by Neve Wilder
5
Want Me
I bro-fisted Ansel as he passed by with his duffle bag and walked out the front door, leaving the house quiet. Jesse had left earlier in the morning, right as I headed out for the test I was convinced Professor Lingen had sprung on us just to be a dick. Mark had left the night before. Eric, who fucking knew? His car was still in the driveway, but we hadn’t spoken much since Mark confronted us.
Nothing happened with the botanical gardens. Or, at least, they didn’t press charges. I paid for the trumped-up damage claim. Eric had paid initially, but I’d told Mark to give him back the money and tell him Merriweather had decided not to charge anything after all. That had earned me a long, hard look from Mark, and then he’d pressed his lips together and walked away.
No doubt the overall vibe in the house had been at little frosty for the past few weeks—at least between me, Eric, and Mark. Eric was hardly there. Mark and I were at odds because he knew I was holding out on something. Except I wasn’t now, was I, because that was done. It fucking hurt and angered me at the same time, and while I may have been down to beg in the bedroom, fuck if I was going to beg outside of it. I’d meant that. Eric could kiss my ass.
Except that resolution was interspersed with what felt like the hundreds of times I’d almost sought him out since that afternoon, ready to grovel, do whatever I needed to do to resume status quo between us. Not that I was sure what status quo even was anymore—in any regard. The most I’d managed lately was to keep my grades up, and that’d been a Herculean struggle, too. I drifted at the library, forgot what the hell I was supposed to be reading, and moved through my workouts like a zombie, running until my body burned with exhaustion and the promise of a dead, dreamless sleep carried me to bed.
After the door closed behind Ansel, I grabbed a protein bar from the kitchen and hoofed it up the stairs, past Eric’s closed door and into my room, where I’d left my duffle open on the bed and half-packed. I tossed the rest of my clothes in hurriedly, ready to get on the road and get home, where I could try to forget about him for a couple of days, see my old high school friends, watch football, eat like a pig, and generally pretend I wasn’t gut twisted over the dark-haired dipshit.
I slung my duffle over my shoulder and closed my bedroom door, then paused outside of Eric’s door, listening to the faint strain of music coming from inside. I rubbed at the twinge in my chest and steadied my breathing. Don’t do it. You’re done with this.
But I knocked on the door anyway because I was a fucking sucker.
“S’open.”
Eric barely acknowledged me as I poked my head in before jerking his gaze back to the textbook open in front of him. Three weeks before, we’d been in the exact same positions. This time didn’t feel much different. Lack of eye contact, impassive expression. Stalemate.
“I’m heading out. Everyone else has already gone. Jesse wanted to make sure all the lights were turned off and the thermostat turned down to 65 so we can save on the bill this month. But I guess if you’re not leaving, it doesn’t matter.” I avoided looking around his room and kept my gaze focused on the line forming between his brows.
“I’ll turn it down anyway, it’s fine. I don’t mind the cold.”
Obviously, you arctic fucking tundra. I gritted my teeth and nodded. “Happy Thanksgiving.” Shut the fuck up. I was humiliating myself.
Eric’s gaze flickered up. A longer look this time, and each place that his eyes landed on my body coiled around the hollowness in my gut and squeezed. That his effect on me was still as instantaneous as a spark of static electricity was annoying as hell. He opened his mouth, then closed it again and licked his lips, his brows furrowing and his expression going dark before it smoothed out and he said, “Drive safe, okay?”
“Same goes,” I replied, even though it sounded like he’d be staying put for the holiday. I shut the door, racing down the stairs and antsy to get the fuck out of there so I could better ignore the ache spreading through my chest at the prospect of him being alone for the entire break. Surely he wouldn’t, though. He knew other people, had other friends. He’d probably go out and…no, I didn’t want to go down avenue of thought. I’d been walking it for too long.
