fic: the light from the lamp on the wall; eliot/--
Title: the light from the lamp on the wall
Disclaimer: i really own none of this.
Fandom: Leverage/ a bunch of mystery fandoms because I wanted to have fun with this
Pairing: Eliot and uh, some guys, some girls, but, uh, just one at a time
Word count: 2,601 total
Rating: G - R for language
Summary: Nine drabbles, all crossovers, all starring Eliot Spencer. Because he's the prettiest one of them all.
Warnings: Language, also this probably won't make any sense if you don't live in my head.
Prompts: sleep, grump, sneeze, doctor, grim, happiness, clumsy, snow, bash
Author’s Notes:
- Title from Everything We Had by The Academy Is...
*****
Sleep
“Can’t sleep?”
Eliot doesn’t startle because footsteps are loud and the man behind him did nothing to conceal his. It’s almost one of the things Eliot likes about him. “You going to offer me warm milk?”
The man laughs. “Fuck no.” He slides his arms around Eliot’s waist and leans his head against Eliot’s shoulder. “You don’t have to stay.”
The last time Eliot did something he didn’t want to do, he’d been seven and his father had made him take out the trash. He doesn’t say that, though, because the words have already been said but not heard. “When’s your guy coming?” he asks instead.
He senses more than feels the smile that brings. “Around noon.” He presses his face into Eliot’s shirt. “He’s not my guy.”
“Not yet,” Eliot agrees. There isn’t any jealousy lingering between them. They’re friends, and even if they weren’t, this man has never been Eliot’s. He’s always belonged to a tiny, fierce redhead with too many hats.
“When are you leaving?”
“Depends on how many coffees your guy brings.”
“He likes you.”
“Maybe,” Eliot allows. It’s probably true.
“Mm. You gonna go hurt some bad guys?”
Eliot covers one of the hands around his waist. “And Hardison,” he adds.
The man snorts. “You love him.”
“Yeah, well, I love you, too,” Eliot shrugs. “Seems I have terrible taste in people.”
“Do you ever regret saving me?”
Eliot has no time for regrets, but he says, honestly, “I only regret that I didn’t earlier.”
“When I’m going to do something stupid, he says your name.”
Eliot lets that sink in before he says, “You could never disappoint me.”
“One day I might.”
“No,” Eliot says firmly. “Never.”
“I love you,” is exhaled into Eliot’s back.
The door opens and an animated voice says from the kitchen, “I’m here early! Sorry, I couldn’t sleep and figured you couldn’t either, and I had an idea about some lines--oh! I brought coffee. Is Eliot still here? I got him his usual.” The voice is loud and clear and without any hesitation for waking the occupants of the house.
Arms unwind themselves from Eliot’s body and the footsteps going away from him are quicker than they were walking towards him. Promises of coffee and free hugs and tilted necks are too much to resist.
“When’s your flight?” a bright voice asks a few minutes after Eliot was left alone.
Eliot turns and takes his coffee from the outstretched hand. “A couple hours.” He doesn’t actually have a flight time, because Eliot hasn’t paid for a flight in years.
He receives a warm smile for his maybe lie. “You should visit us more.”
Once a year is already more than he visits anyone else. Once a decade is more than he visits anyone else. “Yeah.”
There are shy eyes peering out from under the bill of a blue hat. Eliot can’t look at them for too long without wanting to offer up everything he owns. “Thanks for coming.”
Eliot’s eyes flicker to the direction of the kitchen. “He didn’t sleep.”
“He never does when you’re here.”
“Then why--”
“Sometimes the abyss peers back.”
“And you--”
“Never peered into it to begin with. Not like he did.” Not like you, remains unsaid.
“And now?”
“Now he has someone who’s already fought his battles for him.”
The thing about saving lives, the thing that Eliot never fully understood before he met a man with too many tattoos and too many demons, is that everything ever said about it is true. Once you save a life, it’s yours to guard. Forever. Eliot doesn’t mind forever, not with these two. “And when I leave?”
The man in front of him smiles, tiny and real. “Who said I was talking about you?”
Eliot nods slowly because he thinks this man might know something about guarding a life. “Okay.”
