Little Battles (14 page)

Pain swept through me as his shoulders gently slumped forward. Maybe I should’ve asked those things in an e-mail, but I was here with him now and it seemed like I should be able to ask him something like this now that we were…whatever the hell we were to each other.

“M-M-MMMcKay.”

“Did you have to change your name?” He shook his head as he turned around, apparently satisfied with this depressing-ass piano music, and went over to his bed. “You wanted to?” He nodded and took a deep breath.

Instead of sitting down, he walked over to his bedside table and opened a drawer. He lifted a million little things before pulling out something small, and then walked over to me.

I sat up and reached for it, shivering a little as our fingers brushed and the usual rounds of chemicals passed between us. When I looked at the paper, I found that it was a small photograph of four people. A red-haired woman held a boy with rusty auburn hair. She stood next to a very severe-looking man with his hands very awkwardly resting on a brown-haired boy’s shoulders.

Elliott had handed me the photograph face down and moved away before I turned it over. He was currently sitting on the edge of his bed
not
looking like he owned it, while his eyes were steadfastly fixed on one of his guitars.

He obviously didn’t like this picture, or what it represented. I wished I hadn’t asked about it. But it was in my hands now and I looked at it closely. Little boy Elliott was amazingly cute with crazy long eyelashes and amazingly bright hazel eyes, and hair that stood out. It wasn’t as bright as his mother’s, it was more subdued, but the color drew my eyes to it instantly.

The smiles didn’t seem right. They were all wrong, like they were fake or forced, and the guy who was apparently Elliott’s father didn’t even try to smile.

He looked like an asshole.

I studied the younger version of Elliott. He was small and his face was different, but I could see the Elliott I knew in there. I sucked at guessing ages, but he looked like he could have only been five at the time. I wondered what his voice sounded like when he was that young. I wondered if when this picture was taken he’d already begun stuttering.

“Do you miss your brother?” I asked. I hadn’t even looked at his brother really, so as I asked the question, I studied the photograph. He seemed fairly unremarkable, but not in a bad way. He just looked like every other kid in the world, and seemed quite a bit older than Elliott. If Elliott was five, he would have been nine or ten.

When I looked back up, he wasn’t perched on the edge of his bed; he was standing right next to me. He gently plucked the picture from between my fingers and then silently replaced it in the drawer.

I wished that I hadn’t looked up at him in that moment and seen the unmasked sadness on his face, and some kind of fresh fear in his eyes.

So Elliott didn’t want to talk about his brother.

“Do you want to do something this weekend?

His eyes suddenly brightened and sparkled like usual. “Y-y-yes,” he answered immediately and I couldn’t stifle my smile. I was more excited than I cared to admit that he was still so happy to spend time with me.

“You should come over then. Like tomorrow or something. I think Tom has to work. I was going to make a roast, but I work Sunday so we can’t hang out until after three.” I stood, feeling somewhat overexposed, and crossed over to his bookshelf. Gliding my fingers over the spines of the books, I added, “Or I can come over here if we have to do shit with the Brussels sprouts or whatever.”

“W-w-what do you w-want to do?”

I sighed. “I’ll come over here,” I answered quietly.

“Ssssso tomorrow?”

“Yeah.”

I heard him take a deep breath. “W-w-will you n-not get hhhhigh?”

I spun around, ready to be absolutely and completely pissed off at him. I could be high if I wanted to, and I certainly didn’t need his permission. Then I saw his face and how absolutely torn he looked, and I couldn’t be angry. When I thought about it, I was pretty damn sure Elliott would be upset if I got angry with him for asking. Actually, I was oddly proud of him.

“Yeah, fine. I mean, sure.” I swallowed hard, wondering how the hell I was going to get through an entire day without getting high. Well, I would try anyway. I felt scared looking at Elliott and his all-too-hopeful smile. All this shit was scary. I’d never really wanted to try for anything before and here I was making this pledge.

He came over to me and I turned back around, reaching out for some green chunk of rock on his shelf. I squeezed it tightly in my palm and angled my face away from Elliott. His presence was like the sun, his body radiating heat and light and energy into me.

He held my left hand with both of his, and I squeezed the rock tighter in my right. My breath caught as I felt like giving up everything I’d been holding onto so tightly. I wanted to give him everything inside of me. I wanted the light of his sun to stamp out the coldness of the dark night in my heart.

It was in these moments that my time with Elliott was the most dangerous. It was times like these that he made me feel safe and secure, and it was in these minutes that were ours alone where I gave him everything I never wanted to.

My hair fell like a shield between us. He took one of his hands away and I squeezed the rock again when I felt his fingertips brush my cheek. I’d told him that I didn’t like that, and I wanted to get upset and angry, but I couldn’t.

“D-don’t hhhide, p-please.”

I didn’t understand him at all. Why wasn’t he trying to get me in his bed? Why would he give a shit if I hid? I turned around, still holding the rock, and lightly pressed my fist into his ribs. I wanted to mold myself to him and undo the buttons of his shirt, but as I applied pressure to his side, he took in a sharp breath and closed his eyes tightly.

“What’s wrong?” I asked him quietly.

“N-nothing.”

Bullshit. Elliott was a terrible liar. His eyes told the truth when his mouth did not. “Why does your side hurt, Elliott?”

He dropped my hand and moved away, but not far. “I-it’s o-okay, S-Sophie.”

Liar.

“Why can’t I hide if you do?”

