Psync by Zile Elliven

Chapter Nine

Eli

Eli jolted backward and realized too late he’d climbed the railing to get a better look at Haruka’s performance.

He fully expected to eat dirt, but strong arms caught him before he hit the ground.

Wrongwrongwrong

Eli pulled away as soon as he righted himself and rubbed his arms trying to rid himself of the sensation.

“Sorry, Eli. I thought you’d prefer being touched over falling.”

It was Nate.

The wrongness faded, and he stopped shrinking away from his rescuer. “No, it’s fine. Thank you.” He nodded his head in appreciation.

“Next time find a safer place to sit before you succumb to the thirst, Eli.” Alice grinned at him shamelessly.

“Wh-what?” Eli’s face felt like it was going to burst into flames. “I was just watching the exhibition.”

“Sure, I always watch archery with my mouth open. Don’t you, Nate?”

“Depends on the archer.” Nate put his hands behind his head and smiled at the blonde archer from earlier.

Eli was not blind to the fact that his friends had created a small pocket of space around him, protecting him from the crowd. And now they were teasing him to distract him, just like his sister did. In his chest, a warm, glowing sensation began to form.

His hands dropped from where they were strangling his hoodie strings.

“Are you okay?” A very familiar voice asked from the other side of the fence.

Eli froze. He gave his friends a pleading look, but for some reason, his usually supportive friends were immersed in what looked to be a very intense conversation about a nearby trashcan.

He was going to have to turn around now, wasn’t he?

He set his shoulders and turned to face Haruka.

Was he always that big? Eli felt like he couldn’t have been that tall the last time they’d talked.

His eyes traced Haruka’s arm from his mitsugake—a three-fingered archery glove—to his smooth, well-muscled forearm, up his bicep and toned shoulder to his clavicle. All just hanging out for the entire world to see.

Eli blinked slowly.

What were they talking about?

“Do you need to go to the nurse’s station?”

Right. They were talking about Eli’s magical ability to embarrass himself at any and all times.

“No, I—this is actually par for the course for me.”

“Par for the what?”

“Sorry, English idiom for normal.” Eli bit his lip. Haruka’s accent was so faint, he’d forgotten English wasn’t his first language. Idioms were a major bitch for language learners. Every time you started to think you’d mastered something, one would pop up and ruin your confidence.

Except Haruka didn’t seem to care.

“Falling off things is normal for you?”

Oh, Eli really wanted to be anywhere else but here right now. “Sometimes?”

“That’s not a good thing.” Haruka put a hand on the railing and vaulted over to Eli’s side of the fence.

“What are you doing? Don’t you have an exhibition?”

“My part’s done.” Haruka stepped forward, invading Eli’s personal space. “Are you okay?” His voice was quiet, and his eyes searched Eli’s body, looking for signs of injury.

“I’m fine. No harm done, see?” He spun around in a circle to prove everything was in perfect working order and that Haruka was free to leave.

For some strange reason, Haruka leveled a stare at Nate then turned back to Eli to say, “Wait here.” And popped back over the fence as easily as he had the first time.

“Show off.” Eli muttered. Then to his friends he said, “I could do that too if I was taller.”

“Oh, are you two done? I was running out of things to say.”

“I don’t know, Al, I think you were doing a fine job of describing the campus waste removal procedures.”

Alice flicked Nate in the forehead. “Don’t call me Al.”

Nate rubbed his head. “The abuse! Why do I put up with you?”

“You two abandoned me! I thought we were friends!”

“We are, which is why we abandoned you all the way over here.” Alice pointed to the five feet of distance separating them.

“I thought you liked Haruka. Didn’t you say you wanted me to help you meet him?”

“I did, but then something interesting happened and I changed my mind.”

“What happened?”

“I think I’ll wait to tell you. It’s too early to say.”

Eli looked to Nate for clarification, but he was busy trying to get the blonde archer’s attention.

“Right. Okay, well, let’s go look at the other booths. We didn’t come here to join the archery club.” They already decided collectively as a group that none of them were interested in being in an athletic club.

“Hold on for”—Alice’s eyes flicked to somewhere over Eli’s shoulder—“one more minute. I need to check something on my phone.” Then she pulled out her phone and started typing.

“How did you two find me? This place is crazy busy.” Eli asked Nate, pulling his friend’s attention away from flirting.

“When you didn’t text me back, I decided to look for pockets of chaos. After that, it didn’t take long to find you.”

“I’m not that bad.”

“You are that bad.”

“You seem like you’re that bad.” Haruka had magically materialized beside Eli. He hadn’t made a sound coming back over the fence and was no longer sporting the off-the-shoulder top of his kyudo attire. In its place, he wore a white tank top, though he still had on the black hakama.

Eli could only wish to ever look half as cool in his lifetime. Even if he had the exact same outfit, he would somehow manage to look more like a toy gotten out of a claw machine than the casually wandered out of a historical J-drama Haruka effortlessly pulled off.

