Eli Pride is Elizabeth Bennet (hybristic) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2011-06-23 02:37:00 |
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Entry tags: | elizabeth bennet, viola |
Who: Eli and Preston
What: Talking and kissing
Where: Reliquary
When: The morning after this
Warnings: None really. This one fades to black at the end.
Rome had gone, and the couples upstairs had slipped out of the shop, one-by-one, guilty lovers, as if Eli hadn’t been listening to everything they’d been doing together for the past hour.
Outside, fog was beginning to blanket the city in deep, unforgiving darkness. Lucas had gone, and Julian was out, and Eli could hear Preston moving around in the back room. He’d been listening to him for minutes now, long ones that seemed like hours. He had smoked three cigarettes, and he’d turned the sign over on the door and locked it, calling a cab for Nana and figuring the fog would keep anyone from venturing out. He didn’t bother to turn on the radio, and he did not attempt to find out what had shadowed the world in cotton and isolation so quickly. The Weatherman, he suspected, and he kept the worry at bay for the moment. It was easy to do, actually, much easier than expected when the view out of every window was cotton. It was easy to feel like there was only himself and the man moving about the back room. Nothing else in the world but them. No Oscar Wilde, no best friends come with brown eyes and easy, tempting smiles. No miles stretching between, and no worries about bottles and too much drink.
Eli walked to the antique jukebox in the corner, the one nobody would ever purchase because it was too expensive by far, and he found Sinatra (regrets were never too few to mention, Eli thought), and he walked toward the back room.
Preston, as always after he had anything to drink, was adding his regrets to Old Blue Eyes’. He was sure that Frankie had probably been in this situation plenty of times, staring at the tile and wishing he was dead in more ways than he could count. Preston never drank in high school, quite petrified enough to want all his wits about him, and in college he had a hard enough time trying to stay under the radar when sober. Shiloh had been the one going to parties during both times, and Preston had practice being the one tsk-ing from the bathroom doorway. Apparently he was just putting the whole thing off for his adult life.
Halfway through the morning, between being disgustingly sick, Preston had called into the office and checked in with Shiloh, and then he’d managed to pour himself into a shower. Preston was almost sure that if there’d been anything left to be sick, he probably would have thrown that up too, but as it was he choked down some water from the bathroom and put his pants back on just for the sake of pretending he wasn’t as fucked up as he had been the night previous. He’d been trying to work up the guts (ha) to go downstairs, say he’d call a car or something, but he hadn’t been able to face it.
When Eli came to the door Preston was sitting on the end of the bed, elbows on his knees, bare shoulders tense, his phone in one hand and the other hand pressed against the ache in the back of his neck. When he heard or sensed movement he sat upright. Apology slid over the tired blue eyes, but he didn’t say anything yet.
The sound of the music carried, and Eli leaned in the doorway. He didn’t walk into the room, though he did look Preston over from foot to shoulder, his gaze finishing their sweep by making eye contact and holding it. “Are you inclined to talk?” he asked, very properly; a man asking for a formal audience. He had been thinking quite a bit since Rome left, and he had convinced himself to come into this room with an open mind. He was going to attempt to listen, and to speak his thoughts as he had with the younger man. He only hoped it went as he anticipated. He was not expecting terribly much, admittedly. An opening for other conversations, perhaps? It was not much to ask for.
Preston didn’t look away, though he was bracing himself for anger, or worse, cold, and he looked slightly uncertain when he didn’t see it. Eli looked bizarrely relaxed, and in response some of the tension went out of Preston’s shoulders, utterly visible as they sank about an inch down his spine. “I can be out of your hair soon, if that’s what you prefer,” he felt compelled to offer, looking around for his shirt but not finding it. He returned the gaze to Eli, faintly anxious.
Eli watched Preston scan for a shirt, and he walked into the room and opened the dresser in the corner. It was one of his favorite pieces in the shop, and he ran a hand along the outside while he opened it, not even realizing he was doing so. He pulled out a sweater, blue with gray striped, his own, and he handed it over in silence. It smelled of cigarettes and dust and something like oranges, and he crossed to the chair beside the divan once he’d handed it off. “I’d prefer to talk, if you’re so inclined,” he repeated, ignoring the offer to leave entirely.
