Lusting For Elliot

:Part Two: Chapter Twenty-One

~Chapter Twenty-One~

I wasn't allowed to see him. Life had quickly become a confiscating fist.

The news of Elliot's imprisonment had spread like wild fire, started as a campfire only to spread far and wide without inhibition, grappling at dried twigs and forgotten nests, rising to the skies with high, fully grown trees full of dried bark, and this metaphorical picture was the equal of what happened. News spread far, and speculations and truths were mixed into it all to create a smoky hazard.

The first week of school was a mind boggling spectacle as glances were cast my way, speculations thrown back and forth. Some thought it was my bratty idea to send him to jail, having lost patience with the war about school. None had seemed to linger on the idea that Elliot and I had become something more than rivalling warriors. In fact, the white flag had been cast when someone had near stumbled on us smooching, but the anger that grumbled inside me from that idea had more than one friend staying away, and that brought more solidity to that theory than I'd wished.

Of course, Elaine and Meredith knew the truth, but Elliot's friends had advised against contact, as advised by Elliot's lawyer. I was left with the few friends I'd made ignoring my presence, the school I'd quickly become attached to hating the very air I breathed, while the eagle eyes seemed to make things more real, and I wanted to cease it all.

But what could I do? The answer to that question came easily a few days later. How had I been so blind? I was once the best at discovering her ploys before she could cast the dices; I unravelled them, broke them into dust, always receiving that indignant huff or that stubborn chin. Yet, here I was in Canada, attempting to discover how I'd missed this ploy.

Elliot's seat glared at me every time I was in a class. It asked me why I'd abandoned its owner; why I couldn't see the only way out. My heart broke every time an escape mocked me in the face for failure after failure. It was not an option.#

"There she goes," a female had whispered in a hushing tone, but I heard, not far enough away from them.

Another female had scoffed. "Why doesn't she just leave already?" she said. "Can you imagine the guts she has to say Elliot kidnapped her? For what?"

"I hear Elliot and that Mongo kid had some sort of off, all because of her," the first female had said. At this point I was before my locker, pulling out books I may carry with me, not knowing the future that no longer cared about my say.

The male chose to speak. "Hey now, let's not forget Pretty Boy's not a saint," he said. "Drug charges, vandalism, illegal drinking and driving. Let's not forget that murder charge."

The locker had shut a little more forcefully than I'd intended it to. A murder charge? That was preposterous. There was no way Elliot could kill someone. Sure, I'd never seen him fight, or seen him lose his cool other than the one time he'd near thrown me into the pool, but for such an idea to spread through the school... it must have been a jaded fact, interwoven with lies.

The silence had been palpable as I'd moved past them, but later, as I'd stormed into my brother's room and horded his computer, the truth had hit me as Jonny had slowly, unsurely, opened a window. The FBI had an unwarranted leach on their lines as Jonny's window had showed Elliot Dupree's murder charge.

It wasn't the file that stemmed this idea into mind, but rather what conclusion I achieved by reading it. Eliot Dupree had been the drunk driver in a car accident that nearly killed his girlfriend, Marinna Carson, on the same night his mother had passed away.

The news came as a shock to me. I'd known he'd lost his mother, and he'd never wanted to speak about it, always avoiding the topic. It hadn't just been on anything; she'd died of cancer, a long struggle that begun when he was ten years old, and right when he should have been with her, he'd been drunk and out of his wits, driving with his girlfriend in the passenger seat.