Page 39 of The 21-Day Boyfriend
Eric weighs up my words.
“Don’t feel like you have to.”
“I don’t.”
“So you want to do this?”
“I have nothing better to do.”
Another silence, this one longer and heavier than before.
“As long as you can do it,” I say, then.
“Do what?”
“Put up with me for another few weeks.”
Eric’s eyes land on mine, and he studies me for a moment; his gaze roams my body, making me shiver with hope and anxiety. That same gaze climbs back to my body again, with the same exhausting and dishonest slowness, before returning to my eyes. He waits for two or three breaths, then speaks, as if I could still breathe at all.
“I think I can manage.”
And it’s in that precise moment that I realise I can’t.
13Eric
“Ithink I might be in trouble.”
“What kind of trouble are we talking?”
I’ve come out with Jake for a few hours on one of the rare days I’m only working the lunch shift. I don’t like going anywhere else to eat – I always spend too much time analysing the food other people have cooked – so the most I can manage is a few beers in a pub in town.
“I went to my grandmother’s for dinner a few days ago.”
Jake watches, waiting for me to say more.
“I wasn’t alone.”
He lifts both eyebrows.
“Let’s just say I’ve got myself tangled up in something.”
“Are you trying to tell me that…?”
My guilty gaze finishes his sentence for him.
“And to think you were so against meeting him!”
“Don’t start. It just happened. My grandmother was at the fundraiser. She met him, she liked him…”
“No, surely not,” he says sarcastically. “I’d never have guessed.”
“And she wanted to meet him again, for dinner, at hers, without the rest of the family getting in the way.”
“So you had to ask him for another favour.”
“And that’s not all.”
“What the hell have you done now?”