Preston felt sure that the quiet demeanor might just be a gentle way of preparing to tell him to never call again, but it was so new and, if he was honest, pleasant, that he nodded slowly. “Thanks,” he said, about the sweater. “Alright.” He almost asked if he wanted to sit, but fortunately Eli started to move toward the chair and he didn’t have to. “I hope I don’t stretch this out too much,” he said, to fill a bit of silence before his head disappeared into the sweater.
“It’s hardly the only blue sweater I own,” Eli said, because he was rather fond of blue sweaters as a rule. He pulled his cigarettes from his pocket, and he tapped one out of the pack and lit it as he watched Preston slip the sweater on. It was too snug, a wee bit to short at the waist and the cuffs, and the look Eli gave the man across from him was a fond one. “Are you inclined?” he asked, repeating the phrase for the third time. “It goes two ways, you see. I agree to listen, as do you, and we both agree to talk. I shall throw no punches, and you shall remain honest.” He wasn’t certain either of them could manage it, but he was willing to try. He nodded toward the window and the fog. “We’ve nowhere to go, as I see it.”
The fond look, the one of familiarity and warmth, was utterly unexpected, but Preston reacted immediately with a slight smile that made it through the hangover, his chin coming up and his eyes meeting Eli’s. Absently pulling at the neck of the sweater, which emphasized Preston’s blue eyes as much as it did Eli’s, Preston set the phone aside and glanced out the window. A trace of a frown touched his brown, but not too heavy. “That sounds like a good idea, the talking.” He looked at Eli out of the corner of one eye, and gave him a tentative little nod of agreement.
“I’m quite angry,” Eli said without reservation, feeling it was better to make that clear. “I’m doing my best to remain calm, but I do apologize if I slip.” He shrugged a shoulder helplessly, and he took a drag from the cigarette, all while leaning forward to hold out the box. “Lucas came over to discuss why we’d broken up, you see, and we had an entire, multi-hour conversation, during which he neglected to tell me you were the man he’d spent the evening of the party with. I’ve known Lucas since we were both quite young, and I think he’s the person I’ve trusted most in my life before you. For him to lie to my face in that way, it stings, on top of everything else.”
Preston looked at the box, but his stomach roiled, and he shook his head. “I would be angry too,” Preston said, trying to sound as earnest as he was without being trite at the same time. He was a little disappointed that Eli was still angry, but far from surprised. Then, after a short pause to make sure he wasn’t interrupting, “I didn’t ask him not to say anything. I admit I was worried you would cut everyone off, but in the end I just said to do what he thought was best, since he... since he knows you so well.” A trace of jealousy there flickered like a flame.
“Yes, well, he made the wrong choice. Perhaps too many years apart caused him to forget my preference for honesty. Or, perhaps he did not want to lose whatever he’d gained with you.” Eli sounded jealous, too, but it was a modulated jealousy. “He informed he’d been in love with me before, and I informed him I’d not act on those feelings,” he clarified, not in the mood for secrets any longer. “We were both quite in our cups, and he still kept your secret.” He sounded hurt and excluded, and he scratched his temple with his thumb. “Why did you choose Wilde?” he asked, remembering Rome’s suggestions.
This series of revelations successfully disarmed Preston. Lucas was in love with Eli, Lucas who Preston had never heard of until yesterday. He stared at the floor and tried not to think about how he was definitely not the first at all. He replied without really thinking. “I thought--I thought you’d like it.” Then, coming a little down to earth and blushing in that colorless, uncertain way of his, “With the suit and all. ...I like his poetry.”
The blush made Eli sit forward in the chair, lean closer without any true realization that he was doing it. “What do you like about his poetry?” Eli asked, because it wasn’t lost on him that this might be the first personal interest he’d managed to extract from Preston. He was well aware of Preston’s fondness for old movie actors, but that was not a confessed interest, not precisely. It was observation. The jukebox changed to a song about coins in a fountain. “I know very little of his work,” Eli acknowledged.
Uncomfortable with so intimate a look at his preferences, Preston looked back down at the floor. “He’s--” Preston’s throat worked some of the bitter taste off his tongue, and said, ‘Well.” And then, in a quiet, smooth kind of voice, he recited: