Page 86 of The Spice Play

Her gaze flicked away from me, but she didn’t say a word.

“I need you to believe me,” I said, tightening my grip on her wrist to try to get her attention back. “Tell me what I can do to prove that to you. I don’t want you hurting over this.”

Her eyes went glassy, fogging over with tears as she lifted her gaze to the ceiling to try to stop them. “Seb…”

“Please,” I breathed. I reached out to her with my other hand, grasping her gently by the waist and pulling her just alittle bit closer. “I’ll do whatever you need me to do. What can I do to show you that it was nothing?”

She swallowed. “I don’t know.”

“If I was sleeping with her behind your back, baby, I wouldn’t have spent that time chatting with her in front of you,” I said, pulling her a little closer, dragging her knees to the edge of the bed. “I wouldn’t have made up something so easily refutable by saying she’s employed by the team. I wouldn’t have gotten into a fucking fight with Bryan over what he did to you.”

“That’s what this was about?” she asked, her voice full power, her head snapping back into place to look at me. There was something there, something unreadable behind her eyes.

“Yeah,” I admitted.

“I don’t want you to get into fights over me,” she said, dropping the damp down into my lap and slipping from my grasp.

“Wait. Nell?—”

“You don’t understand,” she snapped, passing me the band-aid she’d procured from somewhere in my bathroom, along with a couple of damp cotton balls that smelled heavily of peroxide. “You don’t fucking get it, and that’s fine. Do this yourself.”

“Help me understand, then,” I insisted, pushing myself up off the bed and abandoning the first-aid tools she’d given me. I reached for her retreating frame again, desperate to deal with this, desperate to put it to bed. “Please, I need you to fucking talk to me about this. I need you to not shut down. I know that’s easier, but you’re just hurting us both.”

“I don’t know how!” She spun on her heel, the tears breaking free and splitting down her cheeks. “It’s not that it’seasier, Sebastian, it’s just the only thing I know how tofucking do. Shit gets hard, I shut down. I can’t control that. Ilearnedthat from five years of shit being hard. That’s not something I can turn off overnight for someone I apparently can’t even trust.”

My chest tightened as if she was Bryan, an hour ago, shoving his shoulder into my sternum. Her words stung, but it was the way her voice cracked, it was the way her tears fell, that hurt even more. “Nelly,” I said softly, stepping a little closer, my hands raised in surrender. “You can trust me. I don’t know how to convince you of that, but I swear on Matty’s goddamn life, I didn’t do anything with Zoe. I would never?—”

Her hand rose between us like a fucking brick wall was being erected. “Don’t say that. Don’t tell me you’d never hurt me, or that I should just believe you, or that this is different. It’s exactly what he did. And you know what? It was all lies. All of it.”

“I’m not him,” I pleaded, my voice cracking from the frustration I couldn’t hold back. “I’ve never been him. It breaks my goddamn heart that he did that to you, thatanyonecould do that to you, and I’m so sorry that you had to go through that, but that’s not who I am.”

“I don’t know that,” she croaked. “How am I supposed to know that? How am I supposed to blindly believe that?”

“I can’t—” I cut myself off, dragging a hand down my face, exasperation boiling in my gut and under my skin. “I can’t fix any of this if you won’t let me. You’re putting roadblocks down again. You’re making me fight a ghost, baby, making me fight someone else’s mistakes, someone else’s lies. I’m not the one who did that to you.”

“You think I don’t know that?” she choked, pressing her palms into her eyes and smearing away the tears. “Even if you didn’t do it, it doesn’t mean that you won’t, that youcan’t. It doesn’t mean I can just… I don’t know, shut off the fucking voice in my head telling me I’ll never be enough for you, for anyone, because ofhim. I feel like I’m going crazy, Seb, I don’t know what happened and what didn’t anymore. How am I supposed to believe you when I don’t even know how to believe myself?”

How am I supposed to love you when I don’t even know how to love myself?

The words hit me like a fucking freight train. I struggled for a moment to get my bearings, to remember that I was here, in my room, a five-year-old downstairs instead of a one-year-old, Nelly in front of me instead of Taryn. I knew she didn’t mean to say something so close to what Taryn had thrown at me before she left, but it still felt like whiplash, still felt like I was thrown back into the fucking River Styx and left to claw my way out again.

I swallowed down the weight of it, forcing myself to breathe, to push through it. I took another step toward her, shaky but steady-footed, and reached for her — but she flinched back.

“Don’t,” she said, her voice trembling, her fire and frustration burning out like embers. “I can’t do this right now. I… I need to go back to the guesthouse. Can you handle bedtime?”

“Nelly,” I begged, my voice barely above a whisper. “Please don’t walk away from this.”

But she was already turning, already stepping toward the door, already leaving me behind. “I saw what I did to you. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize until after I said it.”

“It’s okay, just stay?—”

She slipped from the room, the door clicking shut behind her, leaving me standing there with nothing but thefucking Band-Aid and peroxide-soaked cotton balls and thesilence.

————

“What the fuck do I do?”

“I really don’t know why you’re asking me for advice after the shit you pulled today,” Luke huffed, his voice barely cutting through the background noise filtering in through the phone. He was at Smokey’s, and it wasloud— our main rivals were playing tonight, and the bar was filled with Atlanta Fire fans hoping they’d lose and drop out of the playoffs. “Isn’t your sister a therapist? Why don’t you ask her?”

---