by Sierra Rose
Although it clearly went against his every restless instinct, he had taken to our newfound stagnancy like a fish to water—deliberately hollowing out a little crater for himself in the couch cushions, just so it looked like he had been there longer than he had. Online shopping, in particular, was a source of great entertainment and fun. Perhaps, because it was the only bit of common ground he was likely to find—Nick loved to spend money.
“For fuck’s sake,” I spat out a mouthful of his hair, “this cannot possibly be the first time you’ve done this. How have you never heard of Amazon?”
“I was always under the impression it was a river. Come on,” he reached pleadingly for the keyboard, “give it to me. Let me help.”
“You’re not helping,” I clarified, shutting down the notion. “If anything, you’re making this take ten times longer than it’s supposed to.”
He ignored me, eyes lit up with a manic glow from the screen.
“Go back to ‘patio and garden.’ I think we should buy a rake.”
“We are not buying a—” I slapped his hand as he reached for the mouse, “don’t touch that! We are not buying a rake. You don’t even have a lawn.”
“Someday I might have one.” His eyes glassed over as he imagined a million possibilities he’d never considered. “In fact—I bet that’s something we could order from here too!”
I gave him a long look, before securing the laptop squarely on my own legs.
“This was a huge mistake.”
“No, it wasn’t!” he said excitedly. “Abby, you were totally right. This is great! And very normal,” he added seriously, upon seeing the look on my face.
I let out a snort of laughter, and continued browsing for clothes.
Nick hadn’t told me where the storage space was—according to him, it was somewhere on the Eastern seaboard, but that was the only thing he could remember. Instead, he had insisted upon building up my wardrobe from scratch—his treat.
Under normal circumstances, I would have refused. But no matter how hard we were pretending, these were hardly normal circumstances. And since it was his fault that I didn’t have any clothes in the first place, well...his treat.
“I still can’t believe you’ve never done this,” I muttered, adding a full length trench coat to my bag. At first, I’d tried to be thrifty. He’d deleted the entire bag and forced me to start over. “I think I could literally do it in my sleep.”
He bristled defensively.
“I could do it if I want.” The cool confidence was gone, replaced again with that same little kid. The one who was eyeing the laptop with a strangely covetous expression. “I’m sure I could do it a hell of a lot faster than you.”
“Oh yeah?” I turned to him expectantly. “What’s your email password?”
He hesitated, probably wishing he hadn’t made it the name of whatever girlfriend he’d had at the time. There was no way to track it now.
“It’s...uh, it’s...”
“What’s your cell phone provider? The name of those Belgian chocolates you like so much? What’s the PIN to your ATM card? I noticed the other night, that the teller just checked your ID and handed you money.”
Outgunned at every turn, he decided to ignore the problem entirely—turning up his head with a sneer. “Abby, haven’t you ever read Thoreau? That stuff isn’t what’s important. It’s people. It’s the connections we—”
“Really?” I cut him off with a sarcastic grin. “You’re going to try to get out of this by faking an existential awakening? Will I find you reading down by the pond?”
“Point is,” he countered defiantly, “all you need to buy those things is money. I have money. Case closed.”
“I have your bank passwords.”
The two of us shared a long look. Then he lowered his eyes with a shudder.
“That’s a chilling thought...”
I laughed and got back to my shopping, as he folded his hands petulantly in his lap, and tried ever-so-casually to insert what he thought to be vital input.
“You should get it in the blue...” he muttered, casting a sideways glance at the screen.
The mouse hovered uncertainly over two different designer slips. I had been going for the black. He was obviously leaning the other way. After another moment’s pause, I went with my original instinct. He leaned back his head with a long-suffering sigh.
“Really?” I exclaimed, turning to face him. “Who’s going to be the one wearing the slip, Nicholas? Who should be the one to pick it?”
He sat up—thrilled to finally be included, and just as indignant as me.
“Who do you buy a slip to impress, Abby? Who’s the one who takes it off?”
Who the fuck decided it was a good idea to give this man skills in debate? As if he needed another weapon in his arsenal.
“...my boyfriend.”
“Exactly,” Nick declared triumphantly. “And as your boyfriend, I’m saying that you should definitely go with the blue!”
He reached again for the mouse, but I twisted it away.
“Well given that you’re my fake boyfriend, I’m not entirely sure your opinion matters.”
“Oh really?” His face lit up with a grin, as he shifted closer to me on the cushion. I bit my lip, but the giggles still leaked through. “Is that the way you want to play it? Give it here!”
“No!” I squealed, doing my very best to keep the computer out of reach.
It was no use.
In an act of desperation, I made a wild leap to freedom—only to get instantly captured by his arms. Then he lunged. Then came the tickling.
“Nick—don’t! You’ll break it!”
I would have said more, but his fingers were relentless and I soon lost my breath to waves of uncontrollable laughter. It was torture! I wriggled and gasped and writhed, trying to break free, but his arms created an inescapable circle around me—pulling me tightly against his chest.
