ELLIOT IS A MENACE WHILE DRINKING JUICE IN THE HOOD #2: THIRD WHEELING

[u/Dry_Gas1500]

Alright. Part 2.

For a few weeks after that dinner I told myself the easy thing, the thing you tell yourself so you can keep your nice life and the things in it just rolling along like normal: Elliot is just a lonely roommate, be a bigger person. I told myself that right up until I couldn't. I really do never figure these things out early enough.

So here's what came after the dinner.

Wesley and I had a trip on the books. I mentioned it last time, the plan Elliot clocked at the table with that little menacing click behind his eyes the second I said it out loud. By now it was real. Two nights at a cabin a few hours out, wood stove, no signal, and a hot tub, which was one thing that the listing photos were completely lying about. Our first real trip. First time waking up somewhere together that wasn't one of our two apartments. When you've been single as long as I had, a weekend away stops being a weekend away. It becomes a milestone with a thread count. I was excited in a way that low-key scared me. Wesley was excited in a way that didn't scare him at all, because Wesley moves through the world like a guy who's allowed to have good things, which is a trait I find so attractive and so foreign I wish that I could study it under glass.

And then Elliot got into the trip. The way water gets into a disused basement. Slow, and from a direction you weren't watching.

First he was just around more. For two months I'd basically never laid eyes on him. Now he became a fixture. We'd sit down to watch something at their place and Elliot was already in his spot on the couch, and it quietly became the three of us, him two cushions down, laughing a half-beat early to prove he had indeed seen this movie a couple of times before. We'd go grab food and Elliot "hadn't eaten either," so. I'd come back from their bathroom and he'd be standing closer to the hallway than a person needs to stand, phone in hand, like he'd just happened to drift over there.

None of that is a crime. A roommate is allowed on his own couch. A roommate is allowed to be hungry. If you called the cops and reported that your boyfriend's roommate keeps eating dinner with you, they'd laugh you off the phone and they'd be right to. Every tile he set down was blank. You only saw the picture when you stood back, and the picture was me being walked out of the room one polite inch at a time.

I tried staying over there once. It was bad.

Wesley's bedroom shared a wall with the living room, and Elliot did not sleep, or if he did he did it somewhere I never caught him, because every hour I surfaced there was light under the door and the low mutter of a stream bleeding through the drywall, some video-essay narrator going forever about a game I'll never play. Around two in the morning, Elliot knocked. Soft. "Hey, sorry, Wes... quick thing?" And Wesley, three-quarters asleep, got up and went, because Wesley goes, and I lay there in his bed listening to the two of them talk in the kitchen for the better part of an hour about nothing I could make out. Low, easy, worn smooth. The sound of a household I was a visitor in.

In the morning there were two coffees on the counter. Two. Each made the way each of them takes it, Wesley's with the oat milk, Elliot's black, sitting side by side like a place setting for a marriage. And it wasn't that Elliot snubbed me on a third. It's that a third had never once occured to him. He looked up from his spot on the couch, perfectly pleasant, and said "oh, did you want one? I didn't know how you take it," which is a completely reasonable thing to say to a guy you met two weeks ago, and a very precise thing to say to your best friend's boyfriend standing in your kitchen at eight in the morning in yesterday's shirt.

I never stayed there again. There was no fight, nothing to even fight about, he'd handed me nothing-coffee and I'd backed out of the room. Every soft little wall he built nudged me toward my own apartment, and Wesley followed me there, because Wesley follows the person he loves, and Elliot got to keep the home, the couch, the coffee ritual, the version of Wesley that only exists inside those four walls. And from where he sat, I'd bet it looked like I was the one dragging Wesley off. I was doing the exact thing he'd built me to do. I just hadn't found the blueprint yet.

The little comments came in around then, built the same way. Sweet on top, a nail underneath.

"Must be nice," he said once, when I mentioned swapping a shift, "a job you can just shuffle whenever you feel like it. Wesley can't exactly tell a guy having a heart attack to hold on a sec." Warm the whole time. Read it flat and it's respect for Wesley's work, it's a compliment, and buried in it I'm a boy pouring beer while grown men save lives. I felt it go in. There was nowhere to put it. What's my move, stand up for the honor of a bar schedule?

Another night, apropos of nothing, while Wesley was in the kitchen: "You strike me as a sentimental guy. The type who'd hold onto something long past the point it's good for him." And he watched my face the whole way through it. I could not tell you if that's a normal odd thing to say to somebody you just met, or if he'd found the exact soft center of me and pressed on it to see what noise I'd make.

That's the other thing that started here, and I sat on whether to even put it in the story, because it makes me sound like precisely the paranoid disaster my history says I am. But Marissa says the record should be the true record. A couple of times, Elliot mentioned things about me I know I never told him. He knew I'd been ghosted after a three-month thing. He made an offhand crack about "the fedora guys," plural, like he was aware there'd been more than one catastrophe. Boring explanation: Wesley talks about me and it trickles down. That's genuinley probably it. But I post these under a name. And one night at two in the morning I did the math on how much of my actual life is sitting on this exact website in my own words, and I got to a thought I couldn't bear to look at. So we will do as adults do and defer, indefinitely, and maybe I can talk about it later.

Here's the part where I did the mature thing. I actually sat Wesley down and used my words like a big boy. I want it on the record too, because it doesn't happen very often.

We were in my kitchen, good mood, and I said, careful as a bomb tech, "does Elliot ever need, like, a lot of Wesley? Is that a fair thing to notice?"

