Elliot didn’t tell him that he only noticed because he suddenly found himself daydreaming about kissing Blake. Maybe he’d noticed before, had noticed guys who looked hot, but he’d never noticed anyone as much as he noticed Blake. He didn’t want Blake to think that Elliot only wanted to kiss him because Blake happened to be gay and it was convenient for him.
He fell for Blake when he had that unflattering, really short haircut and pimples all over his face and when he glared at everyone, even Elliot, all the fucking time.
But he can’t tell Natalie any of that. It’s like he’s carrying around half of a secret. He could share his half, obviously, but even just the thought scares the crap out of him. So he stays quiet and starts unpacking their dinner, somehow unable to look up, and he lets Natalie think whatever she’s thinking, because right now it somehow seems better than the alternative.
Natalie doesn’t say much to him for the rest of the evening and he probably deserves it.
Chapter Eight
When the Ravens announce Jacob Desjardins’s retirement before the start of training camp, they call in Elliot for a meeting and tell him that they want to make him captain. This is somehow surprising only to Elliot and nobody else.
Jacob calls him to congratulate him and the first thing he says is, “You’ll be great at this.”
Elliot is freaking the fuck out, but obviously he can’t tell Jacob that. “How do you know?” he asks instead, because that sounds a lot better than, I’m actually really scared that I’ll fuck this up and that the team will suffer because of it and that we’ll be even worse than last season and everything will fall apart.
“Moo,” Jacob says. “You’ve been their captain ever since I got injured.”
But that’s not right, because Jacob was still their captain, was still around, was with them in the locker room. “But–”
“You didn’t have the C on your jersey, but that doesn’t mean you weren’t it. I saw that and everyone else saw it, too. Keep doing what you were doing and you’ll be fine. I trust you to take care of my guys, yeah?”
“Okay,” Elliot says.
“I was scared shitless when they gave me the C.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. And I’m sure you’ll fuck up here and there, but everyone fucks up here and there. Try to remember that. You get to fuck up, too, like everyone else.”
“Thank you, Jacob.”
“Sure, kid.”
He catches himself smiling when he hangs up the phone.
He can tell that the guys are sad about Jacob, but he’s also getting more hugs than ever when he shows up for training camp. It’s strange to pull on the jersey with the C on it, PR taking pictures for the announcement, meeting the media after, getting all those questions about how he feels, what it means to him.
The guys take him out that day to celebrate and he lets them buy him way too many drinks. This is probably one of the things he fucked up as a captain. He let them play him. It made them happy, though, so he clearly only fucked himself over.
Natalie is already asleep when he sneaks into their apartment and promptly knocks over something that makes a shitton of noise when it falls. He’s pretty sure that it’s the frame they got for the black-and-white print that Natalie picked. They haven’t managed to hang it up yet, because Elliot doesn’t know how to hang up pictures. He’s absolutely useless. He turns on the lights and bends down to pick up the frame, makes a little more noise and then has to sit down on the floor to get off his shoes, because apparently untying your laces is really hard after a few drinks and he… wants to lie down.
Which is a terrible idea.
He knows that.
He falls over when he takes his second shoe off, but he’s already sitting on the floor, so he doesn’t fall far.
His phone chimes somewhere.
Elliot should probably check that. Maybe someone’s wondering if he’s dying. Maybe he is dying. He’s on the floor and he can’t get up.
Fingers clumsy, he starts digging for his phone. It’s in his pocket, which isn’t that hard to access, but it still takes him an eternity to dig it out. Elliot squints down at it and finds a text from Blake.
For a second there, he’s pretty sure that he’s hallucinating, but then he reads it and realizes that it couldn’t be from anyone else. Congrats! it says.
Elliot struggles to sit up and stares down at it, phone in his lap, at that one word and suddenly, for some reason that his inebriated brain can’t understand, he wants to call him. He just wants to hear his voice, wants to hear Blake say congrats in person, wants to pretend, only for a moment, that they still have a chance at being friends.
He leans his head against the wall and sighs, phone still in hand, not drunk enough to fucking do it, and to hell with how his sober self will feel about this tomorrow.
He’s about to do… something, when the picture frame behind him falls over again.
The lights come on in their bedroom a few seconds later, and Natalie comes padding into the hallway, feet bare, wearing one of her Columbia University shirts, looking at first confused, then amused. “Elliot, babe, what are you doing?”
Elliot
