“I can,” he said, figuring it was only a few steps.
“Good,” Eliot said. “Get in, and I’ll take you home.”
Danny frowned. “What about your car?”
“I took the bus here.” Eliot shrugged. “Now get in, before some enterprising young reporter catches up to us.”
“Other than you, you mean?” Danny asked.
“I’m on our side,” Eliot said, stepping away from Danny and getting into the car.
Danny couldn’t argue with that. If he’d been in doubt at all about whether he could expect loyalty from Eliot, he knew now that he could. This hadn’t been a part of their agreement. He hadn’t even told Eliot about his injury.
Neither of them spoke again until they drove out of the stadium and directly into a traffic jam.
Eliot turned to look at Danny. “Why do you even have a car in LA?”
“I dunno, why doyouhave a car?” Danny raised an eyebrow. He still remembered that Eliot did, though he’d never seen him drive it.
“Because it reminds me of what happens if I fail here. I get in it and drive home.” Eliot looked out at the bumper-to-bumper traffic ahead of him. “I have to keep it until I know I’m not going back.”
Danny suspected there was a reason Eliot didn’t want to go back, but he didn’t need to know the specifics. Especially not while the guy was driving.
Instead of interrogating him further, he opened the glove box and got out the bottle of painkillers he kept in there precisely for moments like this.
Normally, he just had to move his seat back as far as it could go and stretch out his leg until he could drive. Embarrassment aside, he was glad Eliot had been around.
“You haven’t got water or something by any chance, have you?”
“In the bottom of my bag.” Eliot reached behind the seat to grab it and dumped it on Danny’s lap.
Danny pulled out two notebooks, a pot of hand cream, a pack of tissues, and a tube of what turned out to be peppermint-flavored lip balm in his quest for the water bottle that really was at the bottom of Eliot’s laptop bag.
“Sothisis why you taste like a goddamn candy cane,” he said, presenting the tube.
Eliot chuckled. “You’re welcome to some of that, too. Your lips are really dry, it kinda sucks all the fun out of kissing you.”
Danny wrinkled his nose, then considered. Eliot’s lipshadbeen soft. So had his skin. It had never entered his mind that these might be good or desirable qualities in a partner, but Eliot had just changed his mind.
“When in Rome,” he murmured, taking some of the balm off the top of the tube with his finger and smearing it over his lips. It tingled for a few seconds, and the smell of peppermint hit him again.
His cock twitched at the reminder.
Danny capped the lip balm as fast as humanly possible and threw it back into the bottom of the bag.
It wasn’t that he was attracted to Eliot, specifically. It was that no one had kissed him like that in a long time, and he’d missed it. His cock didn’t care that Eliot wasn’t actually someone he could have sex with. He’d been a warm body showing an interest.
That was all.
“So it’s your knee, huh?” Eliot asked. “I had a few theories, but I know you’ve had two reconstructions…”
“And I need a third,” Danny admitted, grateful for the distraction as he swallowed the painkillers and washed them down with pretty much the entire contents of Eliot’s water bottle. “Like, yesterday. But I have to hold out for the rest of the season.”
“And then retire, right? You nearly let that slip the first time we talked.”
“Yeah. I mean, my body can only take so much.”
“Your laundry list of injuries was pretty impressive. You must be covered in surgical scars,” Eliot said.
