One More Year Ch. 18

"Hey Caitlyn." I crossed my arms, and saw Eric pop up behind her. After all the dithering on the way there, and how annoyed I felt with myself, I wasn't in the mood to even be civil to her. "Congrats on your ranking. Twenty-four, right?"

"Thanks." She turned around and marched off, her face stony.

"Wow, nerd politics are scary." Eric chuckled as she disappeared into the house. I just shrugged. He led me to his room, and closed the door and turned to face me, a serious expression on his face. "So... I hear you've been fucking my boyfriend."

My breath caught in my chest. I knew that something like this would happen. Their open-relationship bullshit probably didn't include hookups when the other guy wasn't present. Or something like that. Of course I couldn't have trusted Nick to-

"Relax." He laughed. "I'm messing with you."

"Oh." I let out a sigh of relief, but then I began to feel annoyed. "Hilarious."

"I'm sorry." He grinned broadly. "It seemed funnier in my head."

I just shrugged, and started pacing.

"He loved it, by the way." His eyes followed me around the room. "Did you have a good time?"

"It was all right," I said nonchalantly.

"Apparently I was involved."

So Nick had told him about that part. I shrugged. "Not really. You just lay there."

He chuckled. "Nick's very talented, isn't he?"

I raised an eyebrow. "I assume we're talking about his painting skills."

"Of course."

"I don't know." I shot him a wicked grin. "He could probably learn to portray proportions more accurately."

He crossed his arms. "It looked pretty accurate to me."

"I suppose things look bigger when you're in love." I bit my lip, waiting for him to laugh.

The smile dropped off his face. "We're not in love."

It felt like I'd struck a nerve, so I didn't respond immediately. I just quietly kept pacing, walking along the wall of shelves. "Too soon to say, then?"

"Yeah, maybe."

"Maybe? What does that mean?"

"I just..." He shrugged, following along behind me now. "I don't know if I feel that way about him. He's very... different."

"I thought that's what you liked about him." I said softly.

"He's not very nice."

I glanced back at him. "Neither are you, really."

"Ouch."

I paused, and turned to face him. "Sorry."

"Yeah, me too," he said, with a meaningful look. "Really, really sorry."

I looked away, and resumed pacing. At the end of the shelves, my eyes fell on the oddball collection of items that had never matched the otherwise perfect room. It was still there. The glass paperweight that I'd given him, with the rose inside.

I felt his breath on the side of my neck as he stepped up to me. He put his arm on my shoulder, and reached over to touch the glass sphere with his fingertips. I looked over at him.

"I don't know if I ever told you this, but my mom's obsessed with minimalistic living. We always have to get rid of things we don't need. But this little pile of stuff, I always fight to keep." He sighed, and his eyes shot up to my face. "I try to hold on to things that mean a lot to me."

"Do you?" I avoided his gaze.

"I don't always do the best job."

I locked eyes with him. "No."

"I was very jealous, you know." He said. "When Nick told me what you guys did."

"Sorry." I shrugged, and broke eye-contact. "Maybe you shouldn't have an open relationship then."

"I wasn't jealous that you got him." He ran his hand across my shoulder, and around the back of my neck. "I was jealous that he got you."

He pulled me close and planted a forceful kiss on my lips, his tongue twisting its way into my mouth. There'd always been something about Eric's kisses - the taste, the mastery of it - that couldn't fail to win me over. Regardless of how I felt about him.

Nick always left a bitter tang of ashes and mint in my mouth, and his kisses felt... calculating. Perfunctory. A concession to one of the necessary components of sex. Jamie wasn't even willing to offer that much, and the only comment I could make about the taste of his mouth was that it remained a mystery.

But with Eric, there was a freshness to his breath that undercut whatever taste lingered on his lips. I could have picked it out of a line-up. And the way his tongue moved - passionate, skilful, and completely sincere. I don't think Eric was ever as honest as he was when kissing me.

