"OK, no more experiencing war for you." He plucked a couple more tissues out of the box and pushed them into my hand, pressing his fingers briefly against mine in what I could only translate as a reassuring squeeze. "The world is a bad place, I'm sorry."
"Not your fault," I blew my nose and then, remembering who I was talking to, added, "not all the time, anyway."
"Atta girl," he said gently. "So…" he looked around, as if for inspiration and then finished, "who's Jason?"
The mention of plain old Jason, after all the awfulness I'd just witnessed, seemed so thoroughly out of place I stared at Elliot blankly.
"The guy whose penis you can't stop thinking about," he prompted and my brain finally caught up.
"He's my ex," I said glumly, not sure this topic was any great improvement over the indignities of war. "I was out with him and a bunch of other people tonight, but his penis kept getting in the way of conversation."
"I hear they can do that," he said gravely.
"And it's not that I want to get back together with him or anything!" I burst out passionately. "Nothing like that, it's just..."
"You know what it looks like," he finished for me and I gaped at him, stunned that he knew what I meant.
"Yes," I said fervently, "that's exactly it."
He nodded sagely. "This Jason guy, he wasn't the tall one with the glasses and the thing for cardigans, was he?"
I looked at him oddly, then nodded slowly. "Yeah, that's him. How do you know that?"
"I saw the two of you together sometimes." He shrugged as if this was no big deal, but then, as I continued to stare at him, he added, "What? As if you weren't keeping tabs on me to report back to your mum? You probably remember my girlfriends from first year better than me."
"Dark hair with small nose, Asian girl with shiny jacket, blonde haired giant, hippy girl with see-through shirts," I reluctantly reeled off the girls I'd seen him with. "You certainly couldn't be accused of having a 'type'."
He seemed proud of this appraisal, but I ignored his Cheshire cat smile to add, "You went all monogamous in second year, though. Every time I saw you, you were with the girl with the red hair."
"Sophie." His smile disappeared. "Yeah, get ready for this, we were together about 8 months."
I blinked, genuinely surprised. I'd just been joking about him being monogamous. "That's huge," I said, begrudgingly congratulatory. "So what happened?"
"She got back with her ex."
Ouch.
"That sucks." I tucked some of my hair behind my ear self-consciously. I was perfectly comfortable calling Elliot a moron to his face, but talking about his past relationships? That was awkward.
"Can't fight history, I guess." He shrugged, but I could see it was a deliberate attempt to hide that having this Sophie girl nick off with some other guy had hurt. "So what about you and this Jason guy? Not the greatest love affair of the 21st Century?"
"Definitely not," I snorted. "I mean, he was fine and everything, but it turned out everything about him was irritating so I walked away."
He snuck a sideways look at me and then laughed softly and ran a hand through his floppy hair, saying, "He would have enjoyed that at least."
“What does that mean?" I asked, actually a bit hurt. "That any guy would be happy to break up with me?"
"No, that's not what I meant." He was still smiling and I felt the traditional 'Elliot is near' ire start to rise.
"Well, what did you mean?" I pushed him.
"Nothing, it's nothing."
“No.” I chucked my, now empty, bottle across at him in frustration. "You can't just say something like that and then not back it up."
"Fine." He easily batted away the projectile and held up his hands in surrender. "You have a nice arse, OK? I just meant he would have enjoyed the view of you walking away."
My mouth was already open to keep arguing, but now it just hung slack with astonishment. What had he just said?
"I have a nice arse?" I checked, sure I couldn't have heard him correctly.
"Yeah," he smirked at my shocked expression. "Don't you remember the arse currency guy?"
"He was crazy," I pointed out, "so he doesn't really count."
"Crazy, sure," he agreed, 'but spot on about your arse."
I was sure he was having me on, but found myself slowly rising from the couch and starting to twist round anyway; trying to catch a glimpse of this supposedly attractive quality that had been secretly following me around all this time.
"You look like a dog trying to catch its tail," he remarked in amusement as I twirled around beside him.
"A dog trying to catch its nice tail," I corrected him and he laughed.
