“I hoped you’d pull your head out of your ass and come.” Frisco buttoned his coat. “Now it’s time for me to leave you two idiots to figure out what the hell to do with each other. This is why I stay away from relationships. You’re both a mess.” Shaking his head, he walked out. Nate remained in the doorway, and he cleared his throat.
“Press?”
“Oh, uh, sorry. C’min.”
Nate strode inside. I closed the door behind him and leaned on it for support. My hungry gaze roamed over him. He unbuttoned his coat, slipped it off, and tossed it over a chair. From the way his pants hung loosely on his hips and his haggard, rumpled appearance, he was in as bad an emotional state as I was. And yet I couldn’t stop staring and drinking in his presence.
He’s here.
All I wanted to do was fling myself into his arms and bury myself in his neck to smell his cool, rainwater scent. In the weeks we’d been apart, I hadn’t washed the clothes I wore the last time we were together. I knew it was pathetic and foolish, but I couldn’t help missing Nate.
“Do you want to sit down?” If he said yes, I figured he was willing to stay and try to work it out. But the pitiful shred of hope I carried inside me burned to ash when he shook his head.
“I’ll stand, thanks.”
My head bent, I trudged past him into my living room and picked up the empty bottle and glass from the floor. I put the bottle in the recycling bin and the glass in the sink while I braced myself for Nate telling me he was done. But when I faced him, pride made me angry, and I refused to be treated like a criminal.
“Why are you here?”
His brows shot up, disappearing under that thick fall of hair, and I wanted to reach out and push it back like I’d seen him do a hundred times.
“I…we…dammit, Press.” He raked his hands through his hair and paced around my living room. “I wanted to talk to you.”
“When I wanted to talk, you hung up on me.” On a roll with my newly discovered strength, I planted myself in front of him. “Why do you get to say what you want, but when I want to talk, I get brushed aside? I’ve spent my whole life in second place. I deserve to be number one for once. I count.”
For the first time since I met Nate, he was speechless. And even though I trembled with a combination of anger and frustration at his high-handedness, I wanted to touch him so badly, I had to restrain myself from reaching out. I fisted my hands at my sides and threw my best angry glare at him.
“You’re right.”
The words came out so low, I had to strain to hear them.
“So now can you sit with me? And we’ll each say our piece?”
The haunted darkness I remembered from when we’d first met had returned to Nate’s eyes, and a painful ache coiled in my stomach that I’d done that to him. “Okay.” He took the chair while I perched on the edge of the couch. Waiting.
“It was shit without you. I know it was my doing by shutting you out and refusing to see you, but hearing you were with a married man who had a baby was like a fist to my stomach. No, worse. Like a kick in my balls. Everything we’d worked to build between us was a farce. You didn’t want us to have sex, but not because you wanted it to be real between us. You wanted to make sureIwas the one who wanted more than sex.”
“Because I was sick and tired of being used. It took me years to get over Jared. Do you think it’s easy facing the fact that you were nothing more than a means to an end? Six years I spent thinking about a man I now know never loved me. And you know how I figured it out? Because of you. I fell in love with you.”
“Press.”
“No, let me say it. It may be too late for us, but you’re going to let me have my say. You treated me like I was something special and worth every moment we spent together, not someone to hide in out-of-the-way restaurants where no one you knew might see us. I thought love was hard and messy and ugly, but you showed me the opposite. Love can be beautiful and bright. And maybe I don’t deserve it. But I think I do. Love doesn’t always meet us at our best, Nate. It can find us at our worst, and we have to allow it to change us and make us whole again. Only if we want it to. I love you, and I’ve changed. Because of you.”
“Are you finished?”
I lifted my chin. “Yeah. You can leave now if you want.”
“What if I don’t want to?” He left his seat and sat by me, his cold hands finding my equally chilled ones. “What if I said I took it on the chin from my brother and my mother and maybe I’m not so lost and broken anymore.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Ethan told me to let it go. My father’s been dead for three years, and I don’t have to prove myself to him anymore, if I ever did.”
“Ethan’s smart. I thought that the first time I met him.”
Nate’s lips ticked up in a quick smile that didn’t hold. “He has his benefits. But I didn’t want to listen to him. So he called in the secret weapon.”
Despite the seriousness of our conversation, I allowed a smile. “Your mother?”
