Not in Love

RUE

My eyes fluttered open to the uncharacteristically loud rumble of a faraway motorcycle, and stayed that way when I noticed Eli’s head next to mine on the pillow.

The moon must have been near full, because despite the darkness and the late hour, I could see him clearly. The perfect emperor nose. The curls, at once flattened and wild. The slight part of his lips and the regular breaths, matching the surge and fall of his shoulders.

We’d fallen asleep facing each other, sweat still cooling on our bodies, eyes searching as we willed our hearts to slow down. Neither of us had moved in the intervening hours. Eli’s hand still grazed my lower back, forearm draped over my waist, an unfamiliar but pleasant weight.

I remained still in the bluish quiet of the night, pretending to be a photograph of myself, emptying my mind of everything but the faint scent of petrichor seeping in through a window. A few minutes later, Eli’s eyes blinked open, too. “Hey. What time is it?”

He was the kind of insufferable person who slept quietly and woke gracefully. No disorientation from an unknown bed, or the hours of daylight he’d lost. Just that peaceful expression, and his hand resuming where it had stopped before our unplanned nap: drawing scribbles into my skin.

“Eleven.” I glanced at the clock. “Eleven fifteen, actually. Don’t you need to go home and walk your dog?”

I was genuinely curious, but halfway through I realized that my words could have been construed as an attempt to kick him out. Eli, though, just smiled, like he often did when I was my odd, socially awkward self.

He smiled like I delighted him.

“Tiny’s with Maya.” He propped himself up on the mattress. My eyes caught on his strong biceps. “But yes, I should leave if—”

“Wait.” I reached out. Wrapped a hand around his forearm. “Can you wait?”

“Wait?”

“Could you stay a bit longer?”

His brow furrowed with worry. “I’ll stay for as long as you—”

“I didn’t mean to imply that you should leave. Just—you told me your worst story. Before you go, I want to tell you mine.”

“Rue, you don’t owe me—”

“I know. I want to. But this one, it’s not like the others. I don’t think you’ll be able to look past it. So I’ll just tell you. And then…then you can leave.”

His eyes softened. “You were able to look past mine.”

“It’s different. Mine is bad. Mine is my fault. Mine is…I’ll just tell you.” I pulled the sheets up to my chest. “I don’t talk about this stuff to anyone. My brother. The way we grew up. Tisha knows some of it, because she was there, and Florence…it’s not something you say over dinner.”

“Rue.”

“So I’ll tell you. And if you decide to…I guess you and I were never meant to be part of each other’s lives. Being with you was a betrayal from the very start. I just couldn’t stay away.”

His expression was inscrutable.

“And if you can’t bear to look at me after all these things I’m about to tell you, you’ll just leave, and everything will be as it should. It’ll be like I screamed them from the edge of a cliff.” Cathartic, but ultimately meaningless. Lost in the ether. Nothing would change, except for this one moment in time, in the quiet of our bed. “Okay?”

Eli briefly cupped my cheek, then immediately let go, as if aware that I couldn’t have borne a prolonged touch. His eyes, his tone, everything about him felt distant and enigmatic. “Go ahead,” he said, and I was thankful for it.

I started before I could change my mind. “My dad left when I was six. Vince was a little more than three. I don’t remember life before, so I assume things were mostly fine. After he was gone, though, we were poor. Not always. It depended on a lot of things. Whether Mom had a job. What kind of job. Whether something broke in the house and we needed to replace it. Healthcare expenses. That kind of stuff. When I was thirteen, for instance, our landlord decided that she was going to sell our apartment, and between moving to a new place and the increase in rent…it wasn’t a good time.”

I felt naked in an uncomfortable, intolerable way. I spotted one of the oversized T-shirts I slept in, quickly pulled it over my head, and then sat up, cross-legged, to continue. “My mom—she had her own issues. Mental health, I’m sure. Some addiction. As I understand it, her parents were part of one of those ultraconservative churches, and when she decided she didn’t want to stick around, they withdrew any sort of financial and emotional support. She had us when she was very young, and…What I’m trying to say is, she’s not the villain of this story. Or maybe she is, but she was a victim first.

