by Seth King
“Come have a shot with us!” Gracie begs. “Please? I’ll put you on my Instagram story and make all my friends think I’m on a date with a really hot guy. Sorry, but you are hot, can’t help it.”
“But I don’t play for that team,” he smiles, a little nervously.
“Of course you don’t. But these bitches don’t know that.”
Cautiously, Robert sets down his water and joins us in the booth, sinking down next to Gracie. But I’m indignant. Now he’ll be near me? What about before?
David is a little uneasy, and he and Gracie keep exchanging those weird looks, but nobody says anything outright.
After a shot or two, Gracie produces a card game from a drawer, one of those Truth or Dare type things. She’s insistent that we play. I don’t want to go anywhere near this, but at the same time I don’t want to raise any suspicion, either – so I agree when Gracie demands that I pick the first card. Then I groan – it’s asking us to list, out loud, the sluttiest thing we ever did.
“I’m not doing that,” I say, setting down the card.
“Oh, sorry, is that weird to say in front of your dad?” David asks, making Robert flash a mortified grimace. That’s when I snap.
“Okay, you know what? He’s not my dad, and never was, and I don’t feel weird about it at all. And to prove it, I’m going to answer. Gracie, cover your ears.”
David stares at me. I know I revealed too much emotion, but I don’t care. I don’t want to seem like some sexual freak, but at the same time, I don’t want David to think I’m petrified by my former connection to Robert, either. So I take a deep breath. Robert’s expression is unreadable.
“Okay, once, at the gay bar, these two hot guys seemed really close, and they came onto me together. You know, buying me drinks, touching me. I assumed they wanted group play, which I’d never done before – so I invited them home eventually. Just to try it out.”
My face burns. I can’t believe I’m saying this in front of Robert, but I continue.
“Anyway, one thing leads to another, and we all hook up. No sex, just fooling around, but it was hot. When they get ready to leave, though, they casually mention that they’re first cousins.”
“Get out,” David says.
“It’s true. Isn’t that weird? I didn’t believe it, and made them show me their driver’s licenses – and it was true. They were cousins.”
“So you don’t have problem with family relations,” David says, glaring over at Robert, and I stutter. Fuck. If he’s not joking, and if he really knows, this could be bad…
“Oh, God, I wasn’t making a connection to my…ugh, never mind. Wrong story, I guess. David, your turn.”
David reluctantly tells some story about hooking up with two guys in one day – honestly, I’m not even listening, and I don’t care. My eyes are all over Robert, and his are all over me, too. His biceps, his newly trimmed beard – everything about him is turning me on. So much so, in fact, that I am becoming completely uncomfortable. I can feel my blood in my ears. I can feel my heart in my chest. Being around him makes me connected to the physical in ways I’ve never known. Just like the first day, I am alive everywhere. But he won’t talk to me.
When it’s his turn, he finally speaks. “Eliot, are you sure you’re okay with me sharing? Considering…”
“Considering that you were barely married to my mom, a decade ago, and haven’t spoken to me since? Yes, I’m fine.”
“Well, then,” he says angrily, as Gracie and David exchange a look. “I’ve been in…in an orgy once, on a yacht. Everyone played safe, and it was…amazing, really. One of the hottest days of my life.”
“Tell us more,” Gracie sighs in a dreamy tone, but I roll my eyes. “I’m not the one who’s related to you.”
“No, I think we’re done here,” I say as I reach for my drink. “No more games. Let’s just drink.”
“No, I want one more question,” Robert says, staring me in the eye and making me shiver. “What’s the oldest guy you’ve all been with?” Then he turns to David. “You first.”
David looks confused, but he still blushes. “Well, um, Eliot doesn’t know this, but once there was this guy who was probably, um…like, fifty-five? It was really hot…”
“How was it hot?” Robert asks, his eyes twinkling.
“Um, he just knew what to do. He was good, I guess. Why are we talking about this?”
“Because we are. Eliot, now it’s your turn.”
I go red in the face. He can’t toy with me like this when he won’t even speak to me. I won’t play this game. “Sorry,” I say snidely. “I’ve just never been into the older guy thing. It’s not for me.”
Just to get even more revenge, I do something crazier: I reach over and wrap my hand around David’s leg. I know it’s childish and stupid, but I don’t care. Robert chose to ditch me. He can live with the repercussions.
David looks over and smiles. He’s been incredibly clingy today, and I get a little sad at how happy he looks. “Hi. I didn’t know we were touching.”
“Yeah…well, things happen. Let’s keep playing, I guess.”
Gracie picks a card and tells a story which I cover my ears for, since she’s like a sibling to me and that is just weird. The whole time, Robert’s eyes are still on me, and I can’t really read his expression. He could either look frustrated or bored or maybe just hungry – I can’t tell. So to elicit a reaction, I lean in and start whispering nonsense into David’s ear, and licking him now and then, too.
Robert’s eyes grow, and he gives me a taste of his own medicine – smirking, he takes out his phone, and then I hear the unmistakable sound from Grindr, the gay hookup app. How dare he. I know I’m dangling David in his face, but Grindr? Really? That’s a step too far, so I lean in and kiss David on the cheek.
