When their makeshift game of Apples to Apples had ended, Clare headed up for a shower and everyone else went off to bed. Jenna and K.C. were in the upstairs guest bedroom, down the hall from the master that Clare and Eli shared. Alli was sleeping in the nearly closet-sized guest bedroom with two twin beds, but Adam slept on the pull-out couch in the family room, none too keen on sharing a room with a girl.
Eli closed his eyes and breathed in the smell of cedar and linen, trying to put the thought out of his mind that he was in his girlfriend's grandparents' old bedroom, sleeping with her in their bed.
He heard the bathroom door open as Clare emerged, a mirage of steam and light. Still damp from her shower, her wet curls matted to a seal-brown color and her skin flushed from the hot water, she crawled into bed beside him, spooning against his backside and hooking her arms around his belly. She buried her face into the back of his neck, nuzzling the nape of his spine and sending shivers all the way down until he could feel a familiar pulse between his legs. Her lips pressed against the nape of his neck, tracing the freckles on his shoulders like a constellation she formed along his collarbone.
"I guess somebody's having a better time," he whispered.
Clare didn't answer, but instead gripped him tighter and began kissing him more deeply, her breath hot and damp on his shoulders.
Eli rolled over on his side to face her, though in the darkness of the bedroom he could only make out her face in sparse bits. He took the hand that had been wrapped around him and held it in his own, taking the other and wrapping it around her waist.
Clare pulled closer to him, until their bodies were flush against one another. Even when there was not an inch of space left between them, she still kept rustling against him, like she was trying to seal off any distance that might still be trying to open up. It was as if she was trying to burrow under his skin.
To his surprise, one of her hands went down to the hem of his sleep pants, slipping under the waistband and groping down.
Eli reached into his boxer shorts and pulled her hand out before it could go any more southward.
"Whoa, whoa," he said, holding her hand in a tight grasp. "Whoa. Clare. What's going on?"
Clare tugged away from him, rolling away so her back was to him, pulling herself into a fetal position and tucking her chin to her knees.
Eli propped himself up one elbow, tugging the blanket away from her face and touching her shoulder gently.
"Clare…"
She shrunk like a hermit crab, diving deeper into herself as she closed away from him.
"Clare," he said, bending over her and brushing the hair from her face. "Clare, what's going on?"
He couldn't be sure, but he thought he heard her sniffling.
"I'm sorry," she mumbled into her pillow.
He bent closer to her, straining to hear her. "Why?"
When she didn't answer, he said, "Clare. If you don't tell me what's wrong, I can't help you."
She finally turned to him.
"You can't," she whispered.
He took her hands in his. "What can't I do?"
Clare didn't answer him again, but brushed closer to him, wrapping her legs around his and both of her arms around his neck.
"Eli…what can I do?"
The words flashed back to him as Clare determinedly pressed herself against him, her head on the shelf of his jawline and collarbone.
The anniversary of Julia's death, when he had cried and begged Clare to stay, afraid of what would happen to him- of what he might be able to do to himself- if she left him alone to drown in all of that sadness.
The night he'd told her of his suicide attempt.
In all honestly, Eli didn't remember much of that night. He had been in so much of a haze that day, the grim certainty and resolution washing out everything else that had gone on as insignificant and time-wasting. He remembered getting the pills, sneaking the whiskey out of Bullfrog's liquor cabinet, and how, as he made his way up the stairs to his bedroom for what he believed was the last time ever, how his whole body seemed to slant sideways- like there had been an enormous weight attached to one side and it had been pulling him in one direction this whole time, and now that it was gone, he was beginning to topple off-balance.
Although it made him sick to do it, he tried to think of a single memory that involved actually taking the pills, but try as he might, he couldn't. All he really remembered was sitting down on his floor, the pills in one hand and the bottle in the other, crying so hard that he couldn't breathe or speak or even see, really.
But it wasn't a sad kind of crying. It was just…defeated.
He had nothing else to give. He was done. He was used up. Everything he was, was gone, and he'd never, ever be able to get it back. There wasn't anything else to hang on to anymore- whatever Eli had been, that person was gone for good now.
He had always been so sure of who he was, but that had all changed with the screech of tires and the sickening crunch of metal churning on metal.
If he wasn't who he was, than who was he, now?
Didn't matter.
