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The morning Eliot left Indiana, he stole an heirloom crystal wine glass from his mother’s china cabinet.
He didn’t have a good reason for it. In his head, at the time, he thinks he probably had justifications for it: it made him look one inch less like the tired trope of a bedraggled farm boy looking to make it in the big city; he could get a decent price for it on eBay; it could be something he looked at, or drank wine out of, or drank whiskey out of, instead of breaking down and calling home.
That’s bullshit, though. All of it. The reality is: he was seventeen. He was leaving and never coming back, and he wanted to make sure somebody noticed. He wanted to make it hurt. His grandmother had just died the year before, and his family kept all the shit she left to his mother in the hallway cabinet by the front door.
He saw it, he took it, he wrapped it in his sweater, and he left.
He half-expected it to shatter on the bus ride east, but the crystal was heavy and angular, a cheap relic of the sixties, and Eliot had overpacked his bag. It made it all the way to New York with him, and he just... never got rid of it. He tried once to break it, the same night he first tried cocaine: he swung it into the wall like it was a baseball bat. It put a fist-sized hole in his drywall and came out with only a hairline fracture across the bottom of the bowl. Somehow the worst of both worlds: he made it useless to drink out of, and didn’t even get a decent emotional catharsis out of it.
Anyway. Quentin finds it under Eliot’s bed.
He’s sprawled out on his belly, with one elbow curled under his cheek and the other hanging loose over the edge of the mattress. Not for any particular reason; he just does that. He says it’s comfortable, and Eliot has given up on understanding how his spine works.
“Oh,” Quentin says. “Hey.”
When Eliot turns to look, Quentin is rolling over to flop onto his back, and he has Eliot’s grandmother’s wine glass in his hand.
Eliot thinks he does a very good job not reacting at all to this development, but Quentin still picks his head up to look at him. Is this what having a boyfriend is like? Pseudo-psychic bullshit? Eliot thought that was just for deluded straight girls and their finsta stories.
Quentin wiggles the glass at him. He’s smiling, closed-mouthed and wry. His hair is a mess, flopped this way and that over the top of his head. “You fucking would,” he says.
He’s right, obviously. Eliot would have vintage crystal under his bed for no apparent reason. The lie crafts itself: he and Margo were lounging on a Sunday afternoon, he was drunk and he dropped it, it rolled under the bed and he forgot about it. Boom. Done.
He could say that. Quentin would believe him, if he said that.
“I bet I’ve got a whole ecosystem of shitty career fair plastic cups under my bed at this point,” Quentin says. He stretches over to set the glass on Eliot’s side table. The broad brim of Eliot’s lampshade bounces light through the angles of the crystal, shining and brilliant— and Quentin pauses, his thumb pressed against the stem.
“Shit,” he says, sounding— surprised, and sad. Like it’s a baby bird and not an ugly fifty-year-old wine glass. “It’s cracked.”
Eliot was drunk. He was laughing about something with Margo. He dropped the glass. It cracked, and rolled under his bed, and he forgot about it. He’s done it hundreds of times. He doesn’t give a shit. It isn’t important, forget about it, move on. Quentin would accept that.
“It’s not bad, though,” Quentin is saying. He has that sweet, determined, calculating little frown on his face. His left hand curls into Popper 52, the lead-in of a simple first year mending spell. “I bet if I just—”
“Don’t.”
It leaps out of Eliot’s throat before he can stop it, strangled and croaking, like this old, stupid, childish wound is a long-limbed frog that’s been sitting in his chest for the past six years, waiting, and it just now saw its chance to escape.
Quentin twists back toward him. How can it possibly be comfortable, to always be twisted up like that? “It’s just a minor mending,” he says. His brows slope, hurt. He thinks that Eliot thinks he can’t fix it.
It’s a communal glass. It doesn’t matter. Eliot broke it and forgot about it. It’s not worth the effort to fix. Quentin would agree with that.
“It was my grandmother’s,” Eliot says.
He feels it immediately: the dopamine-drop of an overshare, of an otherwise perfectly normal conversation cracking open like a chasm. Quentin sits up straighter. He lifts his left hand back up against his chest, palm out in gentle surrender.
“Okay,” he says carefully. “If you’re worried there’s, like, a piece missing or something— I’m pretty sure I can still fix it. I wouldn’t offer if I thought there was a chance I could make it worse, El, I promise.”
God. Eliot can only imagine what Quentin thinks of when he hears my grandmother. Fresh-baked cookies and floral perfume and plastic curl rollers.
“You’re very sweet,” he says, his lungs like buckets of broth gelatinizing on his mother’s laminate countertops, “and also wildly misinterpreting the sentiment of that statement.”
Quentin makes the face. He and Margo both do it: sad eyes with a flat mouth, barely bitten back frustration; the same message of disappointment, written in two very different fonts. Margo made the face last week, after Eliot clammed up halfway into venting to her about a fight he and Quentin had gotten into the night before. Quentin made it during said fight, right before he said, “I don’t know what else you want from me if you’re not even going to fucking talk to me, Eliot.”
This time Quentin says, “Do you want me to put it back?”
Eliot has been staring at the glass, he realizes. Under the light, the fracture looks like a jagged scar across the carefully-cut angles of the crystal. “What?”
“I can put it back where I found it,” Quentin says. “And we can forget about it. If you want.”
Jesus christ yes, Eliot thinks, and then he feels the whole back of his neck go hot with shame. He wants to— He’s trying. Really, he is. It just doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere.
Quentin doesn’t need him to say it out loud, thank god. Pseudo-psychic bullshit. Emma Whatshername was right. He just nods, and rolls over, belly flat on the bed. He plucks the glass off the side table, swings it behind the curtain of Eliot’s duvet, and sets it gently back down on the floor where he found it.
“Okay.” He flops back over into a starfish, one ankle hanging off the edge of the bed. “Let’s talk about something else. Uh, did Margo tell you what happened with her and Jules today?”
She did. Eliot gives it a week before they fuck, maybe less if Margo manages not to split her attention this weekend. “Antonia is getting back in from her sabbatical on Thursday,” he says, as he crawls up into the empty space next to Quentin. It’s a California king, somebody should be making use of it. “That’s the only thing that could distract Bambi at this point.”
Quentin hums. “Yeah, good point.”
Eliot tries it: he lays flat on his belly on the bed, tucked up into the crook of Quentin’s shoulder, one arm thrown out over Quentin’s stomach. He was right; it feels like shit. His lungs feel squished, and his neck already aches. He doesn’t know how Quentin does it. He doesn’t know how Quentin does anything.
Quentin’s arm curls around him. “You know,” he says, soft and careful and, apparently, not quite ready to forget about it, “I don’t want you to think that, like…” His sweet, determined, calculating little frown, pointed up at the ceiling. “We’re not going to get ambushed by the relationship police and be forced to play the Newlywed Game or whatever. When I say I want you to talk to me, it’s not… You don’t have to tell me everything. Not if you don’t want to.”
Eliot sets his cheek against Quentin’s shoulder. “I do want to, though,” he says, “is the problem.”
Quentin smiles, a flicker like a candle flame. “Okay,” he says. “Well, in that case, we can work up to it.” He tucks his chin to press his lips against the side of Eliot’s head. “For example, now I know your grandma was a bitch, probably.”
“Please,” Eliot mumbles into his collar, “she was the bitch.”
“And now I know that, I guess,” Quentin says. Eliot watches him wiggle his foot, hanging ridiculously off the bed. “See? Progress.”
Maybe it is.