by Dakota Gray
The black hoodie covers her hair, and she's swimming in the thing. Her sweats are as mopey and big. Her feet look dainty in the white running shoes. I manage to drag myself to the counter and order her tea.
I get a small smile out of her when I take a long sip of her drink before I hand it over. We won't be talking about the dirty phone calls I made to her late at night to hold us over the past few days. Or the dirty pictures I sent her that solidifies the fact I'm a pervert. Or the sex toys I had Amazon's drone drop on her doorstep.
Nope.
She might as well be wearing a sign that sex is a no-go.
“How was work?” I ask.
Her brows go up and then slash down in confusion. “Busy. I pulled a couple ten hour days.”
That means she's a salaried employee. Her I-can-do-whatever-the-fuck lifestyle makes less sense. Most places makes a person a salaried employee to work them to the bone. “How many paralegals are at your job?”
“A lot, but I oversee at least two others, and we all share a secretary. I—” She glances at me and shakes her head. “You're asking me this to be nice.”
I was, but she also makes any conversation engaging. “Is the redhead coming?”
“Not today.”
“Let's go.”
She blushes. “I can't.”
I lift one shoulder in a shrug. “I know.”
She purses her lips. “And you still want me to come to your house?”
It's been six goddamn days since I could touch her, see the way one of my jokes lights up her eyes—Did I mention touch her? The thought of saying those words out loud forces sweat to break along my brow.
“Yup...I—”
I can't.
Try again, Nate. “I— have to make sure you're taking care of Babygirl.”
She laughs. “Of course you'd give my vagina a nickname.”
I'm warm from her laugh so I add, “We've gotten to know each other. She has quirks that makes me smile.”
She presses her fingers to the bridge of her nose to hide her smile. It's in her eyes though.
I gesture toward the counter. “Do you want anything else?”
“Sleep is good.”
We don't talk about the fact she still came to meet me, knowing I could have turned her away. And I don't. Or that Robyn has come to see me even though it's not just sex, for her. I take her tea and lead the way to my car.
In no time we're spooned on my bed, my hand resting low on her stomach. She's still buried in her hoodie and sweats. Her feet are cold and curled under one of my legs to warm them. Her hair is in a messy ponytail and the curls are wild. I put my face in them. They smell sweet. I sigh, content, which kind of makes me want to kick her out of my bed. Yeah. I'm that kind of man. The threat of period blood doesn't make me squirm, but emotional connections make me sweat. I fight my way beneath the bulky sweatshirt and top so some part of us is skin to skin.
“Gentle,” she murmurs.
I span my fingers over her belly button. “Better?”
Her expression is contemplative in profile. “Why are you taking care of me?”
Why are you letting me? “I provide full service for Babygirl's needs.”
“How much I hate your Southern accent knows no bounds.” But she laughs.
I know she loves it or at least my accent turns her on. “I will make sure she wants for nothing.” I move my hand to kiss my fingers then place that twisted kiss between her legs.
She's still laughing. “You're the most epic asshole I have ever met.”
“Do you need chocolate? A lower back massage?”
“I will never ask you another question.”
She will. Her brows will furrow, she'll meet my gaze, and treat me as though I am what I am. She's only curious about my make-up, not how she can change me or can fit into my life. Something that simple makes me want to dig deep and give the most honest reply I can.
My mouth is running again before I can shut it. “My mama taught me how to make homemade chicken soup, but if you feel like you can be alone, I'll make a run to the store for ice cream.”
“Just shut up.” She wheezes with laughter.
Lesson learned, I bury my face in her hair again. She's asleep within ten minutes. I pile the pillows I do have around her and head to my office. I'm about to pull up my latest order when my phone rings out the theme song for Law and Order.
I slouch in the chair and answer. “What do you need, Duke?”
“Tarek's talked me into a night out. Fade is the place.” He sounds upbeat, which is a good thing to hear from him.
But I'm shaking my head before I answer. “Can't. Robyn.”
The name drops between us and there's silence for two seconds. “Excuse me?”
I swallow my temper. He's a friend. He's concerned. I don't punch friends when they use that kind of tone. And with Duke it's that voice of an attorney. The one where his client has openly confessed to a felony.
“She's here at my house,” I say, without an ounce of the temper boiling inside me. “I'm not going out.”
“Have fun fucking.”
I'm quiet, because that's so far from what tonight is. Duke lasers in on the dead air between us.
“You're going to have her naked, right?” he asks. “You're not getting in too deep with this crazy woman, right?”
Crazy and broken are not the same thing. And why I'm defending her or myself in my own mind, I don't know.
Back up—why am I skirting my own moral code for her? That's the question.
Duke sighs into the phone and the sound pierces my ear. “Please tell me she's not your girlfriend.”
I haven't had one in at least a decade, but all the signs point to it.
“For fuck sake, Nate. You know she's bad news for you. She hunted you down to hurt you, and you're falling for it like an idiot.”
I haven't sunk so low to say things are not like that when I've had—when I still have—some doubts. I open my mouth and then close it. I sit in the doubts, the unanswered questions, and there's only one thing I'm certain of—she wants to fuck me, and she's conflicted about that urge.
