“Of course,” he replied, reaching out and covering one of my hands with one of his. “I—I want to be your boyfriend.” I could tell it was hard for him to say it.
I offered him a weak smile. “I don’t have to tell?—”
“I want you to,” he interrupted me. “I do. I just—” He ran a hand over his hair, pulled back in a short braid. “It’s just been a long time,” he said, his voice a little hoarse. “Areallylong time.”
“A long time?” I asked.
He sighed, poking at his beans. “I haven’t actuallydatedanyone since—” He swallowed. “—since college.” He grimaced. “Although Val shouldn’t count, since we were both just lonely and stupid, so it didn’t take.”
I went very still.
How I responded was important—I knew that. I just couldn’t come up with anything that wasn’t going to sound either awkward or ragingly jealous. “You dated Hart?”
He looked up. “I’m not even sure I’d call itdated,” he said, and he sounded embarrassed. I deliberately tried not to fill in the blanks. “We were both lonely and stupid and thoughtwhy not. It didn’t take us long to figure out the answer to thewhy not, so we went back to being friends in less than a month.”
It shouldn’t have bothered me, because it wasn’t like it had been recent and Hart wasn’t here to even be a distraction, but Iwas still envious of the fact that they were as close as they were. It was stupid, but I couldn’t help it. I decided it was probably wiser to keep any additional thoughts about Hart and Elliot to myself.
“So, really,” Elliot said, clearing his throat. “It’s been even longer. My last romantic relationship—myonlyromantic relationship, really, was in high school.”
As someone who had essentially just jumped from one relationship to another for most of my adult life, it was hard for me to understand how you could spend almost twenty-five years without one. This was its opposite—refusing to share instead of sharing with all the wrong people. I wasn’t sure which was the better choice. Mine certainly hadn’t been all that great.
The important part wasn’t that he hadn’t had a romantic relationship since high school—and it wasn’t that I had. The important part was that whatever had stopped him from having one was no longer stopping him. That he’d chosen me to be the one person he was willing to end that solitude for.
I turned over the hand under his so that I could thread our fingers together. “So why me?” I asked him.
He tilted his head slightly to the side. “What do you mean?”
“Why choose me?”
Now he frowned. “I—didn’t,” he said.
It was my turn to be confused. “What do you mean, you didn’t?”
“I didn’t choose you—you choseme,” he replied.
I blinked. “I—” I swallowed, my stomach having fallen somewhere around my feet. I stared down at my food, suddenly not hungry anymore, despite the fact that I still hadn’t eaten even remotely enough.
His hand—still in mine—squeezed. “I’m glad you did,” he said softly.
Except I didn’t want this to have been about me. Me wearing him down until he finally gave in, which meant that it wasn’t about what he felt, at all. He probably didn’t even feel what he thought he did, which he’d figure out soon or later, and either start resenting me or, if I was lucky, just dump me.
“Seth.”
I pulled my hand out of his, then closed up my box, not bothering to pretend that I was going to eat anything else. I’d save it, if he didn’t want to take it with him, and have something tomorrow, at least.
“Seth.” His voice was harsher this time.
“It’s fine, Elliot,” I said, trying to keep moving because if I stopped I’d have to face the fact that I’d just manipulated someone else into a relationship that didn’t?—
“Seth!”
I froze as he stepped in front of me and grabbed my face in both his hands.
“Stop.” His voice was more gentle, although he didn’t let go of me.
“I don’t want—” I tried to pull away from him, not wanting him to see the emotion I was attempting to quash.
“Seth, listen to me.”
