Assuming he ever decided to leave the safety of his room.
As brutal as Reese’s physical therapy sessions were, his progress was slow. But his therapists had told him that pushing himself too hard would just cause more damage. I’d known he’d been overdoing it at therapy so that he could escape my house and his father sooner, but I had a feeling he’d taken the warning he’d received today to heart. And while he hopefully wouldn’t need the wheelchair for too much longer, I’d rather he had as much freedom as possible to get around, rather than not enough.
“Believe it or not, my power of persuasion doesn’t always work,” I remarked, which earned me a snide look from Nash.
“No shit,” he muttered.
I smiled at that, but then sobered when my eyes fell on Everett. What if I’d fucked this up too? Like I’d fucked up the approach I’d taken with Nash?
“I’ve tried talking to Reese a couple of times about his father and why he’s so pissed at him, but he shuts me down every time. If I push too hard, he’ll walk,” I said. “No pun intended,” I added. I glanced at Nash and softly said, “I get it wrong sometimes, Nash. You’ve seen proof of that firsthand.”
He stiffened next to me, but fortunately, he stayed where he was.
“I don’t want to fuck this thing up with Reese and Everett. It’s too damn important. But I’ll admit it, I’m flailing a bit here.” I scrubbed my hand over my face before saying, “So if you’ve got any ideas, I’m all ears.”
He didn’t speak for a long time and I fully expected him to get up and walk away. But he didn’t. He just sat there for several long minutes before he said, “What do you mean, get it wrong?”
“What?” I asked.
“You said I’ve seen firsthand that you get it wrong sometimes. That day that you and I… that I… how did you get it wrong? You accomplished what you set out to do.”
I knew he was talking about the day we’d fought and he’d punched me. My bruises were just now starting to fade. The cut on my lip was gone, but the gash beneath my eye was still scabbed over.
“What I set out to do?” I asked, completely confused.
Nash began drumming his fingers on his leg. “You wanted to humiliate me. You wanted to prove you could get to me.”
I could only stare at him in complete and utter disbelief.
“Is that really what you think?”
“Why else would you do it? You went looking for dirt on me and you found it. The FBI didn’t even find some of that shit when they did their background check on me. And I know you told Everett because he’s been treating me different?—”
“Nash,” I said softly as I covered his frantically drumming fingers with my hand before I could think better of what I was doing. He sucked in a breath and I quickly jerked my hand back. “Fuck, sorry,” I muttered. “Nash, I swear to you, I didn’t tell Everetta thing. As for trying to find dirt on you, I just wanted to try and figure you out. You were so adamant about keeping yourself apart from all of us… usually I’m able to get a read on people pretty easily, but with you, I couldn’t. I guess… I guess I was trying to fix something that wasn’t really broken.”
“It’s true,” my father interjected from somewhere behind us. I turned to see him pushing the screen for the sliding door open. He had a tray in his hands.
“Dad,” I said, not thrilled that he’d been listening to us. Though I suspected he’d only heard that last part as he’d been preparing to push the door open. I jumped up and slid the door the rest of the way open. The tray had several glasses of lemonade and three bottles of beer on it.
My father ignored me as he pushed the tray into my hands and grabbed one of the bottles of beer and approached Nash. “When he was about Charlie’s age, his mother and I had this huge fight that got started because we couldn’t agree on which one of us had forgotten to stop at the store to get milk. It wasn’t often that my Charlotte and I got into it, but we were both stressed with new jobs and we were struggling to make ends meet, so that gallon of milk just became the catalyst to get some stuff off our collective chests. We didn’t speak to one another all night, didn’t have dinner together. It wasn’t until my wife went to put Gage to bed that we realized he wasn’t there. We panicked because we’d been so caught up in fighting, we had no clue when he’d gone missing. Charlotte was on the phone with 911 and I was running out the door with my car keys so I could go look for him, when who do you think walked up the front steps?”
I rolled my eyes as my father looked at me. I’d been embarrassed with the recounting of this story more than once. I felt a shiver travel up my spine and shifted my gaze to Nash, who was watching me with an unreadable expression.
“I called out to his mother, who came running and cried all over him. It was a good five minutes before either of us could calm down enough to talk, but Gage beat us to it. He handed me a plastic grocery bag. Guess what was in it.”
I was caught in the snare Nash’s eyes created as he watched me. “Milk,” he said, his voice going softer than I’d ever heard it before. It was laced with a hint of amusement and something… more.
“That’s right,” my father continued, oblivious to the way Nash and I were caught up in watching one another. “He proudly told us that he’d ridden his bike to the store to get the milk and that now we wouldn’t need to fight anymore. As simple as that. He saw a problem and figured it needed to get fixed and so that was what he did.” My father laughed and handed the bottle of beer to Nash. “Charlotte started calling him her Little Mister Fix-It after that.”
“And never stopped,” I added, which actually made Nash smile.
He fucking smiled.
“Here you go, son,” my father said when he thrust the beer in Nash’s direction.
“Oh no, sir, I’m on duty.”
“Pish,” my father responded. “That man’s more in danger of Charlie talking him to death than anything else,” he added.
