CHAPTER FOUR
Elliot’s favorite time of day is when he gets to sit in his car outside Sammy’s school. It isn’t that he’s particularly thrilled to wait for his kid, but for those ten minutes, in the perfect quiet, overlooking the rolling hills that serve as the backdrop to the school building, he finds a kind of peace he struggles to locate in the daily grind of his life. There’s always something going on in his head, or in his work, or with Sammy—but not when he sits outside the school. Here, he lets his mind drift vaguely, paying no attention to the other parents milling around, to the distant sounds of kids tearing up the yard. It’s only ten minutes, but he looks forward to it each day.
Because his life really is that pathetic.
Today, however, his peace is interrupted by a sudden thump on his window, making him let out an undignified squeak as he jumps in surprise. Sammy’s stood outside the car, Wade beside him, both of them wearing matching hopeful grins. Elliot rolls down his window.
“What’s going on?” Instinct tells him he should be suspicious, but he’s feeling too lazy for that.
“Can Wade come over?”
“Now?”
Sammy looks like he almost strains something trying not to roll his eyes. “Yeah, Dad, now.”
“Um.”
“We want to play Minecraft.”
Wade gives an enthusiastic nod to confirm.
Like, it isn’t ideal. Elliot’s got things to do this afternoon—a conference call in an hour, a five o’clock deadline, about ninety-five neglected emails to sort out. But…
“Is your dad here, Wade?” It hadn’t occurred to him, until now, that he could be. If it had, he might’ve done something with his hair.
“Yeah, he’s parked up there,” says Wade, pointing.
Elliot drums his fingers on his thigh, the back of his neck going suddenly warm. “All right,” he says, pulling his key out of the ignition. “Let’s go ask him.”
The black Range Rover sits gleaming in a patch of sunlight like it knows its own worth, and Elliot lets the boys run ahead of him to thump on the window and sweet-talk Mark. By the time Elliot gets there, Mark’s stepping out of the car and the boys are smiling, so Elliot guesses it’s mission accomplished.
Mark is, if possible, even more beautiful in direct sunlight, with his tan highlighted and his aviators making him look like a movie star. His plain white tee shows every swell of his muscles and he’s slipped into another pair of distressed jeans, and suddenly Elliot’s starting to feel like the most unappealing creature on the planet with his ugly grey Henley and boring slacks.
Not that Mark seems to notice. He’s too busy smiling in Elliot’s direction, with all that warmth and charm that continuously disarms Elliot.
“I hope they asked you first,” Mark says when Elliot steps up to them.
Elliot nods. “It’s fine with me. I’m not doing much today anyway,” he lies.
“Well.” Mark draws a deep breath, his chest expanding with it. Elliot swallows. “That puts me at a bit of a loose end.”
Wade snorts. “Loser.”
Mark ignores him. “Guess I’ll have to…work, or something.” He looks absolutely appalled by the idea.
“You could come over as well,” Elliot suggests, and then immediately wants to kick himself. He’s got no idea what compelled him to say it, to even think it, because it didn’t exactly go well the last time they hung out and he still isn’t over the embarrassment, still finds himself dying of shame at one in the morning when his brain helpfully supplies him with the memory. Not even the brief text chats they’ve had in between are enough to dull that burn.
But the suggestion’s done something to Mark’s face, somehow made it light up even more, and Elliot’s nothing if not a complete fucking masochist. “I mean,” he says, “I’ve got beer. And I’m really good at ordering takeout.” He doesn’t know if he’s deliberately referencing their texts or just chatting shit to smooth over the awkward invitation, but the words are out now, and he has to own them.
Mark stares at him, eyes indecipherable behind his sunglasses. The boys go quiet, waiting. It seems like even the trees stop swaying in the breeze. And then Mark smiles, sudden and bright, and that’s how Elliot finds himself driving home full of nervous anticipation, with a black Range Rover following him.
* * * * *
At home, Elliot excuses himself for a moment to send a quick email to his assistant. Cancel my appointments for the day, he says. Something’s come up.
