Page 79 of Fierce Love
So much time has passed, and yet so much hasn’t changed between us. All these years, I talked myself into believing that we’d have grown apart, that the intensity would have faded, that there was no way two people who were raised so differently could have worked out.
And I know why I had to tell myself those things, why I had to convince myself that the path I took was the only one that could have possibly led to anything good—but not one of those things has felt true since we moved into this house together.
Nate and I get along just as well, understand each other just as completely, want each other just as much as we always did.
The snake oil I drank at the time made other people’s lives better, but it didn’t make mine better, and I’m coming to terms with the fact that it didn’t make Nate’s life better either.
While I might have wondered whether my leaving would actually be a blessing for Nate—if he’d get over me and find some suitable socialite—part of me knew there was a chance I was damning us both.
That’s a hard reality to face, and I’m not sure I’m ready to take the full load.
“Hols,” he says, his voice thick, and I know he’s close. His hands are deep in my hair, but I don’t let up. I need this. I need him. “Hols, I’m gonna…” I appreciate the warning, and then he lets out the groan of satisfaction that I love the hear. I swallow, and I try to force the stickiness of my conscience down with it.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Hollyn
With Kinsley gone for the night, we order dinner, and we eat it at the kitchen island while talking about the show’s episodes and Kinsley’s incredible progress at almost every single skill in adventure racing. She’s discovered numerous new loves, and I’ll have to figure out how to make at least one of them work when we return to New York. A blessing and a curse.
After dinner, Nate checks with Owen to see whether the security company’s employees can do puppy pee breaks. There are lots of people on the island who do pet visits, but Nate is paranoid about giving anyone who could possibly have ties to my parents access to the house. He seems to think their net extends quite wide, and maybe it does.
My parents don’t seem to be nearly as poor as they once were. While they look rough, as though life has been hard on them, they don’t appear to be struggling financially. I know them well enough to assume someone else is now suffering on their behalf,hustling to pay whatever debt they owe Mick, making good on whatever scam my parents are running on the island. Any wealth they’ve accumulated hasn’t been earned through legal means.
Given how small Bellerive is, it always amazes me that my parents are capable of finding new people to draw into their webs.
At the kitchen island, Nate mixes himself a gold rush, and my lips tingle at the thought of tasting the bourbon later. While I still don’t drink much at all, there’s been something about the smell and taste of bourbon that’s appealed to me from that first night I met Nate in the bar. At least with me, he was never one to overindulge, and for the first time in my life, alcohol wasn’t linked to a negative experience. Teenage Nate, when he’d had a couple drinks, only became more loving, more gushy, more bright happiness illuminating my life. And so that smell, that taste, is intrinsically tied to goodness, to a period in my life when I felt his warmth shining on me.
“You’re thinking deep thoughts,” Nate says as he slides a glass of sweet tea, that he special orders every week from the hotel, across the kitchen island toward me.
“Am I?” I give him a little smile and take a sip of my drink.
“It’s probably about how much you love Bellerive.” A teasing glint is in his eye. He hasn’t gone so far as to outright ask me to stay, but he frequently dances around it. “Off the top of your head, what’s one good thing about your native land?”
“You,” I say without even a second of hesitation.
He meets my gaze, surprise clear in his blue-green depths, and I wonder if I should have said it. Sometimes, given how things ended between us the first time and my refusal to stay this time, he gets frustrated when I make comments that he thinks should mean something they can’t. I understand, so I’ve tried to be careful, to keep my reemerging feelings buttoned up more than I want to as we’ve lived together the last few weeks.
Even if I love him, even if part of me truly believes now that I’ll never love anyone the way I love Nathaniel Tucker, I also know that the deal I made with Celia Tucker means right now is all I can have, all I’ll ever get.
“Me?” he says, his voice hoarse.
“It’s always been you, Nate.Always.” It’s the closest I’ll ever come to telling him the truth.
He steps around the island, closing the space between us and sweeps me into a passionate kiss, the maple and vanilla notes of the bourbon he drinks sweet on my lips. I wrap my arms around him, and I savor the pureness of this moment, where I can confess something without ruining anything.
“If you never admit to any other feeling,” he murmurs as he kisses me again, “that’s enough.”
“What do you mean?” I draw back and frame his face with my hands. A little frisson shoots along my spine.
He searches my gaze for a beat and then he shakes his head. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s obviously not nothing.” I follow him around the island so we’re on the same side again.
He swirls his drink and takes a long sip, then he sets it on the marble top. “I never asked you when we were kids, but what does love mean to you, Hols? Like if you had to describe it to someone, what is it?”
Strings that strangle you. Sacrifices you don’t want to make. Losing things you want to keep. Nothing good comes from love.
“Why?” I ask, and I can feel myself closing off. Even though the love I feel for Nate right now, the love I felt for him back then, wasn’t initially negative, those thoughts are my instinctual reaction to his question. Except for him, anyone who’s ever said they loved me or pretended to has wanted something, has needed me to give up something for them. Love has always come with conditions.
