Page 8 of Win Some Love Some
“You know I’m talking about sex right now?” I asked, just in case I wasn’t clear. I probably wasn’t. I really messed that speech up.
He closed his eyes and covered his face with his hands. “Please tell me you’re not.”
“Nick,” I said, reaching for his hand. “It’s inevitable. We’re…inevitable. I want inevitable to start now. I want you to show me what it’s all about. So that I know how it’s going to be and-”
“Nick?”
All the blood in my body froze and for a second I let myself believe that I was imagining it. Imagining the woman’s voice coming from inside Nick’s apartment. At midnight. While he had no shirt on.
No. No. Nonononononono.
“Nick, who’s there?”
“No one,” he said over his shoulder and it was like getting punched in the stomach.
I’m no one? Me?
I reeled back, caught myself against the railing.
“I mean, it’s just…don’t worry. Go back to bed, Sheila,” he said.
Sheila Hedgemore. With the hair and the boobs. Who he’d been talking to all night.
“I’m going to be sick,” I whispered.
Nick closed the apartment door behind him, his face was unreadable in the dim light. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. He really needed a stronger lightbulb out here. I told him that all the time.
“What the fuck, Nor?”
Oh, he was mad. Awesome.
Laughter came out of my throat like razor blades. I needed to leave. Now. Immediately. Before it got worse.
How could this get worse?
I turned to race down the steps but he grabbed me by the elbow. His touch made me flinch. It made me want to cry. The best thing in my whole world had turned into something painful.
“That was sort of the point,” I said, trying to laugh again but it sounded more like hysteria. “But you’re fucking…Sheila.”
Of course, I knew he’d had other women. But there was never anyone serious. Not ever. Nick dated, but he didn’t have girlfriends. Because…well, I knew why. Or thought I did.
He was waiting for me.
“What were you thinking?” he asked, like what I was doing was so out of line…so completely out of left field it was like I’d asked him to jump off the roof. The pain in my chest warped and twisted into something bitter, something that threw my shoulders back and allowed me to jerk my arm away and face him.
“Like you don’t know?” I demanded. “Like you don’t feel this?We’re in love, Nick. We have been…forever.”
He was my person. I was his person. It had always been this way.
Fate.
“No, I don’t know…” he whisper yelled because he didn’t want the woman he was banging to hear him breaking the heart of the eighteen year old on the stairs.
He stopped, took a deep breath. “Nora-”
“No. Don’t use that voice with me.” His stupidlet’s be reasonablevoice. Like he was my fucking father or something. When he wasn’t. He was the love of my life and he was breaking my heart. “And don’t act like this is crazy.”
“This is crazy!” he shouted. He ran his hand over his face a few times, and when he’d gathered himself enough, he looked at me and I knew, I knew I’d been wrong. So wrong. Like…change the course of my life wrong. Everything I thought was right was wrong.
