Chapter 11
Eric
I stay exactly where he left me—leaning against the wall, jeans still open, hair and skin a mess. My heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in my fingertips, in my throat, in my cock where it’s still half-hard and leaking against my stomach.
The room feels too quiet after the party noise. Too still. I can hear the faint hum of the mini-fridge, the distant thump of bass from Kappa Sigma three blocks away, and the soft tick of the wall clock I never noticed before.
I miss him already, so much that I’m half tempted to chase him down the hallway just to see him again.
One minute goes by.
Five.
Adrenaline fades, and it leaves me buzzing.
I push off the wall on shaky legs and tug my boxer briefs and jeans back up, wincing at the cold, tacky mess against my skin, but smiling a little anyway.
God, that was… intense. I pace to the window and look out at the dark quad, then back to the door, listening in the hallway for footsteps.
Any second now he’ll walk in with that crooked smile. He’ll tease me about how fast I came, then pull me close again. We’ll laugh about the mess, clean up together, and I’ll finally get to touch him and taste him. We’ll go slower this time, and I can learn every sound he makes when it’s just us.
Maybe I should’ve insisted we stay tangled up instead of rushing to the next step. But this feels right, and he wanted more too. I saw it in his eyes.
I glance at the door again, needing him to hurry so I can show him how much I want this. How much I want him.
Ten minutes.
I sit on the edge of the bed we were just on and stare at the door, legs twitching from leftover heat and the thrill of waiting for him.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand, and it’s pitiful how quickly I grab it, hoping it’s him.
It’s only an email notification. My thumb moves to our thread of texts anyway, scrolling back to the chocolate-pretzels fake-out and the late-night photos, and smiling at how easy it always felt with him.
The last message was him telling me he was on his way to the party. Nothing new yet.
Maybe he couldn’t find anything right away. Maybe he’s looking. That would make sense.
Right?
He wouldn’t just… leave. Not after the way he held me.
Not after “I’ve got you.”
Fifteen minutes.
The vodka haze is thinning fast, leaving a soft nausea and a growing unease in its wake. Campus isn’t that big. He could’ve run to any of the buildings by now… hell, he could’ve run to the 24-hour convenience store on campus and been back by now.
I want to text him. I type You okay? then delete it. I type Hurry back then delete that, too.
Instead I stare at the blank screen, trying to hold onto the warmth still humming under my skin. He’s coming. He has to be. This is the start of something amazing.
Twenty minutes.
What if he’s already regretting it? What if the second he stepped into the hallway the buzz wore off, and he realized how close he came to hooking up with his confused best friend.
What if he decided he doesn’t want me?
My breath comes shorter and my hands are shaking now, no longer from anticipation but from the sudden fear that I’ve ruined everything. That I pushed too hard, asked for too much, and now he’s gone.
I stand up and pace again, bare feet silent on the carpet. Every creak in the hallway makes my heart lurch, and I cave and open the door. Fluorescent lights buzz overhead, and the faint smell of stale beer and ramen noodles drifts from somewhere close by, but there’s no one there.
Thirty minutes.
I sit back on the bed and draw my knees up, then wrap my arms around them.
If he walked in now, I know I’d look pitiful, but I hug my legs to my chest because I need something to anchor me here.
The tiniest pinprick of hope tries to fight those voices in my head telling me how badly I just fucked up, but it isn’t winning.
The ache in my chest isn’t sweet anymore—it’s sharp and panicky.
The clock keeps ticking, and I keep waiting.
Forty-five minutes.
The room is too cold. I pull the blanket around my shoulders, but it doesn’t help. My chest is tight, like someone’s sitting on it and not allowing my lungs to fill. Every time I close my eyes I see his face when he left.
Dark eyes.
Soft promises.
I believed him.
I fucking believed him.
An hour.
No new messages.
No missed calls.
Nothing.
I open our texts and scroll through what feels like a lifetime of memories. The easy banter and sweet words that felt so sincere. The crossed-out lists and scribbled hearts on his notebook. The selfies I stared at as I fell asleep.
All of it feels like evidence now, like proof I didn’t imagine this.
That he wanted me too.
But he’s not here.
My throat closes, and I press the heel of my hand to my sternum, trying to push the pain down, but it only spreads. Tears burn behind my eyes, and I blink them back, furious at myself. They spill over anyway.
