Eli Pride is Elizabeth Bennet (hybristic) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2011-01-24 12:04:00 |
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Entry tags: | elizabeth bennet, viola |
Who: Eli and Preston
What: A rational discussion
Where: Reliquary
When: A few days ago
Warnings: None
Eli wasn’t having the best day.
Kenna had picked up and abandoned Seattle, which wasn’t surprising, really, given the fact that he’d never known the woman to stay in one place over three months. But her leaving had left EIT short a man (in this case, a woman), and he and Drake had come up with a recruitment strategy that seemed quite impossible. The cases were piling up, and without Kenna to answer the numerous calls for assistance, he and Drake were required to be both field work and administration. The only blessing was that Reliquary took care of itself fairly well.
The afternoon, Georgie was sitting on the counter beside him counting quarters from the till, and he was going through voicemails, trying to determine which ones merited a callback, given how short handed they were. At the very least, the lack of time to think kept him from focusing on matters with Preston. His pride was still stinging from their last conversation on the forums, and his thoughts wandered as he listened to a recording of a woman telling him about a haunting in her shed.
The bell at the door jingled, announcing a customer, and Georgie greeted whoever passed the threshold with a cheerful “Good day, Guv’ner,” which was her new, best impression of Eli’s accent, and he couldn’t help but chuckle as he looked up.
As he came in Preston’s eyes had been to the side, making sure that he didn’t plow anyone out of his way. His expression was mild, eyes clear, and for once he didn’t look too tired. The dark blue coat was a good color on him, and instead of looking like Jacob Marley he had a flushed, pleasant face, probably because he’d walked a few streets over to get to Reliquary. He had no idea what he was doing here, so he was doing his absolute best not to overthink it.
His eyes moved next to Georgie, who was cute as a button and wore a grin that said she knew it. He had to smile back, of course, a small but gentle smile, and he said, as brightly as he could manage, “Good day.” It sounded odd with the slight touch of Boston that rolled off the back of his tongue. She sounded like Mary Poppins (on helium) and he just stopped himself from mentioning something of the kind.
To say Eli was surprised to see Preston walk through the door was an understatement, and he lifted Georgie down from the counter and shooed her toward the kitchen, suggesting she help make the cookies that were baking in the kitchen. She looked sorry to go, and she gave Preston (and his interesting accent) a sorrowful look over her shoulder as she went. Eli waited until he was out of earshot before he spoke, putting back the quarters she’d been counting. “You’re the last person I expected to walk through the door.”
Unlike Preston (who Eli had to admit looked good), Eli looked tired, overworked and like he hadn’t had a good sleep in days. His gaze lingered on the other man, and then his attention went back to the register, where balancing the drawer was suddenly terribly important. “Would you like to order something?”
Georgie trotted off and now Eli was the fortunate possessor of Preston’s full attention. He was looking right at his eyes the minute he thought to bring his back up from the assessment, and his expression was now one of careful good will. Small children didn’t bite, and apparently the walls weren’t made for them. He was here, however. Preston’s gaze flicked quickly to the chalked board nearby and back. Once. “Something you think I’d like?” he suggested, trying to hide his preoccupation with whatever it was that was keeping Eli up at night. Preston started going through his coat pockets for his wallet.
“If you pull out your wallet, I’ll be insulted beyond words,” Eli said, turning as he said it and starting the espresso machine, his back to Preston as he concentrated on a task that he could do in his sleep (and often had). The shirt he wore was a deep green, and it was wrinkled across his back and shoulders, a sign he had either slept in it, or grabbed it off the floor, and he wore no belt on the loose jeans that rested somewhere between hip and waist. “How’ve you been?” he asked, resisting the urge to turn around and look again. Instead, he paid attention to frothing the drink, and Georgie snuck out from the back and placed a cookie in front of Preston on the counter, giggling loudly enough that there could be no doubt that she was there. “Mutiny,” Eli called out to her, and she made a pirate sound and ran into the kitchen again.
