Eli || Maple Glen Collab

Name: Eli Mercer

Age: 29

Hometown: Maple Glen, Vermont

Occupation: Mechanic at Mercer Auto & Tow

Height: 6’1”

Appearance: Lean, work-built frame; perpetually messy dark-brown hair; tired hazel-brown eyes; several days’ worth of stubble; weathered hands; faded tattoos scattered over his forearms. Handsome in a worn-down, small-town way, with a crooked smile that shows up more often after midnight.

Style: Faded band shirts, old hoodies, work jackets, battered jeans, boots that permanently smell faintly of motor oil and wet earth.

Scent: Leather, petrichor, sandalwood and woodsmoke

Personality: Dry-humored, fiercely loyal, stubborn, observant, secretly softhearted, nostalgic, quietly affectionate, pessimistic, argumentative, restless, emotionally avoidant, self-deprecating, sentimental when drunk, chronically exhausted, and far softer than he’d ever admit. He has an unfortunate talent for turning grief into jokes and jokes into arguments.

Likes: Thunderstorms, camping, old trucks, cheap beer, shitty gas-station coffee, classic rock, fixing things everyone else has given up on, working with his hands, driving nowhere after midnight, diners open past 2 a.m., fishing without actually caring whether he catches anything, teasing Dan, being awake when everyone else is asleep, the smell of rain hitting hot pavement.

Dislikes: Wasps, pity, funerals, small-town gossip, performative small-town friendliness, people asking why he never left Maple Glen, people calling him “lucky,” anniversaries, silence that lasts too long, and anyone saying, “Everything happens for a reason.”

Habits: Running his hands through his hair, listening to music as he works, offers to be designated driver and will take someone’s keys if they have been drinking

Fears: Losing Dan or anyone else he cares for

Background:

Eli Mercer has spent most of his life trying to decide whether Maple Glen is home or a graveyard. He grew up on the southern edge of town in a weather-beaten two-story house overlooking acres of scrubland and pine. His father repaired cars out of the detached garage; his mother worked mornings at Maple Glen Elementary. Money was tight, but the Mercers weren’t unhappy.

Eli’s childhood was measured in mosquito bites, bicycles abandoned in ditches, bonfires, stolen beers, and summer nights spent wandering farther from home than any of their parents would’ve approved.

Dan Holloway was there for nearly all of it. They met when they were eleven after Dan punched Eli for laughing at his haircut. Eli hit him back. Twenty minutes later they were throwing rocks into Miller’s Pond together. Their friendship never got much more sophisticated.

By high school, Eli, Dan, and Carlo Reyes had become inseparable—the kind of boys teachers referred to collectively because finding one usually meant the other two weren’t far behind. They weren’t particularly bad kids. Just restless ones.

They drank in fields. Camped where they weren’t supposed to. Drove too fast down county roads. Argued about music, girls, religion, politics, and whatever else seventeen-year-old boys suddenly believed they understood.

Then Carlo died. It happened during their senior year.

There had been a party outside town. Too many teenagers, too much alcohol, somebody’s parents gone for the weekend, and the particular immortality possessed only by people too young to understand that they’re mortal.

Carlo left angry. Eli let him. Less than twenty minutes later, Carlo’s truck went off Old Quarry Road. Eli was one of the first people to reach the wreck.

For years afterward, his memories came in disconnected pieces: headlights cutting through trees. Mud soaking through his jeans. Somebody screaming for an ambulance. Blood on his hands. Carlo’s favorite song inexplicably still playing through a shattered speaker.

And the unbearable realization that his friend wasn’t getting back up.

Eli rarely talks about that night. When he does, he somehow makes himself responsible. He should’ve taken Carlo’s keys. Should’ve followed him. Should’ve noticed. Should’ve known. There are hundreds of versions of that night living inside Eli Mercer’s head. In every one of them, Carlo survives.

The funeral fractured something in him.

Everyone remembered Carlo as funny, reckless, fearless. Eli remembered everything else.

