Ominous, Part 1 by K.V. Rose
7
Eden
“What amI supposed to do here?” Trafalgar’s turrets are half-hidden by low-hanging clouds, and heat lightning spikes through them. It’s a strange mix of cool and warm today, the windows down on Eli’s car, and little hairs stand up on the back of my arms despite the fact they’re covered.
A sheer, black long sleeve shirt pushed into my faux leather pants. The shirt is buttoned to the top, but I wore a lime green sports bra underneath, for a pop of color, and a silver necklace with an ouroboros pendant is around my neck. Now, glancing at all the pricy, shiny cars in the parking lot, I’m starting to regret that act of brazenness. I knew I wouldn’t have to wear my uniform, since it’s not school hours, but I guess I didn’t think through being under the eyes of wealthy Trafalgar parents.
I pull down the visor in the passenger seat for something to do with my hands, waiting for Eli’s response, and tilt my head to each side, checking my hair. It’s in a big, tortoiseshell clip affixed to the back of my head, my long bangs hanging down around my face. I tuck them behind my ear and twist my cartilage piercing, wincing as I do. One day, it won’t hurt. I’ve had it for nearly a year now, so maybe I should give it up, but I like the way it looks.
Eli turns down the music, “What Do You Gotta Lose?”by Islander. It’s in my collection of liked songs, but I don’t tell him as much. Our ride has been quiet, as they all are. I like we don’t have to break the silence. It’s comfortable, and after dealing with Reece’s probing questions this morning, Mom shaking her head and getting up abruptly to leave the table while Sebastian barely looked up from his cereal, deep purple shadows under his eyes, I didn’t really want to talk.
“You’re going to watch a boy you hardly know roll around with other boys in a singlet all day?” Reece rolls his eyes and leans back in his chair, the wood creaking beneath him as he does. He spears a piece of thick, burnt sausage at the end of his fork. It looks remarkably like his fingers. “Sounds like he’s really got you brainwashed.”
He’s right, maybe, because when I woke up to Eli’s texts to tell me I wasn’t getting out of this, I darted out of bed and put this outfit together without once trying to turn him down again. Shit.
“Watch me,” Eli answers my question.
I close the visor with a snap as I turn to face him, his seatbelt off, mine still across my chest.
He looks good in a white T-shirt, black sweats. I wonder how many pairs he owns. On his feet are white Chucks, and I imagine his closet, row after row of the same pair, waiting for him to choose them. I could be making it all up in my head, but I wouldn’t be surprised. They’re just so blindingly white.
And for whatever reason, staring at his shoes, I’m hit with the memory of last night, my fingers in my sleep shorts as I waited with bated breath for Eli’s texts. Even imagining them in my head now, his words, my blood pricks with heat, and as lightning flecks the sky, it’s like I can feel it in my chest, too.
Averting my gaze, I turn to look out my half-lowered window, watching other students enter F. M. Fink’s athletic building. It’s quiet out, parents and students far enough away I can’t hear any conversation, and the music is still playing inside the car, but I wish it was a little louder to drown out the sound of my own pulse in my head.
I think of our texts this morning.
Him: Good morning. I hope you slept well because you’re going to be up a while. Can’t take this back, I’m leaving to pick you up soon.
Me: I’ll nap in the bleachers.
Him: Not a fucking chance.
Me: …
Me: If you don’t win every match, I’m going home.
It took him so long to reply to the last message, I wondered if I had actually upset him. But I don’t know why I thought such a thing, now beside him in his car. He seems completely serene.
“What if watching you becomes boring?” I smile as I ask the question, but I don’t look at him. Between us, though, I feel the tension amplified. Worse than it was before, and for me, it was always bad. But after last night, it’s like I can’t stop thinking of how I wanted to give in to him. I’m a little more collected now, not quite ready to fall to my knees, but no less enamored. In fact, my infatuation has broken new ground. He’s just so pretty, his physicality makes it hard not to think of whispered things. Stuff I’ve watched in porn. My hands on his body. My mouth all over him, even as I don’t let him touch me.