Georgie's appearance interrupted Preston's intense gaze on Eli's shirt and the way it stopped just before his hips, and he was thinking about the wrinkles in it when a giggle and a cookie made him start guiltily. He felt like he was a kid again, stuck in church and thinking things that would send him to hell about the choir boys. The thought was now tinged with a touch of amusement and sympathy for his younger self.
"Good. Just busy." Sparke stock had gone up. Preston pushed his wallet back into his inside coat pocket and smiled at his cookie. "Who's the captain of this ship?"
“I delude myself that I am,” Eli said, turning with a white cup and a frothed espresso, Latin style, in his hand. He caught the smile at the cookie, and it made him wonder if Preston realized he was currently sharing the same space with him. He glanced over his shoulder toward the kitchen, catching a glimpse of brown hair as Georgie disappeared around the corner. “Your cookie benefactor is named Georgia, and she is a very mature five years old. Did you want to talk?” he asked, indicating the stairs and privacy from mutineers. “Or are you less likely to want to throw the scalding beverage on me down here?”
A little of the uncertainty came back, but one can't be unwelcome with a cookie present. "Surely it's not Georgia," he said for the benefit of little listening ears. "The Fierce Pirate Georgia, Scourge of the Sea, maybe." The smile came back, and he put out his hands, unsure how to take his cup. "I didn't come to fight," he replied a moment later, in a tone lower, eyes sliding slowly toward where privacy beckoned and back. "I just... we don't have to talk about anything important." He stopped, at a loss.
Georgia giggled from behind the door, an indication that little ears were, in fact, listening. Eli placed the small mug in Preston’s hands, his own hands brushing against Preston’s for the briefest moment, sure and strong and nowhere near as refined as Eli’s speech was. He motioned to the stair again, and he grabbed the coffee he’d been nursing earlier as he moved toward them himself, trying to tell himself that he’d imagined the electricity he felt when he touched Preston’s hand. Honestly, it was a hand.
Eli didn’t stop until he reached the top landing, which was lined with small tables and lovestruck teenagers and college students who chose the second story of the shop for privacy. He crooked his head, letting Preston know to follow, and he rounded the corner to a bright room with a table near a window, the door long since removed and replaced with an arch. “Why did you come?” he asked, setting his drink on the table and taking a seat, looking rumpled and harmless. “If not to find fault with me, that is.”
Preston let that pass with effort. He looked around the little room, wondering if he’d ever looked as silly or cow-eyed as the people outside the door behind him. He flexed his hand cautiously around the cup, feeling like he might break it if he gripped too hard, even if his hands weren’t anything like Eli’s. The worst thing Preston’s fingers encountered were bad papercuts and soreness from too much typing.
It took Preston a few moments longer to get into sitting, and even longer to sit back and relax into the chair. “I came to have a coffee,” he said uncertainly. He skipped the lame ‘in the neighborhood’ bit, and looked down at the surface of his cup. “Maybe to see if we could talk about something without arguing about it.”
Eli watched the process of waiting and watching and sitting, and he noticed something - Preston was either nervous or uncomfortable about something. He was fairly certain that was his place in their relationship (whatever their relationship was), and it made him look across the table at the other man pensively. He went back to his original acknowledgement that Preston looked good - well rested, well put together. He could admit (now) that Preston had always been handsome, though he was glad he hadn’t said it aloud. Still, red tinted the sides of his neck as he thought it, and he cursed his pale, freckled skin. “Perhaps. I think it depends if we’re actually intending to listen to one another.”
Preston hadn't tried the coffee yet, turning the cup in his fingers and watching the smooth foam. Again, he let the comment past him, even though the bitter implication still hung in the air. He steadied the cup in his hand, looked away from Eli's intense gaze out the window, and tried to sip the bitter taste between them off his tongue. "And by that you mean mutual willful disregard, or just me?" Another sip.
“I think we’re both guilty, to some extent, but you more so. Is it because I wronged you in the past?” Eli asked, voice mild despite the question. “And you’re looking for the first indication of my doing so again?” He’d been thinking about it, that much was clear. He watched the cup in Preston’s hand, and then he watched him take a sip, his gaze blatantly lingering on Preston’s mouth. Whatever else was between them, Eli had a very difficult time keeping his gaze off Preston, obviously so.
