Page 66 of Final Drive

“When you came to me last night, I sat in my room for two hours working out how to kill him. Not in a vague way. Routes. Timing. What you’d do afterward.” He drags a hand down his face. “I don’t think like that. I never have about anybody.”

“But you did. For me.”

“For you.” He meets my eyes. “And I realized somewhere in the last three months you stopped being one of the variables and became the reason I was doing the math.”

I’ve never heard Eli talk like this. He’s always been the steady one, the one keeping distance while the others closed in, and even with Jackson he runs everything through a framework first. Hearing what I am to him rendered in the only language that’s fully native to him lands harder than any straightforward declaration would.

“I talked to Jackson last night,” he says. “About what we both need going forward.”

My breath catches. “And?”

“The same things. Time with each other. Time with you, all three of us. Time with you on our own.” He picks his way through it. “Something built on purpose instead of built out of an emergency.”

“That sounds complicated.”

“It will be. I’m fine with complicated.”

I study him. “Why didn’t you ever make a move? The others were circling from the first week. You kept your distance.”

“Because I didn’t know what I wanted yet.” He says it without embarrassment, just fact. “Attraction doesn’t work quickly for me. I have to know somebody first. By the time I knew you well enough to understand what this was, you were already tangled up with all of us.” His gaze drops briefly to our hands and comes back. “And Jackson was part of it for me too.”

“And you didn’t know where you fit.”

“I still don’t.” His mouth shifts at one corner. “I know I want to find out.”

“That isn’t nothing.”

“No. I know that now.”

He comes out of the chair and sits beside me on the small couch, close enough that I can feel the heat coming off him, clean soap over something cooler underneath. Eli smells like open water and cold air, like the lake at six in the morning.

“You came to me last night,” he says. “Not Bo, not Gray, not Jackson. And it wasn’t because I’m the safest one. It’s because you needed somebody who would listen instead of act.”

I turn my hand over and lace my fingers through his.

“I came to you because you don’t make me a project. Everybody else wants to fix it or shield it or claim it. You sat with it. You let me be a mess without tidying me up.”

His thumb draws one slow circle on the inside of my wrist. My pulse jumps under it, and I watch him register the jump and put it somewhere for later.

“I don’t want to think about Quinton anymore tonight,” I say. “Any of it.”

“What do you want to think about?”

The question is so plainly meant, so entirely him, that something in me lets go. Not the immediate want that drove the others. Something with less noise in it, built up in the margins over months, in every conversation where he listened more than he talked.

“You,” I say, and I kiss him.

It starts tentative on my side, because I’ve never been the one to start anything with Eli and I don’t know what he wants from it. Then his hand comes up to my jaw and tilts my head, adjusting the angle until our mouths fit better. When I open up to him, he makes a sound low in his throat.

Not a growl. Nothing dominant in it. Just desire with nothing layered over the top.

I shift closer and he pulls me into his lap, hands settling on my hips with a certainty I wasn’t expecting. He’s always been careful about space, about the gap between what he feels and what he lets himself do. There’s no distance in him now. His thumbs press into the hollows above my hip bones, and when I roll against him and feel how hard he is, his breath catches.

“Upstairs,” I say against his mouth.

He stands with me still wrapped around him, hands under my thighs, and carries me up.

His room is what I’d have guessed. Shelves in order, a second monitor dark on the desk, the bed made with corners. He sets me on the edge of the mattress and stays standing.