“Um,” Luke said. “Yes. Yes!”
“Just to talk,” said Elliot.
“Obviously,” said Luke. “What else would we—what? Talking. Of course.”
“Cool,” said Elliot as Luke was engulfed by the crowd.
Luke was always being engulfed by crowds. He might be insecure enough now to look for affection from a reliable source, but Luke did not realize how many fish, or indeed potential mermen, there were in the sea.
Elliot had evolved a master scheme: transform himself into more of a trusted friend than a boyfriend, a confidant, to become a pathway to different and better things. They could come to a mature and mutual realization that their romantic relationship would not work out.
“If you’re happy to be with Luke,” Serene said, under the noise of the crowd, “I’m happy.”
Elliot nodded. “Great, thanks.”
“You don’t look very happy,” Serene continued.
Elliot bared his teeth at her. “I’m ecstatic.”
Behind them, Swift-Arrows-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle said in an awestruck voice: “Who is that?”
Elliot looked where Swift was looking. Bright-Eyes the librarian was standing at the gates of the Border camp, scolding the returning cadets about their late fines.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll introduce you.”
Luke’s cabin was one of those built farther out from the camp, among the trees. The Border guard had strung lanterns in the trees overhead, so cadets could follow the path of light to their rest. The lanterns glowed like cat’s eyes in the dark, bright and watchful in a coil of branches, like a cat’s limbs and tail. Elliot recalled one book about magical lands in which there had been a disappearing cat who mocked people. The leering lanterns and the waiting trees seemed to be mocking Elliot: perhaps the whole night was mocking him.
Elliot walked under the trees to Luke’s cabin, knocked on the rough wood of the door, and went in without waiting for an answer. This was part of his new campaign of casual friendship.
“Hey,” he said casually.
Luke’s room was neat with the terrifying neatness of someone raised to military discipline, but Elliot suspected he had still been cleaning up in some fashion. Luke was holding a knife, but dropped it when Elliot came in. Elliot stared at the blade skidding toward his feet, and then at Luke’s open, dismayed face.
“Sorry!” Luke said.
“Sad to say, I think I’m used to hurtling weaponry by now.” Elliot picked up the knife and tossed it back at Luke. Luke caught it with no fuss, as Elliot had expected.
A slight pang of unease went through Elliot as he strolled into the cabin. He was used to someone having easy expertise with murder weapons, handling blades with careless confidence. That was who Luke was: that was who Elliot was, now.
He thought of the way the man from the humans’ side of the Border had looked at him. He had not known, before, how much he had changed. He had not fully realized how the people of the Borderlands looked to people from across the Border.
He thought again: they had to be ready.
And he was not distracting himself with thoughts of diplomatic crises from his personal crisis at all.
Elliot paid a fond visit to several items of contraband he had hidden in Luke’s room, including an old radio that occasionally crackled and never went on fire. He had high hopes for the radio. He talked about classes, and Golden, and the disturbing fact that Bright-Eyes the librarian had worn scarlet flowers in his hair that evening.
“So,” he said, once Luke was sitting on his bed, looking relaxed, and Elliot felt that an air of undemanding camaraderie had been established. “Uh. Wanna talk about boys?”
“Um,” Luke said. “What do you mean?”
They were both amazingly eloquent. Elliot was amazed by them.
“It’s just I thought we could talk about them,” said Elliot. “Given that you didn’t know that I could”—he searched for friendly and not sexy words—“sympathize and empathize with you!” he said triumphantly. “I’m sure you’ve had a lot of crushes on guys, right?”
“What?” said Luke.
“Adam or Neal?” Elliot asked. “Gregory Sunborn? I always thought he was kind of a silver fox. In a leonine way. A silver lion.”
“I think they’re all related to me,” said Luke.
Luke’s parents were both Sunborns, so they were related to each other. Elliot did not point this out. He was amazed to discover that he had a line he was not willing to cross. Parents were one unsexy step too far.
