by M. K. Hale
There was no magical fix for what I had been through, but I had grown and dealt with it. I knew who I was now.
And I did want a real relationship again, to prove it to myself and because I had not realized how much I missed someone rubbing my back until Nate did it after my nightmare. I had run to myself enough. I wanted to find someone else to run to.
The next Monday, I saw Nate again in our history class. He no longer frowned when he saw me. In fact, I swore I saw a bit of a smile. It eased some of my caution as I slipped into the seat next to him.
“Hey.” Post-him-comforting-me-and-watching-me-fall-apart-in-my-bedroom, post me-being-rude-in-the-cafeteria-after-he-made-it-sound-like-it-was-his-job-to-comfort-me, and post-my-date-with-Ryan, I was unsure how to proceed with him.
He now knew more about me than anyone. And though that should have disturbed me, it felt right.
“How was your weekend?” he asked.
Were we going to act like small talk with each other was normal? Was I supposed to tell him about my date with Ryan like we were friends? “Good, actually,” I responded. “How was yours?”
He hesitated before saying, “Fine.”
“And by fine, you mean?” I prodded him.
“It was…stressful, I suppose.” He faced the front of the classroom again like he expected me to drop the subject. He should have known me better than that.
“Why?”
“Just some stuff with my father.”
The rough draft of my psychology paper had focused on him and his father, citing the article his ex-girlfriend inspired when she gave up Reddington family secrets for cold, hard cash. She had told the press Nate’s relationship with his father was worse than rocky and qualified as neglect. She said his father used to lock him in the closet as a kid when he had business calls. “Want to talk about it?” I offered.
“No.” His gaze remained focused on mine, and I could not tear myself away. “Do you want to talk about it?” He hinted at knowing my secrets as well.
“No.” I did not want to talk about or even think about Logan. Nate turned away from me again, and I took a deep breath. “But I do want to talk to you about other things. I want us to be friends.”
He stared at me. “Me too.”
“Good,” I said and smiled.
Now I just needed to stop thinking about him naked.
Nate was funny. I had no idea Nate could be funny. I laughed so hard; some of the soda I drank at lunch came out of my nose. Our mutual jagged pasts made talking to him feel right. Open.
“You would really never go skydiving?” I asked him, still smiling at his story of him jumping out of a tree as a kid, thinking if he tried hard enough he would fly.
“Skydiving literally has ‘die’ in it,” he replied.
“It has the sound of ‘die’ in it,” I defended.
He shook his head. “That’s enough for me.”
“But it feels like you’re flying. I think you would like it.”
“It doesn’t just feel like you’re falling to your death?”
“No. It’s magical. With the adrenaline pumping in your veins and the wind slapping at you—you feel…” My heart beat faster as his gaze intensified on me. “This will sound weird, but you almost feel like a God.”
“How can a girl who is brave enough to spend a year abroad alone and go skydiving be so afraid of cockroaches?”
That morning I had screamed at finding the bug in my room, and he had rescued me, complaining about how I should not eat and leave crumbs in my room.
“Bugs creep me out.” I shivered from just thinking about them. “They make me think of coffins.” Ever since the funeral of my great aunt when a maggot crawled over her face, anything in the realm of creepy crawly terrified me.
“So, what you’re really scared of is death,” he said. I was surprised at how well he analyzed me while I still struggled to figure him out.
“Isn’t everyone afraid of death? It’s a cliché at this point.”
“Are you more afraid of death or the idea of not living?” His question shook me to the bone. I had not expected something like that from him. My idea of living was distracting myself to not think about my past.
“I almost died once.” I tended to block out the memory, but for some reason, I felt no need to hide from Nate.
He hesitated before asking, “When?”
“Around a year ago.” I prayed he did not do the math. I had told him about my breaking up with Logan a little over a year ago. Nate could guess something dramatic had given me the courage to leave him.
His angry eyes told me he understood. As did his flaring nostrils and tightening fists. “He fucking didn’t.”
“Well, as you can see, I’m alive, so correct, he didn’t.”
“I’ll kill him,” he growled under his breath, and the fierceness of it distracted me from noticing Ryan until he sat next to me.
“Kill who?” Ryan blinked, shocked to see Nate so riled up. He placed his lunch tray down on our table slowly, as if he was trying to figure out the aura of our conversation. “Is someone messing with you?” He turned to me and sat up a bit straighter, as if to show he could fight whoever it was too. Men.
“No, we were talking about…”
Nate saved me. “A cockroach in Allie’s room.”
I did not want Ryan to know anything about my past, especially Logan. My growing relationship with Ryan was light, bubbly, and nice. I wanted it to stay nice. Everything involving Nate was, well, intense.
“Oh.” Ryan accepted it. “So, what’s up with you two? I didn’t know you ate together sometimes.” There was a jealous ring in his voice.
Nate said, meeting my gaze, “We’re friends.”
My smile was infectious. Nate was contaminated instantly.
“Are you trying to be a terrible daughter or does that come naturally?” my mother asked me on the phone the next day.
