Not in Love

ELI

Minami found him sitting on one of the swinging chairs on the back porch, the ones Maya had bought at a yard sale and restored the previous summer, when she’d been between undergrad and her master’s and had wanted a relaxing craft project to free her mind. The sun was on the verge of setting, a blend of blue and gold and orange hues, and Eli thought it a fitting way to bookend this long, messy, poignant day in which so many things had come to a close.

“Isn’t it too disgustingly hot to be outside?” Minami asked.

He tipped his bottle at her and smiled. “Beer’s nice and cool.”

“God, I’m jealous.”

“Have one, too.”

“Can’t.”

“Yeah, you can. They’re in the fridge.”

“No, Eli. I can’t.”

He frowned, confused. Then it dawned on him all at once, and his eyes bugged out of his face. “Holy shit.”

“Yup.”

“Are you really—”

“Yup, yup.”

“When did you—shit. When you were sick, you weren’t really—”

“Nope. Well, I was puking my heart out. Just not for the reason you thought.”

He hadn’t thought it possible, not after the last few hours, but happy laughter burst out of him. He stood, enveloping Minami in a bear hug. “Jesus. Wow.”

“We’re so happy,” she said against his T-shirt.

“I bet.” He shook his head, amazed. “You’re going to be fantastic parents. Obnoxious, too.”

“I know. And you’re going to be a great uncle who constantly spoils her and undermines our authority.”

Her. Minami couldn’t possibly know yet, but he liked the idea. “I would settle for no less.” He drew back. Took in her smile and shining eyes. “We should celebrate. How about a cold beer?”

“Fuck off.” She plopped on his chair, sighing in pleasure as she sank into the soft cushions.

“I think Maya has root beer somewhere.”

“Oh. Do you have vanilla ice cream?”

“Maybe?”

“I would give my firstborn for a float.”

“Nah.” Eli waved her off. “Keep her.”

Five minutes later he came back with the first float he’d made in over two decades. Minami accepted it with a smile, and as he pulled up another chair, she asked, “Guess how pissed Hark is?”

“About the baby?”

“Oh, he doesn’t know about that yet.”

“Planning to put off telling him until you’re in labor in Harkness’s gender-neutral restrooms?”

“Only if he walks in while she’s crowning. Guess how pissed he is about the deal we made with Florence?”

Eli exhaled. “I’m assuming he’s sharpening his kitchen knives.”

“And you’d be correct.”

He took the first sip of a fresh beer. Work was going to be shit for a while.

“Unfortunately, he’s not showing it,” Minami continued. “I wish he raged at me a bit. Or called me names. Told me I’m a traitor, that I took away his one motivation in life, that I deserve what Florence took from me. You know, the kind of over-the-top dramatic shit he always spouts when he becomes angry and his accent gets unintelligible.”

“I’m familiar,” he said dryly.

“But he’s just sourpussing. Icily polite. Like when I told him Sul and I were going to get married? I was bracing for an explosion, and what I got was a four-hundred-dollar toaster.”Content held by NôvelDrama.Org.

“What the fuck?” Eli lifted his eyebrow. “Is it encrusted with diamonds?”

“No. It looks like the twenty-five-dollar toaster I had in grad school.”

“Fuck capitalism, man.” He snorted. “Don’t worry, this time around it wasn’t your doing. I’m the one who put Rue before Kline. It’s me he’s pissed at.”

“I was the deciding vote, though. I sided with you.” She sucked an impressive amount of sludge through her straw. “How did you know that I would, by the way?”

The thing was, he hadn’t. Not before Hark had asked them to put the matter to a vote. What he had known was that Rue stood to lose something that meant the world to her, and he wasn’t willing to accept that without a fight. “You know what I think?” he said.

“What?”

“That what nearly happened to Rue was so similar to what Florence did to us, I’m not sure he’d have allowed it, either. He tries to play the part of the asshole, but…I can’t see him living with that.”

“You think he counted on us to overrule him?”

Eli shrugged.

“Wow. He’s such a shithead.”

“I can’t prove it.”

“Such an alleged shithead.”

Eli laughed, and a comfortable silence descended, filled by cicadas and slurping sounds. Until she asked quietly, “Do we have a deal?”

He nodded. “The lawyers are writing it up.”

“Do tell.”

“Florence won’t be selling the patent, or any other company asset. The patent will be Rue’s. In exchange, we’ll forgive the loan, and get a sixty percent equity in Kline. The other investors keep thirty-five.”

“And she gets…?”

“Five percent. Which is five percent more than she deserves. We allow her to stay on as CEO. We get three of the five board seats and observer rights at board meetings. And, as a bonus, I threw in a little gift.”

“Which is?”

“I’m not going to key her car.”

“You’re very generous.”

“Am I?” He sighed, wondering at the empty ache in his chest, resisting the urge to massage his sternum, to think about Rue. He’d known what he needed from her for a while, but putting it into words had precipitated the feeling, amplified the way every single nerve in his body simply wanted her. “Maybe I’m just an idiot.”

“No maybes there. How was it, talking to Florence face-to-face?”

