by Krista Holt
“You can take me to my apartment. That’s it,” I declare as soon as he buckles his seatbelt.
He looks over at me, and shakes his head gently.
I turn away, staring out the window. Silently, he drives in the direction of my apartment, and it’s not completely lost on me that he seems to know exactly where that is, without being told.
CHAPTER 14
Nic
She hasn’t said a word since we left, and I hate it.
I’d rather she lecture me or yell. That’s easier to take than her silence. When the words run out of her, at least I know where I stand.
“Are we going to talk?” I glance over at her. “Or are you going to freeze me out for the duration of the ride?”
“I think that’s the least you deserve for what you did to me.”
I swallow my words, focusing on getting to her place where I can finally explain. I need her to listen. She has to understand, and right now, trying to do two things at once isn’t putting me in a position to win her over.
My foot leans heavy on the accelerator, passing car after car. If she notices she doesn’t say anything, staying quiet until I pull up in front of her apartment building.
“We’re here. You have five minutes.” She leans against the window, shifting her body toward me.
I shut the car off, listening to the engine hiss softly as it cools. “This might take longer than that. Can we go up?”
“No. Becca will be home in a few minutes, and you’re not her favorite person.” There’s another pause between us. “This is the part where you explain yourself, Nic.” Her eyes meet mine, and she’s unable to hide the hesitation . . . the hurt.
I stare at her, suddenly at a loss for words. She’s here, and I can’t speak. I need to explain. I have to start somewhere. It’s sure not going to be at the beginning. I can’t share that, not yet, so I pick somewhere in the middle.
“My father had a heart attack.”
She inhales sharply. “Is he . . .”
“He’s alive.” I reach over and grab her hand, feeling her pulse race against my thumb.
She rubs her forehead with her other hand as her mind tries to unravel the truth from the tangled knot of my actions. “Wait—why would you disappear over something like that?” She tugs her hand away from me.
“That’s more difficult to explain.”
“Nic!” Her animosity rises a few degrees.
I take a deep breath. Things between us are so precarious; one wrong word could end it all. I need to pick my words carefully, for many reasons. “Gimme me a second.”
“You had eighteen months.”
I lean over the console and gently take her face in my hands. “I am sorry. I should have never done that.”
“You left me. Without a word. Without an explanation.”
I close my eyes, bracing against the emotions rioting through my body. The hurt in her voice is lethal. As much as I like to pretend nothing and no one gets to me, she does.
That’s why I couldn’t bring myself to tell her, to her face, that I was leaving. I never could have walked away.
“Reagan, leaving you was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
“Why?” she cries. “Why did you do it?”
“I had to take care of some things for my family.”
“So you just left, you couldn’t tell me that?”
“Let me get this out, and then you can yell at me.” I smile half-heartedly, dropping my hands from her face.
“Fine, continue.” She retreats as soon as I let her go, pressing herself against the door.
“My family . . . is hard to explain to someone on the outside. Loyalty is important to them.” You come when you’re called. No exceptions.
“I don’t understand.” She sighs. “Who was on the phone that night?”
“My mother. She asked me to come back to New York.”
Silence stretches between us for the briefest of minutes, and then a pained gasp leaves her lips. “You knew.” Her voice stings with accusation. “You knew what you were going to do when you left me at the dorm that night, didn’t you?”
My guilt-ridden silence screams louder than any sentence ever could.
“I can’t believe you,” she cries. “Did you even think about what you were doing to me?”
“Of course I did. It was all I thought about for days.”
“Did you? Did you? Do you know how many nights I cried myself to sleep after you left? Let’s forget about the days I couldn’t stop crying. What about how many hours I spent wondering what I could have possibly done, analyzing every conversation we’d had that last night? Months spent wracking my brain, trying to figure out why, how, you could have possibly just left like that.” She draws a deep breath, wiping at her eyes. “You can’t possibly know, because you weren’t there.”
Her words rip me apart. I wish I would have known. From what I was told, she didn’t seem that upset, but even knowing the truth now, I don’t know what I could have done differently. Still, her tears are hard to take.
“Reagan,” I say roughly.
“You broke me, Nic.” My gaze snaps back to her. “And I had to pick up the pieces, by myself. Without you.”
“I never meant for that to happen. Believe me, hurting you is like hurting myself.”
She takes a deep breath. “Nothing you’ve told me explains why you’re here, now. What do you want from me?”
“I want you to forgive me, and I want you back.”
She shakes her head, and her dark hair falls forward, shielding her face from me. I reach over and tuck some of it behind her ear.
“Why didn’t you answer any of my calls? Any one of my hundreds of calls?”
“I couldn’t.”
“Why?” Her eyes meet mine.
“It was hard enough to leave you. I couldn’t handle hearing your voice, too.”
I slide my hand down the back of her neck, running my thumb over her skin. “I am sorry, but I can’t give you a better explanation than that.”
I can’t tell her that my family knows nothing about her, and that I kept it that way on purpose, to protect her. It’s why I left the way I did. My only option was a clean break. I couldn’t be in touch with her, taking her phone calls or texting her, without someone picking up on it.
