by Neve Wilder
Want Me
Neve Wilder
Copyright © 2019 by Neve Wilder
Cover art by Neve Wilder
Copy Editing by One Love Editing
Cover Design by Neve Wilder
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
For my newsletter subscribers who (mostly) patiently waited for each installment.
And for Dana, Joseph, and Kirk, who were there for this story from the very beginning. And quite vocal about it, too. <3
Contents
Foreword
1. Watch Me
2. Take Me
3. Push Me
4. Show Me
5. Want Me
6. Keep Me
7. Late May
Also Available: Dedicated
Also Available: Center of Gravity
Where Can I Stalk You, Neve?
About Neve Wilder
Foreword
Nate and Eric’s story originally appeared as a serial sent out to my newsletter subscribers. It was initially meant as a one-shot deal that would begin and end at “Watch Me.”
However, these guys charmed me unexpectedly, and the response to them was so enthusiastic that I kept going, dishing out a new “episode” each month until we reached their HEA.
I’ve chosen to keep the episodic structure in tact, rather than dividing by chapters, because that’s what feels best to me for their story.
In addition, I’ve added a bonus episode that I hope veteran and new readers alike will enjoy.
1
Watch Me
Just act normal, I told myself as I walked into the kitchen the next morning. With four other roommates, the small, brightly lit space was usually a zoo in the a.m., all of us scrambling around each other dumping cereal into bowls, frying eggs, or toasting Pop-Tarts. None of us were gourmands except Jesse, and he grumbled as my elbow knocked his when I passed by the stove where he was making some kind of omelet that smelled delicious. Not that he’d be sharing it with any of us, the greedy bastard.
My stomach growled as I headed toward the fridge. After a quick glance around, for a second I thought I was home free. Until I spotted him tucked in the dining nook, dark slashes of hair hiding his face where he sat at the table bent over a textbook. He had his arm curled around it protectively, a pen tapping restlessly against the top of the page. Eric. Shit.
As if he knew I’d stuttered to a stop upon spotting him, he glanced up, met my eyes, and lifted a brow. “’Sup?”
I upnodded him and wrenched open the fridge, burying my face inside it as my cheeks flamed.
It was a perfectly typical greeting between us, and I reminded myself of that as I pulled a carton of milk from the fridge and sniffed it before setting it on the counter and rummaging through the cabinet for some cereal. Any cereal. I didn’t care at that point. I was distracted thinking that Eric was watching me, but when I glanced over my shoulder to check, his attention was drilled into his textbook.
Ansel wandered in next, lanky body drenched with sweat from track practice.
“You’re stinking up the kitchen,” Jesse said.
“I literally just walked in. You must be smelling your face.”
Jesse flicked a bit of egg at him, which Ansel picked up from the floor and popped in his mouth while I dumped cereal into my bowl. My other roommate, Mark, grabbed the cereal box from me and stuffed his hand inside, coming out with a handful of Cheerios he tipped into his mouth.
“Caveman,” I accused, and he grinned.
I hopped up on the counter to eat and tried not to look over at Eric again. I’d already established that he wasn’t giving me weird looks, so I told myself to relax.
“Which pledge should we get to DD for the mixer Thursday?” Mark asked, leaning up against the island across from me. I reached for the empty bowl in his hand and dropped it in the sink next to me, shaking my head.
“I can’t go. Huge calc midterm Friday, and I’m 90 percent sure I’m going to fail.”
Movement in the corner of my eye. Eric glanced up at me, then looked down again. My stomach flipped on itself, then sank. When my cock gave a twitch, I ground my teeth and set my cereal bowl in my lap. What the ever-loving fuck?
“Dude, come on. For an hour.” Mark was my fraternity brother, the only one in the house. Ansel was a friend of Mark’s from high school, and Jesse was my dorm roommate freshman year.
“Nope. I like my scholarship too much. You should get Braden to DD, though.”