“I’m n-n-not hhhhhiding.” He came back to me and retook my hand, while I squeezed the rock again. “M-my sssside is fine.”

It was because of my mutinous body that did whatever it wanted instead of listening to me, that I found myself pressed against him, breathing in his orange earth scent. Careful of his seemingly injured side, I slid my hands around his waist and hugged him.

Measuring my breaths, I kept telling myself that it was okay, that I could be this close to him. I felt like I was moving, even though I was pretty sure I was totally still. He rested his chin on the top of my head, and my heart started racing as I fought desperately between wanting this comfort from him, and needing to be very far away from his touch. This felt
so
good. Too good.

I wasn’t stupid. I recognized the want, the
need
, for him that had been created within me. But like I told him, it was stupid to want what you couldn’t have. Although he was so incredibly willing to give himself to me, what he offered came at such a high price.

If this continued, I’d let him see me; I’d tell him things that even
I
didn’t want to know. Once someone knew something they couldn’t ever not know it, and once he was aware of everything, he would leave, so he shouldn’t even try.

I pushed away from him, still mindful of the pain in his side. I wanted to go to the other side of the room, a safer place where he wasn’t, but he took my hand again and sure enough I was bound to him once more.

He kept me close to him. “Elliott,” I exhaled, not entirely sure why I was saying his name like that.

“D-d-don’t get hhhhigh tomorrow a-a-and I’ll tell you ab-b-bout mmmy r-ribs.”

Saturday morning was the outright worst Saturday morning known to man. I woke up after only a few hours of sleep, wishing that I had never made that stupid promise to Elliott. I had the perfect opportunity, since Tom was gone by the time I left my room, and I had plenty of pot. It would have helped me fall back to sleep, but the stupid nagging voice inside my head wouldn’t let me disappoint Elliott.

I nearly fell to my death on the stupid, slanted stairs in Tom’s old-as-shit house. I burned my finger on the coffee burner since the carafe wasn’t the correct one for the model, and it took me longer than ever to read my blood sugar so that I could inject my insulin. When I did, I jabbed the lancet in the finger that always hurt and it bled like hell. A small red drop found its way onto the knee of my jeans.

I took the bus to the strip mall about a mile from Elliott’s house. I could’ve let him pick me up, and now that I was hoofing it the rest of the way, I wished my stupid, prideful mouth would have accepted when he’d offered to pick me up.

I held the rock from the night before in my right fist. I wondered if he missed it, or if he even knew that I had it.

He looked so good in jeans and a light blue t-shirt when he opened the door. He was so much more comfortable in his own home than he was at school. Then he grabbed his coat as we went to the quiet greenhouse, and I was amazed by how warm it was in there. I looked at the plants, which were no longer sprouts but actual plants, and I immediately felt like shit.

If I’d been high, I wouldn’t have felt like the worst person on the planet.

“I’m sorry.”

“Ffffor w-what?”

“I’m not really fair to you, am I?” He looked at me, questioningly. “You give more than you get from me.”

Elliott shook his head. “Y-you g-give a-a-a llllot.”

His eyes said he was lying. “Your lies make baby Jesus cry, Elliott. I’m a bad lab partner.”

I almost regretted trying to lighten the mood just a little when he looked down, but then his mouth slowly turned up into a smile.

“I haven’t gotten high all day, you know,” I whispered.

What the hell did I want? Diabetic cookies and a gold star that said “Elliott Dalton approved?”

Then I realized that my reward was the beautiful smile that rarely graced his face, and I wanted to bask in it forever, but I remembered he promised me something in return. “So, what happened to your side?”

The smile faded and he shook his head. “C-C-C-Ch-Chr-Chris.”

“What the fuck did he do?”

Again, Elliott shook his head and he held up a hand as if to tell me that his ribs didn’t hurt that badly. “Hhhe j-just hhhhit me.”

“Why?” My teeth were clenched. I wanted to hurt Anderson.

“D-does hhhhe n-need a reason?”

No matter how much I yearned to beat the shit out of Chris for hurting Elliott, we spoke no more of it. It was obviously a subject Elliott didn’t want to talk about, and I was pretty sure it was because he was embarrassed. I wished he wasn’t embarrassed. I wished he’d just kick the shit out of the guy and get it over with.

We went inside and started cooking dinner.

“You made your own barbeque sauce?”

David’s loud question shook me out of my quiet thoughts as I stared at my food. I’d been trying to avoid too much talking. I wasn’t high at all, and it was incredibly difficult to hold much of a conversation with anyone.

I cleared my throat. “Uh, yeah, all you really need is tomatoes, hickory smoke, molasses, and a couple of spices.”

I wanted dinner to be over so that I could go back up to Elliott’s room with him. Alone.

“You have an artful eye for plating, Sophie,” Jane said. “The colors and shapes are beautiful.”

“Yeah, whatever.” She could stop saying shit like that any time now.

It wasn’t until I was in the solace of Elliott’s room that I was comfortable again, and it was with that comfort that I was sitting on his couch with him beside me.

It was incredibly new to me, because every single cell in my body was directing me to climb into his lap, lock my arms around him, and wriggle around until we were naked and attached to each other. The only things that kept my hands off of him were how incredibly nervous he looked, and the fact that he hadn’t touched me.

It was ridiculous. I could be riding him right now, but no, I was stone-cold sober, sitting next to him with no part of my body touching him.