"Even a little bit of information is dangerous in your hands."
Trying to simultaneously catch a glimpse of my butt in the reflection from the TV screen, and sneer at Elliot for this patronising remark, I momentarily lost my bearings and caught my foot on a coffee table leg. I let out a little shriek as I tripped, and moving surprisingly swiftly for someone recently slingshot, Elliot literally snatched me out of midair and pulled me down onto his lap.
Well now…
I'd seen this sort of thing play out in movies before. Even in real life I'd watched girls play the whole 'oh I'm so weak, catch me' ploy, but it was only now that I really got its power. The point was, it's only when you're pressed up so closely against another person that you fully appreciate one crucial thing: whether you want to push them away, or pull them closer.
Always one to seek out option c, I did neither, instead I just froze. One of my hands was on his shoulder and the other was against his chest, in prime position to give him a shove back, but they stayed limp and unresisting.
For Elliot's part, he looked just as dumbfounded by the situation as I was. His arms stayed wrapped around me, holding, even welcoming, me where I was, but they weren't tight. It was a hold that both kept me there, and allowed me to go.
And we stared at each other, that was perhaps the most crucial thing. My gaze was steady, unblinking, while his eyes were constantly moving, raking my face, presumably for any indication of what I was thinking.
Well, I wished him good luck with that. Not even I had any inkling of what was going on in my head, until I found myself whispering, "You smell green."
His eyes widened slightly, and then he licked his bottom lip, as if his mouth had gone dry, and repeated, "Green?"
"Yeah," my voice was suddenly as husky as Abi's. "Like pine needles and lime, apples, green tea and grass. You smell green."
Perhaps I didn't fully understand what I meant by that, but it seemed that Elliot did because he closed his eyes briefly as if he needed a moment to himself after hearing it. When he opened his eyes again they no longer roamed across my face, but fixed directly onto mine.
"You called Papua New Guinea for me," he said.
And then, because there really didn't seem to be anything else to do, I cupped his face in my hands and leant forward to kiss him.
----------
Her mouth was light against his and he knew that one wrong move would see her bolting from him. It was more than he could deal with to just sit there and not do anything, however, and so, after a couple of seconds, he began to kiss her back.
His bruises were pulsing where she'd fallen against him, but it was a good pain, it kept him grounded and stopped him from grabbing her and kissing her in the way he had before. The kisses from the night they’d slept together had been rough and hot, born from fury and confused lust, nothing like the lead up to this.
He would probably never be able to adequately explain to her, or even himself, how it had felt listening to her tell him he smelt green. All he'd known was that if she didn't kiss him, he was going to kiss her, and consequences be damned.
Her hands tightened, clutching up little handfuls of his t-shirt as their kiss deepened, but with what little self control he had left, he kept his hands still. He held himself back because he knew, any moment now…
/>
Rox suddenly stiffened and then, like a startled bird, she was gone; scrambling off his lap and across the room. She pressed her wrist up to her mouth, not wiping his kiss from her exactly, but obviously trying in some way to cover it up.
Stifling a groan, he rubbed his hands across his face and waited for the yelling to begin. It didn't. When she spoke it came out in a sort of strangled whisper.
"So that's what déjà vu feels like."
Well, damn.
"Listen," he started, but was actually glad she cut him off because he didn't have a clue what he was going to say.
"OK, you've had your fun," she was trying to be hard-arse, but her voice shook, "but that's it; now you've got to tell me. What happened the night we had sex?"
It was so different from the first time she'd asked. Then it hadn't been about her, not really, but he couldn't tell himself that now.
"Christ, Rox." He dropped his head into his hands, suddenly feeling tired. "Don't ask me that."
"Why not? I thought before you weren't telling me because you were just enjoying being such a dick, but now..." she trailed off and waved her hands around to demonstrate everything that had happened since. He stayed silent, unable to give her an answer, and she exploded, "What can be that bad that you can't tell me? What are you trying to protect?"
Whom, he thought desperately. It's whom I'm trying to protect.