"I don't know," Preston admitted, trying to look at it abstractly and glancing occasionally back at Eli's face to see if he was still staring, and he always was. Feeling as if he was losing ground in his first thirty seconds of conversation. "Maybe. Maybe I am just more accustomed to avoiding serious conflict. None of my past relationships were this..." Preston hesitated. "Personal." Hastily, he took another sip.
Eli, who had been about to take a sip of his lukewarm coffee, paused with the cup partway to his mouth. “How can relationships be anything but personal, Preston?” he asked, sounding like he knew he wasn’t going to like the response.
Caught, Preston swallowed and squirmed a little uncomfortably in his coat. “What I meant was they didn’t go into the past or include much analysis of my character,” he said, enunciating carefully and avoiding Eli’s eyes entirely. The espresso was delicious, but it was a quick caffeine jump and Preston decided to blame that for his skittish approach to a conversation he was sure he could keep civil--right up until he walked in the door.
Eli opted to put his coffee cup down before he squeezed it too hard, which was an indication that he had not, in fact, liked what Preston had said. “I can’t claim to have had many successful relationships over the years, but I believe analysis of your lover’s character is a requirement.” He moved his chair slightly, moving it around the curve of the table and closer to Preston, his knee bumping the outside of Preston’s knee with the new placement. “I can’t un-know you,” he said, the whole Ash business finally starting to make some sense.
Preston tried not to feel like a trapped rabbit as Eli came closer, and reminded himself that he had come here, after all. They were having a conversation. Normal, talking. Coffee. Like a date. After sex. But like a date. Preston’s throat worked again. “A cursory one,” he agreed. “I meant not... not in depth. Not ‘where’s your family how was high school’ in depth.” Preston kept his shoulders oriented toward his coffee. “I wasn’t asking you to... ‘unknow’ anything. I was just saying...” he trailed off, he couldn’t remember what he was saying.
“Maybe dating women has colored my experience, but they’re exceptionally nosy creatures. I’ve found they insist on knowing a man from the tips of his toes, to the last hair on his head,” Eli said, and he gave Preston a sweeping look to go along with the comment. He leaned closer, forward, and his voice dropped, dipped into a low, masculine whisper. “Why are you nervous? I’m the one meant to be nervous around you, remember?”
“Well I might have... been light on the details initially,” Preston admitted. “You just don’t date on holidays and you can usually avoid those questions for a few months.” He turned his chin all the way over his shoulder to look at Eli as he leaned forward, and his gaze stopped darting away, pupils widening ever so slightly as Preston kept himself from blinking. “No, I don’t recall it being that way.”
“I wouldn’t let you avoid those questions,” Eli said, but it was a distracted sentence, caught up as he was in Preston’s movement - the turn of his chin, and the way he leaned forward. He watched Preston’s pupils widen, and then his gaze dropped to the other man’s mouth, voice dropping as his eyelids did. “How do you recall it being?”
“That’s my point,” Preston said, sticking to his intent in the conversation to the best of his ability. He gave up and blinked several times at once. “You don’t. It’s disconcerting.” He watched Eli’s eyes move and inadvertently wet his lips. “You’re disconcerting.” With effort he broke the gaze and fiddled with the espresso cup. “I’ve never actually had a fist fight with anyone,” he added.
That made Eli chuckle, and he sat back in the chair, slouching slightly, knees spread wide and one of his feet hooking under Preston’s chair. He leaned back, looking like he could use a good rest, and he gave Preston a grin that was slow and masculine-cocky. “Well, that just makes me memorable. I’ll take that,” he said, then, more seriously. “What’s the point in a relationship if you hide everything that makes you who you are?” And that was a hypocritical question if ever there was one, at least as far as his relationship history went.
Preston had been around the block enough times to know when he was being seduced. He decided to pretend it wasn’t happening in an attempt to keep the conversation relatively civil. That involved avoiding looking in Eli’s direction, since his gaze tended to stray. “I just don’t feel those things are as important to who I am as you do,” Preston replied, with a good approximation of flippancy.