He receives a soft hug and hears, “We’ll share him.”
“I’ll be back at Christmas,” Eliot finds himself promising.
“We’ll buy something to go with the tofurkey.”
“You fuckin’ better.”
-0-
Grump
“G-R-U-M-P.”
“I hate Words With Friends.”
“So stop playing it,” Eliot says. He sits down and passes over a beer.
“I fucking hate the desert, too, it’s fuckin’ hot, man.”
“So move.”
The guy sighs and twists the top off his beer. “Sometimes when I talk, you don’t have to be all rational in your responses.”
Eliot smirks. “And sometimes, when you get dressed, you can pick clothes actually made for men.” He pauses. “But you don’t.”
The man flips him off as he drinks his beer.
“When are your guys getting here?” Eliot asks.
Shrug. “Few hours, maybe.”
“Then you’re out for a few months?”
“Yep. We’ll see you in Boston, right?”
“Sure, kid,” Eliot agrees.
“Fuck you, ‘m not a kid,” he argues. He’s sort of not really a kid--he’s significantly younger than Eliot, but Eliot knows what he’s been through. Eliot knows he hasn’t been a kid since his parents kicked him out for picking music and walking away from everything they wanted for him.
Eliot reaches out and cups the back of the guy’s neck and tugs their heads together. Their foreheads bump and it should be awkward, but it isn’t. “Hey,” Eliot says, until the other guy looks at him. “Hey, these kids, these other guys, they treat you right?”
His voice is small but sure. “Yeah.”
“You call me if I have asses to kick.”
“Don’t I always?” He sounds resigned but not put upon. It’s enough.
Eliot pats his cheek. ‘”Good man.” He releases him and they go back to drinking good beer and watching the sunset.
-0-
Sneeze
Eliot’s been a guitar tech since one of his friends joined a band and said, “Hey, we need a guitar tech.” His friend’s band isn’t a band anymore, but Eliot is still a tech. His name is out there and people call him and then Eliot goes on tour with them. He likes to think they like him for his guitar teching abilities alone, but Eliot makes a mean breakfast on a bus stove, so that’s probably a little bit of it, too.
Eliot’s sliding pancakes onto a plate when he hears someone sneeze behind him. “Seriously?” he says, more to himself than anyone else.
He digs the orange juice out of the fridge and gives it a smell. It shouldn’t be too old, but this is a tour bus full of guys who are all mentally twelve. Food should be sacred, but it is not. (Unless it’s strictly labeled with Eliot’s name because Eliot isn’t afraid to mess shit up if they touch his food.)
He pours some of the orange juice into a glass and pushes the glass and a handful of pills through a bunk curtain.
“Thanks, dude,” he hears weakly.
“Drink it now so I can take the glass back.”
Eliot waits for the slurping to stop before he pushes his hand back in and takes the empty glass. “The fuck is your immune system,” he grumbles.
“Fucking sucks,” he hears back in reply.
“I’ll get you up for sound check,” Eliot tells him with a sigh.
“You’re the best.”
“I’ll tell that to your unicorn-loving bunk buddy.”
“Unicorns are awesome!” he hears from inside the same bunk. Eliot grins to himself because he’d actually only had about a forty percent chance of being right that there were two people in there instead of the supposed to be one.
“Uh-huh.”
“Fuck you, Spencer!”
-0-
Doctor
“That suit does nothing for your ass.” Even though it was custom made.
There’s a soft snort and then the sound of a belt buckle clicking. “Didn’t know you were looking.”
“I’m repeating what someone told me.”
“We can’t all save the city in jeans and a flannel shirt.”
Eliot sits down on top of a table filled with more gadgets than he could name. “Jealously looks worse on you than that suit.”
“Shut up,” the guy says with a laugh. “What are you doing here, anyway?”
“Nate went to rehab; I got bored.” It was mostly the truth. Eliot had done some other stuff between then and now, but mostly he matched the demons in his head drink for drink. He hates being drunk, mostly because his drunk self thinks it’s funny to let his sober self wake up on the front steps of houses owned by people who are almost friends.
“I have meetings in the morning.”
Eliot shrugs. He doesn’t really care. “Okay.”