"Look, you turned up here, you'd already drunk a fair bit and you were angry at me." He lifted his head and stared forwards, not looking at her, but at the TV she hated so much. "I'd just heard that Nan had had a stroke so I was trying to drown my sorrows in peace. You shouted, I shouted, there was a lot of drinking to emphasis points..."
"And?"
With a big effort he did manage to look at her then, but he wished he hadn't because she looked as twisted up as he felt.
"You were sad," he said uncomfortably. "I was sad. We were really drunk. Does how things ended up really seem that incredible?"
"Why was I sad?" Rox folded her arms, ignoring his question. "Because that's what this is really about, isn't it? Not what happened once I got here, but why I came here in the first place?"
"I can't tell you." He was low, lower than low, and her expression told him she thought so too.
"You can't? Are you under some sort of spell? Is there a curse at work here so you turn into a mouse or something if you tell me?" Maybe someone else would’ve thought she was joking, but he knew she'd never been more serious. She glared at him, daring him to answer her, cheeks flushed with fury.
"Well go ahead and turn into a bloody mouse then," she snapped when his mouth remained firmly closed, "because you're sure as hell not acting like a man."
He turned away and she let out a snarl of anger at his cowardice. The next he heard was the door banging shut and he knew she'd stormed out.
He slammed a fist down onto his coffee table and swore loudly. Then, reaching blindly into his pocket, he dragged out his mobile and scrolled to Nan's number. He needed her to laugh at him; to tell him he was a pathetic relic of chivalry and to drop the nobility act. If Nan could mock him it would tell him that everything was OK really; that this was just another of those times when he'd pissed off Rox, no big deal.
But the phone kept ringing. It rang and rang, until the line went dead.
Chapter 9 – The Bouncing and the Closed Doors
I burst into Abi’s and my room with no thought to my previous 'I'm so homeless, woe is me' complaints. There was no room for thought; my whole body was too full of my heartbeat. It pounded in my fingertips, in my ears, at my throat and in my temples until I was so consumed by the erratic thumping I was kind of surprised when I realised my autopilot setting had managed to bring me home.
Two heads flew up as I threw open the door, but thankfully, they were atop fully clothed bodies. That was at least one stroke of luck, I don't know what I would’ve done if I'd run in on Abi and Jonah having sex. It was one thing to admit Jonah had grown into a decent sort of fellow, it was quite another to see him naked when I was in the midst of a breakdown.
Abi, bless her heart, was the first one of us to react. Jonah had presumably used up all his reaction time on the rugby pitch during his teens, and I was frozen by the thought of him in nothing but his bare necessities. My friend obviously saw more than 'ewgh' in my face as she snatched the bowl Jonah had been scooping ice cream from right out of his hands and said, "Sorry, babe, you have to go." She jumped off her bed and then reached back to grab Jonah's arm as he sat there, dumbstruck.
I groaned and smacked my forehead against the doorframe as Abi's voice broke through the momentary relief the thought of Jonah in the nude had afforded me. That thoughts of Jonah in the buff were a relief really went a long way in demonstrating how much I did not want to think about Elliot. That reprieve was gone now, however, and there Sinclair was in my mind, all sexy and infuriating.
"You alright, Cinders?" Jonah asked uncomfortably as he shuffled his feet into his clown sized shoes, and I started to rhythmically bang my head against the plasterboard.
"Uh-uh." Abi shot me a quick look of concern and then shook her head at her boyfriend. "No talking, only leaving."
I gave up hitting my head as it was really offering no assistance and moved inside to slump against the wall next to our Mona Lisa poster.
"I'll call you tomorrow, bye!" Abi smacked a quick kiss on her boyfriend's lips and then basically shoved him out the door. Slamming it shut, she came to crouch beside me where I'd slid down to the floor.
"OK," she breathed, her shocked expression telling me just how freaked out I looked. "What the hell?"
"I kissed him," I said blankly.
"Who?" She asked incredulously. "Jason?"
"Jason?" I repeated. "What? Why would I be kissing Jason?"
