“What changed for you?”
He sends me a thoughtful glance. With a small grin, he answers, “I got laid.”
I crack up. “I know I’m new to getting properly laid, and I know it’s a whole thing to say sex can’t fix things. But…having sex with someone who wants to have sex with you for all the right reasons? I don’t know. It definitely makes me feel better.”
Erik’s soulful eyes find mine again. “Really? It helps?”
“Of course it does. I don’t have anything positive to compare it to, so I needed this experience to understand sex wasn’t the problem.”
Erik nods in agreement. “My first time wasn’t anything to write home about. We’d gotten drunk and admitted to each other we were both gay and terrified. He’d had a blowjob before but wanted to see what it would be like to be fucked. He thought he might like it, but he wasn’t sure.”
“Did he?”
Erik’s proud little smile makes me laugh. “He did. It was messy and quick but kind of nice, even though we were bad at it. We knew we weren’t a love match, but we both wanted to practice things before it counted. So we kind of practiced all over Ålesund.”
I crack up, leaning over the console to kiss his cheek. “Classy.”
“The number of times we were almost caught…was not a small number. When my mother almost caught us, however, things got so much worse. She could tell what we’d been doing, so she went onto some American website aboutpraying the gay away. It was funny because we were not a religious family, but she would quote scriptures at me. Tell me what some countries do to their gay people. She told me I was not gay, and I had no choice in the matter.”
“I fucking hate people sometimes,” I say. “I’m sorry. I know she’s your mother, but—”
Erik shakes his head. “You heard what Anja called her. She wasn’t wrong. My mother was all about the humiliation. When she discovered I was still texting my fuck buddy, she made me eat dinner out of my jockstrap.”
"Fuck, that’s awful,” I say, shuddering as a hard knot of hatred for this woman finds its way into my chest.
“Yet she would still never acknowledge my sexuality.”
“How?” I ask, incredulous.
“She pretended I was doing it to be disrespectful. To test her.”
I let out a low whistle. “Damn.”
“Exactly. I started working at the docks after high school, and when she found out that I would sometimes stay and entertain sailors coming into port, she drove out there and made a scene. Called me every name in the book in front of all those dockworkers.”
“What happened?”
“My boss told her to go home, and a couple of my work buddies came up to me and told me they didn’t care. One of them offered to blow me, so I let him.”
I crack up. “Of course you did. You are such a slut.”
“Who are you calling a slut?”
I laugh. “Nacho made the same joke, but unlike you, he fell all over himself apologizing.”
“Why? It’s a great joke,” Erik says, flashing a grin.
Rolling my eyes, I ask, “How did you get to America?”
His expression goes serious as he knots his hair in a bun at the base of his neck. “I called Anja and Georg. I had some money, but they helped me buy the ticket to New York and stayed with me for a few days while I got set up.”
“That’s where you met Charlie, right?”
“Ja. I rented a place and put an ad in the paper. Charlie responded and said he was from Texas, a Buddhist, and sober, and that he was looking for a quiet roommate. We didn’t have anything in common, but I was quiet, so I had him come by the apartment, and we hit it off.”
“Wait—hit it offhow? Did you sleep with him?” I ask, narrowing my eyes.
“We shared a friendly hand job once,” Erik says, laughing at my adorable snarl, “but we kept trying to give each other directions, which didn’t really work. Charlie and I are great as friends, but we would have been completely incompatible in the bedroom.”