He pulled back, and I studied him coolly as he pulled my shirt up, and then whipped it off over my head. It scraped me in a few places on the way, but I didn't comment. I was too busy watching him with fascination, studying his frantic speed, and the way he started to scrabble at the belt of my jeans.

Fixing my gaze on him, I reached down to grab his hands. "I've got nowhere to be this afternoon, you know."

"Right." He laughed nervously, pulling out of my grasp. "Sorry."

I just shrugged, and started to unbuckle and unzip. He took a step back and began stripping off his own clothes. They came off so quickly that by the time I was pulling off my socks, he was already completely naked. As I straightened up he crashed against me again, the warmth of his skin washing over mine as we made contact.

With his mouth fastened to mine, he dragged me over to the bed, our hands roaming over each other the whole way. For once, I had nothing to feel self-conscious about. There was no Nick there with us this time, or even a painting to give me an eerie sense of being watched. There also wasn't a sense of the strange boundaries that had been there with Jamie, that had kept me from ever fully letting go.

It was just the two of us, the way it used to be. Well, almost. This wasn't just me and Eric any more. It was me and Nick's boyfriend, me and the guy who'd gotten jealous of Jamie. Me and Jess's unrequited love. Me and Louis' brief fling. Too many things, and without a head full of tequila and my misplaced jealousy, the force of him - his touch, his smell, his heat - was no longer carrying me away like it used to.

Not that he wasn't having his effect. He was still a looming bundle of muscles with a face that made me go weak at the knees. Plus, he had fast hands and a talented mouth. His fist pumped away at my dick, and he kept taking short breaks from kissing me to bite, lick and nibble at my shoulders and my chest.

On the outside, I was a cacophony of groans and gasps as he worked away at me. I pawed at him, feeling his muscles, tugging at his erection. Even if I couldn't match his desperate, violent energy. It didn't matter though. I wanted this. He wanted me.

When he straddled me and held our dicks together to pump them back and forth in his hand, it didn't take more than a couple dozen strokes - along with the pinching of my nipples and the caressing of my skin - before I started to tense and twitch on the bed.

His heavy breathing and that look on his face told me he was close too, and when the pressure built up in my balls, and I was too far gone to hold it back, salty white ropes of his cum shot out soon enough to join mine as they sprayed and pooled on my chest and abs.

I lay there afterwards, gasping, while he absent-mindedly traced a pattern through the cum on my torso. There didn't seem to be a towel on the way. Not any time soon, not without me asking. Chivalry was dead, clearly. I smirked.

"What?" he asked, a relaxed smile playing across his face.

"Nothing..." I shrugged. "Are we going to clean this up? I don't want to drip everywhere."

"You're good." He laughed softly. "I think I've spread it around too much for that."

"Such a gentleman."

"Come on." Grinning, he hopped off the bed and held out his hand to me. "Let's go shower."

"Okay." I grabbed hold of it and carefully pulled myself up off the bed, swiftly pacing over to his bathroom and into the shower before anything had a chance to run. He flipped the water on, and once it was warm I stepped in and rinsed myself off.

He clearly wasn't out of the mood yet, though, pressing himself up against me again and starting to soap me up. I wasn't, either - between him kissing me under the spray of the shower, and the way his hand kept moving up and down my dick while he worked up a lather on me, I was already hard again.

"So." His mouth was right by my ear. "This secret lover guy."

"Yes?" I sighed.

"Promise it's not Jamie?"

I pulled away slightly. "Why do I have to promise you anything?"

"I guess you don't." He shrugged and pulled me back. "Did you really fuck him? Whoever he was."

"Yes."

"So you've fucked two guys now."

"Yep."

"You never fucked me."

I blinked. "I don't remember you ever offering."

"And if I offered now?"

I looked away, and the trickle of the shower filled the silence while I figured out how to respond. "I definitely wouldn't be ready to reciprocate."

"I know. I wouldn't expect you to." He nudged my chin with his hand, so that I looked up at him again. "I'm just asking - what if I wanted you to fuck me?"

"Do you?"

His eyes locked onto mine. "Yes."

