“This seat taken?” he asks, sitting next to me on my bench without waiting for an answer.
“What if I said yes?” I say, lazily. I slouch on the bench, my head against the back of it, and I turn to look at him. My field of vision sloshes. “Would you actually get up and sit somewhere else?”
“Probably not,” he admits.
“Then why ask?”
“Because we live in a society where manners are expected,” he says, that note of amusement in his voice that drives me up the wall. “Even though it’s obvious that no one’s sitting here, I say is this seat taken and you say no, please sit down, but only one of us managed to do it right. Hi, Lydia.”
She’s trying not to laugh at us.
Does she know? She must know. She knows that this is basically foreplay.
Oh, God.
“Hi, Eli,” she says. “Good party.”
“Thank you,” he says. “Same to you.”
“Thanks,” she says, and heaves herself out of the chair. “You guys want anything?”
We both decline. Lydia leaves the ring of light cast by the fire, and then, for the first time all night, Eli and I are alone together.
“You’re such a dick sometimes,” I say, relaxing against the back of the bench, no heat behind my words.
“You wouldn’t like me if I weren’t,” he says.
Something pops in the fire, sparks shooting upward.
“Do I like you?” I ask, finally looking over at him.
His smile’s slow, deliberate, cocky. He’s drunk too. It’s in his voice, his exaggerated movements, in the way he looks at me with the raw, naked lust he usually saves for in private.
“You like me plenty,” he says. “And there’s plenty of me you like.”
For once, I don’t argue, just look at him and let him know I’m looking: black t-shirt tight around the biceps, across the chest, bulge in the jeans, that easy, relaxed posture that screams I know how to fuck.
I want him to touch me and I don’t. I want him to take my hand where no one can see. I want one stolen kiss.
I want so, so much more.
But I feel like every single person left at this party is looking at us. I’m fire-blind and can’t see more than five feet, right to the edge of the circle of light, but I know I’m easily seen.
We’re easily seen.
“Eli,” I say, unnecessarily.
“Violet.”
“Everyone knows,” I say, my voice hushed.
“Knows what?” he asks, his voice low as gravel, secret and quiet and meant only for me, the voice he uses when we’re alone together.
I pause. Maybe it’s the whiskey but I suddenly realize that I don’t know how to answer the question, not exactly.
Or, more accurately, I realize that there are multiple answers.
I could say they know we’re sleeping together. Simple and true, but in this moment, firelit and drunk, it feels incomplete.
I could say they know we’re dating. I could say they know we’re together.
I could say they know you’re my boyfriend or they know we’re in love or any one of a hundred other things, and I think they’d come true, just like that.
Words have power. Labels have power, and right now, it all lies with me. I can name what I want and form reality.
But then I remember what and who I’m talking about. It’s Eli. If I said they know you’re my boyfriend and we’re in love he’d laugh and say then they’re wrong.
So I go ahead and strike boyfriend and together and in love out of my lexicon, because none of those things are true.
We’re not in love.
We’re not even in like.
“That we’re sleeping together,” I say.
Eli just sighs. If he senses the weight of everything I didn’t say, he doesn’t show it. If he thought, for a moment, that I might label us differently, I can’t tell.
“I know,” he admits.
“Then why’d you ask?”
“Levi and Seth discussed it with me,” he says, ignoring my question.
“Mindy Drake asked Adeline about it,” I say.
“You told Adeline?”
“Of course I told Adeline. You didn’t tell your brothers?”
Eli sighs, running one hand through his hair.
“Just Daniel, for obvious reasons,” he says.
“Not the others?”
He looks at me, green eyes serious. The fire makes the bones of his face stand out, makes his cheekbones and jawline sharper. He looks like a painting, breathtakingly beautiful.
Maybe it’s just the whiskey, but suddenly I want to trace every angle with my fingers.
I don’t touch. I can’t touch. I don’t dare.
“I thought you didn’t want me to,” he says.
“I didn’t,” I say.
“And now?” he asks me, the syllables low and quiet, secret.
“Now it’s not up to me any more,” I say.
Whenever I’m in his orbit, I always feel too far away and right now is no exception. I want him, his touch, his skin on mine. I wake up wanting it. I go to bed wanting it.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s a pointless question,” I say.