Her reply is instantaneous: Details!! Because his life really is that boring, so anything interrupting his usual routine is cause for great curiosity. He sighs and pockets his phone, heads into the kitchen where he left Mark waiting. The boys have long since disappeared, with various bumps and hollers coming from the general direction of Sammy’s room.
Elliot smiles at Mark as he enters the kitchen, tries to pretend the atmosphere isn’t awkward as fuck. Grabs a couple of beers from the fridge, pops the caps off, and joins Mark at the table. In his desperation to break the silence, he blurts, “Apparently you’re more of a celebrity than I thought,” while handing Mark his beer. “My husband was impressed I knew you.”
Mark takes a sip of his beer, eyebrows raised. “So you’re still close with your husband.” It’s a statement, not a question, and there’s something a little heavy about it.
“We never should’ve married,” Elliot says, shrugging. “Always been better friends. But we started fooling around and then that turned into something and we gave it a go for a few years, had a baby, the whole nine yards.” He smiles ruefully, gets a smile in return. Mark’s face is strangely rapt, like Elliot’s telling the world’s most interesting story. He swallows under the weird pressure of that and adds, “We’ve been married friends ever since.”
Mark considers him a long moment, fingers idly working the label on his bottle. “You never been tempted to go back?” he asks, and Elliot huffs a laugh.
“Pretty sure neither of us has,” he says, tone flat. “I don’t see him in that way anymore and he’s been sleeping his way around the art scene pretty much since the day we got together.” Off Mark’s expression of surprise, Elliot clarifies, “He cheated. He’s a great friend. An amazing dad. But a terrible husband. He had this dream of settling down or whatever, but when it came down to it, it’s not in his nature.”
“You seem surprisingly fine with it all.”
Well, yeah. Now he is. Maybe.
Nope, says his brain.
“I got over it a long time ago. Years ago.” Not that it wasn’t hard—the hardest thing he’s ever had to deal with—and sometimes he feels that pang of anger and crushing hurt, emotions more like ghosts than anything tangible. He doesn’t for one moment wish he and Lucas had worked out, but it doesn’t change the fact that he wasn’t enough. That Lucas couldn’t love him enough to not hurt him.
But that’s a box of pain locked away tight in the back of his mind, and opening it now would be the worst thing to do,
He swallows, feels the silence settle around them again, Mark watching him with something like sympathy in his eyes. With a swig of beer and a monumental urge to sweep this weird moment under the rug, Elliot gets to his feet and says, “Anyway, I just need to—” He grabs his old hobby camera from the shelf beside his dusty cookbooks and points it at Mark. “Hold there. Smile.” He clicks the button, and the Polaroid picture creaks out. “Sign this,” he says, sliding it across the table with a pen. Mark does as he’s told, obviously bemused by the situation. “That’ll earn me a favor or two from him,” Elliot explains, and Mark snorts.
“Anything for a fan.”
“He’ll probably just jerk off over it,” Elliot says, and Mark’s face flattens like someone’s just whacked it with a frying pan. Elliot grins.
After returning the camera and tucking the picture away to develop, he joins Mark at the table again and swipes up his beer. “So how are you finding it being back home?”
“Strange,” says Mark. “Lonely.” He smiles to take the weight out of the word, and adds, “You’re pretty much my only friend right now.”
“Mark Kade from school wouldn’t have a gay friend,” he observes—doesn’t really know why. It’s pretty much a non sequitur, not to mention highly awkward, but maybe it’s his clumsy attempt to find out how and why Mark remembers him. If it’s something.
“Mark Kade from school was a miserable fool who followed the pack,” Mark says dryly. “Forget him.”
Carefully, slowly, and without eye contact, Elliot asks, “Do you remember me from school?” and it takes Mark a few heartbeats to reply, long enough for Elliot to look up at him again.