I was so mad, my voice cracked. “Like mother, like daughter, right?” I hated how it sounded like I was crying. I would not give her the satisfaction of hearing me cry ever again.
“I just don’t understand you. Why won’t you let Logan come see you?”
My bitter laugh croaked. How could she not understand? He had almost killed her daughter. He had beaten me every month for two years. The little advice she had offered me was which shade of makeup best covers a black eye. I hated him. I hated her.
“I told you he wants to apologize,” she said after I did not respond to her question.
“And I told you I never want to see or hear from him again.”
“If you would just cancel the restraining order—”
“Cancel it? Really?”
“You two belong together.” Her voice became dreamy, as if it was a fairytale to her. But Logan was a dragon instead of a prince, and I was far from a princess anymore. He had hardened me. I could no longer watch Sleeping Beauty without thinking about the coma he had put me in, without thinking about the kisses he stole without permission.
“I’d rather die.” I hung up on her and let out a deep breath. I allowed a loud, tortured yell to escape my throat, to push out all my oppressive and negative feelings.
My fingers twitched as I craved a distraction from it all. It was the same feeling I got before obtaining a random tattoo or going skydiving or skinny-dipping in the middle of the winter. My mantra in my head turned into: forget, forget, forget.
“Are you okay?” I heard Nate’s voice, and my head snapped up. How had I not noticed him entering my room? Was I so lost in my thoughts? “I heard you yell,” he explained.
He sat next to me on my mattress with the ease of a normal friend, while my mind was infiltrated by treacherous thoughts of all the other reasons for why he could be on my bed. An image of him on top of me, pinning my arms behind my head burned into my brain, and I gave an awkward cough before I said anything to him.
“The walls are that thin?” I asked.
“What’s wrong?”
> I settled for being dramatic. My body dove into his chest, absorbing his heat and releasing a content sigh. “My birth giver called me again.”
His strong arms pulled me in closer to him. “Who?”
“That’s what I call my mother.”
“Well, I call my mother ‘mom’ like a normal person,” he teased me, his arms tightening around me for a moment.
“I hate her,” I mumbled into his chest as I buried my face farther into him, using him as a shell of protection.
“Do you really?” Nate had problems with his parents, but he had never said he hated them. “Why are you so upset with her? What did she say?”
“She wants me to see Logan.”
His body tensed under me. “What the fuck?”
“You took the words out of my mouth and my diary.”
“What do you mean she wants you to see him?” He sounded as angry as I felt, and nothing had ever comforted me more. He was what I had needed. After Logan and what he had done to me, everyone had treated me like a fragile flower, like a single breath or comment would make me fly away. It was why I now kept it a secret wherever I went. I liked how Nate was as fiery as me. Every one of his reactions felt similar to my own. “What does she expect? You to take a break from classes, drive down, and visit him in jail? After everything he did?”
“Well—” I hesitated. “That’s not—I mean, what she wants is for me to withdraw the restraining order and for him to come see me.”
He was quiet at first. I could see the machinery of his mind working to understand what I said. “What do you mean him to come see you? He’s locked up.” Now I was the quiet one. “Allie, tell me he’s locked up.”
“I can’t.”
His shaken expression matched mine when the judge declared Logan innocent for attempted murder and guilty for mere light battery. “Didn’t you testify?”
“I did.”
“And the jury still let him off?”
“He got community service.”
“What. The. Fuck.”
The intensity in his eyes melted me. I should not have been feeling so at ease while talking about something continuing to haunt me, but I felt safe and understood around Nate. No one had cared for me this much in so long. No one had stood up for me or protected me.
His face was so close to mine, his warm breath hit my cheek, grazing the skin like a teasing thumb. My gaze locked onto his full lower lip. I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to kiss him so badly. I just wanted to feel something.
I leaned in and closed my eyes, but right before my lips could meet his, he pushed me away.
He shot up and off of my bed. “Allie.”
I flinched at the pain on his face. “I—I just…” What could I say? I was weak, and I wanted him? I was feeling things I had not felt in so long?
He shut it down, rejecting me. “We can’t.”
Why can’t we?
“How could you?” Logan screamed at me, the agony in his voice matching the pain I felt as his grip tightened on my throat. The gaudy, fake-jeweled necklace my mother had bought me to match my dress cut into my neck. My perfect curls were ruined, and my mascara ran from my watering eyes. Prom had never sucked more. “I know it’s not mine.”
I sucked in a harsh breath. “It is yours. You’re the only one—”
He let go of my throat and pushed me away from him. “Who else have you been fucking?”
I stumbled back in my high heels, almost falling onto the pavement of our high school’s parking lot. We had danced for an hour before I built up the courage to tell him something that scared me worse than anything else. He had pulled me from the decorated gymnasium and outside to his car.
“No one. I told you, it’s yours—”
“I always use condoms.” The way he worded it instead of “we used condoms” made me even angrier. My anger, however, lacked the strength to drown out my fear.
“One must have broken,” I said softly, in hopes to calm him down.
“You’re cheating on me, I know you are,” he yelled.
