34. “If you keep looking at me like that we won’t make it to a bed.”
“okay but that was funny, though.”
eliott turns nineteen inconspicuously. it’s a party on a rooftop; cheap beer and summer dripping all around him — and the boy next to him — pretty, playful, popular, laughing at a joke eliott doesn’t quite catch, pupils glimmering from the fairy lights strung about. his words are sort of hazy, soft from how the syllables slip out. “what was?” eliott asks, sipping the last of his drink in the red solo cup. “you or the joke?”
eliott turns nineteen inconspicuously. six hours before he turns nineteen-and-one-day, though, is anything but. nineteen is a strange number, average, a number still clad in its juvenile anxiety. neither old, neither young (for him, at least). however this year, today, tonight, nineteen is special because it is, eliott, it’s special, why wouldn’t it be? lucas had his palms over eliott’s eyes in front of an abandoned building, standing on his toes, giggly, and eliott would follow him to the ends of the earth. “i’m always funny, eliott,” lucas is playing with his fingers. “i can’t believe i’ve got a boyfriend who doesn’t think i am, i’m offended.”
“i could object,” eliott grins, then puts his middle finger up at the boys who are gagging into their respective drinks, the empty cup now on the table beside them. “i think you’re hotter.”
it will never not to be enthralling to watch the way lucas bites on his lip, hiding his face behind his third beer, suddenly rendered mute. “you’re ridiculous,” and eliott knows he doesn’t mean it because the blush is a flush of pleasure, really, and eliott will never be unwilling to make him pleased. lucas’ stare is ebullient, head tilted back. “you’re ridiculous,” he repeats. eliott kisses him, anyway.
daytime in summer is lengthy, but it deepens into indigo as lucas is on his fourth beer. it’s nearly eleven. eliott is just on his second. happy birthday is thrown around, bright yellow party hat on his head, a matching one on lucas’, too. he’s happy, he is, and as he looks around the feeling is bone-deep and all-consuming it almost hurts to breathe. gifts that were poorly wrapped are handed over to him. manon leaves lipstick on his cheek. lucas declares that he needs to, too. candles are blown out and cake is eaten and it’s nearly one by the time lucas slides an arm around his waist, feet stumbling together as they go down the stairs, walking out onto the streets.
the alcohol makes lucas clingier, and the touches are distracting as they make their way back to eliott’s apartment, gentle and demanding all at once. blunt fingernails press into the soft skin of his palm, experimental somehow. the walk home feels too long. “i want to hold your hand,” lucas orders under mercury vapor, voice childish. eliott huffs a laugh. “i’m serious, eliott.”
“you already are,” the beat to his heart is messy, fond, complicated. you always are. “come on, we’re almost there.” fingers curl around his, and his breath is warm and shallow on his neck, apartment building quiet as the grave as they walk up, and he can feel how awestruck lucas is looking at him. it makes him feel things he’s never felt before again. things he never wants to stop feeling.
eliott heads to the bathroom first thing when he unlocks the door. lucas stumbles in before him, flopping on the couch, smiling up at the ceiling. it doesn’t take long before he gets out, all the lights are turned off. lucas is holding a cake. two candles. flames throwing shadows over his contours.
“happy birthday, eliott,” he whispers. “i mean it’s not your birthday anymore — but. still. happy birthday.”
the silence feels like forever. eliott takes weak steps toward him, until he stands in front of what’s probably a chocolate cake, messily decorated with an icing pen (happy birthday eliott! nineteen, hearts filled in), candlelight making lucas’ irises an uncanny kind of blue. “lucas,” he starts, bewildered. “god, i’m —" everything he wants to say is half-formed, dying in his mouth.
“make a wish and blow it out?”
he does, and nighttime consumes them the moment ‘nine’ is blown out. in the darkness eliott reaches for his hand. the cake is placed on the kitchen table and he stands by him, tenderly watching lucas eat. “good?”
a sheepish smile adorns his face, tongue darting out to lick the stray icing around his mouth. “here—,” lucas holds out a piece of cake between his fingers, sugary and sweet, and it overwhelms. the air turns stuffy, clothes stifling, prickly, maybe not just from the summer heat.
“later,” eliott barely gets out, shifting on his weight.
