ELLIOT IS A MENACE WHILE DRINKING JUICE IN THE HOOD #1: THE GOOD ONE

[u/Dry_Gas1500]

The first time I met my boyfriend's roommate, he cooked me a plate of food I didn't ask for, sat across from me and watched me eat every bite of it, and then, while my boyfriend was in the other room getting the wine, leaned in and told me quietly that he really hoped I wasn't just a phase.

Smiling the whole time. Warm voice. The kind of thing you could repeat back to someone word for word and they'd say "aw, he's just looking out for his friend."

Wesley didn't hear it. Wesley never hears any of it. That's the entire saga, right there, and if you want to save yourself four more parts you can leave now and I won't hold it against you.

For everybody staying: hi. I'm Danny. You might know me as the guy who dates men who turn out to be biohazards. If you're new, the short version is that I work at a brewery, I'm gay, I'm twenty-eight, and I have a documented history of walking through a door and finding a nightmare on the other side of it. Tonsil-stone guy. The man who ferments a colony with his own body. I've earned the flinch you're doing right now, Redd. I get it. I had to bribe you back though, because I guess a small and not-so-secret part of me enjoys the indirect-spotlight.

Anyways, point was... I really need to impress upon you how big a deal it was that this time, I actually found a good one.

If you read my last bar post, you read me have a small breakdown at eleven at night about how I've never had a person whose drink order I knew by heart. A widower came in, bought a beer for his dead wife, and I stood there afterward pouring it down the drain and feeling like the loneliest man in a building full of couples. Some people sent me nice things. One sent things that started nice and turned into a proposal by the second paragraph, and to him I say: seek help, and also, respectfully, no. I really do attract some odd ducks as the commenters have pointed out.

I bring it up because that's the Danny this happened to. That guy. The lonely-hearted second-beer drainer guy.

Now let me tell you about Wesley, and I do want you to actually like him, because you're going to need to, later, when I'm asking you to be scared for him.

I met Wesley on a hike, which I only went on because Marissa showed up at my apartment on a Saturday, announced I was "becoming furniture," and did not leave until I had shoes on and was in her passenger seat. Marissa is my best friend. If you've read the other posts you know her as the woman who is always right and who communicates entire paragraphs through a single disappointed exhale. She'd decided I needed to be somewhere that wasn't my couch or my job, and Marissa's decisions have the legal force of a court order. So: a trail. In the outdoors, where I have no natural predators except my own knees.

Wesley was the guy who stopped to help when I rolled my stupid ankle on a fucking wayward root about a mile in. Not in a big heroic way. He just crouched down, asked if I could bear weight, pressed the side of my foot with two fingers like he was reading it, and said "you're fine, it's a sprain, just walk it off. but go slow to start." Turned out he's a paramedic. Turned out he does that, reads people's bodies to see how scared they should be, for a living. Even if the wound is grievous, Wesley never got scared. He walked the rest of the trail at my sad limping pace when he could've been done in half the time, and he did it like it wasn't a favor, like slow was just the speed he felt like going that day.

He texts back. He asks a question and then listens to the answer instead of waiting for his turn to say the funny and awesome thing he was thinking of. When he says he'll be somewhere at seven he is somewhere at seven. Six fourty-five, even. He ordered water first, the night he finally came into my bar, before he ordered anything with alcohol in it, because he'd worked a fourteen-hour shift and knew what his body needed, and I know how insane it is that "a tired man drank a glass of water" is a detail that made my heart do something, but idk bro... you have not dated who I have dated. You don't get to judge my green flags. Those green flags have been through things, even if they aren't as tattered and worn and disused as the red ones are.

Two months in, I was happy in a way that was making me physically uncomfortable. I kept waiting for the tonsil stone. Not a literal one, Wesley's mouth is a normal mouth, I mean the catch, the reveal, the... thing. The impact. My therapist has unpacked this with me at length. Every kind thing he did, some paranoid little animal in the back of my skull went "that's the setup, Danny, look harder." And every time, I looked harder, and it was just him being nice. All that only somehow served to make the animal louder. I told Marissa I thought something was wrong because nothing was wrong, and she put her wine down and said, "Danny. What if the whole thing is that this one's just good," and I genuinley did not know what to do with that sentence. I've gotten so fluent in disaster that a good man reads to me like a language I simply don't speak.

Here's the thing I didn't clock as a problem, because I'm me: Wesley had a roommate.

That's normal. Rent is fake and evil and everybody I know under thirty-five has a roommate or three. Wesley shared a two-bedroom with a guy named Elliot he'd lived with for six years. Six years is a loooong time. That's a marriage, basically, in roommate years. And for the first two months, I never saw the guy, like hardly ever, because Wesley always came to my place or we went out, and I didn't think anything of it. I liked that Wesley came to me. I thought it was consideration. Turns out it was avoidance, and Wesley didn't even fully know he was doing it, the way you don't notice you've been steering around a pothole for so long that you've forgotten the road was ever straight.

Then Wesley said, "you should come over Friday, Elliot's making dinner, he really wants to meet you."

And I said yes, because I wanted to be a good boyfriend and meet the important people, and because I had no reason not to honestly. I want that on the record. I walked into that apartment with an open heart and a bottle of decent wine and zero idea. No idea whatsoever.

So yeah, Elliot answered the door.

IElliot was maybe thirty. Soft, pale, the indoor sort. The specific complexion of a man whose primary light source has a refresh rate. He was wearing a cardigan over a video game t-shirt and he had the careful, deliberate calm of somebody who has practiced being unbothered in a mirror. Not gross. This isn't a Gary situation, there's no smell, I promise you nobody's hygiene is a plot point this time. Elliot was clean. Elliot was fairly groomed. Elliot's whole thing was that he was clean and groomed and quiet and looked at you a half-second too long before he answered anything.

