The Sweetest Summer

Chapter Twenty-Five - Not in the Same Way

I didn't see Eli for three days after that night in my living room. It was like he'd fallen off the face of the earth, insisting he had 'work to do' and 'scripts to read', but I wasn't buying it. I knew it somehow had to do with Franc Blanchett's proposal.

My suspicions for his absence were all but confirmed when Eli woke me up on Thursday morning around three A.M., climbing through my window and falling onto my floor, giggling like a mad man, obviously drunk.

"What the fuck are you doing, West?!" I hissed, pulling him up from my carpet and he staggered, falling into me. Smelling like whiskey and cigarettes and....overly sweet candy?

"Is that glitter all over your shirt?!" I took a step backward as Eli closed one eye to inspect his white button down. Bright silver glitter covered his chest and shoulders.

"Oh shit. Natasha must've gotten me." Natasha?! My throat closed.

"Who is Natasha?" I croaked, trying to control myself, but he detected the strain in my voice despite his overt inebriation.

"Oh, nothing like that. She was one of the strippers. Really a nice girl, in nursing school at USC right now."

"What?! You were at the strip club on a Thursday night...by yourself?!"

"I wasn't alone. My friends are in town from Vancouver."

"Oh." I didn't know whether to feel relieved that he wasn't out sleeping with someone else, but getting wasted lap dances wasn't much better. I had read once that if the girl is open to it, then the patrons can touch them during a lap dance and they can touch them back. I had a feeling none of the strippers would have a problem with Eli touching them...hell, no woman in America would.

"The girls were nice enough, but I had to ghost because none of them were you. None of them even came close to what you've got..." He waved his hand at my body standing shivering in the breeze from the open window in my pale pink pajama set.

"How romantic." I deadpanned. "Look, I'm glad that you like 'what I've got', but it's not going to happen with you fucked up and smelling like cotton candy..."

"Come on, kid. Don't be like that..." Eli groaned, but his bloodshot puppy dog eyes did nothing for me.

"I'm serious. Not tonight West, go home." I gestured to my window and watched him pause before he hobbled down the trellis, worried he may actually fall to his death, but he made it all the way down before stumbling onto my lawn.

The stench of cotton candy lingered in the air and I grabbed my fresh cotton room spray, dousing the air and leaving the window open, despite the way it made me shiver, and the way I couldn't help but think of Natasha's perfect stripper body wrapped around the love of my life.

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I angrily combed through my short hair, pulling it back into a bun at the nape of my neck. I had hardly slept last night, and couldn't stop thinking about the way Eli had looked, all drunk and disorderly and covered in glitter.

"Avery, darling there is someone here to see you..." My mother's satisfied voice came up the staircase and I quickly dotted some concealer under my eyes and mascara on my eyelashes, smearing on some rose colored gloss as an afterthought. It was just after ten A.M. much earlier than I would have anticipated Eli to rise from his drunken slumber, but I was glad he had come to his senses and showed up this morning to apologize. I wasn't some three A.M. wasted booty call and I was glad he knew that too.

I trotted down the steps in my white t-shirt and dark blue skinny jeans, feeling beautiful but understated at the same time.