Eli wouldn’t have called it seduction. Seduction would have involved his hands somewhere they most certainly were not. He folded those hands behind his head, stretching until his shoulders cracked, shirt riding up past his jeans. “What things? Who you are, where you came from? How you became the man that is sitting across from me today?” he asked. “Then what is important, Preston?” He might not care for his own past, but he knew it mattered, even if he’d like to run from it, if at all possible.
What Eli called seduction, Preston called foreplay. Stretching like that was what Preston would refer to as seduction. He looked at the wallpaper. “Who I am,” he said carefully, “isn’t where I came from. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.” He raised his eyes and forgot not to look at him. “That would be the part that you don’t listen to.”
Eli stopped stretching, and he sat forward, hands clasped between his knees and his attention entirely focused on Preston, gaze holding Preston’s unflinchingly. “Who are you?”
Ash’s blue eyes looked back. “Preston,” he said, firmly.
“And who,” Eli asked, slow and deliberate, “is that?”
"He's a successful businessman with two degrees, a lot of experience, and a problem lusting after antique books. When I date I like it private and--maybe not as intense as the next man." He frowned slightly. "I get the feeling you don't like him much, the man I've become."
“I like everything but the comment about intensity, because i think it’s a load of shit,” Eli said, reaching out a hand to fist in the front of Preston’s very neat, very pressed shirt. “I think it’s safer for you and your walls.” He smoothed the fabric, and he sat back, not having raised his voice above a whisper.
Preston wore an expensive designer's cologne that smelled of citrus and warm woods, and it came off his shirt in skin-warmed reminders of other things as Eli pulled him forward. The espresso cup rattled on the table as Preston quickly drew his hand away from it, to forestall or encourage, he wasn't sure which. He didn't get that far, though. He just sat there. "Maybe it is, while you're dealing with yours," he said baldly. "You're a hell of a person to talk to me about knowing myself, Eli."
“I’ll take that jibe,” Eli said, only a little defensively. “I was drunk at the mixer, yes, but I can’t deny I danced with a man,” he said, and it was obviously hard for him to say, despite all the bravado. He looked away a moment, calmed, then looked back. “I never claimed to know who I was. I told you from go that I only know that I want to see more of you. I don’t know anything beyond that.” He slid one hand around the nape of Preston’s neck, then, dragging him forward very intentionally this time. “I’m not going to settle for lukewarm from you. Not when I’ve seen what else you have in you.”
"You were a little beyond dancing," Preston said with a small, almost wistful smile, their foreheads nearly touching. Preston closed the distance and the resulting kiss couldn't be classified as "lukewarm" in any sense except that it was relatively brief. They weren't alone in an apartment and there was a detectable reserve past open lips and rough chin. "Just seeing," Preston agreed quietly.
Eli was, as always, less able to think when his blood was heated, and he pursued after the brief kiss, keeping Preston still with the hand on his nape and pressing his lips against that rough jaw for a moment, a low, hungry sound escaping him and giving away the fact that he was exerting control over himself, even if it didn’t seem like it. “I feel as if you’re asking me to agree to some limit there. Are you?”
"Something like that," Preston said after a brief attempt at pulling back and an equally prompt abandonment of the idea. "Stop pushing so hard at who I am and I'll stop pushing so hard at you and what you do." He didn't mean serve coffee, either. He ran his fingers through the hair behind Eli's left ear and smiled at how mussed he was.
“You realize those two things aren’t comparable? Something equal would be me not pushing about your satellites and what you do for Anton Sparke and his robot, not an agreement to stop finding out who the man across from me is,” Eli said, gaze intense and focused, despite the thrill that coursed through his veins at the innocent touch.
For some reason Preston thought this was an easy question to answer. The smile stayed. "I'm his assistant, which means I do pretty much anything he needs, from satellites to coffee meetings. I'm not as good at the coffee." He leaned slowly back, comfortable with that answer.
"You intentionally ignored my point," Eli said, watching Preston sit back, an intense sweep of his gaze meeting the movement.
