Chapter 5: You Look so Lonely

By seven forty three in the evening, the campus had a new post.

@saintaurelius_confessions: ‘Lucien Vale just publicly destroyed Hargreaves in the planning meeting for talking about Eli Thorne. I need everyone to understand what I just witnessed. HE SAT DOWN NEXT TO HIM AFTER. like it was nothing. like he does this’

The comments were different this time.

"Okay, I was wrong. This is real’

‘the way he just LISTED his credentials at him. surgical’

‘somebody protect the scholarship boy because Lucien Vale is down BAD and doesn’t know it yet’

Eli baked when things got loud in his head, tonight his head was full, the planning meeting, Lucien’s voice saying you were just leaving and the look on Hargreaves’ face and the way he had sat down beside him.

The Bee’s Hive kitchen was mostly used for instant noodles. Eli had claimed it at ten pm with a mixing bowl, flour and butter. He was making shortbread, because it was simple, exactly what the occasion required.

At ten forty-five, someone knocked at the door, he assumed it was Noah, It was Lucien.

He was still in his day clothes, his blazer was gone, his collar open, and it was the most undone Eli had ever seen him. He stood in the doorway of the kitchen and he lookedEli, the flour-dusted counter, the mixing bowl and he said nothing for a moment.

“You’re in the Bee’s Hive,” Eli said, breaking the silence.

“I’m aware.”

“This is the athletes’ dormitory.”

“Also aware.”

“Did you just” Eli started.

“I was walking past,” Lucien said, which was so obviously not true that neither of them addressed it. He came in and sat on the counter across from Eli.

Eli looked at him for a moment. Then he turned back to his bowl.

“Hmm…okay”

Lucien walked in quietly, he watched him work.

“You didn’t react,” Lucien said after a while. “At the meeting. When Hargreaves started.”

“I reacted.”

“Not the way most people would.”

“I’ve had a lot of practice.” Eli said.

The kitchen went quiet, except for the low sound of the oven pre-heating.

“You have flour,” Lucien said suddenly.

Eli looked up. “What?”

“On your face. Just..” Lucien gestured vaguely at his own cheekbone, coming down from where he sat on the counter.

Eli reached up and rubbed at the wrong spot entirely, rubbing more flour on his face and Lucien made a sound that was entirely unexpected, he laughed.

It was short and unguarded, his whole face changing  in a way that Eli could not immediately recover from.

Lucien realized what had happened,  and he became briefly unguarded. .

Eli looked at him with flour still on his cheek and said, very softly; “You’re nice, you just act like you’re not.” 

Lucien stared at him. He wanted to say something, but it seemed like it was stuck in his throat. 

He finally broke the silence and said, “Why did you like me, in the first place?”

Eli held his gaze, not sure he wanted to tell him the answer.

“Because you looked lonely,” he replied.

Lucien looked at the counter. Then he straightened, and the close distance between them was gone.

“Goodnight, Eli,” he said with a tight smile, and was gone before Eli could say anything back, the kitchen door swinging softly shut.

***

Lucien heard voices before he reached the common room. It was the usual crowd, Cassian’s friends, people Lucien had known since first year, that took up space in his life the way furniture did, familiar and unremarkable.

He almost went straight to his room, he didn’t, because his room was past the common room and the door was open and Cassian’s voice was the one he heard narrating a story.

“..so I told him, first person you see, and I genuinely thought it would be some random second year he’d never spoken to, right, because the odds alone..”

Lucien stopped outside the doorway.

“..but then the next morning, I’m there, I have my coffee, I’m ready to watch this play out, and waiting at the gates, I mean waiting, like he’d been there a while is this kid, the transfer, the one who’d shown up the day before with a tart..” the room laughed. 

“..and Lucien looks at him and I can see him doing the calculation, right, he’s trapped and he knows it, so he just says..” Cassian turned, still smiling, reaching for his cup on the side table.

He saw Lucien in the doorway. Cassian's smile didn’t fall immediately, it took a second, everyone in the room followed his gaze and found Lucien standing in the doorway in his day clothes with his blazer gone and his expression doing absolutely nothing at all.

The room went quiet.

Cassian set his cup down.

“Luce..” he started, “It’s fine,” Lucien said.

He looked at the room, at the grins that were fading now, at Cassian still half-reaching toward an explanation he hadn’t found yet, and he felt something in his chest go very still. He thought about the kitchen, about flour on Eli’s cheek and a laugh he hadn’t meant to give and ‘because you looked lonely’ said in a voice that had no lie in it whatsoever.

He walked past the common room to his door, went in, and closed it behind him. 

He knew that soon the whole school would find out about the bet, but there was only one person he worried about.

Day seven of thirty

Twenty-three to go