His thumb traces my lower lip, and my breath catches. Before I can think better of it, I curl my fingers around the back of his neck and kiss him.
It’s desperate, hungry, all the want I’ve been suppressing for weeks condensed into a single point of contact. He responds immediately, his other hand coming up to cup my face, angling my head so he can deepen the kiss.
And for one reckless, airless second, I let it happen.
Then the guilt hits like a wave breaking over my head. Wyatt. The pregnancy. The abortion. Chris’s hands on my face and his mouth on mine and he doesn’t even know?—
I wrench backward. “Stop. I can’t—we can’t?—”
“Nina—”
“I was pregnant.” It comes out like something breaking. Not a confession—a rupture. “After that night, after I moved to LA, I found out I was pregnant and I—” My voice cracks. “I’m not anymore.”
His face goes blank. It’s the worst kind of blank—not the trained mask, just incomprehension. Like the words reached him but his brain won’t assemble them.
“I had an abortion,” I say, because apparently my mouth has decided that if I’m going to destroy this, I’m going to be thorough about it. “A week ago. Callie was there. And I should have told you, I know I should have told you, but I couldn’t—I can’t?—”
I’m backing away from him. Not toward the door, just away, and my hands are shaking too badly to do anything with them so I press them against the counter behind me and try to breathe but I can’t breathe because I just told him and now it’s real and now he knows and?—
“Nina.” Chris moves toward me. “Look at me.”
“Don’t.” I hold up a hand. “Don’t be kind about this. I don’t—I can’t handle that right now.”
“You think I’d be angry?”
The confusion in his voice nearly breaks me. Because yes—I expected anger, betrayal, how could you not tell me. I needed it, almost. Anger I know how to absorb. Compassion from the man whose baby I?—
“I took something from you,” I manage. “Without asking. Without even telling you there was something to take.”
“You didn’t take anything from me.” He says it so simply. Like it’s obvious. Like he knows exactly what pregnancy means to the girl who lost her mother to it. Because he does. He was there when I was nine and lost my shit over a pregnant woman in the grocery store, or when I was fourteen and had a panic attack at a baby shower. He knows.
And I can’t stand it. His understanding is worse than anger because it leaves me nowhere to put the shame.
“Wyatt knows,” I hear myself say. “I told him tonight. Before you got here. And he—we haven’t even finished that conversation—and now I’m in here kissing you and telling you things I?—”
I’m spiraling. I can hear it in my own voice—the pitch climbing, the sentences fragmenting—and some distant clinical part of my brain recognizes it but can’t stop it. I’m pressing my back against the counter, and my hands are pulling at each other like I can wring the guilt out through my fingers.
“Nina. Hey.” Chris is in front of me. His hands close around my wrists—not pulling, just stopping the motion, his thumbs finding my pulse the way they did a hundred times when we were younger and I was coming apart. “Listen to me. Breathe.”
“I can’t be here. I need to—I have to go?—”
“Just breathe. You’re okay.”
“I’m not okay?—”
“Let go of her.”
We both freeze.
Wyatt is in the doorway, his figure blurred by my tears.
“I said let go.”
Chris drops my wrists. Steps back. But the damage is done—Wyatt crosses the kitchen, puts himself between us, and the rigid line of his shoulders tells me he’s drawn the most obvious conclusion to what he saw.
“Are you okay?” He’s facing me, his voice low. Behind him, Chris hasn’t moved.
“He wasn’t hurting me?—”
