15. Eric
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ERIC
There’s a quiet rhythm to living with Amanda, and as much as I’m loving it, I’d love it more if she used the damn key.
Since she won’t, though, I make up errands, excuses, or “forget” things just to meet her on campus so we can commute back together.
I can’t stand that she’d rather wait for me elsewhere than let herself in at home.
Because my place is her home now. The whole apartment smells of her, vanilla clinging to every surface.
Her books are always in disarray, and condensation rings from hot tea mugs she never quite picks up are everywhere.
There are also purple strands of hair on the bathroom counter and on my jackets, no matter how much she cleans after herself.
It should irritate me. It almost does. Except I love every quiet, persistent sign that she’s here, stubborn and real, settling into a life with me.
Even if she’s resisting how natural this all feels.
Right now, I’m dusting her bookshelf. I despise dusting, but Amanda hates it more. And I detest folding even more than that. So I dust, she folds. Division of labor, according to the most hated house chore.
The routines I’m building with Amanda speak to needs I didn’t even know I have, filling my cup before I realized it was half-full.
It’s like Val said when she heard us meal planning—“so fucking domestic”—right before she fake-gagged and reminded us what a bad idea this is.
For someone like me, who struggled to find continuity in childhood… It’s healing.
I don’t need Amanda folding my clothes, doing household stuff for me.
I could fold and just don’t. When she noticed that I pull shirts from a canvas bag like an undergrad in a frat house, she confiscated the bag.
Now the sight of her sitting cross-legged on the carpet, folding our clothes, warms my chest. Seeing my hamper next to hers.
Her underwear. Everywhere. Lace, floral prints, stretchy Lycra.
I imagine how fucking good it looks on her.
My breath quickens. My hands stop moving.
“Eric.” She breaks the spell. “You’re dusting over the clean clothes. Can you not?”
As Amanda scolds me, she pulls a pair of boxers out of my bag. Her fingers trace the waistband, and her touch echoes on my skin. I swallow, but I still move fast and snatch them out of her hands.
She grins, eyes narrowed. “Don’t be embarrassed. I’ve folded weirder things for roommates. Val’s into—”
“No fucking way. Just leave those in the hamper, and I’ll dump them in the drawer later.” I try to resume dusting, but neither my mind nor heart is in it.
“Would you feel better if you also folded mine?”
I whip my head around at her. She’s twirling a black lace thong through her fingers, smirking. Amanda thinks she’s teasing me. Instead, I’m about to have a heart attack, because my damn brain can’t help but hope there’s at least a hint of an insinuation.
“You want your hands on mine and my hands on yours, Amanda?” My voice comes out lower and raspy. She freezes for half a second, and my hope crashes and burns furiously until her smile grows wider.
Then she flings the thong at my face and, with terrifying precision, lands it right on my head. We both stare at each other just until she makes a strangling noise—laughter she can’t contain. Now we’re both laughing, loud and hysterical.
I take the underwear off my head, bunch it up, and fling it right back at her.
She makes a quick motion to dodge it, but my aim’s garbage, and it just catches on the corner lamp.
She breaks into louder laughter and rolls onto her back, legs kicking in the air.
I sit down cross-legged beside her, my laughter subsiding, just to watch her laugh.
I want to savor, memorize, and bottle the taste of her happiness.
When Amanda calms, she shifts onto her side instead of sitting up.
Loose strands, burgundy and chestnut, spill across her cheek, and I can’t help myself.
I reach down and brush them back, feeling the thin, silky locks between my knuckles.
My fingers graze her temple, lingering even when I’m afraid I’m crossing one of her boundaries.
Her eyes flutter closed, and for a second, she doesn’t pull away or move closer.
I’m walking on a tightrope. There are possibilities on the other side if I manage the right amount of almost.
The sun filters through the blinds and hits my eyes, blinding me and pulling me back to one of the times I fell off the tightrope.
Back then, it wasn’t warm sunlight, but a fluorescent strobe. Amanda wasn’t in leggings and Crocs, but in heels and a skirt, hand in hand with Daray.
Neon lights pulsed in front of me, the flicker of the sign DRINK UP, SUCKERS blinding my eyes.
