by Amy Brent
“Come. Here,” he pointed to the seat next to him. “I think I owe you an explanation.”
With my heart in my mouth, I made my way towards him, perched on the cushion next to him, and waited for him to begin at last.
Chapter Seventeen
“What do you need to tell me?” I asked, after a long pause. He was just sitting there, staring in to space, like he was trying to hide from whatever it was that was in his head right now. I knew how he felt all too well. It was what I’d been trying to do since the first time we hooked up, in this very apartment, when I had felt that click of want for him deep inside of me that I had never been able to fully shake once it had taken effect.
“There’s a lot,” he shook his head. “I don’t know where to start.”
“How about at the beginning?” I suggested, and he finished his drink in one more gulp like he would need the Dutch courage to get through this, and finally, he began.
“Okay, so,” He sighed heavily, as though he was dredging up memories he had long since buried down deep inside him, never to be looked at again. “Six years ago, I met this woman. Maya.”
“Right,” I nodded. Was he going to tell me about another kid he had? A bunch of girlfriends on the side?
“She was working as a model and she featured in one of our ad campaigns,” he explained, and I could hear a softness to his voice that made my heart tighten with jealousy. I tried to ignore it.
“And the two of us, we started dating and I was just head over heels for this woman,” he shook his head as he spoke, as though he didn’t even recognize himself in the story any more.
“We were together for a few months before I proposed,” he went on and I tried to keep the shock from my face. I had done so much research on the company in general and Nate in particular when I had first landed the volunteer position there – how had I not heard about this?
“And she said yes, and so the two of us went off and got married in this private little ceremony,” he went on, his eyes misting over as though he was back there right now as he spoke. “And it was really good for a while. We were both doing well in our careers, both making good money, both keeping the marriage on the down-low so the press wouldn’t find out about it and drag it up every time either of us had an interview anywhere.”
He paused again, tracing his finger around the rim of his glass a few times like he would find the rest of his story in there.
“But then things started to take a turn,” he sighed. “I…I guess I wasn’t as attentive as I should have been with her. At least, that’s what she told me when she asked for a divorce.”
“What?” I gasped. The pain on his face was palpable.
“She had been cheating on me with some other guy,” he shook his head, his voice low, as though he somehow didn’t want me to hear this part. “For a year or so. And I had been so caught up in the business that I didn’t even notice.”
“Cheating on you,” I repeated after him, testing the words on my tongue. They brought back the all-too-familiar sting of what had happened with Matt and I, made it feel fresh after how well I had blurred it out in the back of my head until now.
“Yeah, cheating on me,” he shook his head. “And so we broke up. We got a divorce. That was about…I would say eighteen months ago, at least.”
“Why didn’t I know anything about this?” I wondered aloud. “Why did you keep it so quiet?”
“For one thing, she wanted to be able to move on to her new guy without any complications,” he replied, the bitterness in his voice obvious. “And for another – I just couldn’t handle the thought of everyone around me knowing.”
“Why not?” I shook my head. After what I’d been through with Matt, I could say for damn certain that I wouldn’t have been able to do it had it not been for the support of my friends to get me through the whole thing. The thought of dealing with something like that all alone made my chest ache.
“People don’t want to work with someone who isn’t a success,” he shrugged and smiled up at me, a little sadly. “Would you want to work with the asshole who couldn’t even hold his own marriage together? Most of the guys I work with, guys like your father, they’ve been in solid marriages for so long and they consider that another marker of their success. If those people were to find out about me, find out that I hadn’t been able to keep my wife – it would have changed their opinions on me, no doubt. And you can’t get that kind of thing back. That kind of good press is priceless if you can manage it, and if you can’t, it’ll send you way down on the list of people these guys want to work with.”
“So you covered it up?”
“Pretty much,” he admitted, and he finally looked up at me, meeting my gaze properly for the first time since I had sat down. “And that’s why – shit, when we met, I just wanted to have a little fun. I was sure that’s what I needed more than anything else. And you were just a booty call. I guess I managed to talk myself into believing that the best thing for me was just to hook up with someone and have a good time and try to put all that shit with Maya behind me once and for all.”
“Yeah, I feel you on that,” I nodded grimly.
“And that’s why I’ve been so fucking all over the place with us,” he continued, sounding annoyed at himself – as annoyed as I’d been at him when I had walked into this place just a few minutes earlier but I didn’t have it in me to keep up the rage I’d felt when I arrived.
“I really fucking like you, Nia,” he looked into my eyes. “And when – when I saw you again at that party, I wasn’t sure whether it was a godsend or a curse. Because I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about you since that day at the restaurant, but I knew as soon as I figured out who you were that we couldn’t do anything else.”
“Nate, people are going to know about us when I start showing,” I pointed out gently. “You can’t hide this from everyone, forever.”
