All Chapters of Loving Him For 30 Days: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Eli came back from the Dean’s office and made dinner, he didn’t want the noise and the eyes that would be on him all night, thanks to Lucien Vale. He went to the Bee’s Hive kitchen and made toast and scrambled eggs and ate them standing at the counter. The kitchen was empty, which was what he expected and preferred.He stood at the counter for a moment after, his hands flat on the surface, as he stared blankly at the wall. He didn’t know what he felt, that was the honest answer he tried to locate all day after he walked into the Dean’s office. He kept reaching for something to describe how he felt, maybe anger, hurt, or heartbreak, anything with a shape he could work with, and finding instead this flat, grey absence like it was there but he couldn’t feel it completely. Lucien had walked past him, he looked at him and waited for some sort of expla, anythung and Lucuen just walked away. No matter how he thought about it, and tried to downplay it, it made him feel shame. But what exac

The bus north took four hours and Eli slept for two of them.He woke up somewhere past Yonkers with his face against the cold window and the city already gone, replaced by the landscape of upstate New York in late November; bare trees, grey sky, fields that had given up their color weeks ago and were waiting for snow to give them something else to be.He watched it pass and didn’t think about Saint Aurelius, he was moderately successful at this.Farrow was the kind of town that appeared on maps but not in conversations, it had one main street, a gas station, a diner that had been there since before Eli was born and would probably outlast everyone he knew. The houses were spread out, yards that needed work, the look of the place showed that money had always been slightly beside the point because there wasn’t enough of it to organize your life around.Eli had grown up two streets back from the main road in a building that his grandmother had owned and his mother had inherited and had b

Seraphine Vale lived in a third floor apartment in the West Village that gave off her vibes, clean lines, good light, books arranged by color on shelves that had been measured before being installed, very organised and calculating.She opened the door in an oversized sweater with a glass of wine already in her hand and looked at Lucien the way she always looked at him, like she could see three conversations ahead of the one they were currently having.“You look terrible,” she said.“Thank you,” Lucien said. “For seeing me.”She stepped aside and let him in.The apartment was warm and smelled like she’d been cooking. She set two plates on the small dining table without asking whether he’d eaten, which he hadn’t. He sat down and ate because arguing with Seraphine about food was a battle nobody had ever won.They talked about small things while they ate, her firm, a case she couldn’t discuss but was clearly thinking about. After dinner she cleared the plates and came back with a second g

Eli came back on a Tuesday morning, he dropped his bag on his bed, changed out of his travel clothes, laced up his shoes, and walked out of the Bee’s Hive into the Saint Aurelius morning as he’d never left. Noah looked up from his desk when Eli walked back in from his first lap of the campus.“You’re back,” Noah said.“I’m back,” Eli said, and grabbed his water bottle.“You look” Noah studied him. “Different.”“Good different or bad different?”Noah considered this seriously. “Neither, just an amplification of you”“Hmm…big word, gotta be good,” Eli said, and didn’t say anything further, which Noah accepted because sooner rather than later, he would get the explanation, it would come and he would wait for Eli to spill.Saint Aurelius wasn’t dramatic about these things, it was subtle but everyone knew Eli was back, there were eyes that lingered a little longer when he showed up, and conversations that paused when he walked by the dining hall and got his food and sat down easily. He a

The festival planning meeting ran forty minutes over because someone from the Bird’s Nest had seventeen slides about acoustic arrangements for the main hall and was not going to be rushed.Eli sat three seats down from Lucien for the entire thing, which was a new development; they were not beside each other, just close enough that Eli could see Lucien’s handwriting in the margins of his agenda from this angle, completely illegible from three seats away, which felt very on brand.“Help me Lord,” Lucien said, pinching the space between his eyes, as the acoustic presentation kept stretching for longer minutes. Eli pressed his lips together to keep from laughing, and Lucien didn’t look directly at him, but the corner of his mouth moved. The girl sitting between them noticed and looked back and forth between them, but she didn't quite catch it. When the soul-draining presentation finally ended, the room emptied fast and everyone spilled out into the main hall corridorEli was pulling hi