Page 40 of Want Me
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, thehimnessof 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 inside 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.”