That was what he remembered the most. That complete hopelessness; that feeling of realizing that the real Eli, who ever that person had been, wasn't going to die that night. It was this imposter, this ventriloquist who had shoved his hand inside of Eli, ripped his own heart out, and replaced it with his hand, emptying him of everything he was so that he no longer had any control over his own life, but became a puppet, sleepwalking day-to-day and speaking pre-scripted phrases to everything around him because he no longer had the heart to put anything into life anymore.
He remembered that his hands had shook, the slightest little tremor, right before he tossed the pills into his mouth, and that a little bit of whiskey had dribbled down his chin like drool as he downed gulp after gulp like a man dying of thirst.
And then…
Nothing.
He didn't even remember feeling peaceful at the thought of death. It wasn't like he had done it to be with Julia, or anything crazy like that. No. Julia was dead, and to him, dead was dead. Gone. Forever. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, all that. Nothing left. We just…vanish. No heaven, hell, purgatory, all that bullshit people are spoon-fed. There was just…nothing. A black hole.
All he could really do was sit there, a strange calm taking place inside of him. Like the subsequent silence after a tornado that rips the sky apart, all he felt now was numb from head to toe. But, he had mused, that wasn't any big shock. All he'd felt was numb, ever since Julia died. Numb was the only thing he'd felt for an entire year, because he didn't feel anything at all. Eli wasn't really Eli anymore.
The last thing Eli could really remember about that night- well, one of the last things- was thinking that it didn't matter when his body would eventually die from this. He had been dead a long time. You couldn't live very long without a heart.
"I don't know if I can do this," he heard Clare whisper suddenly.
Her voice brought him back to the present. He blinked at her, curled like an inchworm in their bed, her arms still tight around his neck and her ear against his heart, a hammer under cloth.
"Can't do what?" he murmured into her hair.
Clare looked up at him, her eyes red. "You being gone."
His mother had come up to check on him, who knows how much later. His mind had still been in a fog, and he hadn't noticed that she had been yelling for him, or that she had even into his room until she was kneeling in front of him, her eyes wild in sheer panic, grabbing his face in her hands and screaming directly at him, words he could barely comprehend or hear.
"Oh my god, oh my god, oh Christ, oh my god…Eli, baby? Baby? Baby, please talk to me! Oh, god, oh god, oh god…ARTHUR!"
To his knowledge, his mother never called his father by his first name- always Bullfrog or simply "Bull". But here she was, screaming "Arthur!" at the top of her voice, running down the stairs.
After a moment, his father had appeared, looking ready to throw up and knock him into unconsciousness at the same time.
"Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus FUCKING Christ, oh fuck, oh fuck, oh Jesus Christ fuck oh God, Eli, Eli, what the fuck did you do? Eli! Fuck, what did you do? Oh Jesus Christ!"
Then he'd just dropped to his knees, and pulled Eli into such a vice-like hold that it was all he could do to breathe as he shook in his father's arms. One of Bullfrog's large, meaty hands- nearly the size of Eli's skull- wrapped around his body, and his father's chin rested on the horizon of his head, pulling him into Bullfrog's collarbone so tightly he could smell the wine and steak on his father's breath from dinner.
Bullfrog's cursing had stopped by this point, and now he just knelt on the floor, his arms around Eli, brushing the fringe of his hair with his fingers like he had when Eli was a baby and refused to go to sleep. The touch had mesmerized him as an infant, lulling him into a silent trance, but that night all it had made him do was cry harder- graceless, inelegant, gasping sobs that made him shake so violently he couldn't sit up straight any longer.
"Shhh, shhh, shh, baby, shhh, I got ya…shhh, shhhh. I got ya, it's alright, I got ya, you're gonna be alright, shh, baby, I got ya, shh…"
His father had just held him, rocking him like he was still a colicky newborn, uttering words he had not said to Eli since he had been one. It took a moment of him trembling uncontrollably in Bullfrog's arms for Eli to realize that the tremors he felt weren't just coming from him- Bullfrog was doing the same.
And right before the ambulance had pulled into their driveway, sirens wailing loudly enough to temporarily drown out his wails, his father had kissed his forehead, something Eli was positive his father had not done in nearly 15 years.
"I'm not going anywhere."
He kicked himself at his words, knowing he'd probably never said anything stupider.
"Of course you are," Clare sniffed.
He knew this had been coming.
"I'm not going just yet."
