preston rawlings . {viola} (theviola) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2010-12-18 00:17:00 |
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Entry tags: | elizabeth bennet, viola |
Who: Ash Preston & Elijah
What: Because people change their names when they want to pretend things never happened, and we’re sadistic so we make it so they can’t.
Where: Outside Bathos, on the fire escape on the seventh floor.
When: Directly after this.
Warnings: Not a one. They shook hands. ONCE.
The photograph did, indeed, say hello.
But Eli wasn’t listening to the question, not really. With his neighbor leaning out the window like he was, there was light behind him, and in that light he reminded Eli of the past.
Eli stepped back, stepped further from that light, and he reminded himself that he could not see well, that it was a trick of memory, of seeing Ash (or someone who resembled him) in the coffee shop, of thinking too much about high school and what it all had meant. He told himself that this thing, this reluctance to speak to his nameless neighbor in person had nothing to do with his sexuality. His sexuality, he reminded himself, was settled. Had been settled for years, verified by countless failed relationships with female members of the species.
“Hello is what one normally says when they meet someone new,” he finally said, remembering the photograph and what was written on the flip side. It was, admittedly, not the most heterosexual move to leave a photograph on your neighbor’s window when you angered him. But Eli communicated through images on a regular basis. It was nothing. Yes, nothing. “You’ll catch your death,” he added. “Perhaps a coat would be wise.”
Eli’s accent was a nuanced thing. Mostly non-existent, present only in certain words and eternally confusing. As a youngster, he had sounded very Devonshire, but through the years that mingled with Boston, and then both faded away and he was left with his original, unaccented Las Vegas, with a touch of Boston in the Os and a touch of Devonshire in the Is and Es.
Preston--God, he tried not to be Ash, if he’d known that Eli knew about that, his own statement about being the same person incapable of change would have been problematic--didn’t move yet, his fingertips melting ridges into the snow on the windowsill. The light was behind him, and he had a thin secretary’s build with features almost too strong for his personality, all silhouette as he squinted over at his neighbor. Not even managing to make out a silhouette of the other, he said, after a pause, “...Hello.” There was a certain heaviness in the “eh,” enough to make it very obvious that Preston had not left Boston that far behind.
Preston smiled at the critique about the coat, but did not immediately move. He felt better about a meeting in person, better than obscure images he didn’t understand (the bed... did not say ‘hello’ to him) and strange comments about his metaphorical walls. “Why didn’t you just give me a jello mold, say welcome to the building and ignore me?” He was still trying to make something out of the bundled up figure just out of reach of the light.
Boston, and it was all Eli could do not to run inside.
“A jello mold would hardly be as memorable,” Eli replied, the quip easy despite the thoughts racing through his mind. It was a good thing he was far away, he knew. Ash might not remember his voice, but he would surely remember his face. Age changed people, but not that deeply. And he could see now, see better since his eyes had adjusted to that light behind the other man’s head. Ash had always been refined and strong featured, even during the awkwardness of being an uncertain teenager. There was no doubt this was the man he’d seen in Reliquary, and the Boston accent removed any doubt that this was Ash. The name made little sense right then, but he was certain there was a logic to it. After all, he’d changed his own surname as well, hadn’t he? “And I only moved here within the past month. I suspect you are the one who should be welcoming me.”
Preston had to smile again, but it didn’t last too long, as he dipped his chin as if it embarrassed him--a very old habit. “I never had a jello mold gifted to me,” he said. Hahd. “It might be interesting.” He shook the snow out of his hair, blinked it out of his eyes, and shifted his shoulders forward again. Just the white Oxford, no tie, no suit coat, but he did look so much more at ease than he had in the awkward tea shop. “But you didn’t answer my question, I notice.” There was some refinement in the continuation of the question. He let it hang. After a moment, pulled his head back under the sill and vanished, saying, “I’ll be back. You’re right, I need a coat.”