“Do you want to hear about Jase?” Elliot asked. “He was”—an asshole—“kind of good-looking.”
Luke made a face. “I don’t.”
“Golden?” Elliot hazarded.
“Serene’s Golden?” Luke demanded, sounding scandalized. He stared at Elliot. “Do you think Golden—do you—”
“Not really,” said Elliot.
Luke did not look any less upset. He got off the bed, standing and then pacing, scrubbing a hand absently over his face. Word was that Luke and Dale had got pretty hot and heavy in Dale’s cabin, before it all ended in tears and interspecies prejudice. Elliot was doing terribly, in comparison.
Elliot was not supposed to be trying. He was supposed to end this before he let Luke down and so they could stay friends.
“When was the first time you realized you had a crush on Dale?” he asked, forcing himself to sound relaxed and friendly, prepared to hear a long story about some good-looking boy on a Trigon pitch.
“What are you doing?” Luke demanded.
“I don’t know!” Elliot snapped. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m sorry.”
That had not sounded very casual at all. Elliot stared into Luke’s blazing eyes. He had wanted to be taller than Luke for years, and now he was, and it did not matter.
“You want to talk about boys, and crushes, you want to laugh about it the way my family does,” Luke said. “Fine. Let’s talk about when I tried to be with Dale, and I couldn’t stop thinking about you.”
Elliot opened his mouth to say “What?” and found he was incapable of saying any words at all. This was absurd. Elliot had great mastery of many words, and “what” was not a difficult word. Luke had ruined everything he knew about himself.
“Let’s talk about how I came to the Border camp to make friends, and I met you, and you didn’t like me at all. Everybody always liked me before. I couldn’t figure out how to get you to like me. At first you didn’t even remember my name.”
Elliot wondered if it would make things worse or better for him to tell Luke that he had only pretended to forget Luke’s name in order to torment him. Apparently he had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams and maybe actually driven Luke out of his mind.
“Let’s talk,” Luke continued in a savage voice, having seemingly not noticed that he was the only one talking, “about the fact you kept reminding me that you thought I was a waste of space and we weren’t friends. Eventually I had to tell myself fine. We weren’t friends. I told myself I didn’t care about what you thought of me or how you behaved or whatever stupid way your mind worked. I didn’t want to deal with you. I’d spend my time with people who didn’t hate me and everything about me. I told myself there were a lot of people in the Border camp I could get along with just fine.”
Elliot nodded with conviction. That made sense.
“But I didn’t go away, did I?” Luke demanded. Elliot shook his head, bewildered all over again. “If I didn’t want to deal with you, why was I always pathetically hanging around? You made it clear you didn’t want me there. I wanted to be there. It was me.”
Luke was applying the word pathetic to himself. It was possible nothing would ever make sense again.
“Let’s talk about when you kept asking me who I had a crush on, and you wouldn’t drop it, because you’re relentless, and so—I said Dale. It wasn’t a lie. He said he liked guys too, and I thought it made sense. He was good-looking and he liked Trigon and he liked me. Ther
e was no point in thinking about anything else, and I didn’t. You didn’t even want to be my friend.”
Let’s not talk, Elliot wanted to suggest for the first time in his life, because he could not quite process all these revelations and thought he might be in shock, but Luke appeared to be on a roll.
“Then let’s talk about when we were doing the school play, and you were playing that stupid character, and you were wearing that stupid costume, and you were being nice, and it was all for Myra but I didn’t know that at the time, I didn’t know—”
“What?” said Elliot, finally able to say the word.
He had thought he could deal with anything Luke threw at him: anger or disappointment or scorn. He had not expected to feel utterly wrong-footed, as if he had stumbled into a reality that was different than the one he had always perceived and had no idea how to react.
He also had not expected to be at a loss for words when Luke could find so many. Even the most basic facts of his life had utterly betrayed him.
“Do you want to talk about the night of the play, when you talked to me about Adara kissing me and how it didn’t have to count, and I thought—I thought—”
“What?” Elliot asked for the third time. “What did you think?”
