Her eyes are wary when they meet mine.
“What we did tonight—that was everything I needed. Not because it had to be enough, but because it was enough.”
Wyatt shifts beside her, his voice gentle. “You don’t owe us anything, Nina. Not your body, not apologies, nothing.”
“But you both wanted?—”
“We wanted you,” I interrupt. “We wanted to be close to you. To touch you, to make you feel good. That’s what happened.”
She’s quiet for a moment. I can see her mind working, trying to reconcile what we’re saying with whatever story she’s been telling herself.
“After we thought you died,” she says finally, voice barely above a whisper, “I went a little crazy. Slept with a lot of people. Always made sure they got what they wanted, even when I didn’t really want to give it.”
I know that survival mechanism. The way you learn to shape yourself into what someone expects because it feels safer than risking rejection for who you actually are.
“I thought that was just how it worked,” she continues. “That if I fucked them well enough, made them come hard enough, they might stick around long enough for me to matter.”
A stone settles in my gut, because of how we left things all those years ago. How we had sex the night of hers and Callie’s college graduation, and how I left literally the next day for the op that “killed” me. I didn’t break her—Nina’s too strong for that—but I gave her a wound she had to heal without me. No conversation with Wyatt about how she was when I was dead could have clued me in on that.
That’s on me.
Wyatt’s arm tightens around her. “And now?”
“Now I’m terrified I’m falling back into old patterns. Apologizing for having limits. Apologizing for not offering more than I want to give because I think you’ll leave if I don’t.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” I tell her, meaning it more than I’ve meant anything in years.
“How can you be sure?” She gives me a look that’s half silent plea, half blame for when I did leave, and it hits the mark.
“Because we already had the chance to leave,” Wyatt says. “Tonight, when we found out about the pregnancy—the abortion, we ran to you, not away.”
She nods slowly, some of the tension leaving her shoulders.
“The surgery,” I say carefully. “Are you doing it for us? To make things easier?”
“No.” Her voice is firm, certain. “I’m doing it for me. Because I never want to go through that fear again.”
“Good,” Wyatt murmurs against her hair. “That’s exactly why you should do it.”
The conversation fades into comfortable silence, bodies warm and relaxed in the dim light. Wyatt meets my eyes across her shoulder, a silent challenge as if he’s expecting me to do what I did the last two times I was with either of them. The only right answer is for me to pull back the covers and climb underneath. They both join me, with Nina letting out a sigh as she curls against my side. Only then does Wyatt reach over and click off the bedside lamp, cloaking us in darkness.
I squeeze Nina’s hand between us. “I’m sorry for ever leaving you. If there’s anything I could do to change what happened, I would.”
She turns her face up to me in the darkness, and I can feel her eyes searching the shadows of my face. “You’re here now, and that’s what matters,” she whispers, then kisses me softly before settling deeper between us.
Nina’s breathing evens out first, exhaustion finally claiming her. Wyatt follows soon after, his arm curved protectively around her waist.
I stay awake longer, watching them sleep.
Experimentally I search for any kernel of anger over what she did, but all I wind up with is a question about whether I should have a particular feeling about it, and what does it mean that I don’t? And all I feel is pissed at a system that makes us ashamed of who we are at our cores. That holds everyone up against some impossible standard of what makes a person worthy of societal acceptance.
I’m not often able to think about my time with Vicente in such an abstract way, but can’t help but wonder if it was always his shame over being left behind by Arturo that defined how he approached intimate relationships. Ours wasn’t exactly one free from shame. We were steeped in it with every word, every action. I think some people get off on shame. I think I got off on his shame. Because as powerless as I was with him, being given permission to exploit that shame was the only way I could pretend to have any control.
Shame is the last thing Nina should feel. It isn’t sexy when it tears you down, makes you believe you’re broken in such a fundamental way that you doubt your own sense of self worth.
It’s not an easy thing to shake though. Even now, lying in her bed, quiet, calm, and completely sated, listening to the two of them breathing, almost in sync, that compulsion to run is difficult to ignore. Because that’s what I was conditioned to feel with him. The exits to his bedroom are still mapped in my head. The number of steps to reach each one. The aftermath of our assignations while he slept was the only respite I ever got.
Ever since I came home, the shadow sits like a loaded weapon in an unsecured room. Because even after I ingratiated myself to a monster well enough to become his sex toy, even knowing I had zero agency, some part of me still craves that slow, velvet slide into darkness. Still aches to relinquish all inhibition and control. And that fucking terrifies me more than my job, more than even letting myself love these two people.
