Loving Him For 30 Days의 모든 챕터: 챕터 91 - 챕터 100

Eli sat on the edge of the kitchen table, his legs dangling over the side as he watched the steady, rhythmic movement of the iron stove’s small air vent. He hadn't slept. Every time he closed his eyes, the image of those black SUVs outside his mother’s fence blurred into the long, sterile hallways of the Saint Aurelius campus, creating a tight, suffocating knot right in the center of his chest. His track trousers were still damp at the cuffs, stiff with dried mountain mud.Lucien was sitting in the wooden chair directly across from him, his chin resting in his palm as he stared at the closed cover of the 2021 ledger. His face looked gray in the early light, the dark circles under his green eyes giving him a hard, hollow appearance. He looked less like the untouchable Senior Liaison and more like a boy who had spent the night counting the minutes until his own family name was destroyed."Noah's been out there for an hour," Eli said, his voice sounding thin and raspy in the cold room.L

The rain had entirely stopped by the time Eli reached the rear entrance of the locker rooms, leaving the concrete steps slick and blackened by the damp morning air. He didn't look back to see if Lucien was following him. He didn't want to know if Lucien’s long, steady strides were closing the distance between them, or if he was still standing out by the elms trying to figure out how to patch up a lie that had been five years in the making.Eli pulled the heavy metal door open, the old iron hinges letting out a sharp, familiar groan that usually meant the start of a standard six-and-thirty morning practice. But the hallway inside didn't feel like the regular school lane. It smelled of old floor wax, copper pipes, and the stale laundry detergent from the track bins, a mundane, ordinary smell that felt bizarrely out of place after the freezing alpine roads.Noah was already at his locker at the far end of the row. He had his canvas bag unzipped on the wooden bench, his hands moving with

The head coach didn't say a word when Eli and Lucien finally joined the back of the pack. He just clicked his silver stopwatch, his eyes lingering for a second on Eli’s mud-stained training flats before he pointed toward the inner rail with his clipboard.The pace was fast. Noah was still setting the lead at the front, his small frame cutting through the heavy mist like a machine. He wasn't taking the turns wide; he was hugging the inside line so hard his left shoulder almost brushed the rusted metal markers of the lane. Every time the pack completed a loop, the sound of thirty pairs of spikes hitting the wet clay echoed against the empty concrete stands in a dull, rhythmic slap.Eli kept his head down, his breathing settling into the familiar, agonizing burn of the five-thousand-meter pace. His calves were stiff from the hours spent cramped in the back of the rental sedan, but the physical pain was almost a relief. It gave him something simple to focus on, a clean line to follow, ins

The corridor outside the room didn't hold the echo of Cassian’s voice for long; the old, thick plaster of the Bee Hive block seemed to swallow the sound, burying it back into the floorboards along with decades of student history. When Eli stepped over the threshold, his jacket zipped straight to his chin, he didn't turn his head toward the door across the stairwell. He could still hear the faint, rhythmic scuff of a heavy boot shifting against the lower panel inside Noah's room, a desperate, clumsy sound that stopped the moment the latch on Eli's own door clicked into place.Lucien followed him down the narrow wooden stairs. His long canvas coat was still stiff with the alpine damp, the heavy fabric rustling against the banister as they moved through the gray, unlit landings of the third-floor block. Neither of them spoke as they cleared the main archway of the dorm. The gravel path outside was completely empty now, the underclassmen already cleared from the lanes and routed toward th

The walk back down the concrete steps of the High Line was an absolute hazard.Eli couldn't keep his eyes on the pavement. Every three steps, he would lift his left hand, tilting his wrist slightly to watch the warm yellow glow of the streetlamps bounce off the polished gold band. The tiny, engraved runner's line on the inside of the metal pressed right against his skin—a constant, heavy reminder of the promise they’d just made under the pink sky."Eli, if you trip over that curb, I am going to let the campaign interns know you were taken out by a piece of municipal concrete," Lucien said, his arm instantly wrapping around Eli's waist to pull him back from the edge of the crosswalk."I didn't see it," Eli mumbled, though he didn't lower his hand. He looked up at Lucien, a massive, incredibly smug grin plastered on his face. "You planned this. You literally mapped out the exact minute the sun would hit the river just so the gold would look dramatic.""I am a public policy advisor, Eli.