"But you're still going."
He sighed. "Clare, I know that. That doesn't mean I'm going to be gone forever."
Her voice broke as she said, "you might as well be."
Eli's eyes widened. He pushed Clare back from him a little bit, studying her face closely.
"Clare," he asked very carefully, "you don't want to break up, do you?"
Her words jolted through her like he'd literally shocked her. She hopped away from him, accidentally kicking him in the stomach in her haste to get away.
"I knew you would want that," she cried, bursting into fresh tears.
Eli hastily got up and put an arm around her, but she pulled away.
"Clare, believe me, that's the last thing I want."
"Then why would you even suggest it?" she wailed back.
"Because," he said, keeping his hands at his side with great effort, "I thought you did."
"Why would you think that?"
"I don't know, Clare. You still won't tell me what's wrong."
"I already did!" she shouted, and Eli paused, waiting for the others to come charging in at the sound of her voice. When nobody did, he breathed a sigh of relief and turned back to her.
"Clare," he soothed, using a tone one normally reserved for crying children and startled animals, "you know that that's not the only reason you're upset, right?"
She didn't answer, but kept crying and turned her head away from him, tracing the patchwork quilt pattern of the bedspread with her eyes instead.
"We never really talked about him," he said, still in that same tone of voice. "About…Sav."
Even now, it hurt to say that name. Not as much as it had to bring up Julia, but he still felt that same spasm of pain, albeit much smaller and less intense, that he used to feel (and still did feel, on occasion) whenever he brought her memory to mind.
Clare tried to gain control of herself enough to speak.
"What's there to talk about?" she said. "He's gone."
After a moment, she whispered again, more to herself than to him, "He's gone."
"He's gone. He's never coming back, ever, and there's nothing we can do about it," she went on. Her voice kept rising with each word, the decibels growing like moving up a flight of stairs, but she just went on, and Eli let her, knowing she needed to get this off her chest.
"He'll never be able to do anything with his life, and it's such a fucking waste. 18 years old, and it's like he never lived at all. And he was SO good; I mean, really, he was one of the best people I knew. He was so nice to me whenever I was over and always took the time to talk to me…" she paused to wipe her nose on her sleeve, "and now he's dead, and nobody will ever know that he was even here except us."
Too overcome to continue, Clare's head hung down.
Eli sidled a little closer to her, inch by inch, until he hesitantly wrapped his arms around her. He held his arms awkwardly around her body for a moment, afraid that Clare wouldn't want to be touched, but instead she just leaned into them and let herself go boneless against him, so Eli took her lead and laid down beside her under the covers, brushing her hair out of her eyes and kissing the tracks the tears had left behind on her face.
He finished with a soft kiss on the lips, the most gentle one they'd ever shared.
"Thank you for that," Clare sighed, burrowing closer to him and resting her head on his chest, her ear placed right against his heart.
"I won't leave you," he replied.
"But you will," Clare argued, clamoring around until she was directly on top of him. "Don't say that you aren't, because you will. You're going to leave, and I'll be alone. And don't say that I'll have Adam," she shot back, before Eli could even open his mouth, "because we won't be the same, not without you here. We'll both be messed up when you're gone."
Another sob crossed over her face, but she bit down on her lower lip fiercely, holding it back.
"My dad got a job in Colorado," she said.
This was news to him. "Really?"
She nodded, fiddling with the hem of her shirt. "He's moving there at the end of the summer."
Oh, Eli realized. So not only was this weekend hitting her, but the prospect of losing both Eli and her father was coming to mind.
Clare fought back another sniffle and continued. "He got laid off from his last job because his company got bought out, and they could only keep a few employees. But a few weeks after he left work, he got a call from another company he had interviewed with before the buy-out, and they offered him the same position at their corporate headquarters in Denver."
"And he's moving in September?"
She nodded, biting on her lip so hard Eli was surprised it didn't bleed. "He's actually going to move sometime in late July, because he needs to get an apartment down there before his work starts in September."
Clare's voice trailed off, and now she glanced out the window next to their bed.
"He'll leave me, too."
Eli propped himself up on the head board and slid his hands over hers.
"He's leaving," Clare whispered. "You're leaving."
His grip tightened over hers.
"My parents moved out," she continued. "Darcy left. Even K.C. left me."