Eli had answered the question, albeit not seriously. But when Ash dipped his head back inside, he at least had time to think rationally. There was no need to panic. He'd wanted the chance to apologize, had he not? This was merely fate giving it to him. They had been teenagers when things had- when they'd had their misunderstanding. They had lived that time twice over now. They were grown men. Surely they could mend bridges like civilized men. Still, there was a pang of something he pushed to the back of his mind, and tied up in it was the worry that Ash would not take it well, knowing who he was.
"I recommend gloves as well," he called out.
A long leg came first, same heavy slacks Preston had worn to work, followed by another leg, and then he worked his way out of the window with a limbo-like shimmy that was awkward because he had a full-length coat on. The lapels folded neatly over his chest and they got hung up on the window, which stuck about halfway up. “Never took the opportunity to come out here,” he said, straightening his coat and brushing himself off with another of the embarrassed smiles. “It seems... because I don’t fit.”
He had not brought gloves. “What changed your mind?”
"It isn't the warmest place in Seattle," Eli replied, and he watched. He tried not to, admittedly, but he did it anyway. Casual observation, he told himself. Curiosity as to what Ash had grown into. It had been busy and crowded that day at Reliquary, and he hadn't allowed himself to get close. Even in the dark he could see more than he had then. He almost told him that he'd always been to tall to crawl through windows, but he managed to keep himself from it at the last moment. "I didn't want to validate all your horrible thoughts about mankind."
"Your hands are going to freeze, and then what will Anton Sparke do?" he asked, and no that wasn't jealousy. Not at all.
Preston tucked his hands in the bends of his elbows, for warmth, and settled back with his hips on the farthest edge of his railing. Comfort. “Build me new ones, probably. Anton is good at building solutions to things.” Ah, first name. Comfort there too.
Anton, was it? No formal title. No respect given to a superior. Eli quirked a brow, the slight shift almost imperceptible in the darkness. "You have something more than a working relationship?" he asked, unable to keep himself from voicing the question at the last moment.
Preston's eyebrows did go up, a hard, fast jump toward his hairline, clearly outlined, as the rest of him was, in the warm light from within his apartment. The window was open, and the room beyond had the butter, sage and brown colors of a forest in spring, the details of furniture obscured by their shapes and the quickly accumulating fog on the panes. "I handle a lot of the work that Anton doesn't have time for; things that make it so he can keep building. It is not a partnership."
“What you handle for Anton wasn’t the question,” Eli said, a quirk of lip visible in the dark. He found the non-answer almost more telling than an answer would have been. More telling than a simple Anton and I are friends or We’ve worked together a very long time. He filed the information away, because he did not know yet if Ash had grown into the kind of man who would sleep with his employer.
At the question if Anton, Preston thought that like many straight men, Eli assumed that Preston wanted to sleep with every male he saw. It was not an attitude he understood, even knowing that it was borne of unreasoning fear that a man might turn around one day and fall in love with his best buddy in the most carnal fashion. Preston didn't think he was any more or less likely to do that than anyone else, and he was almost sure he'd put away the juvenile attraction to Anton and his distracted brilliance. Therefore he chose not to answer, and hoped Eli would learn better, when he realized he was safe enough without the fire escape's frosted barrier.
Preston tilted his head. “You warm enough in all that? I can barely see you.” He seemed amused by the fact, not challenged, reassured by the face-to-face meeting in a way he had not been by anything else. It was just them, two people alone, and he wasn’t threatened by his eccentric neighbor the same way he was threatened by the unknown. “You’re going to have to explain the bed to me.” He was talking about the photo, not that it was in his hand.
"I am sufficiently warm, and I'll still be warm once your fingers freeze and you lose sensation in your nose," Eli said. He wouldn't let him stay out that long, but that wasn't in what he said. Not at all. "And I refuse to be held accountable for the bout of pneumonia that is surely headed your way."
