Above & Beyond ✔

31. Welcome to My Sex Life

I was still on the phone with Lea when my doorbell rang. Once I opened the front door, Eric came into view, standing in the hall in his yellow shirt and worn-out jeans. His blond hair was unkempt and his grey-blue eyes twinkled behind a pair of frameless glasses. The boy smiled at me sheepishly.

"Who is coming?" Lea asked.

"Eric." I gestured for him to come inside. "Gotta hang up now."

"Okay. I want to hear everything later."

"Bye, Lee. I miss you already." I hung up and closed the door.

I texted Eric an hour ago, asking if he was still down for coming over. Besides my curiosity about how Dean found out about us, I could use his company for the evening. The confrontation I had with Dean this morning was still too loud echoing in my head.

"Thank you for coming over this late and on short notice," I said as I headed to the kitchen. "Make yourself comfortable. What do you want to drink?"

"Anything cold will do," he replied while roaming his gaze over my living room. "It's a nice place. Compact but homey."

"Thanks, but small and cramped give a better description of this place."

Eric laughed. "Wait until you see my place. You will change your definition of small. And look, you still have the luxury of having a dinner table."

I joined him on the couch with two glasses of coke in my hand. He took one and chucked it down in one go before flinching from the soda burst.

"So, were you on the phone with Lea?"

"Yep."

"How did she find her new place?"

"She is ecstatic. She got a cool apartment, and tomorrow her boss is going to send a car for her. Looks like her company is taking care of her well."

"Good for her."

"Yeah, she deserves it."

We sat there quietly for a couple of minutes, eyes fixed on the TV screen that played a stupid ad for household appliances.

"I think I screwed up. I told the boys about us going to the funfair," Eric blurted. "It just came out during the chat in the group today. Dean, of course, wasn't happy about it and started with all his overprotective wrath. He accused me of playing a game with you."

"Yeah, that's what he warned me about too this morning."

He sighed. "I know I've been dating around. I mean, I've never been in a steady relationship like he has. But it doesn't mean I'm playing our old game. Not anymore."

"What old game did you guys play?"

Eric leaned back to the couch headrest, bringing his hands to his forehead. "We did a lot of nasty stuff back in high school. We scored girls and used them as competition. Whoever got to collect the highest score by the end of the school term, won. So, we slept with as many as girls to keep our scores high. We stopped doing it during senior year, though, because we needed to focus on studying, and around that time, Dean started seeing Susie." He turned his head to me. "But I swear it's not what I'm doing now with you."

"Okay." I pulled my legs up and hugged them closer to my chest. "I told Dean we're hooking up for the summer."

"You did?"

I shrugged. "Yeah. And he went ballistic."

"I bet," he mumbled.

Our eyes were back to the TV screen. A girl screamed in a high pitch before running away from her attacker into the darkness. How smart.