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.”