Note: This takes place after Ominous and prior to Ecstasy.

Alex

“What’s up with you and Larissa?” I inhale from the joint, glancing at Eli through the hazy smoke as I lean my head back against the wall of our dorm. The sweet scent of weed fills the room, but our RA is gone for the weekend. Not like he’d give a fuck anyway.

Eli is sitting at his desk chair, fingers laced behind his head. I see the ink on his biceps, his lean muscles flexing as he seems to stiffen with my question.

I turn to exhale smoke through the open window beside me, then pinch the roach between my index finger and thumb, throwing it out onto Caven’s lawn. We’re on the second floor, and I hope it doesn’t land on some poor fucker’s head.

The fall night is hot, and sticky sweat drips down my back even as the AC runs high, a loud, whining noise coming from the window unit.  

Practice today was brutal, and I didn’t have the fucking energy to shower afterward. But Eli’s weed is coursing through my bloodstream, and my mind feels foggy. Getting up to head to the bathroom and rinse off is the last thing on my mind. Instead, I feel relaxed. Numb.

Does Mom feel like this? Is this what she needs? A blanket over her brain, blocking out all the bad shit?

Does she block me out, too?

“Nothing.” Eli’s voice is soft, but the word is clipped, and it brings me back to the present, erasing thoughts of Mom, forcing me to remember the question I asked him.

Oh yeah. The chick he hooked up with.

I run my palms over my gray sweats, stretching my legs out along the floor. I glance at Eli’s made bed, across from me and to his right. Dark sheets, black pillows. Nice and neat. I don’t know if this fucker ever sleeps. Sophomores now, we’ve been roommates since freshman year, and I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen him asleep.

Wait.

There was the one night.

He went home to visit his dad, came back around midnight. The next morning, his eyes were closed, mouth open, and I heard his soft snores, saw black circles under his eyes as he slept on his stomach.

He had a note fisted in one hand, pulled close to his chest. He was clinging to the paper. I’d wanted to slip it from his tattooed fingers, but if he’d woken up, he’d probably have tried to kill me.

Eli is like that.

Unstable.

Cold and calm, controlled, then… not. It’s rare, seeing him act out and misbehave, but I once watched him smile at a guy in a frat house after the dude was talking shit, then the next minute, Eli had his fingers wrapped around the guy’s throat in some dark corner of the living room.

I’m not even sure if he was hurting him, or if it was Eli’s version of foreplay.

The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as I meet his dark green gaze. He’s still got his hands behind his head, his abs flexing as he shifts in his chair, low slung black pants showing off a whole fucking lot of Eli.

“Nothing?” I prompt him. I can push him on this. I’m not scared of my own best friend. It’s just, I can never really pin down what he’s thinking. I don’t even truly know how he feels about me. I’ve been calling him my best friend for over a year now. We work out together. Live together. Head to breakfast together, sometimes dinner if it doesn’t conflict with my football practice and his wrestling. We’ve driven down to the coast together plenty of times, and I watched him come alive in the ocean.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw him walk out of the Atlantic, raking his fingers through his dark hair, a smile etched on his face. I’d seen him smile a lot, but until that moment on the sand, when I was fucking around with my phone to find music for our speaker and he told me to get my ass in the water, I had never seen a smile meet his eyes.

Last summer, hot as hell outside, his skin nearly brown from the sun, water dripping down the sharp planes of his face, he was alive.

“Nothing,” he repeats, answering my question and bringing my runaway thoughts back on track. To the smile he’s forcing now, showing off white, straight teeth, his lips curving upward, but nothing else about the motion is genuine. It’s like he fakes happiness. I think he fakes everything, truth be told.

Despite the heat from the window and the sweat on my skin, a shiver seems to take over my body, for just one second.

It’s Eli, I remind myself. We’re friends.

Right?

“You were fucking her at Dwight’s party last weekend,” I throw back. I know he fucks girls all the time he’s not in a relationship with, but I saw his phone light up with her name more than once this week. “Come on, she’s hot. You like her?”