An hour and a half.
I’m curled on my side now, knees to my chest, blanket pulled over my head like that will block out the silence.
My face is wet and my pillow damp underneath it.
I keep replaying the night. The way he kissed me and touched me like he couldn’t get enough.
It blurs with the words I glazed over, too ready to move forward to really hear him.
“You’re going to regret this in the morning.”
“It might ruin everything.”
“Will you regret it tomorrow?”
I’d asked him then—countered his question with one of my own. I’d asked him outright if he’d regret this.
He never answered, I realize.
A wave of nausea rolls through my body.
He never answered.
Two hours.
The tears have slowed to a steady leak, and my head throbs. My mouth tastes like copper and vodka and regret. I sit up, wipe my face on my sleeve, and stare at the door again. It hasn’t moved, and the hallway outside is silent.
I grab my phone one more time, searching for an explanation I know isn’t there.
My eyes shift out the window and lock on the Stratton Tower sign near the walkway, lit with tiny spotlights I just mulched around a few days ago.
I drop the phone onto the mattress and bury my face in my hands as my shoulders shake with fresh sobs.
The sky outside the window is starting to lighten.
Gray bleeds into pale pink at the edges as dawn rears its head.
I don’t sleep.
Don’t move.
Just sit here, waiting, breaking a little more with every minute that passes without him.
The sun rises, mercilessly painting the room in soft gold. My eyes are swollen, my throat raw, and my chest hollowed out. I stare at the door one last time, willing it to open, willing him to walk through it with that gorgeous smile and an apology and some explanation that makes this hurt less.
It doesn’t.
The room stays quiet.
The hallway stays empty.
And I’m left sitting here wondering how I could have been so wrong about everything.
Saturday morning, an alert finally rings through the room, but instead of the nervous anticipation I felt before, there's only dread. My hand slaps around the bed until I finally locate the phone underneath my hip.
Dmitri (10:07 A.M.)
Hey. Last night was…
Yeah.
How’s your head?
I stare at the screen until the words blur. One text. One fucking text, and not for almost twelve hours after he left.
No I’m coming back.
No I want this.
No explanation or apology. Nothing more than a lazy check-in, like this was a one night stand he'd rather forget but is too polite to let slide.
My thumb hovers over the keyboard. I type Fine and delete it. Type What the fuck, Dmitri? and delete that too. Type You left me waiting all night and Was this really nothing to you? and delete those even faster.
In the end, I do nothing. I set the phone face-down on the nightstand, curl deeper into the blanket, and tell myself if he really cared, he’d send more. He’d call. He’s right down the hall for fuck’s sake. If he wanted to, he’d show up.
He doesn’t.
The weekend passes in a blur of silence and regret.
Sleep comes in fitful hours or not at all, and nothing feels right.
The room is too small, the bed too empty, and the clock too fucking loud.
At one point, I rip it off the wall and hurl it across the room, shattering the plastic and scattering the batteries across the floor.
At least the ticking stops after that.
It’s fucking pathetic how much I want him to walk back through that door. And I know that if he came back and offered me any sort of explanation at all to where he went, I’d accept it. I’d devour it, because the alternative is this never-ending pain, and I’ve never hurt like this before.
By Monday morning I’m empty. I drag myself out of bed, splash water on my face, pull on the first clean clothes I find, and head outside because staying in that room one more second feels like drowning.
Campus is busy. Students crisscross the paths, coffee cups in hand while laughing about weekend stories I can’t bear to hear.
My heart is lodged in my neck, so painful I’m convinced I just need to let it fall right out of me.
I approach the spot we meet at before class, dread burning like acid in my gut.
He won’t be there.
He can’t possibly be there, because this is all a giant misunderstanding. It has to be. He’ll be missing, and I’ll find out something happened. Maybe he got sick and had to sleep the weekend away. Maybe he had a family emergency and had to rush home, and lost his phone in the process.
It’s convenient, but I’d take it.
I’ll feel like an asshole for assuming the worst, but then I’ll tell him what I went through, and he’ll take care of me. It’ll still hurt, but eventually we’ll laugh about it.
I round the corner, and there he is. He’s sitting on one of the low stone walls with his legs stretched out, wearing the same dark hoodie from Friday night and his hair messy like he just rolled out of bed. There's a coffee in one hand, and his phone in the other.