My father likes to be in the know on everything and everybody. Knowing their home life, their problems, and their strengths helps him keep tabs on the business. He says it helps him know which way trouble is coming from, and I wasn’t about to let him see Reagan as a distraction. Whether she believes it or not, I left to keep her safe.
My hand brushes underneath her jaw. “I tried to explain through the notes, through the gift—”
“I burned your notes,” she interrupts me, tilting her chin up and out of my grasp. “I almost pawned the bracelet, too.”
“I’m glad you didn’t,” I say carefully.
I had tried to balance my words on those scraps of paper. Straddling the line between reassurance and explanation, not wanting to endanger her but trying to explain I wasn’t gone for good. It clearly wasn’t good enough.
“Tell me what I have to do. Tell me how to fix this.”
“I don’t know that you can.”
“You know I don’t give up easily.”
“This isn’t about persistence.” She sighs, hands rubbing at her forehead. “This is about something bigger. I don’t know if you’re telling me the truth or if I can trust you. Not to mention, I don’t know if I even want to do this again.”
I sit there, letting her work through it aloud. She can talk a problem around until she’s blue in the face, even when the solution is staring her right in the face. Which it is this time—I’m not giving her up.
“I need to think about this,” she says.
“No, Reagan. I’m not going to give you the chance to talk yourself out of this.”
“This being what?” she snaps.
“You know,” I give a little bi
t of that anger back, “you’ve had the answer for months. It should be on your wrist as a reminder.”
Her mouth parts slightly.
“I’m yours. Do with me what you want, but this,” I gesture to her, then back to me, “is not over. It’ll never be over. You’re it for me. I want no one else.”
She’s silent. Lips still parted as she struggles to put her thoughts in order.
“Say something.”
“I can’t do this now.” She grabs her purse off of the floorboard and shoves the door open, bailing out of the car.
Some things never change. Always running. I throw open my own door and follow her. “Reagan, you know I’ll chase you. Is that what you want?”
She spins around. “No, I want you to leave me alone.”
“That was never a part of our deal, sweetheart.”
She softens momentarily at the term of endearment, and then it’s gone. “Well, then, deal’s off,” she says sharply. “Not that I need to call it off—you did that a long time ago.”
Did nothing I say sink in? “Reagan—”
She cuts me off with a swipe of her hand through the air. “I need some time to wrap my head around this.”
“You know I’m not going to quit,” I reply. “If anything, you know that. I got you to say yes once before. I can do it again. I’m not adverse to groveling.”
“You’re not listening to me.” She sighs exasperatedly.
Oh I am. I just don’t like what she’s saying.
I approach her, resting my hands on either side of her delicate neck. “I am, but you’re forgetting that I know you. You’re going to run from this if I let you. You want to punish me for leaving you, fine. Do it. I’m not giving you space, though. It’s not going to happen.”
Her blue eyes blaze with anger. I stare back, waiting for her next move, pretending I can’t feel her heart racing underneath my hands. I’m tempted to kiss her again, to remind her of how we’ve always reacted to the other. But her eyes drop to the ground between us.
“It’s late,” she says softly. “I’m tired.”
It goes against my gut instinct, but I let her think I believe her lie. “Fine. Let me walk you up.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” She carefully extricates herself from my embrace. The cold air rushes in, filling the void where her warm body was. “Goodnight, Nic.”
I let her go, watching as she walks toward her building. She pulls the door open and pauses, looking back over her shoulder.
She’s not immune to me.
The tension in my shoulders eases. I can work with that.
CHAPTER 15
Reagan
I wander around my kitchen, trying to find a corkscrew. We have like twenty. It shouldn’t be this hard to find one.
All I want is a glass of wine, but in the last fifteen minutes, I’ve managed to break a wine glass, almost knock the bottle off the counter, and hit my hip bone on an open drawer hard enough to leave a bruise.
“There you are, you sneaky bastard.” I grab it from its hiding spot in the back of our junk drawer. Carefully uncorking the wine, I pour myself a glass. Success.
I take sip, only to spill the red wine down the front of my white shirt. “Damn it!”
I slam the glass down, and the wine to splashes over the rim, making an even bigger mess. “Get it together,” I grumble to myself, grabbing some paper towels to clean the spill up.
“Everything all right in there?” Becca leans against the doorframe, holding a coat in her hands.
“Just fine.” I wipe up the counter, and toss the soaking towels in the trash.
“Okay . . . then is everything all right with you? You’ve been storming around here for the last two days, slamming doors and cabinets. What’s going on?”
I groan, knowing I’ve been in a foul mood ever since Nic dropped me off. I haven’t been able to turn my mind off. It keeps running through what he said, trying to test his explanation and find any weakness in his words. It’s making me crazy.
I’ve tossed and turn the last two nights, only catching a few hours of sleep. I’ve tried distracting myself with reading and work emails, but my mind keeps drifting back to Nic and all the problems he poses. It’s exhausting.