I drag in a deep breath and ask, “What do you know that I don't?”
“Shit. I don't know. You're probably over there having heart-to-hearts.”
I close my eyes and ask the question that's put a pit in my stomach. “Known associates? Do you have information on them?”
If I'm lucky, Broken Virgin will be one of them. Duke's paralegals would have researched almost every one of her friends, and social media is forever.
“Sending it, and maybe you can get your head out of your ass.”
He hangs up on me. I'm not mad about it. Duke is the blunt object and I needed something to hit me upside the head. I'm over here like it's a honeymoon with Robyn, and I know something is off. I've known it since she agreed to letting me have ten minutes in a hotel room. I've done my best to ignore that sixth sense when she looked at me with shadows in her eyes.
I know women. I know women and their best friends. They are the best wingman or the nightmare. Broken Virgin should be in my face, my nightmare as I seduce her friend.
My mind drifts back to Robyn's tattoo. The new one. The one she calls a Guardian when Hermes is a cunning fuckface. The taste of her pussy has clouded my judgment from day one. I haven't cared and told myself it doesn't matter.
Now it does, because I can't ignore the obvious.
My phone beeps three times. I inhale and open the email that's going to confirm my gut instinct.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
ROBYN
I'm not surprised to find Nate gone when I wake from my nap. The man runs on fumes and is still often the sharpest person in the room.
I get up to slip back into my shoes. I have no plans to leave, but I feel vulnerable enough as it is. I should have texted him that I couldn't make it. Our relationship is sexual. Supposed to be. Him cuddling me until I fall asleep in his arms isn't part of the deal.
&nbs
p; My inner voice gives me a side eye.
Who are you lying to?
Pushing the answer to the back of my mind, I go straight to Nate's office since I know that's where he'll be.
I stop inside the door because Nate's so effortlessly handsome. I can be honest and say he takes my breath away. I lean against the doorjamb to just bask in the view of him working. It takes a few seconds to catch the line of tension bunching his shoulders and his clenched jaw. He knows I'm standing here, and yet he won't look at me.
“You should go,” he mutters.
The words slam into me, and my mind races through all the possible reasons. They all point to he's done with me. Just like every woman before me. I wish I could say I shrug it off and leave. I should have known this would happen, especially after the intimacy of this morning. Nate doesn't do relationships, and we’ve been toeing close to the line of one.
How I should feel and what I do is why we’re in this fucked up situation. So I can’t deny his words are a sledgehammer. Takes another quiet second for me to push out, “This is a one-eighty.”
He slowly releases the bracelet on his arm then scrubs his face with his hands. I’ve seen similar tactics from witnesses in the courtroom to know he’s taking his time to reply.
Why?
Why should ending us be hard for him? This is what he does.
Nate finally looks at me. He’s always had a kind of expression where I’m both his salvation and his punishment. All I can see now is pain, like looking at me hurts him. That thought isn't just me wishing it so. The truth is all in the way he's holding himself stiff, as though if he moves one inch he'll touch me.
“You need to go,” he says. “Lose my number.”
If he doesn't want this, why is he ending us? “Can I know what changed, at least?”
“Loraine,” he whispers. He swallows and says louder, “Loraine Stokes.”
No. I was wrong. This is the sledgehammer. This is what puts a wobble in my knees, and squeezes my chest so hard I’m not sure if my heart has stopped or exploded.
Her name in his mouth.
Her name, and the darkness in his gaze as he looks at me like I'm the scum now.
I shake my head but I know the truth. I've been running from it for weeks. He’d find out and we’d end. We’d become him and me and my grief. I couldn’t fuck him if he knew the name to it.
“And I know you didn't just remember her name.” Is that my voice? It sounds so shaky, like I’m crying, but I don’t feel tears. I don’t feel anything. “Who told you?”
“No. I didn't. But now I do, and you need to leave.”
He's right. When he showed up in my coffee shop, I should have turned around and left then. No. The moment I realized he was the one who hurt Loraine, I should have sprouted wings and flew out of the club. I hadn't walked away at every chance that I could have. No matter how many times I reminded myself he was wrong, I stayed. I told myself the only person being hurt was me.
Was I right? Is it really pain staring me down now or anger that I kept Loraine's death to myself? A knot forms in my gut and I press a fist to it because it’s the only thing I can feel. I hold onto the sensation. I can’t feel my heart anymore.
“Did she go peacefully?” His voice is barely above a whisper.
“Now you care?” I feel disconnected from the laugh that falls out.
Did she go peacefully?
That's the part that hurts the most, and what I haven't been able to accept. I haven't even told Samantha or our grief group. Cancer may have been killing Loraine but that's not why she died. That's not why I'm forced to live in this world without her.
“Yes, I want to know.”
The pain digs in like sharp fingernails, and I want him to feel it too. “Do you know the last thing she said to me before she accidentally took too much morphine to ease the pain the cancer gave her?”
He drops his gaze and says nothing in his defense.
The knot in my stomach transforms into bile. I continue to pour the pain out. I taste salt and I realize that I am crying. I think it started when he had her name in his mouth.