“Funbuster.” Mark shot me a finger gun that I shrugged at; then he picked up his backpack off the counter and trotted toward the back door. Ansel disappeared, probably to shower, and Jesse was sliding his omelet onto a paper plate. Seeing the writing on the wall, I scarfed down my cereal. I didn’t want to be alone in the kitchen with Eric. It was a stupid, wimpy reaction, but it was what it was.
Jesse ducked out of the kitchen with his omelet just as I polished off the milk in my bowl. I hopped from the counter, gave the bowl a quick rinse, stuck it in the dishwasher, and was on the way to the door.
“Nate.” Eric’s deep baritone cut my stride in half. I liked the way he said my name, though—the way he said anything, really. Always had. He had a trace of an accent, having spent much of his childhood overseas. Or at least that’s what he’d told us. For sharing a house, I didn’t know him that well, but he’d responded to our ad on the U’s online forum, and he’d seemed all right enough when we first met him. He kept to himself, mostly.
“Yeah?” I said it before I committed fully to turning around, and even I could hear that I sounded kind of annoyed. I didn’t mean to, it was just—
“If you need some help with calc tonight, hit me up. I got an A in it last semester.”
He’d never offered me help before, and it wasn’t like he didn’t know I was taking the course. I bitched about it all the time.
I looked him over like his motivation would become clear. It didn’t. His expression was open and polite, generous mouth pitched in a half-curled smile that seemed genuine. That knot formed in my stomach again. What the fuck was wrong with me?
“I’m probably good. But thanks.”
“I’ll be around if you change your mind.”
“Yep.”
I left, bounding up the stairs to grab my backpack. When I came back down, I went out the front door so I didn’t have to go through the kitchen again.
Upside: for once, I wasn’t nodding off in Western Civ II. Downside: it was because I was replaying last night. It wasn’t anything dramatic, and it wasn’t like I hadn’t been caught jerking off before; I had the typical embarrassing horror show of my mom almost catching me more than a few times, and Jesse had walked in on me once in the dorms. I’d busted him at least twice, and we always laughed it off.
So Eric throwing my door wide—which I’d stupidly forgotten to lock—to find me sitting bare-assed on the small couch by my bed that faced the door while I was jacking my shaft shouldn’t have been all that big of a deal. Except: I also had a finger screwed deep my ass. And then: I came all over my fist while he was still standing there wide-eyed. Maybe because he was standing there wide-eyed. I wasn’t certain, yet, and it wasn’t like he’d done anything unusual. He’d initially muttered a “Shit man, sorry” and started to back away, but his eyes lingered, sketching a quick path from my face to my crotch. I had one leg up on a little coffee table and had slouched low on the couch to get to my ass, so there was plenty for him to look at, but still, he’d seemed mostly unruffled. I was the one who came apart. He paused, just for a second, as thic
k bursts of cream pulsed from the head of my cock while I gasped through my orgasm. There was something in his expression then, a brief darkening that I could’ve sworn was arousal as he stood openmouthed at the doorway. Then he tugged the door quickly shut behind him.
After he was gone, I cleaned myself up and went about business as usual, but I kept getting the visual of him standing in that doorway, wondering what it would have been like if he’d been there the whole time. Or if he’d stayed. Did seeing me get him hard? Did he jerk off afterward? What if he’d stayed and done it in front of me? What if, what if, what-ifs on fucking repeat. What-ifs that didn’t belong in a brain primarily devoted to tits and ass, keg parties, and maintaining a GPA decent enough to keep a scholarship.
I thought I’d resolved that kind of curiosity a long time ago, but now I wasn’t so sure, and it was fucking with my head in a major way. All through class, my imagination kept serving up raunchy images of Eric jacking his meat, then through Professor Lingen’s boring-ass nasal monotone in poli-sci. Even when I grabbed a sandwich from the cafeteria and took it out on the lawn to eat, my mind was wandering, my eyes roaming over the other students walking by, playing tricks on me by painting Eric’s lean proportions over every dark-haired dude who walked past. Usually I was ogling chicks, though on occasion I’d look at a guy, really look at him, and yeah, there was the odd moment here and there that my cock gave a little twitch.
