"I'm fine," I managed to reassure Annette, "just a bit tired, I think."
The words made me sound normal, but in my head I was making up this little ditty:
Jason's penis it was mine,
Jason's penis it was fine.
Jason's penis one of a kind,
Jason's penis GET OUT OF MY MIND!
I'd reached crisis point. I had to get out.
I made my apologies to the group, gratified with the cries along the lines of 'it's still early, stay', but knowing there was no way in hell that was going to happen.
I burst out into the cool evening and took great gulps of 'Jason's penis' free air. It was a relief to be free of that tyranny, but as I wandered down the pavement away from the pub, I wondered what I was supposed to do next. I was essentially homeless. It was only 10.30 and I knew that that wouldn't count as 'nice' or 'late' from Abi's perspective.
I felt fidgety and antsy. I wanted to vent about the Jason situation, but Abi was busy and there was really only one other person that had felt the full force of the non-censored me recently...That wasn't an option, though, right...?
I hadn't seen Elliot for a couple of days, not since Jonah had remembered he had a slightly dented friend hanging around somewhere and come to collect him. By then Elliot had spent two nights in my bed and I'd kind of not minded him being around. This was perhaps due to the fact he spent most of his time unconscious, which I found did wonders for his personality.
Asleep he may have been, but I hadn't liked the idea of him being all hurt and by himself, and I'd blown off most of my classes to keep an eye on him. That I was prepared to do this, regardless of the shrewd looks it earned me from Abi, was perhaps testament to how genuinely worried I was about him. And, trust me, this reaction intrigued me a hell of a lot more than it did her.
When Jonah had whisked him away I'd told myself I was happy to see the back of Elliot, but I knew that that wasn't entirely true. I'd actually started to enjoy being thrown into the caring role, and the sleepy smiles Elliot had sent me in his brief awake periods had been kind of...nice. It felt like a shameful admission, a smack in the face to my past self, so I'd tried to push him out of my mind in the past couple of days...with very little success.
And the moral to this story, I told myself crossly as I stood there on the street outside the uni bar, is 'be careful what you wish for'. I'd rather have more Jason's penis songs stuck in my head than wrestle again with thoughts of Elliot that were veering alarmingly away from the negative.
Enough!
I had too many years of practice blaming Elliot for all the wrongs in my life to be stumped now. I was cold and I was homeless, somehow this must be his fault.
Sure enough, with just a little bit of focus, I came up with an angle in no time. Jonah was Elliot's friend after all, and Jonah was the reason I couldn't just go home. Regardless of the lateness of the hour, or the likelihood that Elliot was out somewhere working his way into some girl's knickers, I told myself it was his responsibility to provide me asylum.
Storming over to Elliot's kept me toasty warm, but once I was standing outside his door I was cold again. Cold, and freaking out.
Could I really just turn up like this? After all the grief I'd given him when he came my way, was I really being the one to deliberately put myself into his path? Not even his path, his home, the place where we'd done the stuff necessitating three condoms.
So what are you going to do? I asked myself sternly. Stay out in the corridor all night? Go back out and lurk around outside the uni bar thinking about Jason's penis?
This scenario was so awful, I found my hand shooting out and rapping smartly on the smooth painted surface of Elliot's door, almost of its own volition. Well that was it. I’d knocked, I was only going to do it once. If Elliot didn't answer I would go find a cardboard box in an alley somewhere to spend the night. In many ways that would probably be preferable to-
"Rox?"
Yikes, and there he was. I'd been so busy convincing myself that Elliot wouldn't open the door, I hadn't clocked the fact that, actually, he already had.
His hair was rumpled, his feet were bare and he looked all clean and fresh, like he'd been not long out of the shower. Yikes again.
"Hi," I said, my voice coming out as a funny little squeak. Oh God, he knew now, he knew I'd sought out his company.
"Hi," he repeated, looking thoroughly blindsided by my presence outside his door. A bare second passed, though, before the tiniest hint of a smile seemed to develop around the corners of his mouth.