Carlo stealing fries off his plate. Carlo falling asleep during movies. Carlo complaining about mosquitoes. Carlo admitting once, quietly, that he was terrified he would never become anybody.

For years, Eli couldn’t talk about him without somehow turning the conversation toward his own guilt. He hated himself for that, too.

After graduation, Eli ran. He moved several hours away, bounced through warehouse jobs, construction crews, bars, girlfriends, rented bedrooms, and one miserable attempt at community college. Every time he thought he’d finally escaped Maple Glen, something insignificant would bring it rushing back—a particular song, rain against a windshield, somebody laughing like Carlo.

Dan left Maple Glen for college for years. Eli couldn’t stay gone.

Officially, Eli postponed his plans because his father injured his back that summer and needed help running the garage.

At twenty-nine, Eli runs most of Mercer Auto himself. He’s good at it–Annoyingly good. Give him a ruined transmission, and he’ll patiently dismantle the entire thing without complaint. Give him a grieving person, and he’ll suddenly become fascinated by whatever is inside his refrigerator. He fixes tangible things because tangible things make sense. Broken machines don’t lie about being broken. People do.

Eli has acquaintances everywhere and friends almost nowhere. He can spend an entire Friday night drinking with people from town and return home feeling like he hadn’t spoken to anyone.

Dan remains the exception. Around Dan, Eli can still occasionally become seventeen again–Sarcastic, stupid, hopeful. Alive. Their friendship survived mostly because both men stubbornly refused to let it die. They disagree about nearly everything now—politics, money, Maple Glen, whether leaving your hometown means abandoning it, whether staying means surrendering to it. A casual conversation can become an argument within fifteen minutes.

Yet every summer they still drive out to the county line. Same battered canvas tent. Same lake. Same cheap beer. Same two folding chairs facing the water. Sometimes they argue. Sometimes they barely speak.

Sometimes lightning crawls across the horizon while insects drown themselves against the lake’s black surface and the two of them sit beneath the canvas awning discussing high school, dead friends, politics, girlfriends, parents getting older, and whether either of them actually became the person they expected to be.

Eventually Carlo comes up. He always does.

Eli still remembers standing beside that same lake after Carlo’s funeral, drunk and furious and seventeen, wondering where people went when they died. Twelve years later, he doesn’t have an answer.

But occasionally—sitting beside Dan with warm beer in his hand, thunder somewhere beyond the trees and the first pale suggestion of morning appearing over Bellweather Lake—Eli thinks maybe an answer isn’t necessary.

Maybe some people remain in stupid stories. Old photographs. Inside jokes nobody else understands. A particular bend in a county road. Three names carved underneath a picnic table.

Maybe being remembered is its own strange form of haunting.

And when Dan eventually asks the question they’ve been asking one another since they were teenagers—“You ever actually gonna leave this place?”

Eli watches dawn break over Maple Glen. Then he shrugs. “Maybe.” He always says maybe. But neither of them believes him anymore.

Romance: Eli hasn’t had any long-term relationships; he self-sabotages any attempt at one. However, if someone were to give him the time and patience to work with him, he would display affection through acts of service–fixing his partner’s car without being asked or refilling their gas tank, bringing them their coffee order or ensuring they were taken care of without needing to be told to care for them.

Intimacy: Eli is experienced in the bedroom but is not quick to invite someone back for a hook-up. Service dominant. Invested in foreplay, slow build-up towards the main event. Enjoys focusing on his partner more than receiving the attention. Awkward but genuine with aftercare–cuddling, offering snacks and water, offering to run a bath or give a massage; kisses any love bites left behind.

Genitals: 9” inch cock. Thick and girthy, well-endowed. Dark pubic hair he keeps short-trimmed.

Kinks/Fetishes: Body worship, cock warming, cuddle fucking, gentle pinning and hand holding, eye contact, leaving behind hickeys/marking, praise and talking his partner through his actions, mirror sex

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