Nick nodded, then kept rolling, working through something in his head. “I think people have certain expectations of what a pan person is like, and I don’t know if I’m that or not. I just know that when I meet someone good, I can be attracted. Hell,sometimes I’m attracted when I meet someone not good.”
“I hope you don’t mean me,” I said with a nervous chuckle.
“No, I mean my whole college mess. He wasn’t a bad person, it was just . . . messy. He wasn’t sure what he wanted, whether he was ready to accept himself. His parents had certain expectations of him, and he was afraid to go outside of them. So no matter what we had, I’d never have him.”
“Kind of like us now,” I blurted, then wished I hadn’t.
“Kind of,” he said morosely.
“I don’t want to hurt you, Nick.”
He shook his head, the pain in his eyes devastating. “Make-believe, Annie. Let’s just have tonight.”
Right. Pretend.
I went back to the previous topic. “Do your parents know about you?”
“Yeah. My mom was fine. She’s all crunchy-granola-earth-mother. My dad took a while to come around. He still doesn’t fully understand it, but he loves me anyway. He’s still proud of me and wants me to be happy. Might be a different story if I didn’t have a successful career, though. If I were the theater nerd I wanted to be, who knows?”
“Sometimes not understanding but loving you anyway is the best you can ask for.”
He nodded, taking a sip of his beer. “What about your parents? Or, your dad, I guess?”
“I actually told my family before my mom passed. Felt like I needed to set the example for my siblings. I wanted them to know that it’s okay to be proud of who you are even if it’s different. Mom was happy, but she assumed I was in love with Kitty.”
Nick laughed. “My mom does the same thing with my friends. She lays eyes on a friend of mine and is like, ‘Is that one of them, Nicky?’ The one time I did go friends to lovers, I got burned, hard.”
I stared at the plate of nachos between us. “And then there arefriends with benefits.”
Nick laughed. “Annabelle Markham, are you looking to get punished tonight or something? Stop bringing up the ugly stuff.”
“Sorry. You know it’s my need for constant certainty,” I whined.
“Uncertainty is freedom,” he said with a wink.
“No, certainty gives you the grounding to be able to be free.”
“Is that it? Because nothing is certain in life. You’ve gotta take the freedom where you can get it.”
Our food came, us picking off each other’s plates. Things were so easy between us, and I realized how comfortable I was with him. It was nice to have some time out together, even though all my wounds were throbbing.
We strolled out of the restaurant blissfully stuffed. Nick put his arm around me as we walked back to the bike path.
“Sorry I got you all banged up tonight, Annie.”
“I’m not even mad,” I said. “Don’t sweat it. Blame the pebble.”
“I actually picked up the evil pebble. Thought you might want a souvenir,” he laughed. “You wanna sit on the beach for a little bit?”
Although the sun had long since disappeared beyond the horizon, the idea of spending some peaceful moments with Nick sounded ideal. We located a dry spot and settled down, observing the moonlight dancing on the waves. He opened his legs slightly for me to sit between them, and I leaned back against him, his comforting presence enveloping me. His chest rose and fell with slow, even breaths against my back. He pressed kisses into my hair, my neck, my shoulders.
And we didn’t say anything. We didn’t need to.
I was free, and he was understood.
Chapter 35
Nick
