One Chance

by Best, Victoria J.

  “Henry,” she said, her voice low and filled with a different emotion now.

  “What are you afraid you’ll do, Nicolette?” I asked, my face inches from hers, our breath mingling as she panted.

  “I–I . . .” She swallowed and closed her eyes for a beat. “I don’t know if I can do this right now.”

  “Why?” I had to know why she hadn’t pushed me away a few nights ago, but now she was.

  She closed her eyes again. “I can’t. I want to, but I can’t tell you. There’s too much—”

  “I thought we were being honest with each other,” I whispered, my lips so close I could brush them against hers.

  “I know. We always have been.” She sighed. “I can tell you one thing, but I need you to trust me. I need you to understand that there is something else I can’t tell you, but I have a good reason. For you, for us. I can’t tell you,” she repeated that over and over. It seemed she was trying to convince herself more than me.

  “Nicolette, I trust you. I trust you more than anyone else in my life at this point in time. If you say you can’t tell me something right now, that’s fine. But I also need you to know that there is nothing you could say or do that would make me not want to be in this exact spot, with you.” It was the closest I had ever come to telling a woman I was in love with them.

  “Since college, I’ve been having sex with random men as a way to deal with my depression and anxiety. I’m so sorry I never told you this before, Henry. I have some things to figure out, but I’ll tell you the rest soon.”

  Tears glistened in her eyes again and my chest clenched at seeing her so sad for the second time tonight. Though it was a shock, because Nicolette didn’t seem the “type” to be promiscuous, I decided to back off and give her some space. Before I did, I brushed my lips against hers, gently, barely even a kiss, to show her that it didn’t matter to me. Even if I wasn’t sure if it did or not. I removed myself from between her legs, walked over to the couch, and sat down.

  “Say something. Will you stay with me a little while?” Worry lined her face.

  “Didn’t I just say that I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else? We all have our baggage, Nic. Mine isn’t much better than yours.”

  She nodded, hopped off the stool, and padded over to the couch to sit next to me. For a second, she sat stiffly, a foot away from me. But even if we couldn’t kiss or have sex, I wanted to be near her, to feel the warmth of her skin against mine, to smell her scent. I reached out and pulled her against my side. She sank into me, resting her head against my chest. We sat that way for a little while, not watching television or making any attempt to. We just sat together, wrapped in one another’s arms, lost in our own thoughts. Each of us with our own things to consider, to determine, and to worry about.

  I just hoped that whatever she was thinking about didn’t end with us being apart. I hoped this wasn’t the thing that tore us apart.

  Chapter 32

  Nicolette

  Guilt. That was the emotion that sat on my chest while I lay against Henry’s on the couch. Guilt over not telling him about the baby. Guilt about using my father’s coming out as an excuse for my shut-in status. Guilt over revealing my promiscuous past but not giving him the space to talk about it tonight.

  Guilt at using him to comfort me when I wasn’t being completely honest with him.

  “Should we watch TV?” I asked, my voice coming out hoarse.

  I cleared my throat before looking up at him. His eyes met mine, those gorgeous emerald orbs that could see straight into my soul. Henry nodded.

  “Sure.” He leaned forward, scooped the remote from the coffee table, and flicked the TV on.

  Without further conversation, he selected a movie on Netflix, settled back against the couch, and pulled me closer.

  The guilt gripped me again, in a way that made me feel like I might throw up. Or was that simply morning sickness?

  “Jax said he caught Liza in a deep conversation with someone yesterday in their closet. Any idea what that was about?” Henry said.

  My heart rate skyrocketed at his words. I wondered how I could get out of it without lying to him. But there was nothing I could even think to say. My mind was suddenly blank.

  “Uh, what?”

  “Were you Liza’s mysterious phone call?”

  I avoided looking up at him, though I knew he was looking down at me. I could feel his eyes burning a hole in the top of my head.

  “Uh, well.” I sighed. Now was my chance to finally be honest. “Yeah. It was me. But it was about the thing I can’t tell you yet.”