"The bed." He looked over at Ash in the dark, trying to decide how honest to be. Knowing who he was dealing with, it gave him a certain advantage. He hadn't known Ash well as a teenager, not beyond the obvious, but there was still a knowledge of history there. "It's empty, indicating sleeplessness, worry. A visual apology."
Preston said, "Surely your gourmet coffee can ward something like that off. Not that my hangover has yet miraculously disappeared." Preston wore his fatigue and hangover well; it was almost invisible, probably because his features were not designed to sag or line. He didn't have the features of his childhood neighbors--it was the nose, probably.
Some understanding seeped into Preston’s gaze and he nodded a little bit. "Ah. Interesting association." And not, he implied unintentionally, the one he had made. "I've scalded my hand before on that thing, though," he continued genially. "You don't need to apologize."
“My gourmet coffee cannot, I’m afraid, work miracles,” Eli continued, wishing he could ask Ash to step inside and into the light. He would be lying if he said he hadn’t wondered what had come of him, of the one man who- What had come of him. He would have liked to look him over and take his measure- for purely curious reasons, he told himself, and nothing more.
“Apologies are not founded in the need to apologize. If they are forced things, they hardly matter at all,” Eli said thoughtlessly, the cadence of the words slightly more accented, the lyrical quality of them marking them as thinking aloud, rather than actually intending to reply.
"If that's a quote," Preston said, admiring because he liked fine words, "then I don't know it; but it's wrong, at any rate. If something forced you to apologize, it wasn't me, and you went to a lot of effort." He smiled in a manner meant to be reassuring, surveying the layers obscuring Eli's face and form. "Speaking of which, how did it go with your apology the other day? The one you posted about."
“But you stated that I did not need to apologize,” Eli clarified. “I was merely pointing out that my apology was not motivated by need.” He looked out over the fire escape when Ash asked about the apology, stepped forward and put his gloved hands on the cold railing. “I didn’t make it, the apology. Didn’t you say it would be reopening old wounds for selfish reasons? Or did I misread your statements?” he asked with a quick look over at the man on the other fire escape. “What does the P stand for?”
For a brief moment, Preston regretted his sage advice, given in the security of anonymity. He thought it was likely for gossip, to know things that the other man not precisely wish him to know; because he held a great many things over Preston's head, he felt, in one coffee-soaked night of fatigue and alcohol buzz. Then he realized that it was selfish, the wanting to know and the apology both, so he just nodded.
"Preston," he said, using his family name with the casual familiarity of someone who has heard it all his life. Perfect. "And your E?"
Ash’s surname.
Any lingering doubt vanished, and Eli didn’t look over at the man beside him when he replied. “Eli.” It had been Elijah in high school - Elijah Garden who had left his birth surname, Pride, behind him in Musings. No one here called him Elijah, and so there was only the risk of a connection between nickname and voice, and Eli felt he was fairly safe in the certainty that he would walk away from this conversation with all the knowledge and recognition, while leaving none to Ash. To Preston.
“Do you change your opinion?” Eli asked, still not looking over at Preston. (Preston, that would take getting used to.) If someone had wronged you in, say, high school, would you want an apology all these years later?”
For his part, Preston leaped to no conclusions. It had been a long time since high school, and Eli's words brought back sour memories that time and occupation had pushed away. Preston leaned on his railing and stared forward through the cold air, unseeing. "A lot of people wronged me in high school," he said quietly, calling up loud voices and hard fists with the distracted intensity of a child working at a sore tooth. "Those aren't people I want to hear or see again. Even if I could imagine they'd have a kind word for me." He hesitated. "But I suppose you would say they were children back then."
“Cruelty is never forgivable when it comes from a desire to see another human being suffering or in pain,” Eli said carefully, not risking another glance over at Preston. “But sometimes cruelty stems from other things. Weakness, fear, cowardice. Those things, I think, can be overcome. Don’t you?” The snow was falling heavier now, coating his shoulders and the black ski cap on his head. “I found high school a very confusing time, personally. I had quite a bit of anger, and quite a bit of fear, and quite a bit of guilt. I still have some of those things, but I like to think that I can layer those shortcomings with maturity now, in a way I could not then. In short, I was a prick, but it was a long time ago. I’ve lived with the guilt of it, and if I apologize to the person I wronged, I’m not sure they’ll understand that.”
