Page 55 of Ecstasy
I nod, looking back at the water. I’ve got one arm around the back of the couch, my feet flat on the deck. I don’t look at him when I ask, “Anything you wanna talk about?”
Silence rings out, and I wonder if he’s going to answer me. I don’t usually ask questions like that, but he’s just seemed even more quiet than usual. I wonder if he’s shook about the whole Zara thing.
I know it wasn’t his fault. She’s just…like that.
“Not really,” he finally answers me. “You?”
I curl my fingers around the fabric of the couch, squeezing. There’s a lot I want to talk about. I want to talk about my mom. I want to talk about Zara. I want to talk about what happened last weekend, at the party. Both with Rihanna and Zara. I want to talk about last fall, too. I want him to tell me that I’m not a bad person. That I just fucked up.
Instead I just say, “Nah. I’ve got an exam tomorrow I should probably study for.” But I don’t get up.
“What class?” he asks, but his voice is just so detached. I know he doesn’t really care. I don’t know if Eli cares about anything.
I glance at him, see his side profile as he stares at the pool. See the clock and skull on his hand, the roses and filigree that trail up his arm, underneath his wrestling hoodie. I think about the controlled way he wrestles, no emotion or outbursts or slipups. When he circles his opponent, he waits until the right time to make a move, and when he strikes, it’s always for a takedown. Our schedules conflict sometimes, with wrestling and football, but I’ve seen a couple of his matches, and I’ve seen videos of the others.
He’s good.
He wrestles like he lives, quietly, with control. I wonder what it would be like for that control to slip.
It almost did last fall.
And then last weekend, I stopped him.
“Just a sociology course, it’ll be easy enough.”
He turns to look at me and arches a brow. “Sociology, huh?”
I nod, flex my fingers and rest them on my thigh.
“You applied to law schools yet?” he asks me.
I bite the inside of my cheek, turn to stare at the pool. “No.”
“Deadline is probably soon for some of them?”
I nod once, scrub a hand over my jaw. “Yep.”
“Having second thoughts?” he presses with a hint of amusement.
I still don’t look at him when I shrug, bouncing my fist on my thigh. “I don’t know. Not really, because what else would I do?” I’m good at sports, but I’m not professional football-level good. I can admit that. Besides that, I don’t really want to play for a league. I’ve thought about opening up a gym, but that seems like a waste of a business, pre-law major. And if I go to law school, my parents will be proud, Dad won’t ride my ass about going into fucking ministry, and hell, maybe I can do some good in the world.
Probably not. But maybe.
I see Eli shake his head out of the corner of my eye. Tip his beer up, then bring it back down, resting it on his knee. “There’s a lot you can do.”
“Why are you even here, anyway?” I ask him, suddenly angry as I turn to glare at him. His father owns the biggest law firm in the state. He’s got family money. What the fuck he’s doing at Caven when he doesn’t want to do shit but work on cars is beyond me. During the summer, he helps his uncle out at his auto body shop, and the only thing I’ve ever seen him act the slightest bit excited about is when he swaps out his car for a new one, which happens like every six months. “Why not just start working?”
He doesn’t look at all affronted by my questions. He cocks his head, as if he’s thinking. “Why not be here?” he finally counters.
I roll my eyes, but I grudgingly see his point, I guess. He likes to wrestle; he did it in high school. He got a free ride here, so it’s not touching any of his family money. The first night we spent in a dorm together, after we were assigned to be roommates, we got high and he told me he wanted the whole college experience so that when he got older, he wouldn’t feel like he missed out on anything.
He wanted to be as bad as he could be, he told me. He wanted to fuck everything up. And when he graduated, he’d put everything back together again.
He also told me, that same night, that his mom was a bitch and he never wanted to have kids. If you didn’t have any, he said, you couldn’t hurt them.
I figured out his mother left him and his father when he was younger. We’ve never discussed it since.
Catching me off guard, he asks, “What’s up with you and Zara?”
