Page 124 of One Wrong Move

Dean was never going to let me be myself. And it took me a long time to wake up to that, and also to realize that, somehow, I had accepted it to the point where I no longer knew exactly what or who I was.

What I actually wanted.

“You wanted to get out of your old job for a while?” Nate asks. He’s leaning against one of the French doors, eyes on me.

“I think so. Yes. Even though, at the time, I wasn’t aware of it myself. Dean used to say it wasn’t the right time… that I should be happy to even have a job with something as useless as an art history degree.” I shake my head, and mortification makes it hard to find the words. I’m still embarrassed over what Nate had just witnessed. What he understood. “Dean took care of so many things. It was his nice apartment I moved into. And his money that bought groceries. He loved to… throw that in my face. Sometimes. And I took it.”

Nate’s voice is soft. “He did what?”

I bury my face in my hands. “Oh God. It’s so embarrassing to say it out loud, now that I’m away from it all.”

“It’s not embarrassing,” Nate says. His voice is sharp. “It’s a lot of things, but that word is very far off target.”

“He made me feel like I owed him. All the time,” I say. “Like his word was the final word, like it was either do it his way… or no way. Did you know that his mother picked out my wedding dress?”

Nate’s eyes narrow. “You weren’t allowed to choose your own dress?”

“Oh, I tried to. But in the end, it was heavily encouraged for me to go with a more traditional option.” I laugh weakly. “That’s the one thing I won’t insist on paying half for. It wasn’t my choice.”

Nate crosses his arms over his chest, the wineglass in his left hand. His jaw clenched.

He looks angry.

I hadn’t anticipated that.

“And Dean knew all of that,” he says.

“Yeah. I think it all came from him. The last straw, the thing that told me I couldn’t stay another day was… It’s so awful to say.”

“I’m listening,” he says quietly.

“I overheard him saying something on the phone. He didn’t even try to hide it, to be fair. Somehow that felt terrible? He thought I wouldn’t care when he told someone that my career would be over after the wedding, or at the very least, when we had kids. He called my art degree decorative.”

Nate makes a low, hoarse sound. “Fuck. I’m so sorry.”

“Looking back on it, he’d made that position clear before, but he’d never said it. Not like that. And I realized he didn’t think I was capable of anything, not of my job, or of earning my own money, and definitely didn’t respect me. At all. That word, decorative, really pushed me over the limit, at any rate.”

“Broke the camel's back,” Nate says. He shakes his head slowly, his jaw tense. “You left that day?”

I nod. “Yes. I wanted out of his cage, and all the strings he attached to everything, every exchange between us. That’s what—shoot!”

The water boils over.

I spring to my feet and race to the stove. Put my glass down. “The pasta won’t be very al dente, I’m afraid!”

“It will be delicious,” Nate says. He’s followed me, his voice closer by. Anger still laced through his tone. But now it has a hesitant note in it. “You know that there aren’t and never will be any strings with me, right?”

I look down at the pasta and feel another kind of blush creeping up my cheeks. With me. We haven’t discussed… what we are. Not yet.

But the way he said it…

“I know,” I say. “Trust me, you’re nothing like Dean.”

He brushes my hair away from the back of my neck, and then there’s a pair of lips against the hot skin at my nape. His hands glide over my hips.

“In one way,” he murmurs, his lips trailing down my bare shoulder, “we are very much alike. He had great taste in women.”

I close my eyes at the sensation. “Is that a compliment, Connovan?”

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