"This is all your fault!" I exclaimed, almost stamping my foot in annoyance with myself. I was belatedly realising that coming to his place had laid me open almost as bare as when I'd woken up after our one night stand, and I hated it. "You should have trained Jonah better!"
He looked at me blankly for a moment, and then leant a shoulder against the doorframe, muttering, "And here we go again…"
And just like that, all the wind was taken out of my sails.
I wanted to battle on; tradition dictated that I snarl and snap at Elliot until I felt better, but I just couldn't do it this time. Truly and honestly, how was it his fault that my roommate had a boy round?
There was a long pause as he waited for me to go on my usual rant. When I broke the silence, however, it was to say quietly, "Abi and Jonah are being gross in my room, I can't get Jason's penis out of my head, and I didn't really know where else to go."
It was the truth; just flat out honesty, no embellishing, no crazy…OK, maybe a little bit of crazy.
One of Elliot's eyebrows quirked, but he stepped back and held the door open for me. As I passed him and entered his studio flat I could've sworn I heard him murmur, "Never a dull moment,", but I chose to let that one go.
"So…how're you healing up?" I looked round his place, trying not to remember the last time I'd been there. This was completely futile of course, but I reassured myself, at least this time I was wearing a bra. "Dr Tagobe said you'd be sore for a while yet, but not to worry unless you get any lumps or swelling."
I snapped my eyes away from where they'd been wandering dangerously close to Elliot's bed, and eyed him suspiciously. I'd suddenly realised that it would be an entirely Smelliot thing to do to turn into one giant hematoma and not mention it to anyone.
"What?" He asked, looking somewhat perturbed by the intense way I was now staring at him.
"Lift up your top," I ordered him and he raised his eyebrows again before he let out a criminally sexy chuckle and reached for the hem of his t-shirt.
"Of course, it all makes sense now, you came here to cop another look at my amazing bod."
I was about to say something snarky in reply to that, when he lifted up his shirt and all my attention instead focused on the expanse of bruised skin displayed before me.
"Holy monkeys, Sinclair, you look like an opal!" I leant down and peered closer at his injuries in horrified wonderment.
Thankfully, even to my untrained eye, it looked like his bruises were healing alright; there were definitely no lumps to speak of…unless the faint lines of his muscles counted.
"Yeah, I counted 9 different colours this morning," he nodded. He continued to hold his top up for me, but flinched away as I raised a hand as if to touch a particularly sore looking bit. I couldn't help it, there was something about the way it looked so tender... Some latent Mother Teresa instinct kicked in and I wanted to press my hand against it and smooth it better somehow.
Still, I couldn't explain that to Elliot so, instead, I straightened with a smirk, remarking, "Who's chicken shit now?" It was perhaps not the wisest thing in the world to hark back to the conversation we'd had at Haze, but then wise was not something I'd ever been accused of being
Elliot let his shirt drop and gave looking both manly and affronted a try. It didn't work.
"You were chicken shit because you were scared of the intense sexual feelings I could summon within you with just the faintest touch." My jaw dropped and I
gaped at him, but he continued, "I don't want you to touch me because of the intense painful feelings you could summon within me with just the faintest touch. That doesn't make me chicken shit, that just makes me not a masochist."
"And speaking of intensely painful feelings," he went on before I could jump in there and refute the 'me being scared stuff' again, "thanks so much for telling your mum on me about the slingshot incident."
It’d been great conversation filler, telling Mum all about Elliot's stupidity. It was just a shame that I hadn't been able to shake the sense that she thought I’d failed in my duties somehow; like it was my job to keep Elliot safe even from himself.
"Bad?" I asked and he flicked me a 'duh' look over his shoulder as he walked to his kitchen area.
"20 solid minutes of 'with all the advantages you've been given in life I can't believe you've done this'," he said wearily.