Today I ignored the bouncy-haired, big-cleavaged girls altogether and focused on the guys, studying them to see if any of them got me going. Nothing. Nada. I mean, I recognized a few of them as attractive, but none of them sent tingles zinging through my balls the way Eric had last night. So maybe it wasn’t about Eric or guys, maybe it was the circumstance? Maybe I’d just inadvertently unlocked some exhibitionist kink and it wasn’t worth working myself up into a sexual identity crisis over.
I finished my sandwich, balled up the plastic wrapper, and stuffed it into my pocket, then checked my watch. Fifteen minutes left until my next class, and then I was done. I figured I’d head to the gym after that, then home to plow through a paper Professor Lingen had assigned last minute like a jerk.
When I looked up again, I spotted Eric—the real one this time—cutting across the quad with a guy and a girl I didn’t recognize. He had a whole circle of friends I didn’t know. Some of the guys in our house knew him better—Jesse and he seemed to especially get along. He occasionally came out with all of us, but I didn’t know a lot about him beyond that he was majoring in structural engineering. And currently minoring in confusing my dick.
I studied him from behind, the way his jeans hugged his thighs and ass, the broad shoulders that tapered to a narrow waist emphasized by the slim-fit navy T-shirt he had on.
As if Eric felt me watching him, he turned a look over his shoulder, spotting me as he scanned the quad, then lifted his hand. I raised mine back. The guy he was with squeezed Eric’s bicep, and he turned away, leaning in as the guy brushed a kiss across his cheek. It was quick, simple, friendly, I guess. But a tiny current of electricity ran through me. Surely that wasn’t fucking jealousy. No. I refused to even consider that, gritting my teeth at myself and shouldering my backpack as I stood. The guy cut off in a different direction, and Eric and the girl walked into the Arts building together.
The next two days passed without any more out-of-the-ordinary occurrences, aside from the fact I was still stuck on Eric and that my fantasies had grown increasingly, dangerously vivid. I’d jacked off imagining his hand in the place of mine more times in those forty-eight hours than I wanted to admit.
When I got back to the house from the gym late Thursday afternoon, it was quiet. Ansel was probably at practice again, Eric’s car was gone, and Jesse? Who knew. Mark would be helping prep for the mixer tonight—the mixer I suddenly wished I was able to go to. Maybe I just needed to get laid. A while ago, I’d broken it off with a girl I’d seen off and on for months and hadn’t gotten laid since. Yeah, maybe I just needed to get back into the mix. If not tonight, then for sure later this weekend. Mark would be down for some barhopping and ogling, and it was highly probable a nice pair of tits and a pretty smile would cure me of all this stupid agita over Eric.
Feeling better about the whole situation, I dropped my backpack off in my room and headed to shower off the reek of sweat before making dinner and cracking down on some studying.
I closed the door behind me, got down my toiletry kit, and turned on the shower while I shaved, letting steam fill up the room. Eric’s caddy was sitting on the top of the toilet, and I eyed it as I rinsed the razor. Jesse, Eric, and I shared the upstairs hall bath, while Mark paid more for the room downstairs with its own bath and Ansel got the hall bath downstairs, which was fine with him because his track career meant he was hardly around anyway.
A bottle of cologne was sticking out of Eric’s kit, and before I could really think about what I was doing, I reached for it, tugging off the cap to sniff the spritzer. The scent enveloped me—dark and rich, masculine without being overbearing. It smelled different on his skin, though, when I caught a whiff of him walking down the hall or when he’d come into my room the other night. There was an additional layer, a kind of musky primal scent that I guess was just him.