Preston was silent during this confession. Up until this point he felt as if E. Pride knew everything he cared to know about him, but not the reverse. This forgiveness thing weighed upon him a great deal, it seemed, and for the first time he said it was something he had done in high school, and that made Preston simultaneously wary and curious. For Preston, high school was fear, all the time. There had been some resentment, some anger, but it all had been crushed under the cold, freezing layers of constant fear from the second of waking to the second he was finally unconscious in the dark of night.
Preston wanted to ask if this had something to do with him. “Like a great many things, it sounds as if to attain truth, you must risk.” He didn’t sound as certain as he should have when spouting off a proverb like that. He wasn’t looking at Eli, either, but rather at the snow settling on his feet, shoved awkwardly into lined winter boots.
“But you imply that the risk might not only be my own,” Eli reminded him. “That I might be wresting someone’s hard won nepenthe from them.” He caught the lack of conviction in the other man’s voice when he quoted the proverb, however, and it put him on alert, made him wary in return. “I think we can agree that being a teenager was something neither of us have interest in experiencing again.”
“We can,” Preston said. “And you might.” The cold wasn’t the kind of cold he came from, and Boston froze with a vigorous certainty in comparison to Seattle’s enduring damp that made Preston wonder when he got so soft. “It doesn’t sound like you’re going to be able to let it go, however,” he said finally, moving for the first time from his railing a little closer and looking for some sign of expression.
“The fact that I haven’t been able to let it go for almost twenty years might be indication, yes,” Eli agreed, and he started taking a step away when Preston stepped forward. He stopped himself, however. Stopped himself, and held his ground, and took in a breath that was meant to bolster him. A beat. “Ash.”
Preston stopped too. He stopped and didn’t move again. Only his expression changed, the warm comfort cooling and the walls coming up around the vulnerable earnestness of his eyes. His eyes flicked from the top of Eli’s head and down, as if he might see something different from a moment ago. He saw a man hiding. “I know you?” He asked it like he would ask a stranger. So this is why the questions, the emails, the coffee. The constant prodding.
Eli made a sound that indicated yes, and he shoved his hands into his pockets, deep and as if he wanted to be able to shove them deeper. “I only realized it this evening, for certain,” he assured him. “Lest you start thinking I began talking to you out of some ulterior motive. I did not. I found you honestly infuriating, even without the connection.” There was fondness there, in the claim that Preston was infuriating, audible and slightly more Boston in the o in honestly.
“For certain,” Preston echoed. There was distance now, distrust, if not quite suspicion. He was not the kind of person to hide it, outside of a business office. The Boston accent just made it worse. Preston shifted away, the old metal of the fire escape creaking even as it held solid. “Like you were the one that left the coffee. Like you being next door without telling me. What else are you hiding?” He brought his shoulders back, not wanting to retreat further. “Your face?” There weren’t very many faces Preston could draw up clearly from his youth. He could count them on one hand.
“You have convicted me, haven’t you?” Eli asked. “It doesn’t matter that ending up next door was happenstance, that the coffee was an act of kindness to a stranger, that I had no notion of who you were until this evening. None of that matters, because you’re going to see some grand conspiracy where none exists.” He jerked his head once, a nod. “What made you settle on Rawlings? I would have known if not for that, and I would have proceeded- no, no. I wouldn’t have proceeded differently. Or, rather, if I had that would have been the falsehood, not the conversations we have had.”
No, Preston was done answering questions. He’d had enough of that, and that was what got him here, talking to someone he wasn’t sure he wanted to talk to, about the worst time of his life. “I don’t remember anyone with your name,” he said, trying to pretend as if he was not affected by the challenges against his accusations. “Tell me something honest, then, if you’re so wrapped up in it.”