That’s when I hear Robert slap his hand down on the table. Everyone goes silent.
“Okay,” he bellows. “That’s enough.”
Robert Glazer
“What’s enough?” Gracie asks, and that’s when I realize I’ve lost control of myself.
“Um…enough Katy Perry playing from your speaker. I need something with some bass, like now, please.”
I try to calm myself. She scrolls through Spotify as I glare at Eliot again. I didn’t sign up for this. I thought I was taking a break from him. I didn’t sign up to watch him throw himself all over David in front of me. I didn’t want to listen to him talk about his sexploits, either. This is proving much harder than I expected.
The thing is, I wanted to drop him because I thought I was saving him from stress while his parents were splitting up, but I’m starting to realize that…well, they’re getting divorced whether I get with Eliot or not. Their split has no bearing on what happens at Woodhouse Lawn. So what’s the point in stepping on the brakes if I can’t help Mary Kate’s situation, anyway? They’re getting divorced, period. Eliot will have deal with that regardless.
There’s another thing. When I distanced myself, I guess I wasn’t thinking about the fact that Eliot is hot as shit, and has another good-looking guy on this fucking trip with him. And if he doesn’t get back with David, he can get with whoever else he wants – there’s a gay bar half an hour away, after all.
Soon Eliot gets up for the bathroom, and I get up and follow a few seconds later. Once he’s hidden in the hallway, I come up from behind and grab at his hand.
“Stop it,” he says, pulling away. I guess he was expecting me.
“No. This is immature. You stop.”
Finally he stops. “Immature? Why do you care? You’re the one who walked away.”
“I never said I didn’t care. You just decided that. You don’t know anything.”
He slips into the bathroom before turning and sticking his face into the space between the door and the wall. “Well you shouldn’t have ditched me, and you just lost the right to an opinion. Period.”
And then he slams the door in my face. And locks it, too.
Eliot P
rince
Gracie ends up falling asleep, drunk, barely after ten. We put her in bed with Aunt Susan, who promises to watch her, before heading back to our room. Or – at least I head back to the room. David, who has been acting weird all night, goes off alone. Oh, well. All I want is for Robert to finally contact me. I could tell that tonight went exactly to plan. At first he didn’t want to react, but eventually it became clear – he was bothered. Very bothered. And if he’s anything like every other man on earth, jealousy will be a pretty effective method in getting him to text me again. Because I’m going crazy without him. He’s in my blood now.
Within ten minutes, phone finally vibrates. Took him long enough, but he finally responded to my desperate messages from earlier. I take out my phone, and-
But it’s not Robert. It’s David, asking me to meet him on the upper porch on the third floor. What’s this about?
I sigh and just force myself to get it over with. I’ve been ignoring him long enough, anyway. It’s time to deal with this, in some way, and just see what happens.
I walk to the end of the hallway, climb some stairs, and find him out on the corner of the expansive porch. He doesn’t hear me open and close the door. I stop next to him, grimace, and then put a hand on his shoulder, like two friends or something. I have no idea how quickly this happened, but at this point I feel like I barely know him. The whole week I’ve been willfully avoiding him, coming up with distractions for him, encouraging him to please go on that fishing trip with my cousins or that picnic with my aunts, because “I don’t want to bore him on my dumb family trip.” But he’s starting to get distant and weird when I crawl into bed, hours past an acceptable time. I still have the upper hand here, though: he’s the one who cheated. He can’t ask any questions yet when he’s the one who severed the bonds tying us together, and he knows it. So for now, he’s just been watching. Waiting. Observing.
But maybe that’s all over.
“Hi,” I say, and he jumps a little. He mumbles something, his eyes glassy. So he went and got even drunker alone – great. Now I really know something is wrong. And he looks nervous, too. “David? Are you…are you drunk? What’s going on?”
“I d-don’t know,” he stutters. “Tonight discombobulated me. I don’t know anymore…”
I stand taller. If this is going into Robert-related waters, I need to be ready. “David. Is there…do you need to tell me anything?”
He takes a hard swallow. “No. I…I think I need to ask you something.”
I shudder. “Ask me what?”
He fumbles with his hands. “Well. The reason I came here under such weird circumstances,” he says, taking something out of his pocket that makes me stop breathing. “The reason I’ve been nervous and distant, the reason I orchestrated dinner with you and your mom the other night, the reason Gracie wanted to get us so drunk tonight, the reason I’ve dealt with all this shit with you and that old guy, is because…”
“Yes?”
He opens the box. “I did all that because when I came on this trip, I was going to ask you to marry me.”
Robert Glazer
I gasp and then wait for Eliot’s reaction as he talks to David.
A few minutes ago I saw Eliot at the end of the hall, then went back into my room and opened the window to listen in on their conversation. My window is only probably fifteen feet away from the porch, and I can hear most of what’s being said. I lost some of the beginning, but I heard every word as David took out the box and proposed – or whatever that was. A drunken, semi-proposal, I guess? But my first impulse was right – David is obsessed with him, and underneath the surface, he’s trying desperately to hold onto him.
Eliot stares down at him, lost in horror.
“David,” he says. “What?”