The looks Haruka was drawing from the crowd said they agreed with Eli.

“What are you doing? Why did you come back?”

Haruka had plenty of admirers on the other side of the fence—not that Eli had been paying attention. The man didn’t need to come over here and get more.

“Coming with you to make sure you don’t fall off something else.”

“I don’t see how that’s your problem.” Eli was going to die of embarrassment long before that would be a possibility.

“It’s everyone’s responsibility to make sure our fellow students are safe!” Alice had emerged from her phone and took Haruka by the arm. “And the more eyes the better for Eli.”

“Alice!” Eli hissed. Betrayal. This was betrayal on the highest level.

Alice ignored him and continued being the worst friend in the history of ever. “We need advice on what club to join anyway. Let’s go, everyone.” Without looking back, she dragged Haruka away, leaving Eli and Nate with no other option but to join them.

For the next hour, they roamed the quad, going from booth to booth, sometimes staying at one for a long time before finally deciding against it and moving on to the next. Alice didn’t want anything packed with people—reasoning that it would be easier to make new friends in a smaller club. Nate flat out refused to join any club that had more men than women.

That left out the Pride club—it had nearly a thousand members—which almost had Alice breaking her rule. “But the rainbow lifestyle flows in my veins!” Alice wailed and shook her bag in Eli’s face. It rattled with an assortment of bi, trans, and LGBTQ rainbows.

Eli would have felt odd joining anyway. Since he was undecided on his sexuality, would he even be welcome? “You don’t have to join the club to live the lifestyle, Alice.”

Haruka gave no input on the decision-making process at all. Eli would have forgotten he was there, except for the quiet aura he radiated that drew every eye around him. He should have come off as intimidating, or annoying, but he didn’t. He just was. And every now and then, he would focus all that quiet intensity on Eli, as if Haruka was trying to convey something. For the life of him, Eli couldn’t figure out what.

“What about the baking club?” Alice asked. “Plenty of girls in that one, Nate.”

Eli bit his lip and said, “I’m not the best at baking.” It was an understatement. “Massive fire hazard would not be an exaggeration of my talents.”

“Next booth, then.” Haruka said and walked toward a tent that had hanging scrolls on one side.

Eli joined him, he loved calligraphy. He wasn’t very good at it, but he loved looking at the curling swoops and swirls and taking in the personality of the artist. Every scroll was different, even if some had the same characters. Whatever was on the scroll was a reflection of the soul of the artist at the time they made the piece.

“This one is wrong.” Haruka pointed at a drying scroll on the table. Eli recognized what he assumed was the kanji for kindness. It was missing a stroke from the base of the first symbol.

A young woman hurried up to them from the back of the tent, looked at it, and then at Haruka. “What did I do wrong?”

Haruka took a brush out of a jar, dipped it in ink, and completed the stroke.

“Thank you. How embarrassing!”

Eli didn’t think she looked embarrassed. More like thrilled.

“You’re welcome.” Haruka nodded to her.

“Would you like to make one of your own?” She held out an empty scroll.

“No, thank you. I already have a club. They’re still looking, though.” Haruka took the scroll and handed it and the brush to Eli just as Alice joined them.

“You have tea!” Alice’s eyes took on an unholy light as they locked on to the tea sets on the other side of the booth.

“We do! We’re kind of a quirky club. My friends and I formed it three years ago when we found out we all shared an extreme love of tea and calligraphy.”

Alice went to the tea display. “Do you buy it, or make your own?”

Another young woman joined her friend and answered. This one was a redhead with a cute little mole next to her eye. “A little of both. We like to find unique blends from all over the world and then come up with something new, inspired by our favorite ones.”

“What’s the difference?” Nate materialized in front of the redhead. “Doesn’t all tea taste the same? It’s just leaves in hot water, right.”

Everyone on both sides of the table stared at Nate in various stages of shock and horror.

Eli didn’t even get a chance to make his opinion known on the matter, Alice and the two women from the booth all began to talk at Nate at once.

“Nate, how could you grow up to be a monster without me noticing?”

“Who do you think you are? Zuko?”

“There are so many different kinds of tea plants out there, not to mention the various fruits and herbs you can use to add flavor to them . . .”

“That kid is a genius.” Haruka observed quietly, bending low so only Eli could hear him.

“How so? He got everyone angry at him.”

Haruka’s only response was to jerk his chin toward Nate.

At first, all Eli saw was his friend getting badgered on all sides as two more women who’d been lingering in the back of the tent came up to join in the heated discussion.

Then he noticed it.

At the very corner of his mouth, Nate was sporting a sly little smile.

“He did that on purpose?”

Haruka shrugged. “Draw something.” He nudged the scroll he’d thrust into Eli’s hand earlier.