Or maybe… maybe I think of other things. His palm pressing into my chest, forcing me down, his fingers digging into my jaw, making me look at him, endure him—
“Do you think that’s even a remote possibility?” And his fucking voice.
I dig my lime green nails into my palms. I’m still wearing the same Band-Aid I was last night. I have the sudden urge to tell him what I did, but I clamp those words down, swallowing them like the lump in my throat. “Everyone can become boring.”
A second later, I hear the leather of his seat shift, and I sense him before he speaks.
Right next to me, his breath, like candy, skates over the side of my mouth, even as he doesn’t touch me. A shiver slides down my spine, and I’m holding all the air in my lungs, dizzy with his nearness.
“What do you feel right now?”
Paralyzed. Alive. Nervous. Scared. Very much not bored.
Back up, Eli.
“Tired.” I almost choke on the lie, and I don’t dare turn my head toward his. If I did, our lips would touch.
“Look at me.”
No. I can’t say it. I just shake my head, a fraction of an inch, not wanting to bring our mouths closer together, because in my head I hear him telling me he’s going to kiss me soon.
He says nothing, and I almost wish he’d make me do it. Listen to him.
Grab me. Force me. Don’t let me get away with this. It all rings alongside of don’t touch me, don’t touch me, don’t touch me.
The anticipation slithers under my skin, my pulse ballooning comically loud in my ears, I’d be surprised if he couldn’t hear it.
But a long second later, he pulls away, and I don’t know if I exhale with relief or disappointment. I sink back into my seat, closing my eyes, but still not able to face him.
“Boring things are easy to look at.” He starts to roll the windows up in his car, and I almost wish he wouldn’t. Like I need the fresh air to get enough oxygen into my lungs. “It’s why people reread books, spend hours watching the same show they’ve already seen a dozen times, listen to a song they heard over and over on the radio when they were a kid.” He finishes with the windows and turns the engine off, plunging us into silence. “It’s comfortable. Meaningless. Boring.” There’s a slice of anger stabbing through the last word. “When you can look at me without blushing, or flinching, or wanting to grab me, wanting me to grab you, then we’ll have a problem.”
I take a deep breath, open my eyes. “I don’t want you to grab me,” I tell him, mostly truthfully, ignoring his commentary on boring.
I can feel his eyes on me, drifting over my skin like a living thing. “Yeah? What do you want?”
I run my tongue over the sharp points of my top teeth, staring at the storm surrounding the castle. I don’t know. Help me decide. Instead of that, all I say is, “You’ll figure it out.”
He answers by getting out of the car.
* * *
Wrestling is fascinating.
Similar to the MMA I’ve seen sporadically with Sebastian, I’m always shocked how such stagnant positions can expend so much effort. Eli, in a black singlet, and his opponent, in red, are head-to-head, their fingers wrapped around one another’s biceps in a strange sort of hug, and they don’t seem to be actually moving. Even still, I can see their flexed muscles, squared shoulders, the tension in their inaction.
Trafalgar’s wrestling coach, standing beside the desk chair placed at the edge of the mat, has his arms crossed, a bundle of papers clenched in one hand, the other under his chin. He’s wearing glasses, a small man in good shape, he hasn’t once looked away from Eli.
The other coach is doing something similar on the opposite end of the square mat, but he isn’t silent like Trafalgar’s.
“Let’s do something, Erling!” His face is pink and he’s probably a decade older than Eli’s coach.
Despite my determination to appear unaffected by anything that happened in this enormous, gleaming gymnasium, I’m leaned over my knees, black, chunky boots tapping up and down on the dark blue bleacher seat below me, thankfully empty. My arms are crossed, my eyes locked in on Eli’s triceps, and I imagine I might look like I have a stomachache, because that’s exactly what so many parents scattered beside and behind me appear to have. Some of them weren’t content to stay up on the bleachers near me though, with the A/C fanning over the back of my neck, rattling the soft, loose fabric of my sheer shirt.
Those parents are dotted around the gleaming, tan floors of the gym, on every square inch not covered by thick black mats with white circles. Eli’s dad may not have come, but it hasn’t stopped his teammates’ parents from cheering him on, calling out his name specifically, every so often for reasons sometimes obvious to me and sometimes not.