David doesn’t respond.
“Wh…what are you saying?” Eliot asks again. “What is this?”
“God,” David finally says, backing away a little. “I thought…I thought I wanted to do that, but God, that was weird. I don’t know what…I just don’t know anymore.”
Eliot starts looking annoyed. “Why’d you do it, then? What’s going on? David, start from the beginning.” He exhales and looks off into the night. “God, it all makes some sense now, though…I thought you were acting weird all along because of…something else, not because you were steeling yourself to do this…”
“What is something else?” David asks, as my ears perk up.
“Never mind. Please just explain. Did you really mean that?”
David collapses onto a bench a few feet away. Eliot sits next to him and rests a hand on his leg, more in a friendly way than anything else.
“The beginning…okay,” David says. “God. The truth is that I cheated for a reason. It wasn’t working. Sorry to say that, but it wasn’t. But after I cheated, the worst thing of all was the guilt. I had a total meltdown. I couldn’t live with how bad I felt.”
“That’s stupid,” Eliot says. “I was fine.”
“Yeah, I see that now, but I didn’t know then.”
Someone opens the door and sticks her head into the night, but I breathe easier when I see it’s just crazy old Aunt Marjorie. She apologizes and retreats, and they turn back to each other. What is Eliot thinking? What does he feel about this?
“So…okay. Back to the cheating. Right after it, I had a crazy meltdown freak-out thing. You were…my first love, I thought I’d never get it back, I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. So I went to my mom’s house and asked for a family ring.”
“Oh, wow…”
“I know,” David says. But I don’t trust something in his little speech – something in his eyes is shifty, beady. He looks like he’s performing more than anything else. “When people want to get serious, they propose – I just thought it was the next step. And I told everyone I was going to get you back by doing it. I know it sounds crazy, but I was crazy at the time. And like, obviously, over the past few days and weeks I realized we really didn’t have a great relationship all along, and we were better off moving on…but by then I’d already made the plans.”
“And…and my mom knew about this?” Eliot asks.
“Yeah. She said she’d help.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I think she felt bad for me.”
“Well…god, I feel so bad now. You didn’t have to do this,” Eliot tells him.
“I know,” David says. “I know…but I thought I wanted to.”
“Why would anyone want to marry me?” Eliot asks soon. “I’m just…me.”
David peers over at him, mystified. “You don’t get it, do you? You still don’t get it. You’re magic in a bottle, Eliot. Anyone would want you.”
I want to hate David in this moment, but I can’t. He’s correct, and it kills me that Eliot doesn’t see himself this way. And at least David has finally said something that seems genuine…
Eliot sighs and then wraps him in his arms.
“I guess this is the end,” David says soon. “You don’t come back from this.”
“From what?”
“From a botched engagement,” David says, sounding dazed.
“I guess,” Eliot says. “It kind of feels right, though. Maybe we needed…something like this.”
“In a weird way, you’re right.”
“Are you sure you’re okay, though?” Eliot asks. “Really okay?”
“Yes. I never wanted to propose, no offense. I just felt pressured into…I don’t know, trying to think of the next step, when really I never even wanted that to begin with. Being here made me realize, once and for all – this really isn’t working.”
“Well…good. I think.”
“So this is what it feels like,” David laughs to himself.
“What?”
“Getting dumped.”
Eliot doesn’t respond.
“The funniest thing,” David says, “is that I’m not sad. Mad, maybe. But not sad.”
“Why would you be mad?”
“Oh, come on, kid. I’m not that dumb. You don’t have to hide anymore. You’re in love with your stepdad.”
My heart stops beating. Eliot snaps his head over at him. “What?”
“Eliot, just stop,” David says. “Up until now, I could deal with it. I mean, it was weird as fuck, sure, but I could deal with it. He’s hot, whatever, I understood it. But…”
“Yes?” Eliot gulps. David’s mood darkens.
“I mean, what are you doing, Eliot Prince? What are you really doing? Have you lost your mind?”
I wait with baited breath for Eliot’s reaction.
“No,” he finally says, very quietly. “Maybe I’m finding it.”
“Uh, I seriously doubt that. You’re fucking your mom’s ex-husband. What don’t you get about that? This is inappropriate. He was your dad for two years. Both of you should know better.”
“Fucking? Pardon me. Who in the world said that?”
“Uh, common sense?”
Eliot pounds the floor of the deck. “David, he was never my fucking dad. I barely knew him, and they separated after a year.”
“Whatever,” David shrugs. “Not my circus, not my monkeys. You know what I mean. No matter what, I am not competing for attention against your former stepfather. That is just too fucking weird.”
For a moment I wonder if Eliot will even challenge him, or just give up.
“David,” he finally says. “You cheated on me, and here you are, judging my decisions. Or possible decisions – nobody has confirmed anything.”
“Not judging. Just pointing it out.”
Eliot’s eyes narrow. “And you’re not competing for me. Who said there was a competition at all?”
“Uh, excuse me?” David asks as my eyes grow. That’s my Eliot, I think to myself.
“Look. I tried my hardest to let you in again after what happened. I tried to forget it. But…I don’t think I can. This whole thing was stupid.”