“Elijah Garden,” Eli said, pulling one hand out from his pocket with no grace at all, the glove’s end getting caught in the pocket itself and causing him to tug it in agitation, before holding his hand out and crossing the expanse of the escape to hold it out to Preston.
Elijah. Preston’s immediate memories of Elijah were better than that of high school in general. Replacing the dread there was the thrill of secrets and the awkward contact of someone who doesn’t have any idea how to touch anyone else, regardless of who they were. It was stupid teenage love, the dumb kind you just fall into one day when you’re not paying attention. Preston stared at him, looking for the boy he’d known. Maybe it was too dark, but he couldn’t find him.
No gloves. Preston’s hand was ice and his grip was like sealing a contract for a shipment of goods: firm, business-like, intractable. He took his hand back as soon as he was able, but he didn’t tuck his fingers back under his arms. He just stood there in the snow and tried not to think about Elijah while looking directly at him. “Did you get tired of your name?”
Eli would have held the grip longer, if given the chance, but he didn’t question that, not then. Instead of shoving his hand back in his pocket, he pulled the other one out and crossed both arms over his chest. He had been younger than Preston in high school, though he hadn’t told anyone that, advanced ahead of his class and when the world turned on Preston, he’d been terrified. None of that mattered now, however, on this fire escape and half a country away. “Garden is my uncle’s last name. He took me in when I crossed the portal, and I adopted the name in high school. Pride is my actual surname.” A pause. “Rawlings?” It was still dark, too dark for Eli’s liking now that there were no secrets and he could give in to the desire to see him better.
Funny, it seemed to matter to Preston a great deal. You could see it in his eyes as he met Eli’s, unflinching. Perhaps the eyes were the same. He couldn’t make out the color. “It’s just a name. Different from the one I had. It doesn’t mean anything except I don’t want to be Ash.” It was a warning, a very serious, very frightened warning, and it said, don’t back me into a corner again. The thought occurred to him that he should say something about how Eli looked good (that was the thing you said when you hadn’t seen someone in a long time), but he couldn’t see him, so he couldn’t say it with honesty. Instead his mind painted pictures and impressions of Elijah against his hands and across a baseball field. Fuck. Preston turned abruptly away, back toward his window. “It was good seeing you again, Elijah.” That was just a fucking lie, but he didn’t care, at this point.
Eli heard the warning, the one about not wanting to be Ash. Eli heard it loud and clear. “It was good seeing you again, Ash.”
He stopped with his hand on the sill. He turned around. The light from the apartment was warm and brown and green, natural, and it gave his face color where it had none within. “You were never one to play their games before.” It was dry, yet hurt; exceedingly brittle. Ash had always been brittle, in his way.
“I’m not one to play their games now,” Eli replied, watching that hand on the sill for much longer than he needed to. He looked up, looked into Preston’s face, which was all shadows with the back-lighting of the apartment. “And you’re still Ash, no matter what you change your name too.”
Preston’s knuckles went white. His hands were red from the cold, but now they were white with strain. “Why is it you think I don’t call myself that anymore, Eli?” He used the preferred shortened version with absolute intention.
“Because it reminds you of hell? Of being scared and bullied,” Eli said, pulling no punches and not couching it at all. “Because Preston is clean slate, a past left behind, buried. I understand that. But you can never be Preston to me, not any more than I can be Eli to you, despite your insistence on using the name for distance right now.”
“I might,” Preston said, straightening away from the window again, “like Eli better than I like Elijah right now.” He stared a second, only a split-second, and then he said, “I would think you would want the past left where it is.”
“The past is the past,” Eli said, but there was a lack of conviction in the vague statement. “We were young, and youth shouldn’t be held against anyone.” That sounded weak, even to his own ears, and he wished he had a wife and a few kids to throw around right then, but he didn’t. “Things are different now, we’ve grown up, and we’ve changed.” Weak too, and he knew it.