The smile slipped a little. “I’ll stop pushing you to figure out what you want, then,” Preston said seriously, meeting the gaze before reaching again for his coffee.
“I’m figuring it out,” Eli said, intercepting Preston’s arm with fingers that closed around his wrist and held it there, between them. “What are you figuring out?” His gaze went from that wrist, masculine and strong boned, to Preston’s face, which held not even a trace of femininity. He was figuring it out; that much was true.
"How to deal with someone who knows too much about me," Preston said bluntly, his other hand coming over his body and gripping El's wrist in turn. It was meant to be a comforting contact, but it was not gentle.
It might have been intended to be comforting, but the result was anything but. As always, Eli was more comfortable with controlling than being controlled, and he flipped his wrist over instantly, trapping Preston’s hand. “Did you really think I would kill Richard in cold blood?” he asked, watching Preston’s face carefully, seeking truth.
Preston's immediate response was to try to free his arm, but he didn't know how to break that grip, and the effort proved useless. He bit his lower lip and glanced back up again. Preston didn't have to control his relationships. He let them control him, because he didn't give him all of himself. This wasn't the case this time, and that was really what bothered him. "No." The answer was honest. "But I didn't know what else you would do. Lock him up, maybe."
“Have I attempted to lock you up?” Eli asked bluntly.
Twitch. "I haven't hurt anyone."
“I have no notion what your ability is, and you seem to think I’m eager to kill every Creation in my path. Shall I start with Georgia, do you think?” he asked, referencing the young girl that had given Preston a cookie earlier. His expression was intense, something in it giving away that Preston’s immediate assumption he would kill Richard had wounded him, and greatly.
Restlessly. "I was angry at you." Preston’s brow clouded. "I didn't think you'd hurt him. I just didn't know what you'd do so I lept to conclusions." He took in a breath. "Georgia is one of us?"
The admission that it was anger that precipitated the accusation made it better somehow, and Eli let go of Preston’s wrist and sat back again in that lazy sprawl. “She is, yes. Her abilities have only just now begun manifesting. I honestly don’t know how children don’t get outed every day in schools across the world.”
Preston took his wrist back and resisted the urge to rub it. "What does she do? Who is she?" He tipped a curious head.
“Are you asking if she’s mine?” Eli asked with an entertained grin.
Preston blinked. "That hadn't occurred to me." It hadn't. Preston heard more than he wanted to of what happened in Eli's apartment, and he hadn't heard any small voices or visitors.
“I fear I’ve failed at heterosexuality if the thought didn’t even cross your mind,” Eli admitted, but he didn’t sound put out by it. “She’s the daughter of a good friend. I pick her up at school in the afternoons and keep her until Kathy gets out of work.” He gave Preston a look that was even more entertained than before. “Do you want to warn her that I’m a terrible human being? Or shall we keep that between the two of us?”
Preston snorted impatiently. "I never thought you were a terrible human being. I don't sleep with terrible human beings."
That caused red to climb up the side of Eli’s neck and splotch his cheeks. “We haven’t slept together,” he reminded Preston, because he had a very heterosexual view of what sex actually entailed, and he would remember if that had occurred.
That made quite an impact on Preston. His views were more conservative and more pragmatic. Once clothes came off, it was sex. It had to do with those walls of his--once you got past a certain point, you were past a certain point. His head came back, surprised. "You weren't drunk, you can't pull that 'I don't remember' thing."
The reaction surprised Eli, and he looked confused as he looked back at Preston, the bit of his upper chest visible above the collar of his shirt as red as his neck and cheeks now. “We’ve never had sex, Preston. We’ve made out, messed around, practiced our reacharound, but sex is-” pause. “Sex.”
Preston sat back in his seat, but it wasn't because he was relaxed. He needed the distance, but it wasn't enough to hide a flicker of hurt that made it into his eyes. Nobody liked hearing the thought the relationship was at a certain level when it apparently wasn't. He reminded himself that he didn't want personal. "Oh." He tried to wave it off. "Then I'm not... intimate with terrible human beings."