Yanking open the fridge, he pulled out a beer and a soft drink, waggling them in my direction. Trying not to think about how I hadn't managed a 20 minute conversation with my mother in over a year, I nodded towards the cola and he chucked it over.
"It's weird my mum still thinks that money could save you from your own idiocy," I remarked as I twisted the lid off the bottle. "You’d think you'd have cured her of that years ago."
"You'd think," he agreed, grabbing himself a drink too and then coming back over to where I stood in the entrance way. "But your mother has a remarkable ability to think I can learn from my mistakes."
"More fool her," I said, but I smiled to take the edge off. He'd not teased me about coming to him when I’d had nowhere else to go, now was not the time to smack him down.
"Yeah, well," he shrugged, "Nan thought it was awesome." He headed for the couch and I followed him, rolling my eyes.
"Of course she did."
"In fact, she told me that's how she wants to go. Death by slingshot." He settled himself in the far corner of the sofa and kicked a game controller onto the floor to make room for me. "She said it would make for an interesting obituary."
Nan and obituary in the same thought made me uncomfortable and I sank down onto the leather next to him without replying.
"She has a nurse now, you know," he said, speaking more seriously as he obviously picked up on my uncharacteristic silence.
I knew he was trying to be all solemn, but this comment actually made me laugh a little bit as I replied, "Yeah, I know." I dug in my bag for my phone and started scrolling through the received messages. "She sent me a photo, see?" I found the text I was after and turned it to show Elliot.
"…and that would be a picture of Chase's arse," he said with a sigh and I grinned.
"What did you expect?"
"I bet mum's putting aside money for the sexual harassment payout as we speak."
I laughed again and then we both paused to take a pull at our drinks. It was only then, as my eyes followed the line of the tipped up bottle, that I twigged to the paused image on the stupidly giant TV that loomed over us.
"Nice," I said, gesturing towards what looked like a leg being blown off by a landmine. "Video from your holiday, is it?"
He followed my gaze to his TV and grinned. "Homework," he explained, "for my Experience of War class."
"Experience of War?" I repeated incredulously. "That's a course?" Unable to keep looking at the gore, I looked at Elliot instead. This turned out to be a bad idea as I found myself suddenly fixated by the little freckle up by his eye. I'd seen it before, of course, but this time it seemed somehow...rakish.
Monkeys, I should’ve stuck with the leg being blown off.
"That's got to be an easy subject to pass," I snatched up the loose reins of the conversation. "Surely you just answer every question by repeating one word – bad. The experience of war is bad."
"War is bad?" Elliot asked in mock surprise, although the way he was looking at me showed that the weird pause when I'd got stuck looking at his freckle had not escaped his notice. "Wow, that clears that up then."
The idea of Elliot doing homework tickled me, and I looked around the room again, this time imagining him pacing up and down in an academic fervour. What was sensationally odd was that, the more I thought about it, the more I could actually kind of see it. There was a pile of textbooks on his desk, and his laptop was humming away on the coffee table in front of us, rows of dot points showing the notes he'd been typing up when I'd arrived.
"You're studying history, right?" I'd heard him mention as much to Abi during that first 'get to know you' lunch that had been so spectacularly unnecessary. "Why's that?"
"Because any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it," he said grandly, adding, when I looked at him in astonishment, "Oscar Wilde."
"...OK," I said slowly, "leaving aside for a moment the fact that you just quoted Oscar Wilde to me, what I really meant is how?"
He shrugged again and I knew straight away that he was going to deliberately misunderstand what I was trying to ask. "Books, internet, American war movies where the Germans have English accents, you know."
"Sinclair," he was frustrating me now, "you know what I mean. How are your parents letting you get away with this? Aren't you supposed to come out of uni and become a captain of industry; high powered, well paid and all that jazz?"
"And are you suggesting my Bachelor of Arts with a major in history isn't going to get me there?" There was a brightness in his eyes that I recognised from years of watching him thoroughly enjoying rebelling against his parents. Clearly seeing my exasperation at his childishness, though, he turned slightly on the couch and fixed me with a level look.