“Have we?” Preston’s arm dropped from the sill and he crossed the fire escape to where Eli stood, as if daring him to back up, and if he did not he kept going until he could make out the color of his eyes. He stared through the intervening cold air. “We’re not young anymore. So there goes that excuse. Now what?”
Eli’s eyes were the same striking blue they had been in his youth, almost unnaturally so, even in the dark, and they were unwavering as Preston neared. He had been hungry for a look at the man the boy had become, and even though shadows still prevailed, he could see more now than before. Preston, always an aristocratic looking boy, had grown into an aristocratic man. “Do we require excuses?” he asked, holding his ground.
“I think you do. You’re going to apologize to me, remember? Are you going to tell me that you were young, and things are different now?” Preston waited. He wasn’t working some kind of twisted strategy, and he wasn’t trying to exact revenge. In fact, he wasn’t really thinking much at all; he was just reacting.
“The photograph still applies, the apology there,” Eli reminded him, but then he sighed and resisted the urge to hang his head and avert his eyes, while he said what needed to be said. “I am sorry I left you alone to deal with it. I was a coward, and I have no intention of trying to justify my actions to you, as they can have no justification in your eyes, can they?”
“They thought they did.” Preston dropped his chin down a little, seeing now too much of Elijah than he really wanted to. “You’re sorry. You dredged it up where I’d left it; you called me by the name no one knows anymore. Do you feel better?” The tone could have mocked, could have swayed with bitterness and lilted with a question not meant to be answered--but it didn’t.
“This was never about my feeling better,” Eli countered. “Would you rather I kept lying to you? Not tell you who I was, continue lurking in the shadows with knowledge you did not share?” he asked. “You know my motives; we talked about them when neither of us knew who the other was. There was no subterfuge there. I saw you in Reliquary, and I though, correctly, that you were you.”
“You didn’t have to talk to me. That wall isn’t thick, but it’s enough. I don’t know who lived there before you. I don’t know who is on the other side. I could have gone on not knowing. You could have left me alone.” Preston had to take a breath after this outburst, and it came out a shudder. The coat wasn’t as thick as it had been a few minutes ago.
“Would you like me to go inside now? And leave you alone?” Eli asked plainly.
Preston’s eyes hurt, abruptly, a strange thing to feel pained him. “This is about the time you take off,” he said, as if agreeing.
Eli looked down at his feet and then back up at Preston’s face. “No, no it isn’t. If my intention was running off, I would never have stepped foot on this fire escape. I would have stopped talking to you when I realized who you were, and I would have taken the coward’s way out.”
“Then maybe you have changed.” Preston’s gaze changed, almost imperceptibly, and once he realized he was looking not at Eli, but his mouth, he backed up a solid two steps. “I hope you feel better about it, then.” It was earnest, at least. Ash was earnest.
“I don’t, actually, because this doesn’t change the fact that I left you to deal with that shit alone,” Eli said truthfully. “And, no, I don’t want the past out for everyone to see, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to take responsibility for my wrongs.” He was trying, very intentionally, not to look at Preston at all. Because looking, especially this close, made remembering entirely too easy for comfort. He swallowed thickly, and he nodded over Preston’s shoulder. “You’re going to freeze.” Any indication of any possible desire to see him in the light was, of course, entirely absent.
Preston impatiently shook his head at the cold. It could wait. His fingers were numb by now anyway. “There’s no point in regrets. You couldn’t have done any different. What would you have said?”
“I could have stayed,” Eli said. “Instead of running and claiming I had nothing to do with it.” He looked back out over the escape, discomfort visible in the way his shoulders straightened defensively, as if bracing for the conversation. “I wasn’t sure what I was doing, and I never had your certainty about it. I never went back, never did that again. And I ran scared.”
“Because you’re straight,” Preston said, not unkindly. “You just said it yesterday. So what would you have said? ‘We’re just friends, but we fell and our mouths got stuck together’?” He almost smiled, perhaps at the idea of their mouths together, or maybe just at the idea of Elijah saying such a thing to the rank and file of their school, which housed elitist, scared little boys more interested in proving their superiority than anything else.
