“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. There 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.