“I know that,” He closed his eyes briefly and then opened them again. He looked so young all of a sudden – he was usually this big, swaggering badass, but in that moment with me it seemed as though he might go to pieces at any moment. It passed when he blinked, but I would never forget it.
“But if this comes out, I’m so worried that people will start doing some digging,” he went on. “And find out about the divorce. And that people will – they’ll figure out the kind of person I am.”
“Which is?” I prompted him. I wasn’t sure what I expected him to say but I knew I had to hear it out of his mouth.
“A fucking mess when it comes to the women I love,” he looked up at me sharply and the words caught me off-guard. Maybe it was just the hormones, but I felt for a moment like I might burst into tears. He looked away from me and got to his feet, beginning to pace up and down the apartment in front of me, like there was this energy inside of him burning him up that he couldn’t keep control of. I took a deep breath. I guessed if he was being honest with me then I should be honest with him, too.
“You know why I hooked up with you the first time?” I blurted out before I could stop myself. He glanced over at me and cocked an eyebrow.
“My irresistible handsomeness?” He suggested, and I rolled my eyes.
“Well, that too,” I teased lightly. “But…I had actually just come out of a long-term relationship. Like, a really long-term one. We were living together and all my friends thought he was going to propose to me.”
“Huh?” He furrowed his brow, waiting for me to go on.
“And when you were hitting on me that first day, I guess there was this part of me that thought, fuck it, I can’t make a proper relationship work so I should just have a little fun,” I explained. “The first night we were here, it was why I left so quickly. I didn’t want to get attached to you, or to any of it.”
He didn’t reply but he was looking up at me with this look in his eyes that told me he knew precisely where I was coming from.
“So I just…I just started hooking up with you, and then before I knew it I gu
ess I realized I actually felt something real for you,” the words were coming so quickly now that I couldn’t keep track of them, so fast that it felt as though my brain was struggling to keep up. “And then when I saw you at that gala I knew – I knew I had to be with you. I had to give things a chance between us. And then the pregnancy, and then you called it off, but those flowers-”
I stopped to catch my breath, running my fingers through my hair.
“I didn’t ask for any of this,” I finally finished up quietly. “But I need you, Nate. I know we have something and I want – fuck, I just want to see how it plays out.”
He was still quiet, staring at his hands, and he stayed that way for a long time as though he was trying to take in everything that I was telling him. I knew how he felt. My brain was still buzzing from everything he’d just dumped on me, and it was difficult keeping my head straight enough to focus on the task at hand. I stared at him intently, the only thing I was sure of through all of this being that I needed him to say yes, needed him to finally accept that whatever it was between the two of us it deserved a chance to breathe.
“Nate?” I prompted him softly, as though my words might take him by surprise. He looked up at me.
“I know what you’re saying,” he sighed. “But with the pregnancy it’s just – it’s just such a big commitment. And then your family on top of all of that-”
“My family will just have to come to terms with it,” I replied firmly. “Don’t let them get in the way of what you want.”
He took my head then, and squeezed softly, a gesture so tender and so sweet that it could me a little off-guard. I opened my mouth to say something but instead just found myself gawking down at our hands next to each other. His touch still drove me crazy, in every way possible.
“I won’t,” he promised me. “But I need some time to figure myself out, okay?”
“Okay,” I sighed deeply, even though the last thing I wanted was for him to slip through my fingers once more. “But you’ll know for sure, won’t you, on the other side?”
“Of course I will,” he assured me. “No more – no more of these games, Nia. I promise.”
“And no more big bunches of flowers out of nowhere when I’m trying not to think about you,” I teased gently, feeling a warmth spread throughout my chest. He cocked an eyebrow.
“I’ll do my best, but I can’t promise anything,” he sighed and shook his head. “Sometimes it just happens spontaneously, you know?”
“Right,” I rolled my eyes, and got to my feet; he was still holding my hand but as tempting as it was to stay I knew I needed to give him some space and time to work out how he felt.
“I’ll see you soon,” I met his gaze steadily, and he squeezed my hand once more.
“Yeah, you will,” he promised me, and for a moment all I wanted to do was lean down and plant a kiss against his lips. But I knew I had to leave. No more distraction, no more back-and-forth; both of us needed to take the time away from each other to figure out what the hell was going on between us once and for all. With one last look at him, I turned and headed for the door, my heart in my throat, and hoped to God that this wouldn’t be the last time I set foot in this apartment.
Chapter Nineteen
Two weeks. That was how long had passed since Nate and I had seen each other last. The flowers that he had sent for me had long since started to droop on the countertop, browning around the edges, but I didn’t quite have it in me to throw them out yet, even though I knew it was ridiculously sentimental for me to still be clinging on to them at all. I just didn’t want to say goodbye to them quite yet, as though they were some kind of direct line to Nate. I read the note that he’d sent with them a hundred times a day, the shape of the letters burned into my memory, as though that would be enough to hurry along his decision.