  I was being honest but evasive. It was the only thing I could offer him right now and I felt like shit about it.

  “Ah, well, that explains it. I’m sure Jax will be relieved that it’s nothing serious. He was worried about Liza,” Henry said, his voice holding a hint of something.

  Was that his way of saying he was worried about me, too?

  The guilt was becoming oppressive.

  “I’m sorry, Henry.” The words I whispered felt inadequate based on the monumental secret I was keeping from him.

  “I trust that you’ll tell me soon, Nic.” Then he did something that broke my heart into tiny little pieces—he dropped a gentle kiss on the top of my head.

  For the next hour, we didn’t speak, just watched the mediocre movie on Netflix. My eyes became heavy towards the end, but I forced them to stay open. Yesterday, I’d noticed that I was beginning to feel exhausted at the end of the day, and the middle of the day, that I wasn’t sure I would make it through without a nap and an early bedtime. I didn’t want to fall asleep on Henry. If I did, he would feel like he had to stay, and I didn’t want to take the choice away from him if he wanted to go.

  “Are you sleeping?” I heard him ask a short time later.

  Had I been asleep?

  I looked at the TV. I had no idea what was happening in the movie.

  Shit.

  “I’m sorry. I was trying really hard not to fall asleep. I guess I’m still not feeling so great.” I sat up, wiped a hand over my face, and turned to look at him.

  Concern flitted across his eyes before he blinked it away. “I can go if you’re ready for bed.”

  I selfishly wanted him to stay, to sleep in his arms so that I didn’t feel like I was alone with this secret.

  “Only if you’re ready to leave.”

  “Nicolette, if you’ve been sick and you want to go to bed, I’m not going to keep you up if you want me to go.”

  “I don’t want you to go,” I admitted, looking down at where my hands rested in my lap.

  “Oh?”

  “Will you, uh, stay with me? Sleep with me tonight?” I asked him the one thing I’d sworn I wouldn’t.

  The guilt became unbearable, and selfishness clogged my throat with tears. But I couldn’t manage to tell him to go. I itched to tell him about the pregnancy, to spill my guts and unburden my mind. But I also knew that if I told him, it would hurt him more now than keeping it to myself would. That it would be even more selfish of me to tell him just to ease my mind and risk his sobriety.

  So, I kept it to myself.

  “I’ll do whatever you need me to do, Nicolette. Didn’t I already make that clear?”

  Those words almost did me in, and made me wish I wasn’t keeping secrets from him. Those words made me tumble further, faster, and harder into loving Henry.

  And the most terrifying part about it was that I wasn’t sure if I was doing the right thing, but I also didn’t know how to fix it.

  “Okay.”

  We stood. Henry switched the TV off as we made our way down the hall and into my room. I slipped off my over-sized sweatshirt, shucked my leggings and got into bed. Henry followed, removing his jeans and t-shirt until he was in only his boxer briefs. I took in the contours and lines of his body. I wanted so much more than just to sleep with him tonight, but knew if I did, I wouldn’t be able to keep the distance I needed not to tell him about the pregnancy.r />
  When he got into bed, I turned over and he pulled me until my back was flush against his chest. Closing my eyes, I hoped sleep would help clarity dawn in the morning. Before I dozed off, Henry whispered something, but it was so soft that I couldn’t make out what he said.

  I almost hoped he’d said he loved me but knew I didn’t deserve it because of what I was keeping from him.

  As I drifted to sleep, my brain suddenly couldn’t understand why I had made the choice to keep this secret from him.

  Chapter 33

  Henry

  “I got some answers for you,” I said to Jax as I walked into his office Saturday morning.

  Since he and Liza had moved in together, he wasn’t usually in the office on the weekend, but because they’d been away for two weeks, he had some catching up to do.

  “Yeah?” He raised an eyebrow in skepticism.

  “Well, sort of,” I added with a grimace.

