Page 84 of Love and the Laws of Motion
Chapter Thirty-Three
As the night stretched on, Livie found herself looking toward the door every five minutes, then every two minutes, torturing herself with thoughts about what might be happening between Nick and his mother, and what he was going to say to her when he came back.If he came back.
It was after midnight when the door opened and this time, Nick was the one who stepped through it.Livie had been drying a rack of glasses, but froze, her towel-covered hand still stuffed down inside a pint glass.
He stopped right inside the door, not making a move to come any closer, watching her from across the room.Her stomach erupted in butterflies.
Her dad looked up from his conversation with Teresa at the end of the bar, his eyes cutting back and forth between them.When Teresa gave him a very unsubtle nudge, he cleared his throat and straightened, coming to take the half-dried glass out of her hands.
“It’s slowing down.Why don’t you head home, Livie?”
Jolted out of her frozen state, she looked up at her father.“Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” Jess chimed in behind her.“We got this.You go on home.”
She wasn’t exactly looking forward to this conversation with Nick, but putting it off wasn’t going to make it any easier.Might as well get it over with.
She ducked under the pass-through and walked over to Nick, tucking her hands in her back pockets to keep from fidgeting.He watched her approach without reaction, closed up like a vault, every thought and feeling locked inside.
“I’m heading home,” she said as brightly as she could manage.She was so terrible at pretending.“Want to walk with me?”
He gave her one tight nod and moved to the side to let her walk out ahead of him.
Outside on the sidewalk, he fell into step beside her, hands stuffed into his jacket pockets, head down, eyes on the sidewalk.
Livie had intended to let him do the talking, but when he made no attempt to break the silence for several endless minutes, she couldn’t take it any longer.“Nick, I’m so sorry.I didn’t plan it, I swear.I saw her at the butcher shop and I acted on impulse.I didn’t know she was going to come here tonight.”
“It’s okay.”
“I have no idea what your relationship with them was like, and it wasn’t my place to insert myself or try to fix things.I’m so sorry you were ambushed that way.I had no right to put you in that position.”
He blew out a long breath and tilted his head back to look at the dark sky overhead.“Liv, it’s fine.”
She almost missed a step in her surprise.“Really?I mean, it is?You seemed really angry earlier.”
“I was.But not at you.Not much anyway.”He trailed off, turning his head away.“It’s a long story.”
“You can tell me.If you want.”She hesitated, then charged on.“I mean, I know we’re not...this is not...But I’m your friend.”
Finally, he looked at her, turning his head enough to give her a slight smile, and to brush his elbow against hers.“Yeah, you are.”
Taking a deep breath, she asked the question that had been eating at her since she met him.“Nick, what happened with your family?Was it about getting kicked out of DeWitt?”
“No.I mean, not directly.But it started there.”He took a deep breath of his own.“After I got kicked out, I moved back home.”He shook his head ruefully.“Things were tense.Things hadalwaysbeen tense, but DeWitt made it all a thousand times worse.”
“You didn’t get along with your parents?”
“Without trying to sound like a whiny teenager, they never understood me.The computer thing started early.I got my first desktop when I was six.Built another one out of spare parts and instructions I found online when I was seven.By the time I was eight, I was writing code, building websites.And this was twenty years ago.There were plenty of grown adults who couldn’t even turn on a computer back then, including my parents.They didn’t understand it, so they didn’t trust it.They were sure everything I was doing was illegal, that I’d get into trouble for it.”
“Wasit illegal?”Considering adult Nick’s attitude toward legality, Livie wasn’t so sure his mother was wrong to question him.
“Nobody’d even written the laws yet.The internet back then...”He stared up at the sky, smiling at the memory.“It was like the Wild West.Anything was possible.People were doing amazing new stuff every day.Things that would have seemed like science fiction just five years earlier were happening right in front of my eyes.I knew the people doing it.Iwas doing it.It felt like we were making the future happen, you know?”
Hearing him talk about those days, it was easy to understand why he loved it.It was no different than what she did, really.The thirst for answers, the giddy high you got when you puzzled out something no one else had yet.
“All the rules and laws about what you could and couldn’t do,” he continued.“All that came later.Some of us got caught, some of us didn’t.”
“You didn’t.”
