Page 24 of Fierce Love
“It’s Nathaniel,” he says.
“Nathaniel,” I whisper. “Sorry.” I clear my throat. “I just… I have to say that I think what you’re trying to do is… it’s admirable.”
“Some experiences, somepeople, change you, and no matter how much you might wish to be unchanged, you can’t go back.”
“Still no time machine,” I say, though his words are both a painful stinger and the calamine lotion to soothe it. Hiscomment is loaded, which makes me believe it’s about me, but if that’s true, it’s hard to be hurt if the change is him caring about the class divide on the island, him actively working to make people’s lives better.
“Not even sure what I’d reverse time for anymore,” he says, setting his empty glass on the table.
Ouch. That comment lands, as I’m sure he intended. His efforts to make my life better when we were teenagers were the first time anyone had ever put me first. Aunt Verna took me in as a kid, but I always felt like I was competing for her heart with my mother. Aunt Verna could never let Mickie go, and even though I understand that sisterly bond better now, part of me resented her for it back then. Mickie could have led Verna straight to hell, and she’d have gone if it meant Mickie suffered a little less.
“Your resume says you went to the East Coast School of Interior Design, but that summer before you left, you had a scholarship at Pratt for art?” He raises his hand, and another drink appears, as though the waitress is waiting for her cue to deliver. I was never that attentive to anyone in this place. She must make a killing on tips.
“I got a last-minute offer from ECSID which included my housing, so I took it.” The half-truth rolls off my tongue, practiced and familiar.
“How last-minute?”
“Very.” There’s nothing I can say to him that’ll change what I did, the choices I made. At eighteen, I did the best I could, and I’ve tried to make peace with that. Rehashing anything when I’m going to be leaving the island in a few days is pointless. Our wounds might have become uncovered in the boardroom, but I’m not going to pick them until they bleed.
“You were going to California for a business degree, but you’ve ended up in television?”
“Cut my producing teeth in documentaries.”
We stare at each other across the table, and I wonder if he’s slotting all the ways we’re the same and different the way I am.
“When you graduated, you went after custody of Kinsley?”
“Yes,” I say, though the answer is a little more complicated than that.
“Your aunt didn’t want to raise another one of Mickie’s kids?”
The way he says it is a poke in my side, but I ignore it. “She would have,” I say, “but I didn’t want Kinsley growing up here.”
“And now?”
“I still don’t,” I say. “Kin seems to think the grass would be greener here, but I suspect the grass is exactly the same as it’s always been.” Burnt.
“You were going to turn down the job?”
I let out a little laugh, realizing how contradictory I’m going to sound. “No, I was going to take it. She hates me right now,” I say, and I fight back the tears that come into my voice, “and I’m not sure I’ve been a better parent than Mickie and Niall would have been.”
Nate’s expression softens, and he leans his elbows on the table, invading my personal space in a way that should bother me. Intimacy, warm and familiar, seeps across the space between us. Gone is the edgy, angry man, and in his place is the Nate I remember, and god, my fucking heart crumbles into dust, flies away on the thin breeze between us, and reassembles at his fingertips, whole and needy.
“I guarantee you’re better than Mickie and Niall. You were better at eighteen, and I know that any mistakes you’ve made would have been done with good intentions.”
“Good intentions don’t make people hurt less,” I say, and my heart pounds at the double meaning in my words. “Doesn’t make Kin hurt less. Good intentions haven’t tucked her into bed at night or gotten her to dance classes when I was too busy working.”
“New York is an expensive city,” Nate says, his words laced with kindness. “Your childhood here was a hell of a lot worse than some missed dance classes and some late nights.” His thumb skims across the scars on my wrist, and I shiver at the contact. “If those are her biggest complaints, I think you’re doing okay.”
Every single fiber of my being is focused on the brush of his thumb against my skin, the rhythmic comfort that’s blossoming into something fuller, heavier. When we were younger, it was like this—the briefest, gentlest touch could inspire a storm of lust that clouded and obscured everything else. Franny called me “dickmatized” that summer—so enamored with Nate that I couldn’t see or hear anything that didn’t have something to do with him.
I would have gladly spent the rest of my life lost in that haze. It was the sole reason I couldn’t let myself see him the night I left. If he’d been within fifty feet of me, I never would have been able to get on that plane. Never.
Right now, the idea of ever leaving this bar is holding less and less appeal. The longer he touches me, the less anything else matters.
When I glance up, our gazes connect, and I see exactly what I’m feeling reflected in his expression. Desire. Confusion. Longing.
He lets go of my wrist like it’s burned him, and he leans back in his chair, runs his hands along his face in quick motions that look almost painful.