“I’ll call out and we can do something.”
And the thing is, Eliot knows that with him do something isn’t code for anything more than watch a movie or get ice cream. He likes that--the simplicity, the ease of it. “I’m not getting up before ten.”
“Like you’ll even sleep that late.”
“You will.”
“Maybe.”
“I can keep myself entertained.”
“Just don’t scare the house staff.”
“Fuck off.”
“No, seriously,” the guy laughs. “I think one of the cooks is still traumatized.”
Eliot hates his drunk self so much. So, so much.
-0-
Grim
“…through grim determination--”
“Wait, no, what the hell?”
“--we have--wait, what?”
“That’s your speech?”
“Yeah,” the guy answers warily.
Eliot sighs. “Re-write that and get back to me.”
“You don’t like it?”
“No, seriously, go, like, shoot some pucks or something and then come back and write a speech for winning that doesn’t sound like it came out of a Charles Dickens novel.”
“Charles Dickens?”
“You’re so uneducated,” Eliot sighs. This is the worst con ever. He’s a bartender at a place near a hockey rink. Hockey players go there and get drunk after a loss or drunk after a win. Or, in this case, to read the speech they have planned to give to their team when they finally hoist the Stanley Cup. Never mind that it’s only November. Eliot figures most team captains have some kind of speech in their back pocket. Even if they’re never going to get to use them.
“I know who Charles Dickens is.”
Eliot looks to his left. “I think your friend is dancing on the tables again.”
The guy sighs and throws down a five. “A shot. Any shot.”
Eliot pours him one and watches him down it before he takes off after his teammate.
-0-
Happiness
When Eliot is sixteen, he gets his first car. It’s a piece of shit Camaro, but it’s yellow and it has racing stripes and Eliot is just shallow enough to think that’ll get him the girl. Girls don’t like boys, girls like cars and money. It’s an almost proven fact. (Sometimes girls might be even more shallow than Eliot, but whatever, as long as everyone’s happy, what does it matter?)
And then his car turns into a robot and Eliot’s saving the world with a really hot chick at his side.
He might have underpaid for his car. Just. Maybe a little.
“So,” she says. Her stance is shifty and Eliot thinks she’s looking at his car more than at him. That’s okay. He sort of is, too.
“See you at school, Monday,” Eliot says.
She nods. “Yeah, yeah sure.”
So the car got him the girl, but it also almost got him killed, and also, now that his car has been sort of outed as a robot, Eliot thinks it might not want to be his car again, so instead of underpaying, he might have overpaid and ended up with nothing if his robot car decides to drive off into the sunset without him.
She leaves and Eliot pats the hood of his car. “Are you going, too?”
In response the driver’s door opens and Eliot slides in behind the wheel.
-0-
Clumsy
“Who’s this?”
Eliot glances at her. “Our Lady Peace.”
“The band with the girl and the sky?”
“Something like that,” Eliot shrugs. “This is their second album.”
“I like it,” she says honestly.
“Me, too.”
Eliot’s stuck in this tiny town. He and his team split and he just. He started driving and ended up in Connecticut and there was a hardware store that was really a diner and well, there was really good coffee. So he stayed.
He’s not sure how he met her. Well, okay, that’s a lie. He knows exactly how he met her. He’s staying at her inn and she’s loud and beautiful and Eliot can’t look away.
She likes music, he finds out. They listen to some together. Except she identifies OLP as the band with the girl and the sky. It should be annoying. It’s not. (Almost like Parker, except Parker is annoying.)
“You’re quiet,” she says, nudging his shoulder.
He grunts a little. “Maybe.”
“The music?” she asks.
He wants to tell her it’s the music and her. She talks a lot. She talks fast. Eliot wants to listen to her talk fast all the time. “Something like that.”
She smiles.
-0-
Snow
Eliot has never been impressed with a store’s need to spray fake snow in the corners of their windows during the winter holiday season. He’s even less impressed when that store is in California.
He buys a coffee and then walks the twenty yards to the beach. It’s December and Eliot doesn’t even have a jacket. Down the shoreline a little, he sees them, a young couple, fighting. She storms off and he sinks down into the sand.
