Nine drinks gone. Elijah liked the fruity, girly drinks. He was drinking a cosmopolitan now because its what they always drank on Sex in the City. He didn’t care that it was pink.

He was shaking his head.

“No, you don’t understand.”

Orli laughed at him. Orli was only five drinks gone, but he drank slower than Elijah did. Elijah would finish with this one and then writhe around on the dance floor for a bit while Orli nursed his next five drinks with whoever came to sit with him.

“Tell me,” he said to Elijah.

“I can’t lie at all.”

“Not at all?” Orli found this hard to believe.

“Not at all.” Elijah blinked bleary eyes and shook his head emphatically.

“Why not?”

“My eyes water.”

“You cry?”

Elijah smacked the table and then stared at his hand for a bit, like he didn’t recognize it as part of his body. He lifted it up and smacked it back down again. He shook his head again.

”No, I don’t cry. They water. Like there’s something stuck in them.”

Orli leaned forward. “Isn’t acting lying? How do you act?”

Elijah took another sip of his drink. He shook his head as he swallowed. “Acting isn’t lying. It’s… it’s… telling a story.” He nodded.

“So, if you told me right now that the sky is green, you’d cry?”

Elijah shuffled his feet around under the table in an attempt to kick Orli. He connected with the table leg and, satisfied that he’d made contact, subsided. “Look,” he said, leaning forward again. “It’s not…”

“Watering. Right. Your eyes would water?”

Elijah shook his head again, the skin between his eyebrows crinkling up as he thought. “No. I don’t think so. It has… It has to be something you’d believe. Anyway.”

“So tell me something I’d believe.”

“No. I can’t. You’re…” Elijah waved his hand at Orli. “Waiting for it… expecting it.”

“Fine, sometime.”

Elijah nodded and drained his glass, tipping his head back to get the last few pink drops pooling at the bottom of his glass. “Goin’ to dance,” he said, and slipped out of the booth.

As these things go, Orli spent a good ten minutes thinking about it, wondering when Elijah would come up and try, and then forgot about it, somewhere into his eighth drink.

After his tenth, he stood to join the mass of bodies on the dance floor. He moved to the middle of the group and found Billy and Dom pressed against each other.

“Elfwich!” they yelled and pressed against him. Orli laughed and let them dance. He closed his eyes and pushed against them with his body, writhing in time with the sultry tones of the music.

He kept dancing when they moved away. His skin felt so hot and he unbuttoned his shirt, ran his hands up his chest to push the edges apart. He could see the pulsing lights through his closed lids.

He didn’t open his eyes when he felt someone press up against his back. There was a warm breath coming to his ear from somewhere below it. He felt two small hands replace his on his chest, holding the shirt open. The hands spread out, making long strokes up and down the warm, sweaty skin.

“Fucking…” a voice said in his ear.

Orli moaned and pressed back into the body behind him.

“Dom and Billy are fucking…” it said.

Orli stopped moving and turned around. Elijah stood behind him. “See?” he asked, pointing to his eyes. “Watering!” Drunken delight that his experiment had worked was plain on his face.

Orli paused a minute, taking several deep breaths before he leaned down to look into Elijah’s eyes. Sure enough, a wet sheen glistened over the blue.

About a month later, Orli found out that Dom and Billy really were fucking, but since Elijah hadn’t known it at the time, he let the lie-turned-truth slide.

Snow prevented them from doing more shooting, and Elijah knocked on the door of his trailer a few minutes after Peter called it a day.

"I didn't know," he said.

Orli waved him to the couch along the side of the trailer. "I know."

"I was just checking," Elijah said as he sat. "Because I really do... I mean, it really does..."

"It doesn't hurt the experiment, that you didn't know."

"So they really are fucking."

Orli nodded. "Looks that way."

"We should be."

"Should be what?"

"Fucking."

Orli leaned down over Lij, peering into his eyes. "Are your eyes watering?"

"No."

"Okay."

"Okay."

“Now?”

Elijah shook his head. "No, tonight. Now we should go play in the snow. Viggo's got his camera out."

"Okay. Tonight."

So they played in the snow all afternoon and Viggo took a million pictures, stopping the action every now and then so he could change rolls of film.

Elijah knelt near his trailer, cigarette in hand as he watched the others throw muddy snowballs at each other. He looked up as a shadow loomed over him and smiled when he saw that it was Viggo.

“What’s this about crying?”

Elijah sighed. “It’s not…”

Viggo laughed and took a picture of Elijah scowling. “Watering, I know. He told me that’d get you riled.”

“It’s just when I lie.”

“Yeah.” Viggo snapped another picture and was about to move away when Dominic came up behind Elijah and dropped a huge, muddy snowball on him.

Viggo stayed long enough to immortalize the look of hurt surprise before he moved on to the other hobbits.

Elijah was still thawing out in his trailer when he heard a knock on the tin door. Orli stood on the shaky steps just outside. Elijah stepped back to let him in.

“You still up for this?”

Elijah nodded. He caught Orli peering intently at his face and widened his eyes dramatically. They were dry. “I should never have told you about that,” he sighed.