I turn to the sink to wash my hands. “I know I’ve been a little . . . off. I’m working on it. I’m sorry.”
“Is this about the blind date?”
I almost laugh. I’d actually forgotten all about that. “No, it’s not about that.”
“Then what?”
I want to tell her about Nic’s sudden reappearance, but I know she will tell me to stay away from him. And I just don’t know if I can.
“It’s nothing,” I lie. “Where are you off to this evening?”
“Dinner with Devin. Are you sure you don’t want to go with us? Nate told Devin this place is amazing.”
“Is Nate a closet foodie or something?”
“I guess.” She shrugs. “Want to tag along?”
“I’ll pass.”
“It’s Sunday night.” She frowns, pulling on her coat. “You haven’t left the apartment all weekend.”
That was intentional, but I don’t tell her that. “No, I’m good. Where’s this place at anyway?”
“Somewhere in Eastern Market, I think. It’s Ethiopian food.”
“Interesting.”
“Yeah, I’m not sure what I’m getting myself into.”
She turns around, walking into the living room. I fill up my glass and follow her, taking a seat on the couch.
“I worry about you, you know,” she says from across the room, standing close to our front door. “You can talk to me if there’s something wrong.”
Guilt pricks at my conscience. She’s my best friend. But, sometimes a lie is easier to swallow than the truth. I should know better than anyone.
“I know you worry about me, Becca. But, I’m just going through something. It’ll all be fine in time. I swear.”
“Okay, but you’ll talk to me if you need to?”
“Cross my heart.”
“As long as you understand how important you are to me, Reagan Delaine.”
“I love you, too, Becca Raye. Now, go have fun with your boyfriend.”
She rolls her eyes. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Is that your way of telling me you’ll be home late?” I wink at her.
“You’re so funny.” She gives me a sarcastic wave and then leaves, closing the door with a soft clunk.
I sink into the couch with a sigh of relief. Closing my eyes, I enjoy the silence for a moment before I pick up a silly gossip magazine and work my way to the bottom of my wine glass. I’m drinking the last of it when my phone rings.
I track it down in the kitchen and find “Concierge” scrolling across the screen.
“Hello?”
“Miss Cooper, this is Anjay, from downstairs. You have a visitor here, but he’s not on your approval list.”
My fingers tighten around the phone. “Who is it?”
“He won’t give me his full name. Only Nic. He insisted on speaking to you.”
I swallow hard. “That’s fine Anjay, I’ll talk to him.”
“Screening your visitors?” his deep voice asks.
“Just the uninvited ones. What are you doing here?”
“I want to talk to you, but your concierge won’t let me up without your approval.”
“I know, that’s why I pay a ridiculous amount in rent.” I sigh. “What part of this is you giving me some time to wrap my mind around things?”
“Sweetheart,” his says roughly, “I never agreed to that. In fact, I think I told you the exact opposite.”
“Why don’t you listen to me?”
He pauses. “Isn’t this an argument we can have upstairs?”
“I don’t want to argue with you at all. I just—”
“Reagan,” he interrupts, “Your apartment number.”
I take a deep breath. “557. Let me talk to
him.”
He hands the phone over, and I tell the concierge to send him up. I’m leaning with my back against the door when he knocks on it. The wood hits the back of my head with the force of his hand.
“Why are you here?” I turn around, resting my forehead on the smooth surface.
“Open the door.”
My hand freezes on the doorknob, hesitating. I’m afraid if I open this door, I’m opening it to more than just him. I don’t think I’m ready for that. But, I turn the handle anyway.
His dark eyes peruse me, awkwardly standing half behind the door. His brow rises at my hesitation, and I pull the door open wider.
“If you’re not going to leave . . .” I gesture to the living room.
He steps inside, stopping just past me. His eyes skim over the comfy couch, throws and pillows spread all over it, to the small kitchen visible over the half wall on the far side of the room. Then to Becca’s room on the right side of the apartment, and to mine on the left side, the door slightly ajar.
“Nice place.”
“It meets our needs. It’s ridiculously expensive, but everything here is.”
“Yeah.” He turns, facing me. His black suit doesn’t have a wrinkle, and the white shirt he’s wearing is still pristine.
I fidget with my T-shirt and adjust my yoga pants, wondering if any stray hairs have escaped the messy bun on the top of my head.
“Are you still pissed at me?” He breaks the silence.
“I don’t know.” Every answer he gave me the other night created ten more questions, and I don’t know what to say to him.
“You didn’t exactly give me a lot of time to get over it.”
I grab my wine glass, and walk towards the kitchen. He follows me. “Do you want something?” I offer.
“Yes.” His hands slide into his pockets. “You.” His expression is so incredibly honest that I feel myself blush. “I want you back.”
“I don’t know.” I rub my hands up my face, tangling them in my hair. “This is just . . .”
He slowly works his way around the island, cornering me. My back hits the counter as I try to put some space between us.
“I don’t want to give you time. I don’t want to give you space. We’ve already had plenty of both. I can’t stay away from you anymore, don’t ask me to.”