He opened his car’s trunk. Inside it was a baseball bat—the bat he had used in the high school championships—and a spare tire. When I saw him reaching for the bat, I ran.
I ran back to the gym where the prom still went on. He would never hurt me in front of other people. He could not afford to get in trouble when he had to maintain his golden boy image. The mayor’s son.
I ran and ran and ran. We had parked far away, and my heels limited my speed. I would have kicked them off, but Logan would catch up to me if I stopped to do so. Tripping on my long ball-gown shaped dress, I fell forward and caught myself with my hands. I cursed my mother for making me wear a princess dress.
“Oh, Allie.” I turned my head to see him swing his bat up and, without hesitation, swing it back down to connect with the back of my knees.
I screamed like I never had before. This was the first time he had ever hit me with a weapon. My bones snapped under the impact. I couldn’t stand up or move my legs, so I started crawling, pulling myself by the strength of my arms closer to the gym entrance and a street lamp. If I could get someone to see me, to see what was happening, they could stop it and help. Please, God, let someone help.
“Honey, you can’t crawl away from me.” His words chilled me, but I continued with haste to pull myself along the pavement. Luckily, my dress covered most of my skin so the harsh ground did not cut me up. Then his bat connected with my right arm, and I saw it break before my eyes. The burning pain blinded me.
He was going to kill me.
“P-Please, just put the bat down. Please.”
He did not listen to me. He did not listen to me when he shattered my ribs. He did not listen to me when he slammed my head into the pavement again and again. He did not listen to me when he left me for dead, bleeding in front of the gymnasium in my four hundred dollar prom dress.
My last thought before I slipped into the coma was a part of me had died that night and so had the baby.
“Allie.” Nate shook me awake as hot tears clung to my cheeks. I must have woken him with my crying again. “It’s okay.” He cradled me against him and stroked a hand through my hair. “It was another nightmare.”
My laugh was as bitter as a lemon, and his look of concern became even graver. “It was the nightmare.”
“What happened?”
“Prom night. The night he put me in the coma.” I hugged myself even as he hugged me. “I’m sorry I woke you up again.”
“Don’t be sorry. Ever.”
“What would Hannah think of you coming over here?” Did he say, “We can’t,” because of the girl he hooked up with? I had all but thrown my lips on his mouth. I had been the one who said I wanted us to be friends. Friends. And then I had tried to kiss him. Was my body incapable of convincing Nate I was not a lonely stalker? The embarrassment was a fresh wound.
His eyebrows furrowed. “Who?”
Evil little tingles sparked my skin at him not recalling the name of the girl he’d had revenge sex with in his room. Maybe she meant nothing to him. “That girl you…slept with.” “Best I’ve ever had,” he had said.
“No,” he said. “I was trying to—No, nothing happened with Savannah.”
“Hannah.”
“Right.” Nate pulled on a strand of my hair. “Allie.” He hesitated. Was he going to admit his feelings? That he wanted me— “I think you need some help.”
Not what I had wanted to hear. “I’ve had help.”
“There are some therapists on campus in the health center. I think maybe—”
“I’ve seen therapists. They all say the same thing and treat me like something out of a textbook.” It was why I wanted to be a psychologist: to help people, rather than make them feel inadequate and easy to define.
He played with my hair for a moment before asking, “What do they usually say?”
“That I should expect to suffer from poor self-esteem, depression, and problems with, um, intimacy.
” One-night stands held no problem for me, but trusting someone with my feelings? No, thank you. But wasn’t that what I did with Nate?
“And do you?”
“I hate how they think of it as a prophecy, like everyone doomed to one fate will be doomed to another. Everything I do is to try to be the opposite of what they tell me. Poor self-esteem? I get dressed up every damn day. Depression? How can someone be depressed if they go to parties, explore the world, go skydiving, and climb mountains in their free time?”
“So, no therapists.” Nate nodded and bit his lip. I loved how he tried to think of ways to help me heal. “What about group therapy?”
“Like people with issues all coming together to sing ‘Kumbaya My Lord?’”
“It may not be as cheesy as you think it is.”
I snuggled closer to him at his comforting tone. “Would you go with me?” I did not want to go open up to strangers all alone.
His silence scared me until he said, “If you want me to.”
“I want you to.” Or more truthfully, “I want you.”
Chapter 15
Nate:
* * *
“Goldy was two years old when he died, and he was my best friend. Whenever I fed him, his tail would move faster and his big eyes would look up at me…” A boy who looked too young to even be a freshman held back tears.
Allie’s hands were pale as she clenched her fingers into tight fists. I put my hand over hers to soothe her, and she glanced at me. Ignoring the sparks radiating from where our skin met, I squeezed her to remind her why we were here. She had been having nightmares every night, and I had thankfully convinced her to go to group therapy. So far, however, everyone’s issues could not even compare to Allie’s.
“I still remember the cute little bubbles he used to make,” the boy finished his story, and everyone glanced around, confused.
“Bubbles?” The group therapy leader questioned. How did a dog make bubbles? Wait. “Goldy was…a fish?”