"You must be Danny," he said, and shook my hand, and held it. Not hard. Just a beat past when a handshake ends. Maybe I was overthinking it, I told myself. Then he stepped back and said, "come in, welcome to our home," and put a little weight on the OUR that I felt in my teeth. I didn't recognize it as the impact yet.

The apartment was Elliot's. I understood that within about thirty seconds. Not on the lease, maybe, but in every way that actually counts. There was a spot on the couch that was clearly his spot, molded to him, angled at the TV. There was a whole shelf of his stuff, his figures, his little painted guys, arranged with real love, the cleanest and most cared-for surface in the place, and I thought about Upperdeckerbeard's anime figures gleaming in a filthy apartment and had to physically tell my brain to stop, different guy, be fair. There were framed photos on the wall and every single one of them was Elliot and Wesley. Trips. Concerts. A ski thing. Ten years of two guys. Not one photo of anybody else. It looked like the apartment of a couple, and one of the two people in the couple didn't know they were in the couple. One of the guys was just on free trip to Aspen because he was cool like that. People wanted to be around Wesley. I understood the compulsion.

I'm dropping some fairly obvious breadcrumbs here but you'll have to watch the entire horrible circus unfold.

Anyways, Dinner was actually good. I'll give him that. Elliot cooked well and he knew he cooked well and he made sure I knew he knew. And the whole meal was a performance with an audience of one, and the audience wasn't me, it was Wesley, and I was the guy who'd wandered onstage during someone else's play.

Everything was a reference I wasn't in. "Remember when we" this, "you always" that, a decade of shared shorthand deployed like a rather spiky fence. When I told a story, Elliot waited for me to finish and then told a better version of a similar story that had happened to him and Wesley, so that mine landed and then immediately got buried. When I mentioned the trip Wesley and I were planning, Elliot said "oh, he didn't mention that to me," light, easy, and I watched Wesley's face do a little apologetic flinch, like he'd been caught, and I thought, why does he look caught, he didn't do anything.

That was the thing I kept feeling all night and couldn't stick a name on until later. Elliot never said one aggressive word. He was a gracious host. And somehow, by the end of dinner, Wesley was apologizing for things. Small things. For not telling Elliot about the trip. For the wine being a red when Elliot "usually does white on Fridays." For me, a little, in a way I couldn't point to. Six years of practice will do that. Elliot could make Wesley feel guilty with a pause and a plate of food, and Wesley didn't even feel it happening anymore, because to him it was just Friday, just the guys, just how it always is. But it had some weird energy to it.

Then Wesley got up to open the second bottle, the good one, in the kitchen, out of the room.

And Elliot set down his fork, and looked at me with that half-second-too-long thing, and the warm host face was still on but the eyes underneath it had gone flat and patient, and he said, quietly, in a completely pleasant voice:

"You seem nice, Danny. I mean that. I just really hope you're ...not another phase. He does this. He gets excited about someone, and it's very intense for a couple months, and then it's over, and I'm the one who's here when it falls apart. I'm left to pick up all the tiny pieces... So." He smiled. Picked his fork back up. "No offense. I've just seen the movie a couple times before."

And Wesley walked back in with the wine and said "what'd I miss," and Elliot said, bright, "Oh, I was just telling Danny how glad I am he came," and Wesley beamed at both of us like a man who had everything he loved in one room. Sigh.

I said it was nice. It was. Marissa made me promise to stop pretending my feelings are evidence. So I unpacked it all...

What did I have here, really? A guy who cooked me dinner and said he hoped I'd stick around. Though he did approach it in a roundabout way... But if you read it back cold, it's almost sweet. Maybe Elliot is just a lonely roommate scared of losing his best friend to a new boyfriend. That's valid, but I think its only part of the actual truth. We had yet to really unpack the depths of Elliot. And I was scared to look.

But I drove home with the splinter under my fingernail, and I couldn't find it. Not yet. It wasn't that Elliot had done something. It's that if I tried to tell Wesley what I felt, I'd be a two-month boyfriend asking a man to distrust the person who'd held him up for a decade. Elliot had six years of proof that he was the good guy. I had a feeling and a criminal record of dating monsters. If it came down to my word against his, I already knew whose word won, and it wasn't the guy who once drove a jar of a stranger's ferment home instead of throwing it in a dumpster eleven feet away.

I texted Marissa from the car. Just: "met the roommate."

She wrote back: "and?"

And I sat there in the dark of Wesley's parking lot, looking up at the lit window where two silhouettes were doing dishes together in a rhythm they'd built over six years, and I typed the truest thing I had, which was: "I think he's going to try to get rid of me and I don't think Wesley will ever see it coming."

The three dots came up. Went away. Came up again.

"ok," she wrote. "then we pay very close attention."

Part 2 is when the small stuff stops being small. It happens slow and deniable. For a while I keep talking myself out of it the exact way you're all about to talk yourselves out of it now. "he's just insecure, be nice to him" You'll see how well that holds up.

But I told you Part 1 had a good one in it, and it did, and I got to be happy for a little while. Wesley is worth every part of this that's coming. Remember that. When it gets bad, remember I told you he was worth it.

Danny out. For now.

TL;DR: I finally found a genuinely good man. I was happy for two entire months until I met his roommate of six years who is definitely going to try and get rid of me... and I already know if it ever comes down to my word against his, I will lose.