Eli didn’t like the distance, and he didn’t like that hurt he saw flash in Preston’s eyes. He stood, glancing back toward the open arch once before planting his knee on the seat of the chair between Preston’s knees. “What?” he asked, leaning down and lowering his voice so it didn’t carry.
"Nothing." It was a word that sounded exactly like it did when a woman said it. "We have different definitions of sex. It's not like I usually discuss it. Forget it. I didn't come to talk about anything serious, remember?"
Eli pressed his knee further forward. “Do the definitions matter so much?” he asked, uncertain as to why it mattered. He was very male that way, was Eli. He got jealous, and he showed it. He felt things, and he showed them. He wanted things, and he grabbed for them. But he didn’t feel the need to label.
Preston looked up and hesitated. “Just to me. I just thought we were... farther along.” For Preston the relationship really didn’t go any farther than where it was. The sex varied or didn’t vary, but the relationship, the intimacy--they were already past any point he’d been before. This conversation didn’t classify in the “nothing serious” category. He touched Eli’s hip, again meaning the contact soothing. “It’s not important.”
The touch might have been meant to soothe, but Eli took it as invitation, which resulted in a fisted hand in Preston’s shirt, and a sharp tug upward, pulling him to his feet.
Preston was not used to being pushed and pulled without warning, particularly out in public. "This is what I mean by disconcerting," Preston said softly, upright and inches away.
Eli remembered to glance toward the door before sliding his hand from the blue fabric to the nape of Preston’s neck. He dragged him close for an open-mouthed, heated kiss that did nothing to sate him, and then he let go entirely. “What, precisely?” he asked.
Preston barely had time to get over his surprise to respond before he was left on his feet again, feeling slightly light-headed and certainly not as mild or as confident as he had when he walked in. “You go hot and cold,” Preston said, not caring for the fact he was supposed to admit it. “Maybe from warm to hot,” he corrected after a second, throwing out a tentative smile and licking his lips.
Eli watched Preston lick his lips, and he held his ground, not moving forward (despite the desire to). “Are we back to your issues with my intensity?” he asked, knowing that was precisely what they were back to. “Tell me, Preston, how it normally works for you. I’ve only dated women. I know how that works. How does it work with you?” he asked, and you clearly meant men, because Preston was his only guide there. And Blake, but he suspected Blake did everything merely to shock.
Preston sighed and slowly sat back down. That meant he had to look up at Eli, but he was trying to keep the conversation on the cooler side and less serious than it insisted on being. “Dating is the same with both--for me. Meeting, coffee, dinner, sex. Then a while where it’s dinner and sex, and then one or the other leaves.” He frowned a little and looked down when it came to the last part.
Eli stood there, looking down at Preston as he spoke, and then a little longer as he looked at the frown on Preston’s face. “You realize you make it sound as fun as a desk job?” he asked, because Preston did. Eli might have completely non-functional relationships, but they tended to burn hot (while they burned).
Preston smiled. “They get more complicated than that, sometimes. Sometimes I skip the first three. Well.” He looked away. “One or two times.” And how much money did Eli want to put on one of those times being Blake? “Sometimes the dinner is more fun than than the sex, and sometimes it’s the other way around.”
“Dinner should never be better than sex,” Eli replied, but his mouth was tight and he was trying very hard to keep the jealousy from his voice - trying and failing. “Is that what we are, then? Bypassing the meeting and coffee and dinner?” Because they hadn’t actually done those things. His gaze narrowed slightly. “You make it sound unemotional, impersonal. Is that with women, too?” He sounded like he didn’t like any of it, because he didn’t.
Preston rubbed an eyebrow and then the back of his neck. “Of course it sounds impersonal. You just had me generalize how my relationships went, Eli, you want summaries of every one I’ve ever had?” It was faintly sarcastic; Preston was going to do no such thing. He was fanatical about the privacy of his relationships.
“You didn’t answer,” Eli said, undeterred. “Is that what we are?”
A hiss of impatience. “No, I just said I wasn’t used to this, didn’t I?”
