Page 106 of Hold Me Today

“You don’t understand. Youcan’tpossibly understand when your parents have always stood by your side, no matter what.” She scrambles to yank on the T-shirt, concealing her nakedness from me like she’s closing me out from her vulnerability. It’s not without a little dose of irony that the Stamos Restoration logo falls flat over her heart. She’s wearing my shirt, and yet this is the first time since Toula’s wedding and that damn elevator that I’ve felt like we’re on two different planes, cruising in two different directions.

Mina pulls hard on the hem of the T-shirt as her voice cracks with barely suppressed emotion. “You wanted to date Brynn? Go right ahead, they told you. You want to go on adating show? No one stopped you, Nick.No one. My entire life I’ve dreamt and celebrated my achievements on my own because—newsflash—nothing I did appeased my parents. But I could turn it all the way around and make them proud, for once, if I did just one thing: bring home a nice Greek boy.”

Harsh laughter pushes its way up and out of me. “We’re back to that again, huh?” I jump up to my feet, unable to just sit here. I need to move, I need to— I whirl around, anger sharpening my tone like a serrated blade as I loom over Mina. She drops her head back, unwilling to stand down, even though she’s almost a foot shorter than me.

“So, I’m good enough to fuck but not good enough for more?” I’ve been there. I’ve stood at the altar, humiliated to my core when the woman I thought I loved turned out to lovesomeone else. I’d rather take a punch to the gonads then go through the misery of that again. “And all because you’re trying to stick it to your parents by not giving in?”

“I’m trying to tell you that I want you!”

My chin jerks back from the force of her shout.

With a hand pressed to her heart, Mina goes on, passion ripping through every word. “I wantyou, Nick, not because of your Greekness or how nice you are but because of how you make mefeel. For once, I feel special. For once, I feel like I’m exactly where I belong. For once”—her features splinter right in front of me, and my heart shoutsgo to her!even as I force myself to stand completely still—“I feel as though I’m not seen as less than or the girl with the problems or Bad Girl Mina.” She swipes angrily at her eyes, thumbs stroking along the damp tears at the crests of her cheeks, and my heart takes another heavy beating.Fuck. As much as I want to comfort her and kiss away her tears, I want to hear what she has to say even more.

“You enter a room and my body comes alive, mysoulcomes alive.” Her shoulders square off like she’s going into battle—against me?Or against herself. The thought comes out of left field but won’t loosen its claws. “My entire life has been one great temporary longing. Get out of my parents’ house. Open a hair salon. Be my own boss and create my own rules. And then shit hit the fan, and you threw all those temporary longings—all those dreams I’d harbored so close to my heart for so many years—straight into chaos until knowing what I want out of life isn’t so clear-cut anymore.”

“It’s not an either-or situation,” I grind out, feeling sick to my stomach. This conversation—thisangerthat’s festering beneath her words—isn’t even about us. It’s aboutherand about the damage that existing in her parents’ orbit wreaked on her. I feel like an idiot for not seeing it sooner. For not predicting that this falloutwould be inevitable.

You can’t accept love from someone else when you don’t even love yourself, and Mina . . . God, listening to her now it’s a wonder she doesn’t hear the self-loathing in her own voice. I could bandage up her insecurities and self-doubt real nice, kiss them better, but at the end of the day, there’d be no hiding from the truth.

And the truth is that Mina is so caught up in proving her parents wrong that she can’t even see that by loving me doesn’t mean her own dreams need to take a backseat to the relationship.

I’m not her father. She isn’t her mother. Can’t she see that?

Chest hurting like I’ve taken a mallet to the heart, I step back, needing space. “I’m not the kind of guy—Greek or otherwise—who swoops in and strips you of everything that makes youyou, Ermione. I wouldn’t do that to a random stranger I just met, and I certainly wouldn’t do it to the woman I love.”

Mina blanches.

And the L-word hangs out in the open like a white, tattered flag of surrender. It hangs there, even when I don’t take it back. And it sure as hell doesn’t go anywhere while she tangles her fingers in the shirt I lent her and stumbles over her words.

“Nick,I—” She rubs her lips together, her gaze darting every which way but to me. “I-I don’t know what to say.”

Say that you love me.

I stare at her, waiting, hoping, and then she’s staring back—and the divide between us grows.

I let my lids fall shut and tip my head back and do nothing to mask my expression.Thisright here, this moment of truth, is by far the worst pain I’ve ever felt. Worse than even standing at the altar as my bride sprinted from the church with her douchebag lover clutching the train of her lace dress.

Because what I feel for Mina eclipses anything I ever felt for Brynn or Savannah Rose or any of those blind dates I went on over the years.

I love her andshe doesn’t know what to say back.

Are you really that surprised?I shouldn’t be. I’m the guy who does relationships and she’s the girl who prefers no-strings-attached flings. In theory, there was no other path for usbutthis one.

My heart calls bullshit on that score.

I take a single step back, arms down by my sides. “I’m gonna sleep upstairs in Dom’s room.”

“No, please.” Mina darts in front of me, blocking my exit. Her expression is nothing short of panic—but it’s that ever-present restlessness that solidifies my decision, however much it kills me. She needs to figure her own shit out without me hovering over her shoulder. And if she can’t do that, then I . . . Well, I’ll figure it out. Because if there’s one thing I know, it’s that pushing her into accepting me—a nice, Greek boy—when doing so makes her feel like she’s caving to her parent’s demands, is only going to be the start of our troubles.

We can’t move forward when she’s stuck in the tangled web of her past.

When I move to the right, she mimics my step, her hands up and facing me as though she can stop me from leaving. “Nick, I like you so, so much. I don’t know why I can’t say the words back when Ifeelso damn much for you that it terrifies me.”

“It’s not the word that matters.”

“Then why—”

“It’s that you have that look on your face, the same one from the night I showed up at your parent’s house and you were practically jumping out of your skin.”

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