“Surrender!”
I shrieked again and doubled over, clinging to the computer like it was my whole life. His chest shook with silent laughter behind me, but he showed not an ounce of mercy. His legs wrapped around mine as his fingers dug into my sides. When my head fell back on his shoulder, gasping for air, he took the opportunity to gleefully bite the side of my neck. Even when the laptop slipped free onto the ground, he continued with his crusade.
It wasn’t until I was sitting squarely in his lap, my hands trapped in his own, that the two of us came to a sudden stop.
Our laughter faded awkwardly, then quieted completely as the air between us became abruptly tense. Neither one of us had mentioned the rather enormous line we had crossed the previous evening. Neither one of us had even come close.
Nick loosened his grip as he made a concerted effort to try.
“Abby, listen—”
But it was at that moment that he put his foot down—unknowingly—right on top of the fallen computer. There was a tiny crunch, as the screen splintered into a million pieces.
That’s one way to break the ice...
The two of us stared down for a long moment, both frozen in surprise, both wondering what to say. Then Nick’s face lit up with sudden inspiration.
“Don’t worry—we can just go online and buy another one!”
Chapter 13
AND SO THE HOURS PASSED.
Considering the fact that Nick had never done ‘normal’ in his entire life, I have to say that he took to it quite beautifully. While I retrieved his computer to finish my shopping, he flipped on the television, and under my guidance, began an old school Netflix fest. After taking a full twenty minutes to read the descriptions of every show, he settled—rather ironically—upon Stranger Things, and it wasn’t long before I abandoned my shopping entirely to watch.
“I still don’t understand,” I murmured a few episodes later.
By now, the sun was hanging low in the sky, but we had yet to move even an inch from our original positions. Truth be told, we had yet to blink.
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The buzzer rang. I buzzed the pizza guy in and opened the door. I didn’t want to miss a minute so I ran back to the TV set.
“Why doesn’t she just tear the whole house down, if he’s in the walls?”
Nick hushed me without ever breaking his gaze.
“Because the walls are only a single portal. If she destroys that, then he has no way of contacting her and all those Christmas lights were for nothing.”
I sat for a minute, considering this.
“Yeah, but why doesn’t she just—”
“No, I thought of that. But it would require a comb, remember?”
“Oh. Right.” I chewed my lip for a second, thinking. “But what if she just—”
“No more idea, okay sweetheart?”
“But they’re good ideas, Nick!”
“Yeah?” He raised his eyebrows defiantly. “Like when you told Barb to go outside and wait by the pool? That turned out to be a great idea!”
I threw up my hands.
“How was I supposed to know the thing was waiting for her—”
A throat cleared softly behind us, and we whipped around to see the most bashful pizza delivery man in the entire city. He grimaced apologetically at startling us, then gestured to the frozen characters on the screen.
“Episode six?”
We nodded silently.
“Yeah—me and my girlfriend started fighting around that point too.” He held out the box with a good-natured smile. “Large pepperoni? Extra cheese?”
For a second, the two of us simply stared. Half horrified at the atrocities we’d just witnessed on screen, and half stunned senseless at the man’s automatic assumption.
Girlfriend. Boyfriend. Couple’s television fight.
There was nothing remotely normal about those words when applied to us, and yet somehow, that happened to be exactly what we were doing.
Maybe this was turning out to be a normal day after all?
As I glanced nervously down at the sofa, Nick sprang to his feet to pay for the pizza. He left a rather outrageously large tip, and the guy left with a grin. A grin that I saw mirrored on Nick’s face as he set the pizza on a coffee table and sat back down beside me.
A grin that abruptly made me suspicious.
“Did you pay that guy to say that?” I asked suddenly.
Nick’s head jerked up in surprise. “What?”
“Oh come on.” I folded my arms across my chest with a grin, tossing my dark waves of hair back behind me. “Like it would be a stretch to assume you’d coached the pizza guy? Like you haven’t gleefully manipulated situations before just to fuck with me?”
I expected a triumphant confession, but Nick just threw back his head with a laugh.
“You—Wilder—are entirely too suspicious, you know that?”
My eyes narrowed as he grabbed a slice of pizza. “That isn’t exactly a denial...”
He laughed again and took a bite, before pulling off another piece for me.
“No—alright—I swear. He was just a random pizza guy.”
I studied him for a moment, a very long moment indeed, before taking the slice with a reluctant smile. I had to admit, when the guy first said it, Nick had looked as surprised as I was.
But he certainly didn’t look that way now. In fact, he looked rather pleased.
“What are you grinning about?” I asked as he turned back to the screen.
He flashed me a dimpled smile, before lifting my feet and laying them across his lap. I looked on in shock as he ate his pizza with one hand, and rubbed my ankles with another.
“Oh, nothing.”
Nicholas Hunter was giving me a foot massage. What the fuck was happening?!
“Come on,” I demanded, propping myself up on my elbows. “Tell me.”