I glanced in the mirror, catching sight of myself, cheeks slightly flushed, blond hair wild, my nose to the bottle like a fucking fiend. I immediately capped the bottle and threw it back in his caddy. What the hell was I even doing? This verged on creeper status, for fuck’s sake. I decided I’d text Mark after I got out of the shower and lock him into the weekend stat before I progressed to the really shady shit like scoping out Eric’s bedroom or sniffing his boxers or something.
The house was still quiet when I emerged from the bathroom, and I threw on some cotton track pants before heading down to the kitchen to make some grub. The contents of the fridge were dismal. I finally unearthed a frozen chicken dinner among bottles of vodka in the freezer and ate it while thumbing a quick text to Mark about the weekend.
Sure thing, man, he replied when I said I needed outing plans that included getting laid. Will see if I can rustle up a few hotties for the weekend.
Relief in sight. Even if I didn’t get laid—and there was no reason that I shouldn’t; I didn’t usually have to try very hard—dedicated female company should get my dick back in line. It had always worked before.
After I finished my meal and gave a cursory clean to the kitchen, throwing a pile of dishes in the dishwasher, I had no other viable procrastination options unless I wanted to go grocery shopping. So I headed upstairs to study.
I was an hour into it, crouched on the couch over the open books on my coffee table. I had a desk, but it was swarmed by my laptop and a bunch of other papers. My head swam with equations and derivatives, and I was considering taking a break, making a snack, then having a quick jerk, when I heard footsteps on the stairs. The bedroom door was cracked, and I could tell by the heavier footfalls it was Eric. Jesse usually ran up and was smaller, lighter on his feet than Eric’s compactly muscled physique. I caught a glimpse of his shirtsleeve as he passed by, and I let out a breath. That’s right, just keep on going, dude.
The footsteps stopped, then Eric came into view again as he took a few backward steps and paused at the door. His loud rap nudged the door wider.
“Yeah?”
He opened the door fully and leaned against the frame, arms folding over his chest. “Figured I’d wait for a verbal confirmation this time.”
I gave him a tight smile. “No prob. That was my bad for forgetting to lock it in the first place.” I felt my cheeks start to flame, but he didn’t bat a lash, just scrutinized me and shrugged nonchalantly. “Nothing to worry about.”
He eyed the books on the table in front of me and then flickered a look up at me. “How’s it going?”
I shrugged. “Not so bad. Just…tedious, I guess.”
“Cool.” He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans, glancing around my r
oom and then back at me. His eyes were an intense, deep green, pine-needle green—which was about as poetic as I got—and they might as well have been real needles the way his look got under my skin and sparked in my groin. “Right. Well, then, I’ve got a paper to work on, so…”
“Actually—” The words launched from my chest, and I hoped they didn’t sound as desperate as I felt. “—I’m a little stuck on this one thing, if you wouldn’t mind. Maybe you can dumb it down for me or something.” I knew Eric was smart, though he didn’t call attention to it or anything. It was just the quiet confidence that seeped from him. While the rest of us were bitching about grades or courses, he never made a peep. But I’d noticed in our student forum announcements that he made the dean’s list every semester.
Another one of those sexy half-smiles that he excelled at rippled along the corner of his mouth. Eric removed his hands from his pockets, one dark brow bowing upward as he sauntered forward—and fuck if I didn’t like that, that little, almost playful quirk of his brow. My dick, too.
“You don’t need me to dumb it down for you. You’re not an idiot, frat boy.”
“I can’t tell if that was a compliment or an insult, or some weird combination of both.” I scooted over on the couch to make room for him. The two of us just fit, the cushions sagging in the middle when he added his weight to it. The thing was ancient, an old, cheesy faux-leather hand-me-down from my parents’ house.
“It was more a tease.” He cut a wry look aside at me, one corner of his mouth lifting again. How he did that effortlessly sexy thing was beyond me. Did he even know he was doing it? Was it some innate gift? Either way, I was responding to it like some hungry fucking animal to the promise of table scraps.