She’ll be back, Eliot can already tell. Maybe not tonight, maybe not tomorrow, but the way the guy holds himself tells him everything Eliot needs to know.
Eliot’s never met the one. He doesn’t even really believe in the one, but here are two kids, probably still in high school, and they’ve found it. It’s in the way the guy hunches down and it’s in the way the girl lingers on the edge of the parking lot, watching the guy she left.
Tomorrow is Christmas and he’ll wake up to a text from Sophie and an email from Hardison, but he’ll still be alone in California.
He thinks that couple won’t be.
-0-
Bash
“Come on, man, it’s one party,” he begs.
Eliot glares at him. “I hate parties.”
“There’s cake.”
Eliot isn’t going to waver for cake. “No.”
“And punch.”
“No.”
“It’s your first night in Hawaii--” And Eliot hates it here. Fucking Nate and his fucking sugarcane plans. What even. “And if I were you--hell, I’ve been you--I’d want to be as drunk as possible.”
“I’m working.”
The guy eyes Eliot’s jeans and shirt and says, “Uh-huh.”
“Look, just because I’m not wearing some ugly ass tie--”
“Hey!”
“--doesn’t mean I’m not working.” Eliot isn’t even sure where this guy came from. Well, okay, that’s a lie. He’d found a little girl wandering around, lost, and he’d provided a phone for her phone number to call and then this guy came rushing in with eyes only for the girl, until she tugged on his hand and told him Eliot’s name.
“It’s just a small thing,” the guy continues. “Not even a bash. Maybe a shindig.”
Eliot stares at him. “The fuck is a shindig.”
“Doesn’t matter,” the guy dismisses. “Just come, please.”
“Fine,” Eliot says. It’s a lie, but he really is working and having some guy flail his hands about while convincing Eliot to go to his party is drawing more attention to Eliot than he’d like.
“Here’s the address,” the guy says, shoving a business card into Eliot’s hand. “And, seriously, thanks.”
The little girl high-fives Eliot before her dad drags her away. A waitress comes by and tries to give him a stupid flower necklace and Eliot scowls at her until she leaves. Fucking Nate.
-0-
Disclaimer: i really own none of this.
Fandom: Leverage/ a bunch of mystery fandoms because I wanted to have fun with this
Pairing: Eliot and uh, some guys, some girls, but, uh, just one at a time
Word count: 2,601 total
Rating: G - R for language
Summary: Nine drabbles, all crossovers, all starring Eliot Spencer. Because he's the prettiest one of them all.
Warnings: Language, also this probably won't make any sense if you don't live in my head.
Prompts: sleep, grump, sneeze, doctor, grim, happiness, clumsy, snow, bash
Author’s Notes:
- Title from Everything We Had by The Academy Is...
*****
Sleep
“Can’t sleep?”
Eliot doesn’t startle because footsteps are loud and the man behind him did nothing to conceal his. It’s almost one of the things Eliot likes about him. “You going to offer me warm milk?”
The man laughs. “Fuck no.” He slides his arms around Eliot’s waist and leans his head against Eliot’s shoulder. “You don’t have to stay.”
The last time Eliot did something he didn’t want to do, he’d been seven and his father had made him take out the trash. He doesn’t say that, though, because the words have already been said but not heard. “When’s your guy coming?” he asks instead.
He senses more than feels the smile that brings. “Around noon.” He presses his face into Eliot’s shirt. “He’s not my guy.”
“Not yet,” Eliot agrees. There isn’t any jealousy lingering between them. They’re friends, and even if they weren’t, this man has never been Eliot’s. He’s always belonged to a tiny, fierce redhead with too many hats.
“When are you leaving?”
“Depends on how many coffees your guy brings.”
“He likes you.”
“Maybe,” Eliot allows. It’s probably true.
“Mm. You gonna go hurt some bad guys?”
Eliot covers one of the hands around his waist. “And Hardison,” he adds.
The man snorts. “You love him.”
“Yeah, well, I love you, too,” Eliot shrugs. “Seems I have terrible taste in people.”
“Do you ever regret saving me?”
Eliot has no time for regrets, but he says, honestly, “I only regret that I didn’t earlier.”
