Page 41 of Win Some Love Some
“You didn’t have to order it,” I said, lifting a fork to my mouth. I was trying to push her to answer me honestly.
“I’m re-assimilating. Lola wasn’t far off. Eating any bread in the States is a little painful. I’m not saying this about all things, but when it comes to bread, the French just do it better.”
“You didn’t have to come home,” I said.
“Wrong,” she corrected me, with a little bite in her voice. “Financially, emotionally and in every other way, I needed to come home.”
“Okay, so let’s do it then.”
“Do what?” she asked, looking confused.
I pointed a piece of bacon at her. “Get it out of the way. You do it once with me, then it won’t be so hard with the next person.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Nick, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Tell me the story,” I said, I wiped my hands and pushed my plate out of the way. “Not the glossed over version. The real one. Tell me how you could have been so stupid.”
7
Nora
It would have been easy to get mad at him. Easy to throw my water in his face and storm out of the diner. I didn’t owe him my story.
Going back to normal was impossible. There was too much past between us. Too much heartbreak. But we were moving on to someplace new. Different. So maybe it was time to put the past, firmly in the past.
I took a deep breath and my entire body fought me. My throat closed up. My brain shut down. Nick reached across the table and squeezed my hand.
“It’s just me, Nora,” he whispered, half his mouth lifted in that smile I used to love.
I blew out the breath and the story just…fell out of me. “I was an idiot. I’m not sure what more there is to say. Part of me was on top of the world. And the other part of me was…missing something. He stepped in and made me forget that.”
“With money?”
“No,” I scoffed. “Everyone wants to think that, but I had my own money. It’s why he targeted me.”
Our eyes met over the table and I didn’t want him to think that he had anything to do with what happened to me. And he didn’t – I’d made my own mistakes. But there was a part of my reaction to Nick that led to what happened.
“Rene was very expressive. I felt like I knew him because he conveyed every emotion every moment he had one. He talked constantly.”
“It prevented me from seeing the lies.”
Nick grunted. His eyes shuddered.
“He was charismatic and old school chivalrous. He filled the void with more adventure than a person was supposed to have.”
“What was so adventurous?”
“Private jets, parties at clubs with only the most famous celebrities. Wealth like you couldn’t imagine. Bodyguards wherever we went. He showed me a France I simply wouldn’t have ever seen. The opulence was jaw dropping. And then there were the great escapes.”
“Great escapes?”
“That’s what I started to call them. We’d be at a club, and his bodyguards would rush us from the floor saying we needed to leave now. We’d get in these dark cars and drive around Paris as if someone was actually following us. It was scary, but it was also exciting. Like we were playing this game, and every time we made it back to his hotel, we won.”
I picked at my eggs with my fork. It was all so stupid.
“Was anyone ever chasing you?”
Nick’s expression was tight, maybe a little angry. I reached my hand over the table to tell him it was all nothing, but touching him while telling this story didn’t feel right, so I stole a piece of his toast instead.