Mark nods. “The day my dad left,” he says, tone cautious and quiet, “I couldn’t get my head right in school. Him leaving fucked me up and I kept it all bottled tight. You know? Kids like me weren’t raised to express themselves. I didn’t know how to deal with it, and no one knew anything. Not a single one of my friends looked at me and figured out there was something going on.” He smiles then, with a little shake of his head, but it all looks painful. “Anyway, I was sitting on the bleachers, cutting class, you know. Just taking five minutes to get my shit together. You came out.”
Elliot knows where this is going—he remembers it like yesterday. But Mark’s not supposed to, and this revelation is leaving Elliot a little breathless.
“I used to go there to listen to music,” he mutters, “and write emo shit in my books while everyone else was in class.”
“I know,” Mark says, smiling again, warmer now, less sad—and what? What? How the fuck does Mark know that Elliot used to do that?
“You came up and sat down and I didn’t think you even knew I was there,” Mark continues. “But then I could feel you watching me, and I don’t know what I was doing, but it was enough to make you come over. Sit next to me.”
Elliot breathes in a subtle, sharp breath. “Gave you one of my earbuds.”
“Sonnet by The Verve. We sat and listened to the whole thing. We didn’t say anything, and I don’t think you even looked at me again, but I…” Mark stops, and he swallows, and he looks into Elliot’s eyes like he’s right back there in that moment, feeling everything he felt that day.
When Mark next speaks, his voice drops lower still, something overwhelmingly intimate about it. It makes Elliot want to crawl in close. “You had words written in blue ink on your arm,” Mark says. He takes Elliot’s wrist, pushes up his sleeve, traces fingers over the skin of his inner forearm and okay, okay, Elliot can’t breathe, but there’s nothing in him at all that wants to move away. “Just here. ‘We loved with a love that was more than love.’” Mark stops, fingers falling still over Elliot’s pulse point. He holds Elliot’s eye with an expression too raw and unguarded for Elliot to make any sense of. “I’ve never forgotten it.”
Elliot doesn’t know what to say. Doesn’t know what to do. He whispers, “Jesus,” and Mark swipes the pad of his thumb over Elliot’s wrist before releasing him, but not moving back.
“I listen to that Verve song now whenever I’m having a bit of shit time. You left after that one song and we still never spoke after that, not once.” He licks his bottom lip. His eyes dart down Elliot’s face and back up. “I never really knew why.”
Somehow, Elliot finds his voice. “I’m surprised you even paid any attention to who sat next to you that day.” If he had known… What? Would it have made a difference? Maybe. It might’ve led to something. Familiarity. Friendship. Maybe he could’ve been a presence in Mark’s life, if nothing else. “I thought it was just…a distraction. Forgotten.”
“Not forgotten,” Mark says, voice laden with something hidden.
Elliot hesitates. He can almost feel Mark’s breath on his mouth. “But a distraction?”
Mark’s pupils contract.
“Dad,” says a voice from the door. “Pizza.”
Elliot and Mark lean away from each other, and Elliot blinks the world back into focus, seeing his son looking expectant in the kitchen entrance, Wade hovering behind him.
“Shit, sorry,” Elliot says, scrubbing a hand over his face. “I’ll do it now. Any preference?”
“We’re easy,” Mark says, a hint of strain in his tone.
The boys disappear again, and Elliot gets up to hunt down the Roberto’s takeout menu in the junk drawer. Mark appears beside him. “This got a bit heavy,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
Elliot smiles. “Don’t be,” he says, and he means it. With a fistful of pizza menus—none of them Roberto’s—he reaches across the counter, a little into Mark’s space, for his phone. “It’s good to know I’m kinda memorable.”
Mark stops him, stops his nervous, agitated movements. Puts a hand on Elliot’s arm and brings him to a sudden halt. They look each other in the eye.
“Do you remember that day?” Mark asks him, almost intensely, like it’s something important. Important to him.
“Yeah.”
“Why did you come over to me?”
Elliot doesn’t know what answer Mark wants, gets the feeling there’s some kind of pivotal moment going on here. He settles on the truth. “You looked like you needed that song,” he says, and Mark pauses, staring at him, staring into him. Then he nods and backs away, face entirely unreadable.
The rest of the night passes like this whole conversation didn’t happen at all.