“When I’m going to do something stupid, he says your name.”
Eliot lets that sink in before he says, “You could never disappoint me.”
“One day I might.”
“No,” Eliot says firmly. “Never.”
“I love you,” is exhaled into Eliot’s back.
The door opens and an animated voice says from the kitchen, “I’m here early! Sorry, I couldn’t sleep and figured you couldn’t either, and I had an idea about some lines--oh! I brought coffee. Is Eliot still here? I got him his usual.” The voice is loud and clear and without any hesitation for waking the occupants of the house.
Arms unwind themselves from Eliot’s body and the footsteps going away from him are quicker than they were walking towards him. Promises of coffee and free hugs and tilted necks are too much to resist.
“When’s your flight?” a bright voice asks a few minutes after Eliot was left alone.
Eliot turns and takes his coffee from the outstretched hand. “A couple hours.” He doesn’t actually have a flight time, because Eliot hasn’t paid for a flight in years.
He receives a warm smile for his maybe lie. “You should visit us more.”
Once a year is already more than he visits anyone else. Once a decade is more than he visits anyone else. “Yeah.”
There are shy eyes peering out from under the bill of a blue hat. Eliot can’t look at them for too long without wanting to offer up everything he owns. “Thanks for coming.”
Eliot’s eyes flicker to the direction of the kitchen. “He didn’t sleep.”
“He never does when you’re here.”
“Then why--”
“Sometimes the abyss peers back.”
“And you--”
“Never peered into it to begin with. Not like he did.” Not like you, remains unsaid.
“And now?”
“Now he has someone who’s already fought his battles for him.”
The thing about saving lives, the thing that Eliot never fully understood before he met a man with too many tattoos and too many demons, is that everything ever said about it is true. Once you save a life, it’s yours to guard. Forever. Eliot doesn’t mind forever, not with these two. “And when I leave?”
The man in front of him smiles, tiny and real. “Who said I was talking about you?”
Eliot nods slowly because he thinks this man might know something about guarding a life. “Okay.”
He receives a soft hug and hears, “We’ll share him.”
“I’ll be back at Christmas,” Eliot finds himself promising.
“We’ll buy something to go with the tofurkey.”
“You fuckin’ better.”
-0-
Grump
“G-R-U-M-P.”
“I hate Words With Friends.”
“So stop playing it,” Eliot says. He sits down and passes over a beer.
“I fucking hate the desert, too, it’s fuckin’ hot, man.”
“So move.”
The guy sighs and twists the top off his beer. “Sometimes when I talk, you don’t have to be all rational in your responses.”
Eliot smirks. “And sometimes, when you get dressed, you can pick clothes actually made for men.” He pauses. “But you don’t.”
The man flips him off as he drinks his beer.
“When are your guys getting here?” Eliot asks.
Shrug. “Few hours, maybe.”
“Then you’re out for a few months?”
“Yep. We’ll see you in Boston, right?”
“Sure, kid,” Eliot agrees.
“Fuck you, ‘m not a kid,” he argues. He’s sort of not really a kid--he’s significantly younger than Eliot, but Eliot knows what he’s been through. Eliot knows he hasn’t been a kid since his parents kicked him out for picking music and walking away from everything they wanted for him.
Eliot reaches out and cups the back of the guy’s neck and tugs their heads together. Their foreheads bump and it should be awkward, but it isn’t. “Hey,” Eliot says, until the other guy looks at him. “Hey, these kids, these other guys, they treat you right?”
His voice is small but sure. “Yeah.”
“You call me if I have asses to kick.”
“Don’t I always?” He sounds resigned but not put upon. It’s enough.
Eliot pats his cheek. ‘”Good man.” He releases him and they go back to drinking good beer and watching the sunset.
-0-
Sneeze
Eliot’s been a guitar tech since one of his friends joined a band and said, “Hey, we need a guitar tech.” His friend’s band isn’t a band anymore, but Eliot is still a tech. His name is out there and people call him and then Eliot goes on tour with them. He likes to think they like him for his guitar teching abilities alone, but Eliot makes a mean breakfast on a bus stove, so that’s probably a little bit of it, too.