  “Sort of? What does that even mean?” Jax shook his head, turning his attention back to his computer screen. He began to type away, like I wasn’t even in the room.

  “I asked Nicolette if she was Liza’s mysterious caller. She said yes, but she also told me she couldn’t tell me what it was about. Only that it had nothing to do with Liza.” I shrugged and sank into the loveseat against the wall.

  Jax stopped typing, his fingers over the keys but not moving. He glanced up at me, confusion on his face. “That’s not really an answer.”

  I waved my hand out towards him. “Exactly. But that’s all Nicolette would tell me right now. She was acting kind of strange when I was there last night.”

  Jax was interested now, standing to come around his desk before settling into a wingback chair that faced the loveseat.

  “Strange how?” His eyes flicked to the bar cart in the corner, the one I had been trying to ignore since stepping into the room.

  While Jax hadn’t been acting like I might fall off the wagon at any moment, he was still dancing around me and alcohol.

  “Last week we had slept together, and I thought she was beginning to thaw to the idea of us being together after the weirdness from when I came back from rehab. But last night, something was off. She wanted to be with me, I could tell, but she was fighting it. She claimed it was because her dad gave her some shocking news, but something else is going on. The only information I got out of her was that she couldn’t tell me yet.”

  “And this same something she couldn’t tell you yet was what she and Liza were talking about the other day?” Jax’s brows knit together, his face grim. I could see the wheels turning. He was trying to piece it together, trying to figure out how his girlfriend was involved.

  “Yup. Same thing,” I said, my eyes flicking to the bar cart again. I squeezed them shut for a moment, repeating the same mantra that I had adopted in group therapy at the rehab facility.

  I am strong, I am capable, I don’t need a drink.

  Taking a deep breath, I opened my eyes.

  “You okay?” he asked, his eyes flitting to the bar cart. He’d seen me looking at it.

  “I am now. I don’t need that shit to handle my problems anymore. I should have figured it out a long time ago. Maybe my poor life choices are the reason Nicolette is backing away from me again?” I ran a hand through my hair, running it down over my face before I let it drop to my lap.

  Jax shook his head. “I doubt it, cousin. She’s not like most women. Her and Liza are a special breed. They want to help, to fix. Why they chose us I’ll never know, but they have.” I could see the wheels turning again as he seemed to mull over whether or not to tell me something. “I’m gonna propose to Liza, but I need to make sure there isn’t anything that can get in the way of our happiness first. I’m going to finally get that paternity test from Natalie. She told me she would do it. Even though she swore I wasn’t the baby’s father, I need to see for myself that he’s not mine. Before I can move on with Liza, so that there are no secrets between us.” He gave me a pointed look, nodding his head as if to drive the point home.

  I got what he was saying without hearing it spoken. I needed to make sure that there wasn’t anything left unsaid between Nicolette and me before we took this to the next level. She had to trust me, and I had to trust her. Whatever she couldn’t tell me yet, might be the thing that’s keeping us from becoming something more.

  It might be the thing that was keeping me from telling her I love her when she was actually awake to hear me say it.

  * * *

  The weekends were the hardest since getting sober. I couldn’t go to bars or clubs like I did before, couldn’t drown my sorrows and doubts in a bottle of whiskey. So today, I was headed to the golf course with my father to play eighteen holes.

  “You’re early,” Dad said as I walked into the club, my golf bag over my shoulder.

  I didn’t golf often, but my father insisted that I have a proper set of clubs. If my mother was a stickler for fashion and propriety in the public eye, my father was one for what a “proper set of clubs” entailed. When I turned eighteen, he bought me the best set he could find.

  I’d used it only three times in the last eight years.

  We were playing with a few of his friends on Wall Street. He said it would help me network. I could use all the help I could get, so I didn’t argue. I was trying to do something right for once.

  I owed it to myself not to self-sabotage any longer.

  “I went by to see Jax at the office first. It didn’t take me long to get here from there,” I said as I shook his hand.