He glanced at me again, before leaning back with an innocent shrug.
“This is just nice, you know?”
I followed his gaze around the domestic little scene, before returning with a question.
“What’s nice?”
His lips curved up as he picked up the remote and pressed play.
“...normal.”
Chapter 14
LET ME JUST SAY: A normal day did not include fucking Nicholas Hunter.
That being said...I was having some trouble keeping my hands to myself.
If I had been smitten with international sensation Nick...the guy who flew across oceans on a whim, the guy who had an ice cream flavor named after him in seventeen states... If I had been smitten with New York bad boy Nick...the guy who knew the bouncers at every club, the guy who spent half his time schmoozing senators, and the other half sleeping with their wives...
If I had already been smitten with that guy?
It was nothing compared to how I felt about homebody Nick.
He was adorable. Irresistibly fucking adorable.
After consuming an entire box of pizza in one sitting, the two of us had proceeded to turn off the television, and turn to each other instead. Cursory jokes and flippant answers gave way to hard-hitting questions. Questions that the both of us answered as honestly as we could.
How had I felt when my father left? How had he felt never really having much of a father at all? What did my mother do for a living? Did he have any real interest in taking over the family business, or was Mitchell Hunter living in a dream?
It was something that neither one of us was prepared for. Something that neither one of us had at all planned for. It was just something we kind of fell into—then kept each other afloat.
“To be honest...I guess I always assumed that the guy would sort of live forever, that it would never become an actual possibility,” Nick admitted quietly, still rubbing my ankles with a rather thoughtful look on his face. “People like him tend to linger on out of spite, and I have no interest in the corporate world myself. I don’t know what I would do if it ever came down to it.”
I nodded with wide eyes. A little tipsy. Very interested.
Just a few hours before, he and I had made a quick visit to the wine cellar to supplement the rest of our evening. As it was technically still in the building, we were technically still ‘at home,’ and had proceeded back upstairs to drain two bottles. The third was open on the table.
“Well, it’s certainly a huge decision.” I sipped delicately from my glass, trying to envision a world in which Mitchell Hunter was no longer present. “A job like that isn’t just a job—it’s a lifestyle. Not like mine.”
Nick ignored everything that applied to him, and focused instead on the single line that applied to me. “Not like yours?” he quoted incredulously. “You don’t think that being a PR guru at your level is a lifestyle? Who are you kidding, Abby—of course it is.”
I shook my head quickly, trying to divert the attention back away from myself.
“No, that’s not what I meant. My job is crazy time-consuming, but my name isn’t stamped across an international letter-head, you know? If I didn’t show up for work one day, the only person who would suffer would be me.” I gazed at him thoughtfully, eyes lingering on the messy hair and rumpled pajamas. “That’s not like how it is with you. There are people counting on you. People who are counting on you to show up.” I gestured around the living room with a short laugh. “That’s the whole reason we’re doing this.”
His eyes flickered about for a moment, before circling back to me.
“We’re doing this,” he scooted a little closer, “because out of all the people on the planet, there’s no one I’d rather be chained to this sofa with than you.”
My cheeks heated with a flush, and he flashed me a quick smile before continuing.
“And we’re doing this...” he gestured to the two of us, “because we’re drunk.”
The serious mood shattered in an instant, and I threw back my head with a laugh. “Is that right? You wouldn’t be talking to me like this if we were sober?”
“Are you kidding?” He ran a hand back through his hair, keeping the othe
r locked on my ankle the whole time. “I wouldn’t say these things to my priest.” I cocked my eyebrows doubtfully, and he conceded the point. “Fine—I wouldn’t say these things if I had a priest.”
I snorted and leaned back against the cushions.
“What—you think your father has infiltrated the clergy? Even words said in confessional are no longer safe?”
It was said as a joke, but there was a little bit too much truth there for comfort. Not since the robber barons and oil tycoons of the Industrial Revolution had one man in the city possessed so much power. At this point, there was literally nothing and no one out of his reach.
While most sons of such a man would consider this power a blessing...Nick did not.
“The thing about my dad is...
He trailed off, staring at the blank television screen as a small shadow flickered across his handsome face. It was an expression that only Mitchell had ever been able to produce. One that seemed completely out of place on a face so prone to smile. And while I was curious what he’d been about to say—I knew much better than to ask.
After getting hired by the Hunter family, as I was literally walking back down the hall in Nick’s penthouse after seeing father and son together for the first time, I remember being struck with a single pervading thought:
I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to grow up with such a man.
Not that Mitchell had much of a hand in actually raising Nick. Like most children born into wealth and privilege, Nick was raised by nannies until he was shipped off to boarding school to grow up with the rest of the future senators, CEO’s, and leaders of the free world.
What few childhood memories he had of Mitchell were few and far between, and despite the rest of his life being an open book, Nick certainly wasn’t sharing.
A few things had slipped out over the years. Things said in rare, unguarded moments of either intoxication or rage. Things that were chilling enough to make my toes curl.