Firestorm | ✎

4. locker room talk

     Elias and Isla kept their deal intact.

     Well, for the most part.

     It seemed as although they've established some ground rules, the animosity between them was sometimes too strong to ignore.

    "It's sois, not es," Isla had explained for the tenth time the other day, until his head was starting to hurt. "Because you're expressing a desire."

    "You said it was for demands!"

    "I said le subjonctif could be for demands, not that it was limited to it!" She sighed. "It's literally written there in your textbook. In bolded letters. If you reviewed like I told you, maybe you'd catch up just a tad bit faster, don't you think?"

     Elias glared at her. "Je veux que tu sois loin de moi."  (I want that you be far from me.)

    "Much better."

     Their sessions went more or less like that, with passive-aggressiveness being the end of a line they'd never cross. Because if they did, not only would they break their rules, but they knew they couldn't possibly survive the rest of the months together. Insults became fights, fights equaled to trouble.

     One of them was bound to crack, though.

     He just had a terrible feeling that it'd be him.

     A ball smacked his head.

    "Oi!" Charles called. "Are you even listening, you knob?"

     Elias rubbed the side of his head. "Not when you're hitting me like that, Graham. Jesus. What the hell?"

    "Hey, you were too busy glaring at nothing," his dark-skinned friend scoffed, before wiggling his eyebrows. "Thinking of a certain redhead?"

    "No."

    "Ah." Charles put a hand to his chest. "You break my heart, brother, for thinking I know so little of you. You were thinking of her, you sly little snob. No one gets on your tits as much as she does, and you were seconds away from breaking your lacrosse stick."

    "Please don't say tits and refer to her in the same sentence."

    "I don't give two shits about tits."

    "You've made that fairly clear, didn't you?" Elias cringed at the memory of walking in his friend's dorm, stark-naked and a bloke's head between his legs. "I've just never met anyone so fucking annoying. She's rude, a smart-arse and makes fun of me like it's her sole purpose in life."

    "So in short, she's the first person to not worship you."

    "Exact—" then he smacked Charles's shoulder. "Oh, fuck off."

     The boys retired to the locker room after another lacrosse practise that felt like it lasted for hours. The Winter Cup, or the big game, was in two months—November, to be exact—and the intensity of their schedules were getting higher by the minute.

    "Well, well, well," one of their teammates tsked at him. "Our favourite captain, distracted for once. Got a case of blue balls?"

     Elias threw a towel at his face. "Eat shit, Raj."

     The rest of the boys chuckled as Raj fumbled to get it away. "It doesn't have anything to do with all those secret rendez-vouses that you've been having at the library, does it?"

    "Is tutoring such a new concept for you morons?"

    "Nope," another quipped, "but we all know what really happens in tutoring sessions. You know, in-between bookshelves." He made a crude gesture with his hand swinging in an up-and-down motion.