Her tears began anew. "Everyone leaves. You can't rely on anyone but yourself, because all anyone ever does is go away and leave you all alone."
Eli pulled her back down on top of him, one hand running through her tangled hair and the other stroking her back. "That's not true."
"Julia left you," she pointed out.
He stilled for a moment, then loosened his hold on her, tilting her face to his and kissing her between the eyes.
"And I found you," he reminded her.
"But you're going to leave again!" she pointed out, circling the conversation back to where it began. Her tears dripped salty and scalding onto his chest.
Eli sighed. "Look, Clare. I don't know what to say that's going to convince you that we won't break up when I go to school. I hate that I'm going to be away from you, but we'll both make it work, because we both feel the same. And we'll be alright. It's not going to be easy, but we'll do what we need to, because that's what's how it's gotta be."
He let her digest the words for a moment, then felt the knot in his stomach loosen slightly when she grinned through her tears.
"That was so corny," she teased.
He grinned, relieved at her joking. "Hey, I was trying to be soothing. Don't tease."
"You been planning that for awhile?"
"Maybe."
She laughed, then bent down for a kiss, much more contented and satisfying than their chaste, almost prude-ish one from earlier. Clare laid back down on top of him, lacing her fingers with his.
"I'm such a mess right now," she said.
"Like I was the paragon of sanity when I did that to you."
"True," Clare admitted. "But I still hate that it hurts me so much."
"You just don't want to get hurt again." He rested his head on hers. "Nobody does."
"I know. But I wanted this trip to be fun. I can't exactly do that with me crying and being all broody. That's usually your job."
He smirked into her hair.
"Well," he taunted, "just because we had a soap opera moment doesn't mean we can't still have some fun…"
Clare raised her eyebrows, knowing where this was going. Eli rolled her over so that he was poised on top of her, and bent his head to the hem of her night shirt. Very slowly, he began lifting the fabric bit by bit, his lips grazing each new bit of exposed skin, slightly dusted with new sun-kiss, leaving a wet trail of prints from her waist to in between her breasts to the divot of her neck.
When he had made it all the way to her jawbone, Clare's arms went up over her head, and without a word between them he slipped off her shirt, lying their bare chests flat against one another.
"Eli." Clare's voice was in his ear, no more than a puff of steam.
He nodded, making his way back down her body by touching every place he had just kissed. While Clare's arms roamed like a pianist's across his back, his hands moved down the line from the bottom of her breasts to the flat plane of her belly, and eventually the dip of her waist to the rise of her hip, slipping beneath the thin strip of her panties. Her breath hitched, and their eyes locked. Neither one of them dared blink as he slipped into her.
Clare let out a moan as he moved his way through her, arching her back off the bed as her orgasm took over. When she finished riding it out, she grabbed Eli's hand with one arm and used the other to grip the waist band of his shorts again.
Eli looked at her, studying for any hesitation, let her hands drift to his waist, the legs of his sleep pants tangling with his limbs.
"These are so hard to get off," Clare giggled. "I feel like they're chastity pants or something."
"This coming from the girl who wears a purity ring."
"Shut up," she growled in a much sexier tone than Eli knew she possessed. When finally the pants were down at his ankles, he kicked them off furiously, and positioned himself on top of her.
Giving her one more look to make sure she was absolutely certain this was what she wanted, he pushed through her, lowering his body so that his head was flat against the beat of her heart.
They moved together seamlessly, like cogs in a well-tuned machine. He thrust deeper inside her, and she tilted her eyes up towards the ceiling of his bedroom and focused on the unreadable blackness, losing herself in the rhythm their bodies made. And when they came together, finishing at the exact same moment, their bodies spilled into one another entirely, for a brief moment molding their flesh into one like liquid metal being poured into a mold.
Guess the Bible wasn't so much of a fallacy, Eli thought briefly, as he paused a moment on top of Clare's thundering heart, enjoying the feeling of just being still and calm inside her. Flesh melding together. Two become one.
After they had finished, lying on top of one another skin on skin, he pulled out of her, and they placed a stream of gentle kisses all over each other's bodies. Each kiss they shared was like an emblem stamped across their bodies, every movement of their hands a cartographer mapping out a region peak by valley.
And with every movement they made, Eli knew that Clare was just as aware as he was about what exactly they were writing all over one another:
Oh, look at you. Look what you've made me in to. Look what you've done to me.