“We didn’t have lots of material shit growing up, and that wasn’t fun. But the worst part was, by far, being hungry.” I glanced down at my hands and took a moment to collect myself before resuming. I’m saying it. I’m doing it. It’s out there. “A lot of people think that food insecurity means constant, systematic starvation, and sometimes it plays out like that, but for me…I wasn’t hungry all the time. I wasn’t always malnourished. I wasn’t deprived of food for days on end. But sometimes, when I was hungry, there just wouldn’t be anything to eat in the house, or money to buy it. Sometimes that would go on for two, three days in a row. Sometimes it was more than that. Holidays were the worst. In the summer I couldn’t get free lunches at school, which meant no guaranteed meals, and that sucked. I remember my stomach cramping so hard I thought I would die, and…” I covered my mouth with the back of my hand. Exhaled slowly. “I say ‘I,’ but it was the two of us—me and Vince. Whatever hunger I felt, he did, too. And Mom…I’m not sure how to explain this, but she completely checked out. I don’t think she realized, or even cared that there was no food in the house. By the time I was ten, I’d learned that I shouldn’t go to her when I was hungry, because she’d just smile and lie to me that she’d go shopping soon. And by the time Vince was seven, he’d learned that if he was hungry, I was his best bet.”

Eli’s eyes shone with understanding, but I wasn’t done. For someone who never, ever talked about this, it was disconcerting how many words I had.

“Again, this wasn’t all the time. We’d go entire weeks with casseroles for dinner and milk in the fridge and cereal in the cupboard. But then Mom would quit, or lose her job, or break up with a boyfriend, and there would be stretches of nothing, where Vince and I had to ration stale crackers. And because it was all so fucking unpredictable, it was hard to enjoy the good times. They could end any second, so we were constantly on the edges of our seats.

“I developed certain…strategies. I’d steal a few dollars as an emergency fund. Sometimes from Mom’s purse. Other times from other places. I was a very opportunistic thief.” I let out a laugh. “Vince and I got into the habit of eating as quickly as possible. We were afraid to be discovered, or that Mom would come and ask where we’d gotten the food from, or that she’d take it from us. Eating at home was a constant source of anxiety. And naturally, everything we ate was very cheap and poor quality. We didn’t have fresh vegetables at our disposal. The little money we had, we’d use to buy stuff that would keep. I’d go to Tisha’s house and there were these big bowls overflowing with fruit, and it seemed like being in a Disney movie. Princess stuff, you know? The apotheosis of luxury.”

There, I’d learned that food was more than just calories and nutrition. Food was what brought the Fuli family together every night, what the parents of figure skaters made for their kids after a hard practice, what people talked about when they came back from weekends spent in quaint coastal bed-and-breakfasts. Food was collagen, the connective tissue of our society, and if I hadn’t grown up with enough of it, well. Clearly, it had to mean that I wasn’t tethered enough to anyone, and never could be.

“You said that you left for college and never came back, and, Eli, I did the same. Alec and the figure skating program—I owe him everything. Thanks to him I got my tuition waived. I jumped on a plane, left for the dorms on the earliest possible move-in date, and didn’t come back for two years. I just couldn’t. I was on the college meal plan, which meant I could eat plenty, but I still had so much anxiety around food. It was triggered by the weirdest shit—having to eat in a rush, small portions, the cafeterias being closed for Thanksgiving. It was irrational, but—”

“It wasn’t,” he interrupted gently.

I glanced away. “Either way, I wasn’t functioning. So I looked around. A campus therapist helped me find coping strategies, but…I was healing, and I just couldn’t force myself to go back home.” I swallowed. “You went back for Maya, Eli. But I…I was eighteen, and Vince was fifteen, and I left him. I left him alone with Mom for years.” The burning pressure behind my eyes threatened to overflow, and I had no wish to fight it. Instead, I remembered a summer night, when I was thirteen. A sleepover at Tisha’s. The following day Mrs. Fuli had sent me home with leftovers—pasta with chicken, a side of grilled zucchini, and a fruit salad, all fresh and delicious. When I’d returned home, Mom was gone and Vince was sitting on the couch, listening to the news on a TV that had only three channels. His eyes had widened in sheer joy at the sight of the Tupperware containers in my hands, and watching his delight as he worked his way through the food had made me happier than I’d been in a long, long time.

