Page 51 of Want Me
As the chatter around us grew louder, I took a deep breath and focused on my plate and on the feeling of Eric’s hand on my knee. He’d stopped rubbing his thumb over my jeans, and now there was just the silent presence of his touch. Oddly enough, it was the only place on my body that didn’t feel like it was overheating or freezing.
“Okay?” His voice came low and inconspicuous probably to everyone except my dad.
I gave him a short nod. “Yeah.” Never mind I had trouble swallowing my next bite of food. I set my fork down and reached for the wine I’d hardly touched and took a good long swallow, then another until I felt my stomach settle underneath the warmth of the wine coating it. No one was fucking dying because I liked a dick up my ass, after all.
* * *
I leanedover the bathroom sink, slurping water from the faucet, then turned it off and swiped my face against my shirtsleeve before opening the door and immediately startling. “Fuck!”
Eric bit the smile forming over his lower lip and shook his head. He was leaning against the opposite wall and made no move to leave it behind. His smile ebbed as I flicked off the bathroom light and just stood there, running my hands up and down my biceps.
“Your timing was…interesting. Unexpected.”
I snorted. “Tell me about it. I wondered for a second if my dad stroked out.” I moved past Eric into my bedroom, jerking my head to show he should follow me in. He trailed behind, diverging as I turned on a couple of lamps. “It just sort of came out, and I guess I figured if not now, when? It’s not a big deal, right?”
“Depends. Is it?” Eric shoved his hands in his pockets as I walked a couple of paces to pick up the clothes on the floor and toss them toward the laundry basket. My shirt and jeans from last night were wrecked with mud stains and still damp in places.
“In the grand scheme of life? No. Or it shouldn’t be.”
Eric’s mouth twitched, almost imperceptibly, but I’d watched him closely enough to recognize the subtle disagreement in the movement. “But we’re not talking about grand scheme. We’re talking about how it feels right now. To you. Screw everyone else.” He rested against the edge of my dresser, running his thumbnail along a seam in the wood. “You didn’t have to do it at all. I like pushing your boundaries and all in a lot of ways, but that’s the one place I don’t want to.”
“I know.” He’d wanted the acknowledgment, not some proclamation, wanted to know I was just as invested as he was and that I wasn’t going to flip out and bail. I understood that. I yanked a sock from underneath the bed, then hunted for its match, finding it under the dresser, then picked up another pair of boxers and examined them before tossing them toward the basket, too.
Eric stepped away from the dresser and reached to catch me by the wrist. “Nate.” There was something so finite about the way he said my name. Crazy how he could give something I’d heard all my life new worlds of meaning just by his inflection.
With his fingers locked around my wrist, the jittery buzz bouncing around my body settled into a warm hum. Moving his hands up my arms, he squeezed my biceps and pressed against my back. The rampant beating of my heart seemed to slow with the firmness of his touch. I’d stopped asking why; it was just the effect he had on me. I let out a long breath that felt like it’d been hibernating in my chest since dinner and dropped my head back against his shoulder, closing my eyes. “I’m not freaking out. Not the way you think I am. Or, I am a little bit.” I rolled my eyes at myself, stared at the ceiling.
“Did your parents flip?”
I shrugged against him. “Not flip. They were surprised. Especially my dad. In case that didn’t come across from that zombie gape he gave me through the rest of dinner.”
Eric chuckled and released my arms to lock his forearms around my chest, instead. The feeling of intimacy without the nudity or as some precursor to fucking was foreign to me, but not unwelcome. Not at all. Eric and I were trysts and tension and smack talk, but the idea that there was a whole other dimension to us that I’d caught only fractional glimpses of when we were together was surprisingly alluring. Not that I was ready to walk through the U’s quad holding hands with him—and I didn’t even think either of us were the schmoopy handholding type anyway, but still. The concern in the way he’d wrapped himself around me didn’t scare the shit out of me like it would have early on. And right now it relaxed me.
After everyone had left, my mom, dad, and I had sat at the kitchen table, awkward party of three. I’d felt the need to apologize for catching them off guard, and for possibly embarrassing them. My mom had waved her hand agitatedly over that last bit.
I ran my hands over the forearms Eric had crossed over my chest, followed the bend of his elbows up to his shoulders, and locked my fingers behind the nape of his neck. “My dad’ll come around. He just has to get used to it.” It was almost a verbatim parroting of what my mom had said after he’d left the kitchen. He hadn’t blown up or stormed out or anything, just kept looking at me like he’d missed some huge clue about my identity over the years, like I was now a half stranger. “I mean, he’s not homophobic or…biphobic, I guess?” I laughed and pulled away from Eric to flop onto the bed, the mattress dipping as he followed me down. “Did your parents act weird about it?”
Next to me, Eric laced his arms behind his head, and I heard the thump of his shoes on the floor as he kicked them off. “Nah, not really. We weren’t exactly a traditional family to begin with. There wasn’t some big discussion about it. I just had a guy with me one day and casually announced it. Later, when the guy was gone, my stepdad told me to be safe. That was about the extent of it.”
“My dad said that, too.”I hope you’re being safe.It was the only time during the conversation that he’d gone gruff and stern, holding my eyes until I told him I was. Then he’d blinked away uncomfortably. “I think my mom thought…” I paused. We weren’t one of those families who navel-gazed out loud to each other or talked about deep life meanings, but after my dad had gone, my mom said a single name and just let it hang in the air. “She had an idea I’d messed around with a guy before.”
“That guy from right before freshman year?” Eric’s gaze flickered over me.
“Yeah.” I’d asked her how she’d known, and she’d shrugged, saying, “Just mom instinct, I guess.” And then she’d wrapped me in a hug and told me she loved me and asked if Eric was good to me. I’d sat there, thinking about that for a minute, about how the whole thing started between Eric and me, how he’d gone back to the library to get my backpack, how he’d waited for me to be the one to kiss him; his face last night, the vehemence in his voice, and the ache behind it. “Yeah, really good,” I’d said.
I rolled onto my side, propping up on an elbow to face Eric. “And then she said you’re ‘cute as all get-out.’”
“Cute, huh?” A smirk spread slowly over Eric’s face.
“I’ve noticed her sight’s been getting worse lately. You’re not cute.”
He lifted a brow. “No? Not even a little?”
“You’re a lot of other things, but cute has never been something I’d apply to you, and you can go ahead and quit looking at me like that because I’m not about to sit here and feed your massive ego with compliments.”
“But it’s hungry. It’s had a rough few weeks.” That word from his mouth—hungry—just the way he said it made my cock twitch.
“That’s your own damn fault,” I said, just to be argumentative, and then inhaled sharply as his fingers crawled over the bedspread between us and landed on my hip, an upward stroke carrying my shirt up the side of my ribs as he caressed them. “You’re not going to sway me on that, dude.”