I had tried to focus in on catching up with my friends around the city, especially Patricia– she had moved outside of town for a job, but she made the trip back in to the city to catch up with me over breakfast one morning. I had been going to a lot of breakfast and lunch dates with my friends recently, because it was far more acceptable for me not to drink at them than it was any other time. I still hadn’t told anyone else about the pregnancy and I had no intention of doing so yet; I wanted to be able to exist with people who knew nothing about the ridiculousness of what was happening to me.
Patricia had known something was up, though. She always did. She sat there opposite me as I picked at my food, my appetite light thanks to the morning sickness. Nothing on the menu had really appealed to me so I had ordered some fruit and some toast and was doing my best to put them away so I didn’t look so obviously pregnant. I knew it wouldn’t take much for her to put the pieces together.
“Are you sure you’re doing alright?” She asked, for the third time since we’d hugged outside the diner that had been our regular hangover-busting breakfast spot when I had lived with Matt and spent as much time as I could with her instead of him. I nodded.
“Honestly, I think I’m just stressed about the job search,” I shook my head. “You know how it is. Not all of us can walk straight out of college and into careers, can we, Patricia?”
She grinned proudly at my jibe – I knew she was pleased as punch to be doing so well with her job, and I was pleased for her, but more pressingly I knew that talking about what she was up to at work was likely to distract her from pushing too hard on what was up with me. Because the last thing I wanted was for her to put the pieces together and figure out the problem with me.
Breakfast was fun, even if I had to flee to the bathroom to throw up when a waitress came past me with a plate with bacon on it – meat had been turning my stomach and I could hardly even look at the stuff anymore. But I was pretty sure that I’d gotten away with it for now. I returned to my apartment and sank into the couch with a long sigh, and checked my phone for the dozenth time that morning. I still hadn’t heard a thing from Nate. What the hell was he doing?
Because I had been pretty damn sure from our last conversation that the two of us were heading towards finally giving things a shot. Maybe I had been a little too keen to hear that, or maybe he had led me on without intending to, but I could have been damn certain that everything he told me was leading up to an “and now I realize that I have to be with you and that there was no way in hell I could ever be with anyone else”. That was certainly what my whole thing had been heading towards, and now that it hadn’t turned out the way I planned I felt somewhat lied to.
Which was unfair. Because I had gone over that conversation we’d had, the one where we’d told each other the truth for the first time, and had realized that I had all but told him that I had only gotten together with him because I wanted someone to take my mind off some drama in my personal life. Maybe he felt used or hurt by that. I wouldn’t have blamed him – I sure as hell would have. I had scanned every word that came out of my mouth that day, lying awake at night and trying to figure out what I could have done or said differently to get the answer I wanted, but I figured that all of it was the truth and he deserved to hear it in full. Every time my brain made another go-around, I reminded myself that if I wasn’t honest with him then we would have been starting the relationship on uneven ground, and that was just asking for trouble. No, I either wanted to be with him properly and without holding back, or I didn’t want to be with him at all. It just seemed like he had already chosen the latter option for us.
And that was driving me a little crazy. Because I was sure something had brought us together – every inch of the relationship to date seemed to have been brought together by some impossible coincidence, a one-in-a-million chance that had dumped us back together, again and again, as though the universe was urging us to catch on already and figure out that we were meant to be together. I felt as though I had already gotten to that point, and now I was just waiting for Nate to catch the hell up already and jump on board. From our first meeting when I had been sent up to his office to drop off those pa
pers, to trying to end things, to meeting each other once more at the launch event, to the pregnancy; the world had thrown everything at the wall in an attempt to get the two of us to stick together.
But he was still hurting from his ex-wife. That much was obvious, even to me. As much as he tried to play the carefree bachelor with this crazy-luxurious lifestyle and a worldview that seemed more focused on success and victory than it did on anything else, there was this soft side to him, one that he had exposed to his ex and that was clearly still hurting from the pain of her leaving him. With me and Matt, I had always been careful to keep him at arm’s length, to play-act being in love for him and for all our friends and for myself, but I had never truly fallen for him, not the way I had fallen for Nate. Nate had loved fiercely before, and it had ended in agony for him. I could understand why he didn’t want to do it again, even if it hurt to accept that.
So I tried to focus on building my life outside of him. Applying for jobs, seeing my friends – it was all practice and preparation for what I thought was inevitable, his dumping of me as soon as he got the chance. He was still hurting and still scared and I wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t want to do that all over again. Even if I wasn’t sure that I would ever stop hoping he would change his mind and finally come round to what the two of us shared together.