“but it tastes really good,” he gets closer, eliott doesn’t breathe. there’s something daring in lucas’ smile, something wolfish, reckless. “i bought it for you, eliott. it’s your favorite flavor.”
“i will, later—" eliott can smell the chocolate, but he stops when lucas says a soft ah, feeling himself growing warmer by the second as the piece of cake is placed into his mouth, sugary, sweet, saccharine, like the hold lucas has over him. eliott chews on it mildly, watching him lick the leftover icing on his fingers, not really tasting. “lucas, you’re — jesus.”
awareness taints his words even though the sentence is innocent. in most cases eliott would follow up with something witty to say, flick on his shoulder or his nose, but all vocabulary is lost. the air is cloyingly smothering. it’s way deep into the night. “you should stop doing that,” he murmurs, not sure on how to go about doing this. “i’m going to get some water.”
the mugs are slightly chipped and the kettle whistles as water is boiled, poured, lucas standing over the half-eaten cake with chocolate all around his mouth, eyes following his movements intently. it almost makes him feel like he’s choking. still, he hands a cup over to lucas, drinking his until there’s nothing left inside. his teeth are cleaned of icing after it’s finished. eliott puts clingwrap over the cake. it’s two-thirty by then. lucas is still looking at him. “let’s go to bed?” eliott suggests, holding out his arm. “it’s late.”
“because,” lucas shrugs sort of vaguely. “you didn’t have your cake yet.”
he scoffs, a breathy chuckle escaping. “what?” lucas just stares. the faint redolence of cake still remains on his tongue although the portion was small, too incapable of handling him lick icing off his fingers. cake is good — cake is wonderful, just not wonderful enough when eliott has lucas in its presence.
“what kind of birthday boy doesn’t eat his own cake on his birthday?”
“okay, fine,” eliott finally says. “— one slice. a small one.”
a sliver of the dessert is sliced with a butterknife, lucas has it in his fingers again. he offers it to him bit by bit. he’s tipsy. chocolate has never been more tasteless. eliott eats off of them, used to how touchy lucas gets, used enough he doesn’t think too much on it because he is too, but tonight air is heavy. down to the very last bite eliott lets his mouth linger for some reason, and the doe eyes that look at him wide and big and wanting makes heat run through his body, hands moving slow at the sides of his waist. “eliott demaury—” he breathes. right before he moves back, eliott kisses his palm.
they untangle and eliott swallows. he’s furiously pretty, and all of a sudden he loses the ability to pronounce things correctly. “if you keep looking at me like that we won’t make it to a bed.”
“then i’ll keep looking at you like this.”
there’s longing in the air they share even as they’re together, bodies yearning. the bed is big, but not big enough — almost no space between them, and that’s good, eliott thinks. except sleepiness starts seeping in and lucas just cuddles him, pressing soft kisses on the crook of his neck, a little needy, mattress complaining the slightest. he touches him all over, caressing the skin below his ear, all of it mindless now, without consideration. still, lucas seems to flush under it, coiling. the feeling is reciprocated, his own body burning avidly when lucas is too eager and too impatient. everything he does causes him to react in strange ways eliott never did before.
“you’re old now.” eliott laughs, filling the vacancies night often leaves. the room is lit enough that he sees lucas smiling, eyelashes long over his cheeks, shadowy.
“and you’re still young.”
a brief silence follows, until lucas’ words come out small into the darkness: “and you don’t mind?” eliott grimaces, shaking his head vehemently. he’s never given much thought to it before.
“no, never,” the mattress shifts as eliott moves closer to him, as if he was never close before. “— i love you.”
“oh,” eliott echoes. “now go to sleep.” lucas’ eyelashes are soft, closing his eyelids, and he stares into their darkness, but lucas is touchy, clingy, needy. the kiss is quick though insistent. he pulls back, and his smile is endearing, and eliott drags him back in to kiss him again, grip soft on his arm, messy, sloppy, a bit of teeth, neither of them awake enough to care, and there aren’t many things he wants to do on his birthday (or birthday carried on by three hours) but this, or that, or nothing at all. eliott is breathing crookedly when they separate. coughing to recover.
“you taste like cake—” the words come through ragged breaths after a while.
“well, lallemant,” maybe he’ll have it for breakfast tomorrow, “would you believe that you do, too?”
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