I threw my bag in the back seat of my Honda. Once I slid into the front seat, I fiddled with my phone, plugging it into the auxiliary jack so I could listen to some of my playlists. I scrolled through them restlessly, selecting a workout compilation so I wouldn’t be tempted to emo out with some moody depressing shit. When I looked up again to put the car in gear, Eric was standing on the front stoop, his hands in the pockets of his gray hoodie with the U’s dark purple logo blazoned on it as he looked through the windshield at me.
We stared hard at each other for a handful of seconds, and finally I rolled my eyes at myself and started to ease off the brake.
Eric lifted his hand and loped down the steps toward the car. I hesitated, half of me inclined to step on the gas and leave him like that. Then I sighed and rolled down the window.
“I can be ready in five.” He rested his hand on the roof of the car as he leaned in. “If that offer still stands.”
My blood pressure skyrocketed, and then it was quickly taken over by another pang of regret and ache and all kinds of emotional bullshit I’d been trying to avoid dealing with. It was much easier when he wasn’t so close I could see the tiny lines on his lips.
I should say no, tell him to fuck off, but goddamn, the way he was standing there like that—cautiousness written all over his face, even in his stance— was even harder to bear. “Barely, so hurry the fuck up before I change my mind.”
He nodded, turned, and trotted back through the door. Four whole days of Eric. Boy if that didn’t feel like some test sprung last second by the universe. It made the calculus exam I’d just completed feel like a joke in comparison. Formulas and theorems I could memorize. But Eric, he was a philosophy all his own, and there were no shortcuts to solving the riddle of him. My chest seized up, prickly, excited, and twinging with a weird sense of dread that didn’t belong in that mixed bag of fuckery.
Minutes later, Eric returned, tossing his bag in the back seat next to mine before he ducked into the passenger side, and the waft of his spicy, masculine scent hit me like a sledgehammer. I’d missed being close to it like that, the potency, the himness of it undiluted.
Hell, just the weight of his presence displaced the air around me, like the density experiments I’d done in grade school with blocks of wood and foam, and I felt this weird sense of self-deception that I’d let him become so huge to me. I thought of the guy I’d fooled around with the summer before college. It hadn’t been anything like this. Nothing in my life had been like this.
I’d been upset over relationships before, twisted up by girls, sure, but Eric was like this all-encompassing ache. He was a singular force, a comet that’d slammed into me and cratered out the damn core of my being. The confusion he made me feel was maddening, but nothing compared to the desire he instigated. I wasn’t even sure if that was fucking healthy. Probably not. Ask me if I gave a shit.
We spent the first half of the drive in stilted silence mingled with occasional perfunctory questions and perfunctory answers—what my mom had always called waiting-room talk, the conversational equivalent to junk mail that got tossed out. Mostly Eric was doing the asking, and obviously trying to engage, but I wasn’t into it. It was an immature response, yeah, but I wanted him to suffer the cold shoulder for a while, let him throw his words at a brick wall and feel the sharp smack as they bounced back in his face.
But eventually curiosity got the better of me.
“So why didn’t you fly out to your mom and stepdad, wherever they are?”
“Tokyo.” He kept his attention drilled through the front windshield. The intensity of focus in that look should’ve shattered the thing. “Too long of a flight for too short of a time. It didn’t make sense.”
I nodded, staring ahead at the blur of lines on the highway and biting at the insid
e of my lower lip in thought. “You said you were homeschooled. At the gym when…” I trailed off. He knew when.
I thought he might brush the question aside, but instead he laughed, and the dark sound rang through the car bitter as coffee. “Yeah.” His laughter ebbed, and his hands went up to drag down his face. “God, I suck at this.”
“At talking? Yeah, you do, which is kind of ironic since you couldn’t seem to shut the fuck up as long as my dick was involved.” I mean, not that I was any better at talking, but at least I’d fucking tried initially.
He threw me a sharp look, then turned away, staring out the window again, and I figured that was that. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him running his knuckles over the windowpane, tracing the rubber edge where the seal met the glass. “My parents traveled a lot. Seemed like we were somewhere new every other month.”
“Your dad was an engineer, right?”
