Page 26 of Happy After All

Once the courtyard clears out for the evening, I sit and take mental inventory of everything. Every moment of the day. Every beautiful thing that’s still here. Everything that didn’t burn. Every moment Nathan looked at me.

Every second he touched me.

Before I can second-guess myself, I stand up and make my way to his motel room.

Maybe I’m just going to tell him my name. Maybe that’s all. Maybe I’m going to laugh and say it’s funny how we’ve never actually been introduced.

Or maybe I want something more.

I don’t interrogate myself. I just knock. And wait for him.

He opens the door, shirtless, and my heart freezes, my lungs going tight.

“Nathan,” I say.

“Don’t.”

But he doesn’t move away. Instead he takes one step out of the motel room, so close I feel him. The heat. The intense attraction.

He’s vibrating with energy. I want to reach out and feel him under my hands like I did when we were dancing.

He moves his hand, like he’s about to touch me. Instead, he lets it fall.

“I really don’t need this,” he says, his voice rough.

It’s like I was in a trance, and his words snap me right back to reality.

“I didn’t do anything,” I say.

“You know exactly what you’re doing,” he says.

I’m at a loss for words. I have nothing to say. We just went through a fire. We’re still going through it—the aftermath is going to linger for months. The trauma for years. He was so wonderful,helping organize things with military precision. He was a hero. Now he’s acting like an outraged miss whose virtue has been compromised because I’m near him.

“What the hell kind of statement is that?”

The worst thing is, I know exactly what he’s talking about. I feel it too. I won’t let him blame it all on me. Or I’ll deny anything happened at all. To my grave. One or the other.

“You run the motel I’m staying at. That’s it. That’s all it’s going to be.”

“You’re full of shit,” I say.

He says nothing to that.

I let him turn and walk away from me. I let him close the door on me. The really funny thing is it’s a more definitive,angrything than ever got said between me and Christopher in the end.

The fact that I’m still thinking about Christopher is a reminder that, yet again, as much as I hate it, Nathan is right.

I need to stay away from him. I’m closer and closer every day to being fully restored. But he’s too broken for me to manage.

I don’t have to know the details to know that.

Elise wanted an enemies-to-lovers scenario for me, and that’s nice for her.

She might have to accept that sometimes you’re enemies with someone for your own good.

Chapter Seven

Four Months Later

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