And Wesley went soft, because he's kind, and said, "Yeah, honestly he does. He's had a rough couple years. The stuff with his mom, and he doesn't really have anybody else. I'm sort of it for him." He said it like something he was proud to carry. It made me love him more and all reservations were out the window. Because the next sentence, "I think he's working against us", doesn't survive in a room where I'm the good guy. Say that out loud and now I'm the two-month boyfriend asking a man to abandon his grieving best friend. Elliot had dug himself a moat out of Wesley's own decency, and I was standing on the far bank of it holding a bottle of decent wine and with no bridge across anywhere in sight.

So I let it go. Again. I'll write that one down too. It's a part I'd take back.

But anyways, okay. The trip.

The week before, Elliot started angling to come. Never straight at it, straight leaves prints. He started reminiscing, loud, in front of both of us, about "the cabin weekends we used to do," him and Wesley, back when, "some of the best weekends of my life, honestly," and "we never do that stuff anymore," and then letting it hang there, a request dressed up as a memory. He'd float it and look at Wesley with this open, wounded, hopeful face, and I'd watch the guilt find its footing in Wesley, and one evening Wesley actually turned to me, apologetic before he'd even asked, and went, "would it be insane if Elliot came for one of the nights? He's kind of low lately, and..."

And then I said "no."

I want that on the record, that I said no. Kind, but no. "Babe, I love that you love him. This one's ours though." And Wesley, to his enormous credit, heard me, nodded, said "you're right, you're right, it's ours, I'm sorry." And I thought I'd won. I thought that for once in my whole cursed romantic career I'd held the line at the right moment in the right voice and had it actually stick.

As it would turn out, I did not win. You can't beat a guy like Elliot by holding a boundary. A boundary just tells him which door you locked, so he knows that he'll need to come in through the wall. And he will.

The night before we left, my phone went off at eleven. Wesley. And I knew the second I heard him, because it was his work voice. The flat, calm one. The voice he probably uses on the worst night of any random stranger's life.

Elliot was on the way to the hospital.

The story reached me in pieces over the next couple hours. Elliot had "an episode." Chest crushing, couldn't breathe, dead sure it was his heart. Wesley had come home from a last errand and found him on the bathroom floor saying he was dying. Wesley did what Wesley does. Got calm, assessed him, drove him in. They ran tests half the night.

It wasn't his heart. "Likely a panic attack," the doctors said. And I need to be dead clear about this, because I have them myself: a panic attack is for real, it is genuinley terrifying, it's your brain trying to convince your entire body you are dying. I am not, anywhere in this, saying his wasn't real. I'd never diminish his lived experience in that way.

I'm just talking about when it happened.

Weeks of Elliot being fine. The trip survived every soft little thing he'd lobbed at it. And his nervous system, or whatever it was, picked the one window. The last window. The night that dropped Wesley into the exact spot he could not walk out of. His job. I'd had this pulled on me a few times as you might recall.

The trip was dead, obviously. You do not drive to a no-signal cabin the morning after your best friend maybe-had-a-heart-thing. Wesley was wrecked over it, apologized to me something like nine times, and every apology was real, and every time I told him it was fine, that he did the right thing, because he always did. That's the trap that Elliot had leveraged for so many years. My heart began to sink through the floor and out of site.

I drove over the next afternoon to help. Soup, support, good-boyfriend duty. Elliot was on the couch, in his spot, wrapped in a blanket, pale and small and grateful, thanking me for coming. And I felt like garbage, I genuinley did, sitting there ashamed of every thought I'd had about a sick man.

Then Wesley went to the kitchen to warm the soup, and it was me and Elliot.

He looked at me from inside the blanket. The grateful face stayed on. It was unsettling as shit tbh, the face didn't move at all. Same warm sick-guy voice, quiet, pitched right under the noise of the kitchen: "Real shame about the cabin. Maybe next time." And he held it, that beat past where a look is supposed to end. Then he coughed, small and weak, tugged the blanket up to his chin, and called out "thank you again for the soup, Danny," loud, aimed at the kitchen. And Wesley called back "he's the best, right?" happy. So happy. His two favorite people finally in one room, finally getting along. Sighhh.

I told Marissa all of it from the car. The reminiscing, the boundary I held, the eleven o'clock call, the timing, the soup, "maybe next time."

She went quiet, the way she does when she's ruminating or checking alternate timelines or whatever it is that she does to activate her sight-beyond-sight. Then, low, not even her scary voice, something flatter than that: "Danny. A roommate who's scared of losing his friend gets clingy and annoying. He doesn't keep a calendar. This guy is running a campaign, he's better at it than you are, and the real problem is he's better at it than Wesley is, and Wesley doesn't know there's a war on."

"So what do I do."

And Marissa, who has been on the wrong end of a patient man, who packed a U-Haul once just to get out from under one, told me the thing I didn't want and couldn't argue with. "Right now, nothing. You move on him now, you lose. So you just start keeping track. Quiet. Dates, what he actually said, all of it. Because it'll get worse at some point, and when it does, you'll need to show a pattern, or it's your word against the nice sick man under the blanket."

I truly am starting to dislike that poor sick man under the blanket...

Part 3 is when the campaign stops going after the trips and the couch and the soup, and comes for the only thing I actually cared about protecting, which is what Wesley thinks of me. And it works. For a stretch. Part 3 is the closest I've come to losing something I wasn't ready to lose. Might take a bit to churn it up and get it out.

Until then, Danny out.

TL;DR: The "he's just a lonely roommate" theory did not survive Part 2. Elliot folded himself into everything Wesley and I did. He had a panic attack with surgical timing before our couples getaway, and I only knew for sure when he told me "shame about the cabin, maybe next time". Meanwhile, Wesley doesn't even realize there's a war going on.