Page 86 of The Cabin
“Oh really? Were you? I read the letter he wrote you, and he makes it sound like you weren’t.”
It’s raining harder, now. “Maybe not. I was exactly where you are, or were when you first got here. I’d quit sleeping except for a few hours. I was drinking all the time and barely eating. I’d take job after job, anything to keep working, to keep myself out of the house. I dropped to nearly one-sixty, and I’m sitting at two-thirty right now. Maybe less since I’m eating more healthily than I was before I came here.”
He stares at me, his eyes hooded, his emotions so mixed up it’s hard to read them all. “I got past that to a degree, on my own, but…I was no more over her or past my grief or okay than you. And she died almost four years ago. My point is, I had no idea he was going to do this. No clue. I had no idea how anything was going to work. What he wanted. Why do this? What did he expect? I was just fumbling my way through, Nadia. Everything I’ve said is the real, raw, God’s honest truth. Everything was legit, and heartfelt.”
I shake my head. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” I choke on my own rush of words. “That book…why didn’t he write it for me? Why did you get his last book? Why couldn’t he send me out here to heal, but alone? Why did he think he had to set me up? Feeding a perfect stranger intimate details about who I am? What the fuck am I supposed to do with this, Nathan?”
“Knowing things on paper doesn’t make the discovery of them through experience any less real.” He reaches for me, but I dance out of reach. “I’m not okay with this either. It’s scary and hard. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m feeling things I don’t understand, and I don’t know what to do with it.”
“You’re feeling things, are you?” I sound as bitter as I feel.
He flinches. “Hey, that’s not fair.” He thumps his chest. “Look me in the eyes and tell me you think I’ve faked anything.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Then how did you mean it? You think, what? That I’m only in this to…get something out of you? Get in your pants? You can’t honestly tell me you think that either.”
I can’t, not on either score.
I close my eyes. Just breathe. But it doesn’t help. It’s all wrong. I was falling for him—exactly as Adrian planned.
I feel so betrayed—but more by Adrian than by Nathan. And that sucks, because I can’t yell at Adrian, I can’t storm out on him.
I push past Nathan, inside my cabin. Grab my purse and head for my car.
“Where are you going?” Nathan asks, following me.
I get behind the wheel. Close the door, nearly catching his fingers in the process. He stands beside the car, and now it’s pouring. He’s soaked. His hair is pasted to his head. He seems heedless of it.
“I can’t let you go, Nadia.”
I put my finger on the start button. But I can’t push it.
My hand shakes; I want to drive away. I want to forget him. Forget these weeks at the cabin. How long have I been here? Two months? I’ve lost track, if I was ever keeping track. But I can’t. I can’t start the car. I can’t drive away.
“Don’t go, Nadia.” His big hand on the window, fingers splayed. “It was all real. All me.”
“I know.” I choke out the words. “It feels like a betrayal, though.”
“I’m sorry. I should have told you, I just…I didn’t know how.”
I look up and out the window at him. The wind is blowing the rain in sideways sheets, and he stands with feet braced wide against it, oblivious. Shirtless and enormous, all craggy rough features and deep dark eyes. His hand drops from the window, and now he sways, like a punch-drunk fighter.
“Don’t go,” he says again.
My finger curls into my palm, away from the start button. My hand rests on my knee. I can’t.
I keep seeing him—us—at the restaurant, on the bench. His bulk beside me was a bulwark against the world, against my own grief. I was just sitting there, with him. Close. His arm around me, almost intimate, almost holding me. And for a moment, I’d felt…okay.
With him.
And that was what made me panic. That feeling of being okay. It felt like I was betraying Adrian by not clutching my grief to my chest and hoarding it and stockpiling it and counting it like Scrooge McDuck with his vault of gold coins. I was swimming in my grief, like a shark through waters. Gathering it and pouring it over myself. Pain, pain, pain, hard and jagged—armfuls of shale, clattering as I gathered and flung the pieces over my head like mourning ashes.