The hiss actually made Eli stand down, made his relax. He had more trouble with Preston’s distance than with his anger, and he took a step forward and then another, not stopping until he was standing directly in front of the other man’s chair. “Do you date men, Preston? Not dinner. A date.”
“Yes,” Preston said, trying to understand why this was relevant. He found himself looking for pitfalls in almost every conversation he had with Eli. “Will you sit down? You’re making me nervous pacing around.”
Eli propped a hip on the table directly in front of Preston, and if he realized that was distracting there was no indication of it on his face. “And emotional attachment?” he asked, and that was a harder question, and it was obvious. Having sex with a man, it seemed, was easy. Having more was hard.
Preston’s gaze was steady; he kept it on Eli’s face even though it was probably going to give him a crick in his neck. “Once or twice.” He shifted in the chair and remembered, belatedly, the cold coffee at his elbow, but he didn’t turn and look at it. He perceived the height difference and the pose as intimidation, but didn’t mention it.
“Were you out about it?” Eli asked, and there was an extreme amount of interest in that question. “Hand holding on the sidewalks and snogging on the bus, that sort of thing?” he asked. “And,” he added, “is your policy on such things the same with women as it is with men?” If anything, he seemed scared right then, a shadow of the past in his eyes.
“Out,” Preston repeated. “...Generally, no. Occasionally. It just depended where it... where we were.” He rolled his lips together and tried to lighten the inquiry. “I’m sure you’re as public as possible with yours. You know we call it kissing on this side of the pond, Eli.”
“I can’t say I think very much when I’m in a relationship,” Eli admitted, smiling through the uncertainty. “I’m sure that surprises you immensely,” he added, knowing it did nothing of the sort. Then, slower and with even less certainty. “Go on a date with me. Or do you call that something else on this side of the pond, also?”
Preston’s smile matched his and was therefore more natural and warmer than his previous. “Eli, we’re sitting here having coffee. That’s what this is.” He may have done that just to see how he’d react. Preston hadn’t come here with the intent to corner Eli on a date. He just wanted to talk to him.
Eli shook his head. “No,” he insisted. “This is two men having coffee. This didn’t come with planning and fear and a public place.” It was obvious he didn’t consider Reliquary public. It had been his home for years, after all, and this was more familiar than his apartment at Bathos. “I’ve always hated dates,” he admitted. “Female things, made for women and not for men. Men want to get into bed. Women want champagne and strawberries and meaningful conversation. This would be considered a poor date indeed.” He reached out a hand, the back of his fingers brushing Preston’s jaw, as if of their own volition. “Not a date, love.”
“You’re making me sound cheap,” Preston said, smiling as if he was very expensive indeed. “I like meaningful conversation as long as it’s not about me. Champagne and strawberries don’t taste any worse to me than they do to women. You’re generalizing again, Eli, but you can by me dinner when you’re in the mood.”
"Tuesday evening," Eli said, before he could change his mind, standing as he said the words and rubbing his palms against the thighs of his jeans. "8 pm?" he asked, looking at his coffee cup as he lifted it, as if it needed his undivided attention.
The smile was lingering and Preston was enjoying himself far too much. "Are you going to pick me up?" The blue eyes slid down to catch the friction on the jeans, as if the table was transparent, and he lifted the cup again.
"I'll knock on your door, you ungrateful sod."
"How romantic." A flash of a rare grin. "It won't be so bad, Eli."
"Did I say I thought it would be?" Eli asked defensively, nerves roiling as he thought about it. Something in his eyes said this would be much harder for him than anything that happened in bed.
Abruptly Preston wanted a cigarette. He took in a breath and took up the cup again. "I'm pushing when I said I wouldn't. If something comes up for you on Tuesday, then it does." He emptied the coffee cup and stood up. "Thanks for the coffee. It was good."
"Tuesday. 8 pm," Eli repeated, insisting.
Preston took a look out the door and then leaned down and put his lips against Eli's, an enticement that he knew would work better than reassurance. "I'll see you then."
Eli gripped tight fingers in Preston's sleeve, but the press of lips had the intended effect, and by the time Preston was bidding him farewell, Eli was nodding his agreement.