And now I can’t hold back everything I’ve swallowed while being with him. “Three months of her life wasted. Months she couldn't get back. She wished she could see you again and kick you in the balls. Someone who came into my office for a divorce to a dickhead became my best friend. A dickhead she married because no one was you, Nate.”
And I'm just another woman who was fucked by The Nathan Ellis. I've walked in my best friend's footsteps and I'm still alive. I'm the one here with him.
“Who can live up to you?” I murmur.
Silence answers my question. “She would have been so proud of me. Would have laughed her ass off at what I did to you in the club. But no. I fell for it. All of you, even when you were being a pig. And five minutes ago you couldn't remember my best friend's name.
“No.” I say and for the first time I’m aware of the tears dripping down my cheeks. “I should have never let you touch me.”
I force myself to meet his gaze. There's a flush to his face, but he's looking right back at me. I swallow because I've never seen this expression. I don't know this Nate sitting stock still but calm in the office's chair. It's like my words have taken everything he is—cocky, unrepentant—and crushed it.
His voice is low, deadly when he asks, “Then why the fuck did you let me touch you?”
The anger in his words slap me back a step. I never thought how this knowledge would affect him. Why would Nate care his former lover died? Why would he give a shit she damned him when dying?
Because a fuckboy wouldn’t care.
I kept telling myself he didn’t have real feelings.
Even when I found out how much he adored his mother. How much he missed his father. He loved and was loyal to his friends.
None of that mattered. My actions were justified.
But of course this would hurt Nate. He’s human. Not perfect, but he feels, he cares. Shit. He never let me pay for anything, not even a computer he made from scratch. He loves his mother. Women.
And one of the women in his life had died. Damned him.
When did I become this heartless to not even consider that? I only believed he didn’t deserve to know. I could throw a few jabs at his ego. I could make him beg in bed. The thought never crossed my mind that I could crush him with the truth of Loraine’s death.
That’s the Robyn I’ve become.
He makes a low sound like a wounded animal then he’s out of his chair, stomping toward me. “Why? Why the fuck are you still even here?” He slams a fist into the doorjamb but he doesn’t touch me.
Shame weighs on me, and I try to fight it. “It was supposed to help,” I say in my defense.
I would bruise his ego and then I'd be better. I wouldn't be so fucking broken. He would make me laugh, make me need, and then I could be better. The problem is, I didn't remember how much living could hurt. How could I when I was dead on the inside for months?
I meet his gaze again, and I know that he gets it. He can finally see just how fucked up I am. He can see how little I gave a shit about him when, more than once, I pushed him to the edge then over. I didn’t use toys or safewords.
And he wasn’t safe with me.
Nate's just standing there, braced by the doorway, refusing to touch me.
I shouldn't say anything else. I got my wish to leave a bitter mark on his life. I didn't mean to, not like this. “Fucking you was supposed to help. Remind myself that I was alive, because being angry at you made me feel. I would focus on that instead of—. My life would stop revolving around her death. I'd have sex. It would be fun and meaningless.”
The light goes out in his eyes the more I talk.
Fuck. Fuck. I want to make it right, and I don’t know how. I’ve never been the bad guy. How do I undo it? How do I even begin to explain? To make my case?
“I miss her so much and that kept...” My voice catches on a soft sob,
because there is no case to make.
“What's the redhe—” he stops then closes his eyes. “What's Samantha's number? She can pick you up.”
I let the words sink in. By staying, I'm just adding insult to injury. I have to pull myself together and go. I will myself numb so I can leave, so we can be done. So I can stop hurting myself. And him. There’s nothing to undo. The damage has been done.
Pulling myself together takes a lot of deep breathing and wiping my face. He doesn't push for me to hurry it the fuck up. That stems the flow of tears at least.
Finally I can answer him, “She'll just tell me I told you so.”
He turns his back to me and makes a call to a taxi service.
That's it. That's the official end.
A chill washes over me. Maybe that's the new me. Cold. Numb. That Robyn was waiting for me while I skipped over half-truths, ignored the obvious, and told myself Nate didn't need the truth. That's the real me.
Not the Robyn that laughed, had sex, and baited a pervert just to see how depraved we could be together. The one who would trust a man to listen to my safeword. The one who gave about zero fucks about living like a paragon.
No. I’m the Robyn that lives in a dark world that doesn’t have my best friend in it. Where my grief waits to greet me with cold hands. I fucked up everything when I tried to be someone else.
I have to go back to her—the half dead me. I can’t breathe at the thought. I lock down my emotions because I can’t break down. At least not until I get home.
I do what I should have done the moment I knew it was The Nathan Ellis, I walk away from him. He’s called a cab and I’m going to take it. There’s no reason to say goodbye. I’ve done enough damage.
I welcome the cold that thought brings.
I should get used to it again anyway.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
NATE
It’s Tarek, not Duke, who shows up on my doorstep thirty minutes later. He's about thirty minutes too late to talk sense into me. He tries, first by taking the bottle of tequila out of my hand.
“You're going to regret that,” he mumbles and pushes past me to the living room.