one person it could be because everyone else was already in attendance. She’d debated with herself for days whether she was going to come to game night, but she couldn’t avoid him forever. They had mutual friends, and Avian wasn’t the only one who seemed to know something had gone on between them. Nesiah had asked her about it when they’d taken the older woman to brunch for her birthday the weekend before.
“Are you okay?” Avian asked.
Eri put on a smile for her friend. “Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Well, you keep moving that one tray back and forth on the island. That empty tray.”
Eri looked down at the serving tray in her hand before letting it go like it’d burned her. She needed to get it together. This was no different from any other time they’d hung out.
Yes, it is. You hadn’t fucked him and left him then,her subconscious piped up as if she needed a reminder.
Okay, sure. That was true. Everything was different and not in the way she wanted it to be, but she’d battled with and berated herself over it to put on her big-girl panties and talk to him. She wouldn’t do it there. It wasn’t a conversation they needed to have in front of other people, but maybe she could change the energy between them by letting him know she wanted to talk about it. She could have called him or texted him, but that felttoo impersonal. Eri wanted to be genuine, and he deserved her speaking to him in person.
“It’ll be fine,” Avian said. “I’ll be right there if you need me.”