He drops his arms, massaging one hand with the other as he looks down at his palms in his lap, his brows pulled together. I wanna know what you’re really thinking. Who do you really like? You gotta feel something, Eli.

“She’s okay,” he answers quietly, still looking down. I want to see the expression in his eyes, but his stupidly long lashes are blocking my view.

I don’t know if it’s the weed in my system that has me so fixated on him right now, or if I’ve always felt a little on the outside when it comes to my roommate. He holds everyone at arm’s length.

Kind of hurts my fucking feelings, but I could never say it out loud, high or not.

“Give me something, man,” I say with a laugh I don’t feel, looking up at our low, popcorn ceiling. Next year, we’ll get the fuck out of this dorm. His dad, Eric, already offered to get us a house. I know my parents will chip in, too.

We have the whole world at our fingertips, don’t we?

But in moments like these, with this distance between us even though we’re alone, together, it feels like I’ll be pushed into the world by myself. Eli doesn’t do fucking relationships, and not just in a romantic way.

He doesn’t want to conquer shit with me or take advantage of all the opportunities we have. We’re not a team, not in his eyes.

He just… fuck. I don’t even know what the fuck he wants. If I asked, he’d never tell me. Maybe he doesn’t know either.

I sense his eyes on me, and I dip my chin, sucking in a breath as I see the intensity he’s got focused my way. It’s hard to describe. It’s like… he can see right through me. I might not know shit about him, but I have this feeling Eli knows a lot about everyone he meets. I think he catalogs all the information he’ll need to yank the rug right out from under someone’s feet. Use it against them whenever he needs to.

Or wants to, because I think maybe Eli just likes to pull things apart.

I wonder if he took the wings off of butterflies as a kid.

My eyes drop to the tattoo on his chest.

Dragonfly.

Maybe he vivisected dragonflies?

I scrub a hand over my face, closing my eyes for a second and groaning like I’m tired but really, I’m just trying to push aside any thoughts about my roommate being a fucking psychopath.

He’s not.

People love him.

“He’s going to do great things.” My dad said that shit, and my dad is a dick.

“She was good for the night.” Eli shrugs, muscles knotting in his broad shoulders as he does. “I’m over it now.”

“Over it?” I press, crossing my arms over my chest and cocking my head. “What do you mean over it?”

He pushes his thumb against the palm of his opposite hand, and I glance at the tattoos there, over the veins in his skin. What the fuck do you wanna do when you graduate, man? His dad owns one of the largest law firms in the state. He’d have a guaranteed job, but he threw it all away with those fucking tattoos, didn’t he?

Why?

Immediately, though, I glance at the white model Trans Am on the desk behind him. Cars. He spent most of the summer at his uncle’s body shop. He wants to work with cars.

I drop my gaze back to his hands and see his callouses. Not just from wrestling, and the weight room. Nah, they’re from being under the hood of a car for hours on end.

“You ever think you could settle down with one person?”

For a second, I don’t think I’ve heard him correctly. He always speaks quietly, with a voice I swear has an accent but I know doesn’t really. I’ve grown used to it, and I don’t need to step closer to him anymore to decipher what he’s saying, but no way he just asked me what I think he did. Eli doesn’t talk about shit like settling down.

He’s not an obnoxious playboy.

He’s just a playboy, period.

He doesn’t commit to anything.

“What?” I snort, shaking my head. “I’m not thinking about marriage right now.” Just saying the word makes me think of my parents, which twists my stomach into knots. I don’t want what they have. I don’t want to be like them.      

“Seems like torture, doesn’t it?” He grins at me, and I think I see a spark. Something real. “Letting someone consume you like that? I mean, forever? They’d know everything about you. How you sleep, what you look like when you’re most vulnerable, just waking up. The money you spend, what you do when you think no one’s watching.”

I arch a brow, impressed he’s even thought this through. I didn’t think Eli gave much of a fuck about his future, no matter how promising everyone around him says it’s going to be.     

“Yeah?” I nod my head toward him. “And what do you do when no one’s watching?”