Eric nodded. “He did contract work. My mom, too, as a programmer and software engineer. So we went all over the world. I loved it when I was a little kid, had no idea that wasn’t what most people were doing. I never really hung around other kids my age when I was young. It was mostly adults.” He shifted around in his seat, then let his head fall back against the headrest and closed his eyes as he spoke. “By the time my mom started getting proactive about a ‘normal’ education, I don’t know, I guess I was already weird or not properly socialized or whatever. ‘Disregarding of social norms.’” He tapped his finger against the windowpane, the way he’d said “disregarding of social norms” sounding like he was repeating therapist speak or some textbook. “Then my dad died and it was…brutal. It was fucking brutal. My mom thought something was wrong with me. I mean, obviously something was wrong with me. I was getting in trouble all the time, doing stupid shit. She sent me to boarding school to try to give me some stability. I got kicked out. She sent me to military school, got kicked out.”
“What the fuck were you doing?” I tried to keep my focus on the road, but I was equally intrigued by what he was relaying, trying to trace the enormity of it over how little I truly knew about him, and mesmerized by the casual manner in which he was tossing this out to me. Eric was weird, yeah, in his own way. In the way he’d hold your eyes a little too long or his stares felt a little too intent, in how he focused on what you were saying like the deeper meaning was written under your skin. None of my friends looked at people like that. But with how he kept up his grades and studied, I wouldn’t ever have thought of him as some fuckup troublemaker as a kid.
“All sorts of things. Setting shit on fire. Copping drugs, fucking people I shouldn’t have been fucking. My mom had no idea what to do with me. I feel like shit about it now, but I couldn’t see it then, that she was hanging by a thread, too. She loved my dad. Like genuinely loved the shit out of him. It wasn’t just one of those marriages that seems like it goes stale after a while and becomes some partnership.”
I thought immediately of my folks, of course, who seemed comfortable if wholly unremarkable in their marriage.
Eric lolled his head to one side and looked at me, the half-smile he offered more like a reflex than something real. “So when I would’ve been a junior—and that was after being held back twice—she took a two-year contract. I don’t even know how she made that happen, but she did. She telecommuted and homeschooled me, hooked up with a group of other homeschoolers. There was this collective program sort of thing.” He turned his head forward again, raking a hand through his hair. “I’d settled down some by then. Realized I was messing her up. And I didn’t want to do that. We’ve never been that close, but she was all I had left, you know?” He fell silent for a moment, licking his lips. “I’m getting off track, and all of this is starting to sound like some bullshit excuse and it’s not. This is the way I am. I don’t say the right things when I’m supposed to, and I’m fucking impulsive and I react. Sex has always been like…” Eric paused, sketching a shape over the windowpane before curling his hands in his lap. “It’s a pure outlet. It’s something I understand. It makes sense. Not always, but like 95 percent of the time. I can see your reaction, feel it, and you can see mine. I put my hands on you and I can feel your heartbeat speeding up. I don’t have to ask, don’t have to guess or interpret. It’s action and reaction. If I’ve got some guy on his knees for me, some girl. Or vice versa: if I’m sucking—”
“I’ve got the fucking picture,” I growled and forced my hands to relax on the steering wheel before I made the leather squeak.
He angled another look at me. “No you don’t. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
“You had plenty of chances to talk. You didn’t want to take them.”
“Yeah, I fucked up, okay? I’m trying to make things right. Fuck, Nate, we live in a house with three other guys. Mark’s already suspicious, and the look on your face that day when you asked about the cameras—the panic so fucking evident, the fear of being found out? That’s what it was. It wasn’t the trespassing. It wasn’t the idea of being labeled as an addict, or that the place might press charges. It wasn’t even the fucking threat all of that might pose to your scholarship. It was me. I saw that clearly as that wide-eyed fucking lost look you were giving Mark. It was me, and someone was going to find out if we kept going like that. And when it happened, you would hate me for it. You’d regret everything that happened to blow your world up and you’d hate me.” He thumbed at his lower lip and shook his head. “Fuck that.”
I wanted to tell him he was wrong. The expression on his face was tense and pained and exasperated, and I really, really, really wanted to tell him he had it backward or distorted, or that there was some equal division of the panic I’d felt that day.