Eliot’s sliding pancakes onto a plate when he hears someone sneeze behind him. “Seriously?” he says, more to himself than anyone else.
He digs the orange juice out of the fridge and gives it a smell. It shouldn’t be too old, but this is a tour bus full of guys who are all mentally twelve. Food should be sacred, but it is not. (Unless it’s strictly labeled with Eliot’s name because Eliot isn’t afraid to mess shit up if they touch his food.)
He pours some of the orange juice into a glass and pushes the glass and a handful of pills through a bunk curtain.
“Thanks, dude,” he hears weakly.
“Drink it now so I can take the glass back.”
Eliot waits for the slurping to stop before he pushes his hand back in and takes the empty glass. “The fuck is your immune system,” he grumbles.
“Fucking sucks,” he hears back in reply.
“I’ll get you up for sound check,” Eliot tells him with a sigh.
“You’re the best.”
“I’ll tell that to your unicorn-loving bunk buddy.”
“Unicorns are awesome!” he hears from inside the same bunk. Eliot grins to himself because he’d actually only had about a forty percent chance of being right that there were two people in there instead of the supposed to be one.
“Uh-huh.”
“Fuck you, Spencer!”
-0-
Doctor
“That suit does nothing for your ass.” Even though it was custom made.
There’s a soft snort and then the sound of a belt buckle clicking. “Didn’t know you were looking.”
“I’m repeating what someone told me.”
“We can’t all save the city in jeans and a flannel shirt.”
Eliot sits down on top of a table filled with more gadgets than he could name. “Jealously looks worse on you than that suit.”
“Shut up,” the guy says with a laugh. “What are you doing here, anyway?”
“Nate went to rehab; I got bored.” It was mostly the truth. Eliot had done some other stuff between then and now, but mostly he matched the demons in his head drink for drink. He hates being drunk, mostly because his drunk self thinks it’s funny to let his sober self wake up on the front steps of houses owned by people who are almost friends.
“I have meetings in the morning.”
Eliot shrugs. He doesn’t really care. “Okay.”
“I’ll call out and we can do something.”
And the thing is, Eliot knows that with him do something isn’t code for anything more than watch a movie or get ice cream. He likes that--the simplicity, the ease of it. “I’m not getting up before ten.”
“Like you’ll even sleep that late.”
“You will.”
“Maybe.”
“I can keep myself entertained.”
“Just don’t scare the house staff.”
“Fuck off.”
“No, seriously,” the guy laughs. “I think one of the cooks is still traumatized.”
Eliot hates his drunk self so much. So, so much.
-0-
Grim
“…through grim determination--”
“Wait, no, what the hell?”
“--we have--wait, what?”
“That’s your speech?”
“Yeah,” the guy answers warily.
Eliot sighs. “Re-write that and get back to me.”
“You don’t like it?”
“No, seriously, go, like, shoot some pucks or something and then come back and write a speech for winning that doesn’t sound like it came out of a Charles Dickens novel.”
“Charles Dickens?”
“You’re so uneducated,” Eliot sighs. This is the worst con ever. He’s a bartender at a place near a hockey rink. Hockey players go there and get drunk after a loss or drunk after a win. Or, in this case, to read the speech they have planned to give to their team when they finally hoist the Stanley Cup. Never mind that it’s only November. Eliot figures most team captains have some kind of speech in their back pocket. Even if they’re never going to get to use them.
“I know who Charles Dickens is.”
Eliot looks to his left. “I think your friend is dancing on the tables again.”
The guy sighs and throws down a five. “A shot. Any shot.”
Eliot pours him one and watches him down it before he takes off after his teammate.
-0-
Happiness
When Eliot is sixteen, he gets his first car. It’s a piece of shit Camaro, but it’s yellow and it has racing stripes and Eliot is just shallow enough to think that’ll get him the girl. Girls don’t like boys, girls like cars and money. It’s an almost proven fact. (Sometimes girls might be even more shallow than Eliot, but whatever, as long as everyone’s happy, what does it matter?)
And then his car turns into a robot and Eliot’s saving the world with a really hot chick at his side.
He might have underpaid for his car. Just. Maybe a little.
