He's Not My Type

10

"And you know what else I don't like about Christian?"
Shawn glances up at Elijah across the library table. "You seem to be spending a lot of time with someone you don't even like."
Elijah wrinkles his nose. "You're starting to sound like Pieter."
"I am?" Shawn says, brightening up. "You know, this woman at the corner shop yesterday told me I was picking up an Irish accent."
"Anyways," Elijah says, before Shawn can derail him from the topic. "Did you know that Christian laughs at all my jokes?"
"And you don't like that?"
"All my jokes," Elijah repeats. "Even the tofu one."
Shawn's confusion turns to incredulity. "But no one's ever laughed at the tofu one. I thought after we showed you what tofu actually looks like that you'd stopped telling it?"
"Shawn," Elijah says seriously. "He even told off a customer when they didn't laugh at it."

"Sorry if this isn't the best," Christian says, as he passes Elijah the joint. "David always found better shit."
Elijah takes a drag and passes it back to Christian. Pieter doesn't smoke and at get-togethers with Nick's friends weed always seemed to just be there. Elijah had never put much thought into the logistics of actually procuring it. "It's good, though. Thank you."
He shifts in his chair, the rusted metal squeaking, to lean on Christian's shoulder. He'd come out of his Early Literacy and Numeracy exam a jittery sort of exhausted, but Christian had seemed to know exactly what he needed.
Next to them on the narrow balcony, there's a drying rack with a stray pair of trousers, damp from an afternoon shower. There's an ashtray balanced precariously on the railing. Christian had apologized when he'd led him out here, saying that, when Richard moved in, he'd promptly banned smoking inside the house.
Thinking about that now, Elijah feels like there's something he's missing. "Did David used to live here?"
Christian sighs and wraps his arm around Elijah's shoulder. He's in a comfortable grey hoodie and Elijah snuggles into his side as he takes the joint back from him.
"For a couple of years, yeah," Christian says finally.
Elijah is about to ask if Richard and David were somehow a couple — they seem even more like opposites than Christian and Richard — but then Christian continues.
"Up until last year when me and Payno came home to a note saying that he quit the band and was moving out, and not to bother trying to find him because he'd got rid of his phone," Christian says. "Don't even know where he's living half the time, these days."
"Oh." Elijah bites his lip.
Christian doesn't seem like he wants to talk about it anymore because he turns around on his creaky chair and says, "Come here, H."
He takes another drag and positions his mouth just in front of Elijah, chapped lips brushing against his as Elijah breathes in the heady, drugged air.
And then he coughs and laughs and has to break the kiss and Christian is laughing at him and Elijah has to kiss him again.
And then they spend the rest of the afternoon making out on the sofa and they kiss and kiss and rub slowly against each other, languidly, and it doesn't even matter that it's not going anywhere because their hands are tangled together and Christian is a perfect weight on top of him.