Shit. My pulsing erection in his hand was a testament to the fact that I definitely wanted to fuck him. I could have probably worked up a resistance if the concept had seemed scarier. If it were going to be my first time, I would have had a lot more reasons to not do this with him than I'd had with Jamie.

But it didn't seem like that big a deal any more. Hell, I'd already fucked his boyfriend - with him around and without him. I didn't need to feel this big, emotional attachment to him to do something, if I really wanted to do it. Did I? It was hard to properly rationalise, with his hand on me like that. Like he was pulling at the lever that caused me to make terrible decisions.

As if aware of that thought, he slid his hand right down my shaft, drawing a groan from me. He grinned. "Do you want to fuck me?"

I was panting slightly as I nodded.

He let go. "Okay, finish up and head out. I'll be done here in a few minutes."

"Okay."

I quickly rinsed and grabbed a towel, quickly drying myself off on my way into the bedroom. I draped it over his desk chair, and went to sit down on the bed. A flash of light and motion at the corner of my vision caught my eye, and I saw a message from Nick pop up on his phone.

I didn't read it, but it felt like Nick's name was trying to catch my attention, so I stood up, flipped the phone over and took a few steps away from the bed. I'd almost had enough time to start wondering why I was going through with this, when Eric stepped out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam and marched right towards me.

He grabbed me and pulled me into another kiss, his hand immediately wrapping itself around my dick. "Sorry, took a little longer than I thought."

"It's okay." I'd lost my erection while I was walking around, but it didn't take much attention to get it hard again.

He slowly led me to the bed, giving me a gentle nudge as we reached it, and I sat down. He got on his knees in front of me, slipped my entire shaft into his mouth, and began enthusiastically bobbing away. I leaned back and groaned, and he hummed playfully. The sensation almost made me twitch.

He pulled off and looked up at me, a nervous smile on his lips. "You ready?"

I cleared my throat. "Yeah."

He reached over to the bedside table and pulled out a condom. He masterfully got it on me and had me lubed up in seconds, never taking his eyes off my face while he was busy. "Lie back."

"Okay." I shuffled more onto the bed, and lay flat, my dick standing upright like a mast.

He climbed on top of me, being careful not to press down his full weight. I watched his cock bobbing, occasionally pointing at my face, as he worked his way forwards. He straddled my hips and reached behind him. I felt his hand on my dick, then gasped as I felt myself edge inside of him, and as he gradually lowered himself onto me. He let out a low hiss, and scrunched up his face.

"You okay?" I asked.

"Yeah, I'm good. Just taking a second to adjust. I told you, I never really got into this."

Then why was he doing it? I didn't want to actually ask him, though. It was probably more important to figure out why I was doing it. And I really didn't want to think about that. I just waited as his breathing gradually eased, and his face slowly relaxed. He leaned forward, braced his arms on either side of my head, and began to slowly gyrate his hips back and forth. The 'why' of anything stopped feeling so important.

Fucking Eric definitely felt different. Jamie was about my size, and Nick was shorter and quite a lot skinnier. Fucking them had also been a lot more active. I'd felt pressed up against them, wrapped around them. With Eric, I was just laying there, and his bulk loomed over me. I wasn't hating it - I got to see his abs, his chest. Run my hands across his muscles as he rocked his hips back and forth.

Eventually, he stopped moving, panting heavily. He looked down at me and grinned. "Having fun?"

I chuckled. "Yeah, it's all right."

"All right?" He let out a breathy laugh. "Thanks for the high praise."

"Sorry."

"I'm kidding." He inhaled deeply. "Can I lie on my back? I'm getting a little uncomfortable."

"Yeah, sure."

He tumbled off of me, and once I'd gotten up he scooted to the edge of the bed. I grabbed his legs and pulled them up to my shoulders - also a bit more of a struggle than Jamie's had been. But Eric's bed sat higher, so I didn't have to bend my knees to line up the tip of my dick perfectly with his hole.

"Ready?" I asked.

"Yeah."