“Too late, mate.” Orli laughed just after. “Fuck, I rhymed. Give me a prize.”

“What do you want?”

Orli got suddenly serious, looking down into Elijah’s upturned face. Elijah stares back, his eyes going to the top of Orli’s head, which is just a few inches down from the ceiling. “Good thing you’re not any taller,” he said. Orli didn’t answer that.

“You done this before?”

Elijah nodded, remembering Macaulay and hesitant, little boy kisses. And later, Josh and more kisses and then beyond kissing, to moans and touches and rushing completion. He’d done it before. “Here?” he asked, looking at the small couch that just might fit them both if they’re close. He figured they would be close.

Orli shrugged. “Wherever.”

“Where do we start?”

Orli moved closer, till he had Elijah trapped between the counter and his body. “How about here?” he asked before he covered Elijah’s mouth with his own.

Elijah moaned into Orli’s mouth. He came forward from the counter, pressing his length against Orli’s, raising one hand to Orli’s face as the other clutched at the shirt in front of him. The clutching became grasping, which became clawing near the end, when both of them were naked and thrusting against each other, into each other. Words were superfluous and in the end Elijah just screamed.

They were casual about it for a while, until Viggo found them pressed up against one of the prop trees on the abandoned set, tongues in each other’s mouths and well on the way to nakedness. He had his camera in hand and snapped a few pictures before the laughter he’d been suppressing bubbled up out of him.

“Those should fetch a good price on ebay, eh?” he asked as he strolled away, whistling.

After Viggo knew, they pretty much let everything go, as if Viggo’s acceptance signaled some sort of permission they’d been granted. No one really understood why they’d bothered hiding anything and Elijah shrugged. He was just glad no one had asked him directly before then, because he wouldn’t have been able to lie to them now that they all knew his give away.

Ian was the only one who expressed some concern, mostly about on set romances and endings. Elijah caught Orli’s eye and smiled, and Ian threw his hands up, dismissing them both.

Elijah didn’t know if he was in love. He was young enough that he wasn’t sure what real love felt like. He knew all about infatuation, crushes, the angsty, pubescent obsessions that one could have for another. He knew nothing of love.

When Orli started talking about Black Hawk Down, about new projects, about after, Elijah got worried. He didn’t know if he meant as much to Orli as Orli was starting to mean to him. He didn’t know how they’d keep anything going and he didn’t know if he’d be able to stop.

The day Elijah gave it all away was the same day they all packed to go home. After the last “cut!”, after the celebrations, the drinking, the crying, the hugging, after he’d left them all behind to go back to his house and pack up, Orli came looking for him.

They hadn’t made any plans for after. Orli seemed reluctant to bring up the subject and Elijah didn’t want to be the one to initiate that conversation. He still didn’t know what he was going to say. He didn’t think that Orli loved him. Macaulay hadn’t loved him. Granted, they were eleven at the time, but still. Josh hadn’t loved him even though they were both older; both knew what they were doing. No one had loved him before. Not like that.

He’d given Orli a key to his house when they first started so he wasn’t surprised when Orli suddenly appeared in the doorway to his bedroom. His bags and boxes, all he’d accumulated and used in a year and a half, were piled up near the door. Elijah sat cross- legged on the bed.

“What’re you going to do now?” Orli asked.

Elijah shrugged. “Sleep.”

“I mean now, after the movie.”

“Go home and recover. You?”

Orli sat down on the edge of the bed. “Shooting Black Hawk Down.”

“Right, good luck with that.”

“Yeah. You leaving tomorrow?”

“Yeah. But I’ll see you at Cannes.”

“Yeah.”

They sat in silence for a while, both carefully not looking at each other. Then, quietly, “Elijah, do you love me?”

Elijah dropped his head to stare at his hands, twisting in his lap. “What will it mean if I do?” he asked.

Orli didn’t raise his voice at all and Elijah thought Orli might be facing him now, reaching for him. But his head was down and he couldn’t see.

“It’ll mean that this isn’t the end. That we’ll still be together. That we’ll keep trying.”

Elijah rolled to the edge of the bed and stood, moving to the window to look out. It was a gray, sunless day. “And if I don’t?”

“Then it’s been nice knowing you, and I’ll see you later.”

Elijah didn’t answer, didn’t say anything and Orli took the silence as his answer. He moved to the door and then paused, remembering something. Elijah didn’t hear him coming before Orli grabbed his shoulder, turning him around. A thin sheen of moisture covered Elijah’s eyes.

“But why?” Orli asked.

Elijah pulled away, backed away until he was pressed against the windowsill behind him. “Because it doesn’t work this way! Because we don’t fall in love, we don’t see each other after the movie. We say goodbye and go to our homes and maybe run into each other once in the grocery store and pretend we don’t know each other so we don’t blow the other’s cover. We don’t work things out; we don’t try for relationships. We just don’t. And I can’t…”

Orli kissed him to shut him up, then pulled back. “We do. We will. I love you too,” he whispered, dropping his forehead against Elijah’s.

Elijah sighed and wrapped his arms around Orli’s waist. Orli didn’t know, couldn’t know, and he wondered how long they’d last.

[end]