Luke glared at him, then stalked over to sit on the bed again. He covered his face with his hands.
“And I never thought about it again, until I tried with Dale and I couldn’t not,” he said, his voice savage but muffled. He tore his hands away, held them in fists at his sides, and turned his face from Elliot’s sight. “I didn’t think about it because it was useless and I don’t think about useless things,” Luke continued furiously. “What good would it do? I couldn’t have you.”
Elliot came and sat on the bed beside Luke. He did not remember deciding to do that, he thought as soon as he had done it. Nothing was going according to plan, along the lines of the story he had laid out in his head. He reached out a hand and turned Luke’s face back to him.
“Hey,” Elliot murmured, cupping his face in his hands, kissing him, trying to make the kiss say I did not mean to hurt you and I won’t do it again. He covered Luke’s face in kisses and felt Luke draw a breath in against Elliot’s mouth, trembling and close. “You have me.”
Luke kissed him back, and the long kiss that followed meant something else, meant a thousand wild things at once. The kiss seemed to electrify and magnetize their bodies, sealing them tight together even though every inch of Elliot’s skin was crackling. Luke touched Elliot’s face and his hair, his expression wondering. Elliot slid a hand up under Luke’s shirt, stroking lightly and feeling the contrast of sleek skin and tucked-away feathers under his fingertips, held on to Luke’s shoulder with his free hand.
Then the wings burst through the thin material of Luke’s shirt, arching over his shoulders and blocking out the light. Elliot started back. A wing hit him in the face and he tipped off balance, off the bed and hit his head against the wall.
“Oh my God,” said Luke. “Are you all right?”
Elliot sat up on the stone floor, feeling a little dazed but not entirely from the blow, and burst out laughing. “Fine,” he said. “I think all the hair protected my skull.”
He was still blinking, when Luke told him: “You can go, if you want.”
“What?” said Elliot.
Oh, great. They were back to that. If Elliot found himself frequently reduced to this level of verbal inadequacy, he was disowning himself.
“I know you think I’m stupid,” Luke began.
“I don’t think you’re stupid,” said Elliot. “I feel I have to make that clear. But I do want to reserve the right to call you stupid in future just the same.”
“Look, I get it. You came in here talking about how hot your ex was, and then how hot Dale was, and none of that was a good sign, then I panicked and started ranting at you, and now I’ve knocked you into a wall. You’ve been with so many other people, and I got everything wrong. You don’t have to stay because you feel sorry for me. I know I messed this up.”
“Four people is not that many!” Elliot protested vehemently.
He stood up so he could see Luke’s face without the curtain of a wing between them, and saw that Luke looked unhappy, again, so soon after Elliot had promised himself he wouldn’t hurt him. Seeing Luke look like that cut through defensive feelings tangling and trying to form a thorny protective shield in Elliot’s chest. He felt defeated in a strange warm way, almost as he had when his defences were worn away by exhaustion in the commander’s tent, except this time he knew more and had chosen to let the defences fall. He heard his voice come out gentle.
“But maybe it’s enough to know that everyone messes this up,” he said. “Let’s review everything you just said. Basically, I’m a terrible person who is always cruel to you—”
“No,” said Luke. “No, I wasn’t trying to insult—”
“And you are totally into it,” Elliot said. “That’s weird. Like you might want to talk to somebody about that.”
“I just talked to you about it!”
“Someone who’s not me,” said Elliot. “I’ll only mock you. Because I’m going to mess this up. I came here panicking to talk you out of this via a cool casual segue into friendship where we talked about other guys. Do you remember teaching me how to run and how I kept stumbling and wheezing and falling on my face?”
An amused smile crept its way onto the bleakly humiliated plain of Luke’s face. “Yes.”
“And you thought it was super funny, even though I was a bookish child totally unaccustomed to extreme physical exertion and as it turned out I was being held to supernatural standards by wicked bullies. Nobody’s good at something when they start out.”