"In grade 11 my history teacher asked me to stay back after class," he said, seemingly apropos of nothing. "I'd had sex with Emily Simons the week before and had spent the whole class regaling Henderson and that lot about every detail. I thought I was so cool, but Mr Wagg gave me a look, pretty much the look you're giving me right now, and said 'you, my boy, are the dictionary definition of smart, but lazy'. Then he pointed at my history book and told me my homework was to find one person in there who gave a damn that I'd had sex with Emily Simons."
I smiled, impressed with this Mr Wagg's style.
"So I rocked up the next day and showed him the Captain Cook quote," he continued. "You know, the one where he said he wanted to go '... farther than any man has been before me, but as far as I think it is possible for a man to go.' I said that I thought old Jimmy Cook would've known exactly what I was thinking when it came to Emily Simons."
"Ewgh," I groaned. "Trust you to take a quote about the boundless spirit of adventure and turn it into a comment on your sex life."
"Yeah," he grinned, clearly pleased with my reaction. "Mr Wagg said pretty much the same thing. By then, though, after spending all night trying to find some smartarse response, I'd kind of got into the whole thing. History became my favourite subject and I decided to study it at uni; nothing to do with my parents, just natural progression."
"But-" I started to protest and he cut me off with a quiet,
"Hey." As I obligingly closed my mouth, he fixed me with a serious look and added, "What I do with my life is my choice, not theirs."
He sounded so sincere, as if he genuinely believed what he said, but I knew that it wasn't true. How could he be in control of his own life when his parents were the ones paying for everything?
I don't know why thinking about his parents financially supporting him freaked me out so much. It wasn't as if it was coming as some great surprise, but I suddenly really, really didn't want to talk about it. To this end, I gestured jerkily towards the TV and said awkwardly, "I didn't mean to interrupt your studying. You should go back to watching."
"Nah, it's alright," he said offhandedly, but I shook my head.
"Get on with it," I commanded him. "I'll just sit here quietly and see if I can help you with any words beyond 'bad'."
"You? Sit quietly?" He paused in the act of draining his drink and looked at me out of the corner of h
is eye. "I didn't know that was in your repertoire."
"This is going to be a very exciting time for you then," I said sarcastically. "Now get back to work."
He looked at me for another couple of seconds, as if making sure, but I just lifted my eyebrows as if to say 'go on then' and he eventually leant forward to pick up his computer.
And then, oh dear, he pressed play on the remote and within minutes any naive thoughts I had about humanity being honourable were stripped away. It was like watching a horror film, but worse, so much worse, as it was all based on things that had actually happened. For every solider that had his face shot off, for every woman dragged from her home to have unspeakable things done to her, there was a true story behind it. It broke my heart and made me feel dirty.
I curled myself up into a tighter and tighter ball as horror upon horror flashed up on the massive screen. My fingers gripped my drink heedless of the fact that it was cold enough to make my hand go numb. I wanted to go numb...no, I wanted to go deaf and blind. It was so horrible!
After what felt like forever, but according to the clock on his DVD player had only been about half an hour, the screen went suddenly blank and I blinked in surprise. Looking at Elliot I saw him put the remote back down on the table and glance over at me, a little furrow in his brow.
"What are you doing?" I croaked. "It's not finished yet."
"Rox," he released my name on a whoosh of expelled air and shook his head. "You're dying over there."
"No I'm not," I sniffled. "I'm fine."
"You look like a trampled puppy." He reached over to his desk and snagged a tissue out of a box before passing it to me. "I feel like some evil scientist trying to brainwash you into being a serial killer or something."
I rubbed at my wet cheeks, embarrassed at having been reduced to a snivelling wreck in front of him.
"It's just so sad!" I tried for that not to come out as a wail, but failed miserably. "One minute you're just living your life and then the next second your neighbour is trying to torture you to death, and your daughter is raped and the guys trying to save you accidentally bomb your house, then your son becomes a spy for the enemy and-"
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