But I wasn’t sure that was the case. I thought back to that moment, trying to remove my absolute blindness when Eric was around, thought back to the panic that settled in my stomach, the fear, the ridiculous turmoil that had boiled over inside me about whether I was going to be honest about what I’d really been up to. Whether I was ready. If I’d ever be fucking ready.
My heart sank into my stomach, and Eric latched on to my dismal expression.
“What does your future look like to you, man? A nice nine-to-five job? Pickup football with the boys on the weekend. Returning to homecoming every year and tailgating with your frat brothers. There’s probably a pretty wife there. Bouncy tits. Will blow you once a week. Maybe later some kids. Am I right?”
I shrugged. “Maybe. I haven’t given it a whole hell of a lot of consideration.” That was a lie. I’d been thinking about it more than a little lately, because the picture had gotten jumbled up, and the things that my mind’s eye was outlining now were a blow to what I’d always considered my identity. But I hadn’t made any decisions, and that day with Mark, well, all I knew was that I’d desperately not wanted to be forced into some revelation at that moment. At the same time, I’d also desperately not wanted to stop what I was doing with Eric.
Jesus, it was no-win, a total catch-22. And it wasn’t like Eric was even asking me to make some declaration right now, just that he’d fucking seen the moment for what it was. Even before I had.
“Fuck,” I exhaled, defeated.
Eric eyed me like he knew exactly what all those thoughts had distilled down to. “It was an experiment, right? That was all,” he ventured, echoing the words I’d told myself a hundred times over the past couple of weeks. His gaze moved over me, searching and circumspect, something in the depths his eyes that looked almost like sadness, in spite of the smile plastered on his lips.
“Yeah. An experiment,” I echoed. Like I’d said in the beginning. Fuck, the words felt so wrong in my mouth now. “So now what?”
“We try to be friends, I guess.” Eric gave a nonchalant shrug and picked up my phone, scrolling through my Spotify.
“That easy, huh?”
He punched the screen and “Bohemian Rhapsody” boomed through the speakers as he lifted his brows at me. “There’s not a thing about y
ou that’s been easy, frat boy, but I’m trying.”
“Such a martyr.” I rolled my eyes.
“Nope, just selfish.” His smile was self-deprecating, curving in amusement and because it was such an echo of the usual Eric, the one who shot sparks through my bloodstream and pounded me relentlessly, I couldn’t help smiling in return.
Friends, right, because that always worked. Whatever. I wasn’t in fucking high school anymore. Shit didn’t work out sometimes. I got where Eric was coming from, and he got where I was coming from. We could do this. We were adults.
“Wow. All that’s missing is a pie cooling in the window,” Eric said as I pulled into my parents’ driveway. Our house was a two-story colonial, and yeah, it looked very classic Americana. The yard was tidy and well-manicured because my dad was just as obsessive as my mom about it, and as I parked the car, the front door opened and my mom came out to stand on the steps with a big smile. “Holy shit, she’s even wearing an apron.” Eric gaped.
“Don’t let it fool you. She’s got some bite.” I grinned and my mom lifted her hand as we hopped out, then sketched a quick glance over Eric as he stretched. I’d completely forgotten to shoot her a text that he’d be coming, but she masked her surprise well as she came down the steps toward us. “Need help, boys?”
“Nah, we got it.”
We grabbed our bags and strolled toward her. She wrapped me in a quick hug and squeezed as she kissed my cheek.
“You remember Eric, Ma?”
“Of course,” she said warmly, drawing him in for a hug that seemed to catch him off guard.
“His mom and stepdad are still overseas.”
“Well, we’re glad to have you. Just call me Lana.”
“Like Lana Turner.” Eric smiled as she let go of him.
She laughed and smoothed over her hair. “Oh, a charmer. You just go ahead and keep that right up.”
The house was fragrant with her cooking, and as we dropped our bags in the foyer and wandered into the kitchen after her, I asked, “How many are coming tomorrow?” Because it was never just us.