Kissed My Rival, Hear His Mind novel · Chapter 11 of 32
Chapter 11: Loud
Declan didn't come back to the loft that night.
He didn't answer Eli's texts on Saturday, and on Sunday Eli ate his mother's cabbage rolls alone and told her Declan had a work thing.
"A work thing," Joan said, with her good hand on her hip.
"A work thing."
"I raised you, Eli. I know that face. It's the face of a boy who got his heart handed back in a bag."
On Monday morning Declan was at his desk by six.
When Eli walked into the studio at eight thirty, Declan was standing at the plot table in a navy suit, and he looked at Eli exactly as long as he'd look at a door.
"Donnelly. I've marked the corner section. Comments in red."
"Declan."
"The war room is booked for ten."
"I need to talk to you."
"Rule Fourteen," Declan said pleasantly, "applies to talking."
He walked away.
And Eli stood there, and he heard, from fifteen feet off, the thing he'd come to expect: Declan's voice in his head.
Only it wasn't saying anything about him.
"Total eclipse of the heart. Every now and then I fall apart. Total eclipse of the heart. Every now and then I fall apart."
It was the Bonnie Tyler song, looped, in a perfectly steady voice.
Eli followed him at eighteen feet with his coffee.
"Seventeen times thirteen is two hundred and twenty-one. Eighteen times thirteen is two hundred and thirty-four. The capital of Slovenia is Ljubljana. The capital of Slovenia is Ljubljana."
Declan was jamming his own head.
Eli stood in the stairwell door and tried not to laugh.
It was the most heartbreaking thing he had ever seen, and it was also funny.
All day Declan did it.
In the ten o'clock meeting, he recited the periodic table to himself while Godfrey talked about egress.
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