I nod and grab a glass and then get him a cold beer out of the fridge.
“Same brain,” he says with a smile, pouring me a glass of wine as I unscrew his beer and hand it to him.
“Cheers.” He brings it to his lips, tilting his head back, his Adam's apple moving up and down with the movement. He lets out a big sigh when he pulls it away.
“So, where do you need me, boss?” He walks into the living room and scans the floor.
To anyone else, it probably looks a mess, but it's organised chaos at its finest to me.
“Okay, so we need to fill all the bags. There are ones for the adults and ones for the kids. Everything is laid out with the kids’ bags on this side, the adults’ that side.” I move back to where I was sitting on the floor and put my wine on the table beside me. “If you’re good to start on the kids’ ones, I’ll carry on with the adults.”
He finds a space and sits down opposite but crosses his legs like me.
“There’s a lot,” he says, eyeing all the stuff.
I nod. “I know less is more, but they don’t know about the twins yet, so there are double keepsakes which will make sense when they get the favour bags when they leave.”
Reaching for one of the paper bags, he opens it and then adds one of everything inside.
“It’s been bloody hard not slipping up. The gender part is hard enough, but add twins to the mix, even harder.”
He brings his beer to his mouth again and lets out a satisfied sigh. My hand freezes as I watch him, the vein in his neck so prominent, so masculine, I want to crawl over there and lick the length of his throat.
I clear my throat, grab my phone, select my playlist, and press shuffle.
We hum and sing along as we both work together to get the bags filled, and between us, we take turns to refill my wine and grab him a fresh beer.
Surprisingly, working together has us finishing in a few hours. It would have taken me all night on my own.
Now and then, he looks up and smiles, and I swear his cheeks flush. This is a side I’ve never seen from Nathan before. He looks almost shy. His phone starts ringing, and he lets out a curse. The tranquillity of his features disappears as he glances at his phone and presses the button on the side.
“Everything alright?” I ask, flopping down on the sofa as he pushes to his feet to join me, taking the fresh beer I got for him.
“It’s my ex,” he says, rolling the neck of the bottle between his large hands.
“Oh,” I reply, not sure what to say.
“We broke up when I found out she was married. She made me into a cheat, one thing I never wanted to be.”
I shake my head. “That’s not your fault. She’s the cheat, not you.”
“Yeah, I know, but still, it's just a hard no, but I’d already fallen for her, which made it even more fucked up,” he admits.
Sipping my wine, I wait for him to continue. If he needs someone to listen, I can be that someone.
“Her husband doesn’t treat her right, so she still calls me.” His eyes move to mine. “But we’ve not been together intimately since I discovered she was married. And now I’m torn between wanting to ghost her and feeling like I need to protect her.”
His jaw clenches. I wonder why he never addressed the morning after our night out. Maybe I read the signals wrong.
Shit, I’m such an idiot.
“I’ve tried to help her, offered to drive her to the police station to report him. Got her information from Olly. But she won’t have none of it.”
I reach over and touch his arm. “You can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.”
He looks almost pained, and I feel like a bitch, because that sounded bloody insensitive.
“What I mean is you can only do so much.”