  “We’re just waiting for the judge and Ray. Your boss, Walters, had a family function out on Long Island he couldn’t get out of, but he was invited.” My dad winked at me, the ole-boys-club wink.

  “Right. Okay. I’m ready when you are.”

  Dad nodded, picked up his bag and motioned for me to follow. “We can head outside, since the weather has finally given way, and give the caddies our bags.”

  March had come in like a lion for sure the week before, dumping almost a foot of snow on New York and the surrounding areas. But this week, the temps had spiked up to the low sixties with the snow melting into a slushy mess in the city as quickly as it appeared. I trailed my father out onto the patio, where even at this early hour a few of the members were having cocktails. Winter seemed like it was never-ending this year, and people were eager to be outside in the sunshine even if there was a slight chill in the air.

  “Dave, can you take our bags out to the first hole. My son and I will take the cart and meet you there in a few,” my dad said to the caddie, handing him our bags and a twenty.

  “Sure thing, Mr. Rogers,” the caddie said with a serious smile.

  My dad turned his attention back to me. “So, son, how has the new job been treating you?”

  I weighed my words before I spoke. My father had pulled strings to get me this job, and while I was planning to stick it out, I was more of a glorified gopher than anything else. But he didn’t need to know the specific details. Yes, I was supposed to be honest while doing my program, but omitting gritty details wasn’t exactly lying.

  “Good, good. Walters is a fair boss. I’ve been getting the hang of everything pretty quickly. I’m hoping to get a promotion by the summer.” Everything I told him was true. What I left out—my tiny cubicle, the coffee runs for Walters and the partners, and the fact that he’d been treating me more like his assistant than a junior associate—was not important. Just because I’d used my dad’s influence to help me get the job didn’t mean I wanted him fighting my battles for me.

  I had to do this on my own if I was going to make anything of myself that wasn’t attached to my family name.

  Dad clapped me on the back, just as the judge and Ray Howard approached us. “That’s fabulous, son. I’m glad you’re getting back on your feet. Really.” He gave me a genuine smile as he spoke, conveying more with his eyes than with his words.

  My dad tried, he always had, but my mother’s influence
and heavy hand always seemed to trump anything he wanted.

  After a raucous round of hellos with my father’s friends, we ambled over to the golf carts to drive out to the first hole. The golf game, though not usually my thing, wasn’t too bad. Being outside in the early spring sunshine and being included with my father’s inner circle did wonders for my mood, and by the time we hit eighteen, I had managed to shake off some of the funk from the weird night at Nicolette’s.

  Almost.

  “Any plans the rest of the weekend, Henry?” the judge asked me when as we made our way back to the carts after the last hole.

  I shrugged. “I’m not sure. I’ll have to see what’s going on.”

  He and my father chuckled. “Ah, to be young and single again. Those were the days, am I right, boys?”

  My father and Ray gave a hearty chuckle. “I’ll tell you what. I had the pleasure of being single again for a few years after my divorce and it wasn’t all that I remembered it to be. Maybe because this time I was an old man.”

  They all guffawed at that and I played along.

  “Well, Henry won’t be partying for much longer if what I hear about him spending time with the Fowler girl has any legs,” my dad said, raising an eyebrow at me.

  “Fowler? As in Daniel Fowler, the real-estate developer?” the judge asked, his eyes wide.

  Dad nodded. “Yup. One in the same. I heard he’s set to make the Forbes 100 this year with all the new properties his group has acquired.”

  Ray whistled. “Hold onto that one, Henry. Her father’s name alone will get you far in this city.”

  Dad clapped me on the back again, beaming at his friend’s approval of his once-screwed-up son.

  In some ways, he wasn’t much better than my mother.

  “I’m trying, sir,” I said, making the men chortle.

  If they knew just how much I was trying to keep Nicolette, I doubted they would think much of me. These were the type of men who traded their first wives in for a new model once they hit forty-five. They would never understand the way I felt for Nicolette.