Eli remembered her flushed face as he let her know that they had the books. Her bitterness and resignation as they ironed out the kinks of their deal. “I’d tried to imagine it, you know? How it would happen. What I’d say when I finally spoke to her again.”

“Like, in the shower? When you have those forty-minute conversations with yourself?”

He gave her a baffled look. “How long are your showers?”

“A normal length, shut up.”

“In my environmentally conscious, non-shower conversations, I was going to tell her how incredibly shitty my life had been after what she did. About my parents, and Maya. How I had to take two minimum-wage jobs literally three days after it all went down, and the absolute mortification of failing at the one thing I cared about. I was going to take every single moment of misery and anger and desperation the three of us had in the past ten years and throw them in her face and ask her…”

“ ‘Are you not entertained?’ ”

He laughed. “Something like that. Hark and I talked about this several times, mostly drunk. He always said that he wanted to make her pay. Make her feel like a fool for what she’d done to us. And part of me gets it, but the bigger part just…”

“You just wanted her to understand the hurt she caused. Maybe get a nice apology.”

“How did you know?”

“I just know you. A disgustingly unpetty person.” She rolled her eyes theatrically. “I swear you need classes.”

“I don’t know about that. Because when I was there, with Florence…I just pitied her. More than a little.” He looked at Minami’s dark eyes. Her familiar, beloved round face. The expectant tilt of her chin. “She’s alone in this mess she’s made for herself. She has always been her own personal endgame. Played shady games, won shady prizes. If I hadn’t been negotiating for Rue’s patent, we could have kicked her out of Kline altogether. No five percent, no CEO. But I’m not even sure that matters, because everything she owns was built on top of lies, and she hasn’t changed. We have, though. And we’ve stood by each other.”

“Well, Hark is probably going to need a couple of weeks of cooling down before any more consensual by-standing occurs.”

“Up to a month. But the point is, everything she has can be taken from her. While we have built something that—”

“Please don’t say that the real equity in the biofuel tech was the friends we made along the way.”

He set his beer on the small glass table and locked eyes with her. “Minami, I’m going to ask you to get off my porch and go fuck right off.”

She let out a sound that Eli could only describe as a cackle. “Sul says I’m funny.”

“Sul’s more whipped than a bowl of mashed potatoes.”

“Don’t you whisk those?”

“Maybe?”

“McKenzie would know.”

“She would.”

“I’ll text her. Also, he’s only whipped because I’m funny.”

“I’ve never once seen him laugh.”

“And that’s the reason he’s in love with me and not with you. I make him laugh. In the privacy of our home.”

Eli shook his head. Rue made him laugh, too. She made him eager to do unspeakable things for just one more minute with her. She made him crave that comfortable, expansive silence between them. Rue made him stop and think, and above all she made him yearn like he’d not thought himself capable of, and he wanted to spend the rest of his life cataloging the ways she shouldn’t have been right for him, and yet still managed to be perfect.

Rue eviscerated him and made him anew. And if she didn’t want the product of that…

Well. That was for him to accept.

“If you had asked me two weeks ago, I’d have told you that the only happy ending to our story was with Florence out of Kline. But now…” Minami’s lips curved in a small smile, her profile as familiar to him as his sister’s. “We control the board—and the tech. I think the way things turned out might be for the best.”

“Yeah?”

“We started Harkness out of revenge, and we let spite fuel us. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret our multi-presidential-term revenge plot. But we have accomplished so much more and—”

“Gained friends along the way?”

She punched his arm. “We make really good money. We get to work with amazing scientists and help them develop amazing shit. And fine, yes, we have each other. Maybe it’s not what we’d envisioned, but it’s good.” Her eyes gleamed suspiciously. “And now you have Rue.”

Eli glanced at the sun sinking into the sycamore trees. “If Rue is ever ready or willing to be had.”

“We all have shit to work through. It’s just a matter of time.”

He said nothing, letting himself feel the tight knot in his throat, the ache that came with not knowing when, if he’d see her again. He’d made his move, and her silent reaction had been loud and clear. Her shocked look when he’d told her that he loved her. Unfortunately, the gap between “not just fucking” and “wanting a relationship” was wider than the Sargasso Sea. “I don’t know.”

Minami reached out and closed her hand around his. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

“I swear I’m not trying to be condescending—”

“What a promising start.”

“—but, I know this whole being-madly-in-love thing is new for you, so I’m going to impart a piece of wisdom to you. Ready?”

“Go ahead.”

“No one dies of a broken heart.”

A soft laugh eased out of him. “Good to know, because it fucking hurts.” He let out a deep breath. “There is something I want to do for her. But I’m not sure she’ll accept it if it’s from me.”

Her look was concerned. “I think you’ve done enough, Eli. Shouldn’t you keep just a tiny bit of dignity?” It was a joke, but Eli’s reply was serious.

“I want her to be all right more than I want to keep my dignity.”

“Christ.” Minami gave him an aghast look. “On second thought, you might die from a broken heart.” She drained what was left of her float and set her glass on the table. “Okay, hit me. What do you need this fatigued, overworked, pregnant woman to do for you?”