“You’re not the one who’s starting out,” Luke said. “You’re not the one who is going to mess up.”
“I am starting out,” said Elliot, and took a deep breath. “You know the stuff you said about my home life is true.”
“Elliot, I am sorry about that.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry about it too, but it’s true,” said Elliot. “I didn’t have any friends in the human world. I didn’t have anyone.” He smiled. “You of all people know I did not display any expertise in having friends in this world. I had a few disastrous romances. Serene and Adara didn’t take me seriously, and I shouldn’t have taken Jase seriously. I didn’t learn how to . . . run when I was a kid, and I still don’t know how to do it without falling down on my face.”
Elliot was still standing a foot away from Luke, pulling at his own hair. Luke was sitting on the bed, his wings glowing ivory arches above him, his face still unhappy though it had softened when Elliot talked about running, and Elliot saw him understand what Elliot meant.
This was enough distance and unhappiness. Elliot walked toward Luke, and saw Luke barely breathed as he watched him coming, as if he was afraid he might scare Elliot off. Instead of being scared off, Elliot eased gradually into Luke’s lap. The wings could not get him there. Instead, there was Luke’s face, very close, still hardly breathing.
“I’m going to make you a promise. I swear to you, Luke,” Elliot murmured in his ear. “I’m going to mess this up.”
“Yeah?” Luke asked, his voice rough. “How are you going to mess it up?”
“I’ve messed up in the past, but since this is you”—Elliot laid a kiss beside Luke’s ear and when Luke shivered he followed the trail of shivers with kisses along the line of Luke’s jaw, where faint golden stubble scraped against his mouth—“and I have a history of getting things wrong with you—” Elliot reached Luke’s mouth, and paused there. Luke’s shirt was basically in shreds from the sudden wings. Elliot peeled the torn remnants away from Luke’s chest and shoulders, slid his hands down Luke’s skin and murmured, “I have a feeling it could be pretty spectacular.”
“Yeah?” Luke whispered. “What are you going to do?”
“Well, I’ve already spoken extensively about the hotness of my former lover
s,” Elliot pointed out.
The muscles in Luke’s shoulders and jaw both locked at once, tense, and not in a good way.
“I don’t like that,” he said flatly.
“I know, forget that, it was terrible,” Elliot said hastily.
Some people liked it, he knew, but he could see Luke hated it. He imagined Luke telling him about how hot Dale was, and he did not think he would like it himself. He felt a little light-headed with his own daring, as if he were edging out on a thin rope over a cliff or facing the challenge of a treaty he did not know how to draft. He had always tried to show everyone before that he would not mess up, tried to win affection while feeling the weight of a hard lump of despair telling him it would not be possible. There was tension and terror in this, but Elliot laid his face against the side of Luke’s face and did not feel that despair.
“Since it’s you, and I’m unused to complimenting you, I am also going to offer very bad compliments.”
Luke laughed, and Elliot felt his muscles relax slightly. He turned his face into Elliot’s, something very natural about the movement as if Luke had been turning to kiss Elliot for far longer than two days. He kissed Elliot, a little clumsily at first but almost immediately turning it into something devastating, all-consuming and all-conquering. As was the Sunborn way. He kissed Elliot as if he really wanted to: as if he wanted nothing else.
Then he said: “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a compliment from you. Like what?”
“Picture this: the should-be tender morning after the night before, and I turn to you and say, ‘Congratulations on being athletic and well-meaning, Luke!’”
Luke laughed. “That would be bad.”
“I honestly wouldn’t mean it badly,” said Elliot, and helped Luke take off Elliot’s shirt. For a moment they were in a tangle of shirt and sheets that was complicated by the addition of wings. Elliot laughed, kissed Luke and tasted his laughter, stopped laughing, and held on.
“What else?” Luke asked, voice scraping in his throat. He bowed his bright head and kissed Elliot’s chest, and Elliot’s heart pounded.