He goes still, hands clasped together, his elbows on his knees. His eyes stay locked on mine, and he doesn’t even blink for long seconds. It’s kind of hard to hold his gaze, but I try my best, my own eyes heavy from the THC taking over my brain.

Then he says, “You don’t wanna know.” His lips pull into a smile right after, but something about his words unnerves me.

My pulse beats a little faster in my chest, and I swear it’s the weed. Shit, he didn’t even smoke any. Maybe he poisoned me.

I laugh at myself, though, and at him. I’m just paranoid. It’s why I don’t smoke much. It makes my mind race. Eli is my best friend. I repeat it a few times in my head and decide to let his joke be just that. A joke.

“Okay, but… you don’t think you could ever fall for someone you’d never want to let go?” I drum my fingers on the tile floor, shifting my hips and leaning my head against the wall as I watch him watching me. “You ever been in love, dude?”

He averts his eyes a second, running his tongue over his teeth, like he’s thinking my question through. For just an instant, I swear I see something pass across his features. Like a shadow, making all the dark edges of him even darker.

Then it’s over.

His eyes are back on mine, and he doesn’t stumble or hesitate over his words when he answers me.

“Once.” There’s no emotion in his voice. “A long time ago.”

“High school?” I roll my eyes. “No way, man. No fucking way.” I can’t imagine getting my head out of my own ass enough back in high school to fall in love with anyone at all. Then I think of Dad fucking a chick in the pool house, and I feel sick. Maybe that’s why. Maybe I don’t even believe in love.

It’s bullshit.

“Yeah,” Eli says, deadly serious, breaking me away from the past. Of my own parents fucking everything up. Shattering the illusion they were superheroes. I guess, at some point, we all learn mommy and daddy are humans, just like us.

It hurts, though.

The realization is fucking painful.

I study Eli’s eyes as he seems to be thinking over what to say next. When did he learn his parents weren’t perfect?

The shadows beneath his lower lash line are darker than they’ve been in a while, but they’re always present, aren’t they?

My chest tightens.

Maybe it’s the weed or maybe I actually care about him and wish I could help him, but for once, I’m not focused on myself.

I’m thinking about him, and I’m wondering what happened to him.

What happened to you, man? I want to ask it. It’s on the tip of my tongue, but before I can force the words out, before I can pretend I’m not just an asshole athlete, he speaks again, obliterating my thoughts.

“I loved a girl in high school.” I see a bone in his jaw jump as he turns his head, staring at the wall, like he’s remembering something unpleasant. Did she break his heart? The idea is laughable, though. Eli is impenetrable. No one could get to his heart, could they? But he doesn’t say anything else. He just keeps staring at the wall, like he’s not really here.

“What happened?” I can’t help it. I need to know about this mystery girl. What did she do to you?

I watch his throat roll as he swallows. Then he bites the inside of his cheek, still staring at the wall like she’s there. Like he might find her in our fucking dorm. It makes me nervous, the look he has, and imagining him getting a hold of her again.

Whoever she is, I hope she ran far away from him because he looks like he could murder her right now.

But then the moment passes.

He relaxes.

He turns to me, sitting up straighter and clapping his hands over his thighs as he shrugs. Nothing about him suggests he’s upset about it at all anymore. One second to the next, he just shifted his entire demeanor.

“Nothing happened.” He stands, stretching, like what we’re talking about is nothing. I see all the tattoos along his body shift as his muscles flex and he flips his palms upward, fingers laced together toward the ceiling while he groans.

After he drops his arms by his sides, he slips his hands into his pockets. “She was just smart.” Then, without another word, he heads to the bathroom we share with the dorm over.

I hear the door shut as he blocks me out, putting up distance between us.

“She was just smart.”

I close my eyes, thoughts of Eli in love spinning in my head.

Not smart enough to stay off your bad side, though, huh?

Another shiver comes over my body, and I knock my head back against the wall. It’s just the weed. I’m not fucking afraid of you, Eli. It’s not like you’d actually hurt someone, right?