“Of course not,” Eli said, and he sounded very much like the overly confident teenager he’d been, the one who had been too proud for anyone’s good, including his own. “I would have explained to them that teenagers experiment,” he said, but there was a chuckle at the end, because he would have done no such thing, and they both knew it. That was the sort of thing adults said, not scared boys who had just discovered that they kept looking at one of their peers in the locker room. “I am straight, yes,” he added, because it seemed an important thing to say just then.
The sheen of humor melted, very slowly, and with every moment laid bare even in the low light. “I was an experiment?” Preston asked.
Eli’s gaze snapped back to him almost instantly, before the words had even finished passing his lips. “No, Ash. I was referring to teenagers experimenting in general. I am not that good an actor, not then, not now. If you’d only been an experiment, you would have known.” He paused then, thoughtful. “Am I the cause of all this defensiveness?”
Preston sighed. It was a foolish thing to be so hurt by something that happened so long ago. “No, of course not. You will insist calling me that.” He was actually talking about ‘defensive’ and not his name, this time. He resisted asking what he was, if not an experiment, but he told himself it didn’t matter.
“I will, Ash,” Eli said, thinking Preston was referring to his name. “I was not playing with you. I was too scared for that, if the admission helps.” He looked back out over the city. “Did it ever occur to you to lie about your preferences?” he asked, because he’d wondered, even then. Maybe he’d even been angry about it, angry that Preston couldn’t just pretend and avoid everything that came after.
Preston--dammit, Preston--didn’t want to admit it, but yes, it helped. “I couldn’t, I said. I was going to be alone all the time anyway. At least that way I could stand being around myself.” He rubbed his hands together without thinking. It was a move of necessity, not emotion. “They already knew. It wouldn’t have made a difference. Nothing did.” A second later. “Just let it go.” He realized he didn’t like talking about this. Not to someone who had been there. (For a while, anyway.)
The movement of hands drew Eli’s attention entirely, and he found himself staring at them a moment too long. He cleared his throat, covered the sound with an almost-cough, and he nodded back toward the window. “I refuse to be blamed for your fingers requiring amputation due to frostbite. Go inside and warm up,” he said, and it was an imperial sounding order, bossy and masculine all at once.
Preston glanced down at his fingers, and then he put his hands in his coat pockets. His breath plumed in the air as he smiled. “Not even my boss talks to me like that. You order everyone about like that?” There was a lot of Boston in ‘that’ but something else entirely in ‘about.’ Too much reading poetry, from the sound of it.
“Generally, yes,” Eli said honestly. “Which should hardly surprise you, as you were on the receiving end of that often enough, if memory serves.” And memory did serve. It served so much that he cleared his throat again. “I am going inside. I recommend you do the same. And do, please, try not to freak out about this in the morning.” The about mirrored the other man’s speech pattern, and Eli chuckled as he turned toward his own window.
When he put his hand on the pane, Eli turned and looked back at Preston, his blue eyes almost too light for a moment in the reflecting of the shadowed moon. “Go to bed, and don’t toss and turn the entire night wondering if this was some elaborate scheme to torment you,” he said knowingly. “I can hear what happens in your bedroom, you realize? I’ll know if you do.”
Preston thought it very unlikely that he was going to do anything but toss and turn, but the statement at least meant that he wasn’t going to be wondering precisely that. At least it would be a change from the typical, mundane anxieties about work, work, and work. His eyebrows rose slightly at the mention of his bedroom, and he smiled a smile that made it seems as if there was more there than just the words, even though there wasn’t, and he didn’t think there was. Ducking down, he worked his way awkwardly back into the apartment, managing to avoid knocking his brains out when his numb hands stopped supporting him. Finally he pulled in his other boot and looked out for a second. “I can hear what happens in your bedroom, too.”
Then he shut the window, and went to bed.