Since he wasn’t particularly interesting in getting caught up in Nate’s bizarre flirting ritual, Eli decided to go with it. What should he write? His character formation wasn’t the best, but he’d memorized at least four thousand kanji by this point. He had a lot to choose from.

On a whim, he asked, “What characters do you use in your name?”

Haruka went still and got that thoughtful look on his face again. Then he said, “My given name is written using the kanji for distant.”

Eli snorted. “That figures. I didn’t take you as a spring fragrance kind of guy.” Which was another way Haruka could have been written.

Haruka raised his eyebrows playfully. “Are you saying I smell bad?”

“N-no, not at all, you smell great!”

“So, you like how I smell?” Haruka’s mouth curled into a smile that was very reminiscent of the one Nate was still sporting.

Eli was all too aware of how amazing Haruka smelled at the moment. After baking in the hot sun all day, he should have the decency to smell sweaty like other mere mortals, but instead he smelled like fresh laundry hanging outside combined with a hint of lavender. Eli had been doing his best to ignore it.

Instead of responding, Eli rolled his eyes and focused on the scroll in front of him. “What’s your family name?”

“Yamada.”

Eli didn’t need to ask how to draw it. It was a common surname in Japan—like Smith, or Jones were in America. He held the brush perpendicular to the page and drew the kanji for mountain（山）and field（田）placing mountain on top, field underneath, and then distant（ 　遥）at the bottom.

He looked it over and bit his lip. As usual, he managed to splatter ink on the page, rather than the achieving the efficient, tidy strokes he’d been aiming for. He could definitely use some practice.

“That’s really good.” One of the women had drawn away from the group surrounding Nate. It was the redhead with the mole.

“It’s okay, you don’t have to compliment me, I know it needs work.” Eli scrunched his nose ruefully.

“Maybe a little, but we could help you get better if you joined our club. My name is Kate.” The woman held out her hand to shake his.

Eli paused. He’d been having a good day. It probably wouldn’t be the end of the world to shake one hand. Besides, he actually thought he might want to join this club and hurting the feelings of one of the club members wasn’t the best way to go about joining.

Eli lifted his hand slowly but stopped when Haruka placed Eli’s brush in Kate’s hand.

“Thanks for letting us borrow this.”

Kate looked surprised but smiled. “You’re very welcome.”

Alice sidled up to Eli, coming just shy of touching him. “Eliiiiii, can we join this club, please? I need to up my tea-making game.”

“What does Nate think?”

Alice pointed to Nate, still surrounded by women and chatting cheerfully. “I think he’s about three seconds from signing the paperwork with or without us.”

“Then I guess I’m in.”

The Tea and Calligraphy club. It sounded like the perfect stress-free club Eli had been hoping for.

Kate handed him a piece of paper to write his information on, so they could add him to the club register. “Can you put your number at the bottom? I know there isn’t a line for it, but it’s better to have more than just an email to get in contact with you.”

“Sure.”

“I’m hungry.” Haruka was standing so close to Eli he could feel his body heat.

Eli swayed a little. He must be getting hungry too.

“Hold on, I’m almost done.” Eli scribbled his number at the bottom of the page and handed it back to Kate.

“Welcome to the club! I think you guys will like it.”

“Thanks! I—”

“Food.”

Haruka was practically breathing down Eli’s neck. Goosebumps raced across his skin.

“I’ll see you later then. Nice to meet you.” Eli waved and stepped away from the table. “Do you guys want to eat? We’re gonna grab something.”

“No thanks, I want to stay here a little longer. They’re going to make me some tea. We can meet up later.” Nate made a shooing motion at Eli.

“I’m staying too, you two have fun!” Alice stared pointedly at the spot between Eli and Haruka for some reason.

“Okay then.”

Eli allowed himself to be herded away by Haruka. For someone who hadn’t shown any interest in the fair, he was oddly eager now.

“What do you want to eat?” Haruka asked.

Eli took in the line of food trucks. It was almost as long as the rows of club booths. How was he supposed to choose? “I have no idea. I didn’t even know I was hungry until you said something. Maybe an apple?” He pointed to an organic fruit truck.

“An apple? That’s all you want?” Haruka looked at Eli like he had suggested they eat mud. “You just lost the right to have input on food. Follow me.”

Eli followed Haruka to a falafel truck and watched as he ordered an obscene amount of food. Where was he planning on putting it all? The man didn’t have an ounce of fat on him—from what Eli had observed, anyway.

When Haruka finished, Eli stepped up to order, but Haruka waved him away. “I ordered for both of us.”

“Oh.” That made more sense. Though Eli thought Haruka was overestimating how much Eli could eat. “How much was my share?” Eli reached in his pocket for his wallet.

“Nothing.”

“But—”

“Put it away. You can owe me.”

“But I don’t want to owe you.”

“Too bad.”

Eli stood awkwardly with his wallet in his hand before finally putting it away. “I’ll buy you lunch next time, then.”

The smile Eli got in response was like looking at the sun.