This is his second match.
His first ended quickly, in the first period with a takedown that led to a pin, Eli draped over the guy’s upper body like he was using him as a pillow. It was fast, and almost lazy.
Now, though, the ref brings his fists together, knuckles bumping, saying “stalling.” It seems to be a warning, because they break apart, the red headed guy shaking his head as they do, adjusting the strap of his red singlet. Sweat gleams along his ropey muscles, and I watch Eli’s chest heave, but he’s smiling, which seems a little out of place. Then again… it’s Eli. He enjoys a challenge, I think.
I don’t move from my crouched over position, rocking back and forth, and when they come together again, the ref circling them, a whistle in his mouth like he’s on guard to correct them once more for doing nothing, I almost leap to my feet in outrage.
The guy gets Eli on his back in seconds. A sweep of his feet, hugging him close as he causes him to fall.
I think it’s over.
The ref is on his hands and knees, making a sweeping motion with one hand, like he’s counting something, and Eli’s coach narrows his eyes, but while the other guy’s coach is screaming, Trafalgar’s says nothing. It seems like it’s coming to an end, and I feel a sense of dread in my chest. Like it isn’t fair. Like I want to drag the guy off of Eli.
As if he needs saving.
But regardless, saving or not, the match has to be over, and I exhale, sitting up straighter, dropping my feet to the shiny center of the bleachers, unwilling to watch Eli lose as I turn my head to the buzzard. Second period, forty-five seconds left.
Six minutes total. Three two-minute periods. Eli told me as much when we walked into the gym together. He shoved a bundle of dollar bills in my hand before he disappeared into the locker rooms, and at first, I was offended, until he laughed and told me it was for snacks, from the vending machine. Organic animal crackers and sparkling water, I think of getting something after this. Or maybe now, while Eli loses.
But I hear someone yelling.
Multiple people. I think it must mean the match has officially been called, but as I drag my gaze to Eli, I see his hips lifted into the air, the inside of his elbow around the back of his opponent’s head, his other arm beneath his stomach. Eli throws his arms up, tossing the guy off and twisting his body, knee crashing down to the mat as his upper body comes over his opponent’s, gaining the dominant position.
His coach still says nothing, but now he’s smiling.
The referee sweeps his hand two times, in slow motion, then he blows the whistle, and it’s done. Eli won.
After they’re on their feet, when the ref holds up Eli’s hand by his wrist, his eyes find mine, his cheeks pink. He lifts a brow, as if to say, did you really think I was going to lose?
* * *
“What do you think?”He pulls back from the water fountain, releasing it, then swiping at his bottom lip with the back of his hand. His singlet is pulled off of both shoulders, his heaving chest exposed, sweat lining every inch of defined muscle.
My phone slips from the side pouch of my bag, hanging off of one arm, and before I can tell him what I think about watching him wrestle, in this musky back hallway, he bends down to retrieve my phone after it clatters on the tile floor.
The words I try to form die in my mouth.
The tight spandex of his black singlet falls lower as he grabs my phone. In the moment before he straightens, I see it completely.
A fresh bruise, still red with edges of darkening purple. The size of a large apple. His skin is tan with an olive complexion, but the red of the bruise is so stark, it wouldn’t matter his skin tone. There’s no mistaking it.
And what I just saw on the mat… even when his opponent took him down, there was no fist to his chest. Just his body over Eli’s. It wouldn’t form a bruise. And before that, the earlier match, Eli had the upper hand from start to finish.
He offers me the phone as he stands to his full height, looking down on me.
I try to wipe the shock off of my face, but I must do a poor job of it because I know he sees something in my expression. His brows pull together, phone still offered in my direction, but it’s not the focal point.
I close my mouth and try to ignore the feelings flooding through me. Curiosity, concern, anger.
Who touched him like that?
I take my phone from his hand, my fingers grazing his own, but I don’t let them linger as I avert my eyes on pretense of fiddling with my bag, putting the phone away.
