There are people who enter your life through the front door. And there are people who slip in through the side, quiet and patient, waiting for a crack. Eric was the second kind.I had known about Eric from the beginning.He was Felix's friend the quiet one, the dark gentle one who stood slightly apart from conversations as though he was always listening to something the rest of us could not hear. He had kind eyes and a slow smile and a way of appearing exactly when you least expected him that I had initially chalked up to coincidence.It was not coincidence,the first time I noticed was a Tuesday. Felix had a morning lecture that ran late and I was sitting alone at our usual study spot waiting, reading through my anatomy notes with the kind of focus that comes from genuinely loving what you are studying. I heard footsteps and looked up expecting Felix. It was Eric.He sat down without being invited, not rudely just comfortably, as though he had every right to be there, which technically he did since it was a shared campus space. He asked how my studies were going,I told him fine. He asked about specific courses with a knowledge of my timetable that surprised me slightly. I answered politely,He stayed until Felix arrived.When Felix appeared and saw us together his expression did something complicated for just half a second,something that passed so quickly I almost missed it before settling back into his easy smile. He greeted Eric,Eric greeted him back. And the three of us sat there together and everything looked completely normal.But something had shifted. I felt it without being able to name it.Over the following days Eric began appearing more regularly,At the canteen,near my lecture hall. Once, memorably, at the library where I had gone specifically because Felix had an evening tutorial and I wanted uninterrupted study time. Eric arrived twenty minutes after me with a textbook I strongly suspected he had no real need to consult,he was never inappropriate. Never said anything that could be pointed to as a problem.
He was warm and funny and genuinely easy to talk to and that, I slowly realised, was exactly what made him dangerous,not dangerous in the way my parents had warned me about,not loud or forceful or threatening,dngerous in a calm way, the way water is dangerous when it finds a crack, patient,Persistent,Certain that if he stayed close long enough, something would shift in his favour,i liked Eric,that was the uncomfortable truth not in the way I liked Felix,not even close. But i liked his company and i liked that he made me laugh and talking to him was easy in a way that talking to most people was not,and i knew, with a certainty that sat uncomfortably in my stomach, that Felix had noticed.He had not said anything yet. That was the thing about Felix, he did not come at things loudly. He was calm and still,He would look at me sometimes with an expression that had a question in it that his mouth had not yet decided to ask.I wanted to tell him he had nothing to worry about,but i also knew that saying that too quickly, too easily, would only make the question louder.So I said nothing,and Felix said nothing but Eric kept appearing,and somewhere underneath all of it, like a current beneath still water, something was slowly, quietly building.