Being able to keep Vince fed, that had been happiness. And when I couldn’t, that’s when I’d begun to resent him, and the unfairness of what was being asked of me.

“I did go back, eventually. And Vince…he said he forgave me. But things soured anyway. He grew up and made choices that I simply can’t…We’ve been on and off through the years. His current behavior is completely unacceptable, but I hope you can see why me calling the police on him is not really a—”

Two things happened simultaneously: my voice broke, and Eli dragged me into his lap, between his thighs, his arms bands of steel around me. Tears slid down my cheeks, and I hated it a little, this weakness of mine, this inability to deal with my past and with my infinite guilt. But it was nice, having told someone. Taking this stinging pain inside me and putting it outside my body for a little.

“You did what you could.” His hand caressed my hair, my back. “You did enough.”

“Did I?” I pulled back and wiped my cheeks. “Because look at us.” He stared in confusion, his palm warm around my nape. “My story and yours had the same beginnings. Our siblings. The ice. Engineering. But the ending…You and Maya found each other, while Vince and I—it’s like one of those Finish the Picture worksheets. Except that yours became a beautiful painting and mine is a fucking—”Property © 2024 N0(v)elDrama.Org.

“Rue, no.” He shook his head energetically, like I shouldn’t even contemplate the idea. “Maya wanted to be found. Mending that relationship went both ways. This,” he said, angling his head toward the entrance of my apartment, “is not on you. Please, tell me you understand that.”

Maybe I did, at least rationally. But I wasn’t able to feel it in my stomach. I let out a soft, viscous laugh. “Do you think that maybe there’s another version of us, somewhere in another timeline? Where we’re not just a messed-up lump of scar tissue, and we’re whole enough to be capable of loving others the way they want to be loved?”

He stared at me for an endless moment, and a silly thought nestled into my mind. If I were able to love someone, I would choose you. In that timeline, I would want it to be you.

But then he said, “No, Rue.”

“Well, that’s depressing.”

“That’s not it.” He swallowed. Held my eyes with determination. “I just don’t think that we need another timeline to be able to do that.”

It knocked me wordless. My heart stopped so abruptly, I was afraid it wasn’t going to start anymore. “I’m done. You can leave now, if you want to,” I said evenly. I couldn’t believe he’d want otherwise—in my experience, staying was the exception, and leaving, the rule. I hated the thought of him being gone, but maybe it was for the best, to untangle us from this intimacy we’d sunk into.

“Can I?”

I nodded. “I promise I’m fine. I don’t need you to keep hugging me, or—”

“I’m not hugging you.”

“Yes, you—”

“No, here’s what’s happening.” He shifted us around until we were lying down, not unlike the way we’d fallen asleep earlier. Except that he was definitely hugging me, pulling me into his chest and holding me there. Whenever I breathed in, his clean scent filled my lungs. “I’m waiting for you to calm down. Once you’re not upset anymore, we can fool around again. Then I’ll go home. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. It sounded like a good, not overdramatic plan. And despite the night’s events, I was, above all, not overdramatic.

“Perfect. Just close your eyes and relax, okay? The sooner you relax, the sooner we can do something fun.”

“Like what?”

“We could fuck again—that worked well. Or maybe you can suck me off. I’ll think about it.”

I took a deep breath and willed myself to calm down. It was going to be good, moving back to the sex. Something I was familiar with. Something I could control.

But I relaxed a little too much, and ended up falling into an exhausted, dreamless sleep in under a minute. We did not fuck, and I did not suck him off, and he did not go home.

Instead, Eli’s arms stayed around me for the rest of the night.