Page 89 of Psync
Eli suppressed a shiver, but his body swayed toward Haruka. This was completely unfair.
“You are not available.”
Eli closed his eyes tight.Don’t look. If you look at him, it’s all over.
“No, I’m not available, but—”
A finger lifted his chin, and Eli’s eyes opened automatically. The pout was gone, in its place was a serious expression.
“I don’t want to cage you. I want to keep you safe. If I could be around you all the time, it would be different, but I can’t do that.”
“No one is going to hurt me, Haruka.”
“Someone has already hurt you.” Something dark stirred in Haruka’s eyes.
Several someones, in fact, but Haruka didn’t need a reminder of Eli’s tragic backstory right now. Not if Eli wanted to be able to go around campus with any sort of dignity.
“I don’t think walking around looking like I got mauled is going to change anything.”
A flash of hurt surged through Eli—not his, but Haruka’s.
All the irritation from this morning vanished.
He didn’t want to hurt Haruka. They loved to snark and snip at each other, but it was only play. Actually hurting him was simply out of the question.
“You don’t have to tell people who you’re dating as long as it’s obvious that you are.” There was no trace of pain on Haruka’s face, but Eli could still feel it burning in his chest. Then it cut off abruptly.
Eli tugged his zipper down. “Three days.”
Haruka pulled Eli’s collar aside. “Until your video stops trending.”
“Don’t push it.”
???
Three weeks. It had been three goddamned weeks, and Eli still had people trailing after him. He’d become an expert at dodging into empty classrooms and around corners to avoid his fans. It was November and cold every day now, so Haruka had stopped insisting he display his love bites to the world. He didn’t want Eli to get sick.
Not that it stopped him from giving Eli new ones every chance he got.
For a few days after Eli’s new burst of popularity, his friends had begun escorting him to classes again, but when nothing bad happened, they’d started to slack off and allow Eli to have his freedom again. So far, Haruka hadn’t caught on.
It was annoying to have people constantly approaching him—every day at least one representative of the Theater club tried to badger him into joining. He’d also become a pro at declining potential suitors with a simple, “Thank you, but I’m already dating someone.”
But having a modicum of personal autonomy was worth being mildly irritated.
Eli propped his elbows on the fence and watched Haruka as he practiced kyudo. Since it was colder, he’d stopped showing off so much skin, but he was still poetry to watch.
Right now, he stood stock-still, waiting until he found something only Haruka could sense. He’d explained it to Eli as right action. When it was time, right action would flow through him, and the arrow would fly true.
Eli was pretty sure he could watch his boyfriend practice kyudo forever.
Boyfriend. He was dating Haruka.
EliwasdatingHaruka.
It had been three weeks, and he still couldn’t wrap his head around it.
Sure, they had a mysterious mental bond, but what Haruka saw in anxious, bitchy, antisocial Eli was beyond him to understand.
