Page 41 of Want Me

“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 wasme. 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 you 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.