“That bad, huh?” There’s a lightness to his words, so out of place with the heaviness in my chest, like someone just pulled a rug out from underneath me and I’m trying not to fall, my heart racing hard.
“I…” My tongue feels thick in my mouth. I finally drop my hands from my bag, hefting it onto my shoulders as I look up, searching his eyes for something. Anything, like I might read an explanation there, or he might offer it, as if he could read my mind.
I never asked why it took him so long to text me last night. It didn’t feel like my business. But now I’m wondering where he was. Did he get into a fight? Was he with someone else?
My own fantasies of Eli pinning me down like those boys on the mats, digging his fingers into my skin, wrapping them around my throat, hurting me, bruising me… Does he dream of the same thing? Or is it no longer a dream for him?
Feelings of inexperience, inadequacy, stupidity, they all converge on me at once until I want to run. I glance at the double glass doors leading out to the back parking lot of the athletic center.
Eli must see my look because he steps closer and pivots, blocking my view of the dark gray skies beyond the exit.
“Eden.”
I blink a few times before I look up. “It’s great,” I say, but I don’t believe my own words. Truthfully, it is great, but the distraction of blooming red and violet on his chest is making it very hard to think about watching his athletic prowess.
He hooks one arm at a time into his singlet, pulling the straps up on his broad shoulders. My eyes come to his throat, a strip of pale skin where his choker lay this morning. I wonder if it’s against regulations, or he just doesn’t want to give someone the chance to hurt him with it.
Hurt him. I dig my nails into my palms.
“Don’t lie to me.” His words come out even, but they feel like a warning.
I think of our conversation about honesty. But it’s just a bruise. I get them often enough. Perks of being clumsy.
I roll my shoulders back, lifting my chin, standing taller.
I’ll ask him about it later.
He has two more matches. No more than five in a single day. He told me he wanted more than the four. Just one more, to max it out.
Four seems like so many now I know what the sport entails. Even in a stalemate, he’s expending so much energy. And the bruise on his chest, it has to hurt when his opponents collide with him, right?
I realize I don’t like it. Thinking about him getting hurt. It stuns me, my own feelings, but I don’t show it. I school my features to neutrality, like I’ve seen him do dozens of times. Like I do.
“No, really.” I loop a strand of hair behind my ear and resist the urge to put my nails into my mouth and bite, ripping off a piece with my teeth. “Two down, two to go. You think you’re going to walk out of here undefeated?”
He doesn’t smile even though I force myself to fake one. His dark green eyes are roving over mine, a sheen of sweat beneath his lower lash line, beautiful like highlighter on his skin. “Will you stop bullshitting me if I do?” This time, after he asks the question, he smiles.
It makes it much more sinister.
“I’m not bullshitting you.” The annoyance in my tone is real. I don’t want to throw his head for a loop by telling him I saw something he’s probably trying to hide. Or is he? I don’t know, but it seems like Eli Adonis Addison would not like anyone knowing he isn’t invincible.
Later. I’ll ask him later.
I hear a stark clap of hands, and we both turn, although I’m the only one who flinches. A few feet from us, the slim coach with small glasses still has his palms together as he nods toward Eli.
“Let’s go, Stunner.” His dark eyes flicker to me, but he says nothing, then turns on his heel and starts calling out other wrestlers in his charge, posted up along the hallway with water bottles in hand.
Stunner. It makes me smile a little.
“For every win I get, Eden Rain, you’re giving me an answer to any question I want to ask.” Eli takes a step back, untying the drawstring of the gym shorts he has on over his singlet, eyes still holding mine. “An honest answer.” He looks proud of himself for that one. “Now get your fine ass back in here.” He jerks his head to the entrance of the gym, double doors propped open.
“Excuse me?” I feign outrage because the lust bubbling in my core with his command pisses me off.
He smiles at me, like he knows as he walks backward toward the gym. “Don’t act like you don’t like it.” His eyes rake over my body, which grows warm from his gaze. “Walk in with me. Too many dads out there checking you out.”
My skin crawls and automatically, I hurry to walk next to him. The moment he laughs, I know I just lost this game too.