The grocery bags were heavier than he'd planned.
He'd only meant to get ingredients for two or three dishes, but the market had been stocked with good things and Elliot had a weakness for produce when it was good, and then he'd remembered they were out of the coffee Adrian liked and probably needed dish soap and there were some decent-looking clementines near the door - forty minutes later he was standing at the checkout with enough food for a week and a half.
He Tetris-ed the bags around his carry-on and made it two blocks before he had to stop and redistribute. His dress shirt was damp at the back by the time he turned onto their street, and his left hand had gone numb from the handles cutting into his fingers, and he was thinking about the specific noise the apartment elevator made when it was working and the other noise it made when it wasn't, hoping tonight it would be working.
He came around the side hedge and looked up at the building.
The living room was blazing.
Not just the standard lamp Adrian sometimes left on - every ceiling light, the reading light, the sconces near the bar cart. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows the entire space was thrown into sharp, theatrical clarity: a room full of people. Men in suits that cost what Elliot made in a month. Women in dresses that suggested someone's stylist had strong opinions. They were standing, mostly, drinks in hand, the precise configuration of people who had learned at some point in their lives how to be decorative at a party.
And there was the birthday cake on the coffee table. White frosting. The candles weren't lit yet, but Elliot could see them from the sidewalk.
He stood very still.
He wasn't angry. He was something past anger - he was confused, in the way you get confused when reality and expectation diverge so completely that your brain just stalls out and looks at the gap between them and can't quite bridge it. Adrian said he didn't celebrate birthdays. Adrian had always said that. And Elliot had believed him, had adjusted, had arrived tonight with grocery bags and a quiet evening planned, and through the window the cake was sitting right there on the coffee table, and Adrian was standing in the middle of his own living room wearing an expression Elliot almost never saw on him: a small, open smile.
Adrian was smiling. At other people.
The thing Elliot noticed, with a horrible clarity, was the difference in worlds. He was standing outside in the dark in a wrinkled shirt with grocery bags cutting circulation to his fingers. The people inside were backlit by fifty thousand dollars of interior lighting, turning their champagne flutes so the light caught the bubbles. They were not in the same universe.
He'd known, intellectually, that he and Adrian existed in different worlds. He'd always known that. But there was a difference between knowing it in the abstract and seeing it illustrated in real time through floor-to-ceiling glass.
He hadn't moved. The clementines were pressing into his hipbone through the bag.
He walked to the door.
The room went quiet when he came in. Not completely - the music was still on, something elegant and low - but the social sound dropped, the way it does when an unexpected element enters a carefully managed space.
Elliot smiled. It was the smile he used at work when something wasn't going his way.
"Oh - you have company." He kept his voice light, easy, the voice of a man who had simply miscalculated his arrival time and felt appropriately apologetic about it. "Sorry to interrupt."
He set the grocery bags down in the foyer. He didn't look at Adrian. He turned around, opened the front door, and went back outside.
He found his cigarettes in his jacket pocket. He hadn't smoked in three weeks - Adrian didn't like it, and Elliot had been trying, and honestly he'd mostly stopped. He lit one now and leaned against the wall beside the door and stood in the dark and smoked and waited for the party to end.