“So,” she says. Her stance is shifty and Eliot thinks she’s looking at his car more than at him. That’s okay. He sort of is, too.
“See you at school, Monday,” Eliot says.
She nods. “Yeah, yeah sure.”
So the car got him the girl, but it also almost got him killed, and also, now that his car has been sort of outed as a robot, Eliot thinks it might not want to be his car again, so instead of underpaying, he might have overpaid and ended up with nothing if his robot car decides to drive off into the sunset without him.
She leaves and Eliot pats the hood of his car. “Are you going, too?”
In response the driver’s door opens and Eliot slides in behind the wheel.
-0-
Clumsy
“Who’s this?”
Eliot glances at her. “Our Lady Peace.”
“The band with the girl and the sky?”
“Something like that,” Eliot shrugs. “This is their second album.”
“I like it,” she says honestly.
“Me, too.”
Eliot’s stuck in this tiny town. He and his team split and he just. He started driving and ended up in Connecticut and there was a hardware store that was really a diner and well, there was really good coffee. So he stayed.
He’s not sure how he met her. Well, okay, that’s a lie. He knows exactly how he met her. He’s staying at her inn and she’s loud and beautiful and Eliot can’t look away.
She likes music, he finds out. They listen to some together. Except she identifies OLP as the band with the girl and the sky. It should be annoying. It’s not. (Almost like Parker, except Parker is annoying.)
“You’re quiet,” she says, nudging his shoulder.
He grunts a little. “Maybe.”
“The music?” she asks.
He wants to tell her it’s the music and her. She talks a lot. She talks fast. Eliot wants to listen to her talk fast all the time. “Something like that.”
She smiles.
-0-
Snow
Eliot has never been impressed with a store’s need to spray fake snow in the corners of their windows during the winter holiday season. He’s even less impressed when that store is in California.
He buys a coffee and then walks the twenty yards to the beach. It’s December and Eliot doesn’t even have a jacket. Down the shoreline a little, he sees them, a young couple, fighting. She storms off and he sinks down into the sand.
She’ll be back, Eliot can already tell. Maybe not tonight, maybe not tomorrow, but the way the guy holds himself tells him everything Eliot needs to know.
Eliot’s never met the one. He doesn’t even really believe in the one, but here are two kids, probably still in high school, and they’ve found it. It’s in the way the guy hunches down and it’s in the way the girl lingers on the edge of the parking lot, watching the guy she left.
Tomorrow is Christmas and he’ll wake up to a text from Sophie and an email from Hardison, but he’ll still be alone in California.
He thinks that couple won’t be.
-0-
Bash
“Come on, man, it’s one party,” he begs.
Eliot glares at him. “I hate parties.”
“There’s cake.”
Eliot isn’t going to waver for cake. “No.”
“And punch.”
“No.”
“It’s your first night in Hawaii--” And Eliot hates it here. Fucking Nate and his fucking sugarcane plans. What even. “And if I were you--hell, I’ve been you--I’d want to be as drunk as possible.”
“I’m working.”
The guy eyes Eliot’s jeans and shirt and says, “Uh-huh.”
“Look, just because I’m not wearing some ugly ass tie--”
“Hey!”
“--doesn’t mean I’m not working.” Eliot isn’t even sure where this guy came from. Well, okay, that’s a lie. He’d found a little girl wandering around, lost, and he’d provided a phone for her phone number to call and then this guy came rushing in with eyes only for the girl, until she tugged on his hand and told him Eliot’s name.
“It’s just a small thing,” the guy continues. “Not even a bash. Maybe a shindig.”
Eliot stares at him. “The fuck is a shindig.”
“Doesn’t matter,” the guy dismisses. “Just come, please.”
“Fine,” Eliot says. It’s a lie, but he really is working and having some guy flail his hands about while convincing Eliot to go to his party is drawing more attention to Eliot than he’d like.
“Here’s the address,” the guy says, shoving a business card into Eliot’s hand. “And, seriously, thanks.”
The little girl high-fives Eliot before her dad drags her away. A waitress comes by and tries to give him a stupid flower necklace and Eliot scowls at her until she leaves. Fucking Nate.
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