I gently slid in, and he groaned, looking up at me with a happy grin. I slowly started building up into a slow rhythm, pumping in and out of him as I stroked his dick. We grunted, panted and moaned, our bodies covered in sweat.

He stretched out an arm towards me, imploringly. When I leaned forward towards it, he grabbed the back of my neck and pulled me into a kiss. As I pulled away from him, he didn't let me go. He held me a few inches away from his face, and stared deeply into my eyes. "I love you."

"What?" I twisted out of his grip, my dick slipping out of him as I stepped back slightly.

He propped himself up on one arm, and looked up at me. "I love you."

"I should go." I ripped off the condom and tossed it into the bin next to his bed. Grabbing my clothes, I climbed into my boxers, and wrestled myself into my shirt. I began to try and force my still-raging erection into my jeans when he started to speak again.

"Where are you going?" He sat upright, shifting himself towards the edge of the bed. His tone was sharp. Angry.

"Home." I gritted my teeth.

He sat up, looking annoyed. "Seriously?"

"What?" I asked defensively.

"I just told you I loved you."

"I heard." I pulled on my jeans. "And it was fucking inappropriate."

"Why?"

My head could have exploded at that moment. "Are you being serious?"

"Yes." Something about the simple way he said it took me from annoyed to enraged.

"Because I'm not your fucking boyfriend, Eric." I jammed on a shoe. "You have one already, who you apparently don't even really like."

"Okay, fine. I've made some mistakes."

"That's a fucking understatement." I jammed on my other shoe. "What the hell was your game-plan here? We profess our love, you tell Nick to fuck off, and we live happily ever after?"

He frowned, and shrugged.

"Life's not a movie, Eric." I was nearly shouting as I went for the door. "And people aren't your fucking props."

"Tell me you don't love me," he said as I put my hand on the door handle.

"Fine." I turned around, crossed my arms, and gave him a cold stare. "I don't love you."

He didn't move at first, but I could see him inwardly crumple. He'd been standing up, his fists clenched, and his eyes on me. I exhaled slowly as I watched his head drop and his shoulders slacken. He didn't say anything as I opened the door and let myself out. I closed it softly behind me, suddenly too drained to feel angry.

The walk home didn't help me clear my mind. I just felt very, very guilty. I couldn't get it out of my mind. The way Eric's face had fallen kept playing back in my head, over and over. It looked like something had broken inside of him. And my words had done that.

Then there was Nick. I couldn't help but feel that whatever was about to happen between them wasn't going to be good, and that it would be my fault. There were so many things I could have done differently. At the very least I could have not gotten tangled up with the two of them.

Was this all sex was? All it was going to be? Eric, heartbroken. Jamie, freaked out. Nick, cynical and emotionless. What was even the point of doing stuff that felt good in the moment, if I was just going to feel like this afterwards. Did this ever go well for anyone?

And the one person I wanted to comfort me, reassure me that it was okay, I couldn't bring myself to even talk to. Louis would never have done anything like this. Jesus, he put up with a lot, but would even he think what I'd done was okay? I pulled my phone out when I got into my room and just stared at the screen with our messages for what felt like hours.

In the end though, I couldn't do it. I kind of hated myself, and I thought if Louis hated me - or even pitied me, or thought I was gross for just fucking any guy who offered, I wouldn't have been able to bear it. I opened my messages to Ellie instead, and sent her one.

______________[Hey]

She didn't respond for the rest of the day. I tried to distract myself, without much success. After dinner with my family, I threw myself down in bed, wishing I could have changed the past. Left Eric the fuck alone, from the beginning. Never met Nick, never done stuff with Jamie.

But then I also wouldn't have been such good friends with Louis. That thought almost made me want to talk to him about it, but Ellie messaged before I found the courage.

[Hey!]

[Sorry, I was with Gary today]

[He's working at the ferris wheel at the waterfront tomorrow. You should swing by. Keep me company.]

I groaned, and put my phone down. I could tell Ellie when I saw her, and everything would be fine. Maybe. In the meantime, I could sleep, and avoid being me for a few hours.