“Please?” he asked again, going to his knees in front of the couch.
I shouldn’t.
“Okay.”
Fuck.
Here went nothing.
“Thank you.” Eric smiled, then turned his head to Bennie. “Would you mind?”
Bennie gave Eric a huge grin. “What? And miss you groveling? Dude. I’ve been waiting for this moment for months. And now you want me to go?”
“Yes.”
Bennie rolled his eyes, smirk still firmly in place. “You owe me.”
Eric didn’t even look at him, just showed him the finger.
When we were finally alone, Eric sat on the couch next to me, his hands in his lap, fiddling with the strings of his sweatpants, eyes darting around the room, looking anywhere, just not at me.
“Uhm… do you want me to start at the beginning, or do you have questions you want me to answer first?” he finally asked, voice tight.
It was a good question.
I just didn’t have an answer.
“Just tell me everything.”
Eric nodded. “Okay. But please listen until I’m done, okay? Because parts of it will probably sound bad.”
Perfect. Just perfect.
“It all started five years ago.”
“Wait, what?”
Eric gave me a flat look. “That’s what I meant.”
I closed my mouth, but my mind was already racing.
Fiveyearsago?
“I got a glimpse of you during your freshman orientation,” Eric continued, then quickly added. “I didn’t stalk you back then or anything. I just… that’s when I noticed you for the first time. You piqued my interest, but when I realized you were barely eighteen, I uh, obviously didn’t ask you out. You were too young. But I saw you here and there. At a pub with your friends, on campus. Nothing out of the ordinary. I didn’t even know your name. But after more than two years of running into you and thinking, ‘Wow, he’s cute,’ I was ready to actually talk to you. You weren’t eighteen anymore, and it felt less predatory to me.”
I huffed out a laugh.
Good to know that a five-year age gap had felt too big for him when I’d been eighteen but stalking me when I was twenty-three was perfectly fine.
“I know how that sounds.” He scratched the back of his neck and gave me a wry smile. “Anyway. I knew you regularly visited that pub… uhm… the one that closed a year ago? A friend of mine, Winston, liked to go there, and I’d seen you a couple of times. I planned on asking you out the next time I saw you, but then,”—he gestured at himself—“the whole vampire thing happened.”
Holy shit.
He’d wanted to ask me out… three years ago?
My mind kinda hurt trying to wrap around that fact. What did that mean?
“I need you to know that I never stalked you when I was human, okay? I didn’t even have the urge to. It was just…after.”