Leaning on the bar, it wasn’t just the lights making me nauseous.
It was their intertwined fingers that I couldn’t tear my gaze away from.
The squeeze of his hand on her ass. The cold bow of her head when she saw me.
She’d moved back from Milan two months earlier, just like she said she would, after I lost my shit and fell into the river. She had put me firmly in the best friend zone. Nothing romantic or ambiguous between us. All that went to Daray instead—also, what a stupid fucking name.
“Nothing serious. A girl has needs,” she’d told Diego once. But I could feel it heading somewhere in the way my stomach churned whenever they were around each other.
That night, they walked in together, Amanda and Daray, only for him to dump her and make out with some bimbo shortly after. A friend of a friend of a friend, or some bullshit.
Amanda wasn’t watching them. She’d taken a seat instead, a new drink in hand—her second—next to some other fucking guy near the pool table.
I could hear them flirting as I moved closer, still out of her line of sight.
If listening in was perverse, watching when she wrapped her arm around the guy’s was worse.
Tracking how she slid her arm all the way up his neck was sickening.
The way she cocked her head in invitation made me unravel.
I checked on Daray, hoping he’d do something, but he was about to leave with the blonde. Amanda’s eyes flickered to him; their gazes met, and they nodded at each other. Acknowledgment. Permission. Confirmation. They’d agreed to this.
“You’re just gonna let this happen?” I asked Diego, tilting my head toward the scene in front of us. Amanda’s hands wrapped around this random guy’s neck, rising on her toes, her lips moving into his ear.
Diego stared at Amanda. “Sorry to break it to you, but she’s her own boss.”
“This isn’t her. She’s spiraling. She needs someone to stop her before she does something she’ll hate.” He looked at me, puzzled.
“Look, man, Amanda is no stranger to seeing someone she wants and going for it.”
Diego’s point was clear. I needed to get off my high horse and let her do her thing. I knew why, and still… It went in one ear and out the other as I followed them to the back side of the bar, where it was darker.
Sitting on one of the leather couches, away from prying eyes, the guy’s palm stroked up and down her exposed thigh. Her drink had been refilled—the third one. I cleared my throat and, when her eyes snapped to mine, his lips grazed her cheek.
“Can I have a minute with you?” I asked.
“Is he your boyfriend or something?” the guy asked, taking his hand off her. “I don’t want problems.”
Amanda’s expression stayed neutral as she threaded her finger through the side of his hair, taking the time to fan her breath into his ear and whisper something I couldn’t hear.
The caress he gave to her thigh before he left, though, made it clear she had made a promise.
When he walked away, I deliberately bumped into his shoulder.
Some stupid macho display was the only move I had to quench my jealousy.
Once she walked up to me, we were finally face to face, so close that the warmth of her body crept into my soul. What now?
“Why did you follow me?” she asked.
“This isn’t right for you.”
Her brow arched. “You have such a double standard. It’s okay for you to do this, but I can’t?”
“You’re only doing this because of Daray. But you don’t have to be with him. There are better men for you.”
“Are there?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Do you remember that you’re not one of them, Eric?”
The air whooshed out of my lungs. “I never was. Just took longer to prove it.”
She laughed. Pain and self-deprecation edged into her voice.
“Is that the lie you tell yourself to explain what happened?” She stepped even closer, her palms gracing my arms and her fingers intertwining behind my neck.
She rose onto her tiptoes, holding on to me so tightly our chests pressed together.
“That’s not right.” It was the same gesture I’d seen her do before, only inviting me this time.
“You made a choice not to be a good guy for me.” She was drawing patterns on the back of my neck, a knife carving the consequences of my failures into my skin.
“But I don’t always need a good guy. Sometimes, I just need… a man.”
Then, with molten eyes, her lips descended slowly, decadent and deliberate.
She kissed me with her eyes open. Aggressive but unhurried, she bit my bottom lip, demanding permission.
And I gave it, gasping for her, without negotiation.
Her tongue invaded my mouth and took hostage the last pieces of my soul she didn’t already own.
I was numb and afraid that any reaction might startle her out of it. She paused, her lips still over mine.
“Kiss me. Show me you’re a man.”