"I have no idea, but you went out with people from your accounting class, he just seemed the most likely suspect." Abi waved her hands around in agitation, but the clanging of her bracelets unfortunately didn't drown her out as she added, "So who did you kiss?"
I buried my face down onto my drawn up knees and mumbled his name.
"What?" Abi leant in closer so that when I lifted my head, I was staring directly into her wide, grey eyes.
"Elliot." I repeated. "Elliot bloody Sinclair."
"You're kidding me!" Abi clapped a hand to her mouth and I felt my cheeks start to burn with humiliation.
"I promise you I'm not," I said miserably. "I grabbed his face and kissed him. Me, I kissed him, Elliot." It didn't matter how many ways I put it, it still came out sounding like an April Fool's joke.
"Why?" Seemed to be the only word Abi could think to splutter.
"Because he smelt green," I explained through the hard lump in my throat. "But then he turned into a mouse so I left."
Abi stared at me speechlessly for a couple of moments and then, much as she had with Jonah, she grabbed my arm and hauled me to my feet. Depositing me on my bed, she reached into our little fridge and handed me the last few squares of a block of chocolate. Sometimes a stereotype is all a girl has to fall back on, I guess, and I really did love chocolate.
"Right," she said as I picked morosely at the foil packaging, "from the top, please."
And so I took her through it; from thinking of nothing but Jason's penis, to thinking of nothing but how I wanted to kick Elliot in the same region.
"I can't even blame him for the first bit," I had to admit. "I was the one who went to his place. I was the one who kissed him. Oh God, why did I kiss him?"
"Apparently because he smelt green."
I looked up quickly to see if Abi was making fun of me, but her expression was appropriately solemn.
"Lots of people smell nice, though. I don't go round kissing them," I pointed out. "Why did I have to kiss Elliot, no matter how green he smelt?"
Abi shifted uncomfortably beside me and I glanced at her. "What?" I demanded.
"Well, I have another theory as to why you kissed Ellio
t, but you've not been so keen on hearing it in the past," she said meaningfully.
This was true; I'd pretty much blocked my ears and hummed loudly whenever she started in on the 'so what's the deal with you and Elliot?' stuff. I hadn't liked her scrutiny, especially as I'd been battling to stop a more positive opinion of him forming myself without taking on my best friend as well. However, much as I'd hated having Abi add her two cents worth to my 'Elliot isn't actually the spawn of Satan' savings, desperate times call for desperate measures...
"Fine," I said ungraciously. "What's your theory?"
"Do you know what you do when you talk to Elliot?" Clearly happy to be finally given a voice, Abi bit into a square of chocolate and looked at me enquiringly.
"Um, grit my teeth?" I suggested. "Lose my temper? Want to punch him in the nose?"
"Maybe, but the main thing I see when you're with Elliot is that you..." she paused, and I found I was leaning forward, desperate for the wisdom I was sure she was going to impart.
"I...?" I prompted.
"You...bounce."
What now?
"Bounce?" I repeated, just making sure I'd heard her correctly. Because, seriously, what the hell?
"Bounce," she confirmed. "And not in an 'I hate you forever and always' kind of way, either."
"There's an 'I hate you forever and always' bounce?" I choked out.
"I don't know," she admitted, "but if there is, that's not what you do."
I tried to give some thought to what she was saying; I dedicated a good few seconds to deciphering what that was supposed to mean, but still came up with nothing.
"Abigail!" I groaned. "You're supposed to be helping me here, not confusing me even more."
"The second you see him, it starts," she ignored my complaint. "You're up on your toes and bouncing, it's uncanny. Your eyes light up, you're all full of spirit and off you go."
"That's because I'm mad." I rolled up some of the foil into a hard little ball and flicked it off the bed petulantly.
"Are you?" Abi put a hand on mine, stilling my frenetic shredding of the chocolate wrapper and making me look at her. "Or are you just kind of...fired up? And that's what you are 'up'. Being with Elliot doesn't bring you down. Every time I've seen you with him you've laughed at least once or blushed, or generally acted...up."
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