“I stopped being yours the moment you hooked up with my best friend.” I said that knowing that having to break up with him definitively in the coming days would leave me feeling worse than I already did. “You can stay here because I’m not going to upset William or my mother, and I don’t want them to have to know what you did to me. But when that time’s up, I never want to hear from you again.”
“I know I hurt you, Noah. But I love you, I have always loved you, and without you, my life’s a disaster. Since I saw you just now, everything makes sense again. When you told me you were leaving, I tried to make a plan in my head to be able to deal with it, but it didn’t work. Noah, the thing with Beth meant nothing to me. I just leaned on her because she reminded me of you. You two were always together. You were so much alike. I know I’ve been an asshole, but I can’t let what we have end this way.”
I looked down, trying to suppress the tears that wanted out. I wasn’t going to cry. I didn’t cry anymore. I wouldn’t cry.
“So this is where we are now,” he said. “You can’t even look me in the eyes.”
He grabbed my face again.
“Please, just tell me you forgive me,” he whispered, his lips nearly pressed to mine.
I don’t even know what I said, but he kissed me again, hard, with feeling, and I let him do it, again. I couldn’t control it. It was something I needed. But I knew it wasn’t right. I had a strange feeling as I went along with him; I felt guilty, guilty because I was deceiving someone very important: myself.
At last, I managed to get out the words “I need some space.” And it was true; I needed to think, needed to not have him in front of me.
“Fine,” he agreed. “Can I at least leave my things in the guest room?”
I agreed and led him up there. I couldn’t spend another minute with him, so I walked off to my room, thinking I would just climb into bed and sleep until the next day. I didn’t care how early it was. I needed to think and get my feelings in perspective, but then my body made me stop at a room that wasn’t mine, and before I could stop myself, I was knocking at Nicholas’s door.
I don’t know whether he answered. All I know was I heard a noise and went inside.
He was sitting in front of his laptop at a desk in the corner. When he saw me come in, he closed it. He spun his chair around to look at me, and I observed every inch of his anatomy as if it were a work of art. He was shirtless in gray sweatpants. I could tell he wasn’t expecting a visitor, especially not me. It was the first time I’d ever knocked at his door since I’d lived there, but something in me told me my stepbrother would be able to console me, even as I was trying to grasp why I’d chosen to torture myself by being in his presence.
He must have seen something in my face because he immediately asked what was going on and approached me cautiously, not sure what to do. Just as with every other time we’d been alone together, an irresistible attraction crackled in the air. In a way, I was happy to realize Dan couldn’t make me react that way—happy but at the same time confused.
Those eyes of Nick’s only promised darkness. But without thinking twice, I grabbed the back of his neck, pulled him close, and kissed him desperately.
At first, he didn’t react. He was surprised, I guessed, but his body clearly knew what it wanted. He grabbed my waist, and his mouth and tongue took over. He made me forget why I’d even come there, forget everything but him. I had to pull away a second to catch my breath. When I did, he asked me what I was doing, and then his teeth bit into my earlobe before his mouth traveled down to my cheek, my neck… Any notion of pain, loss, or nostalgia vanished from my mind. But then he pushed me away.
“What happened?” he asked.
Why did he have to ask that? Why couldn’t he just kiss me and let me enjoy his undoubted abilities? Since when had Nick cared why someone wanted to hook up with him?
Now I found myself thinking about Dan again. That wound of being betrayed by someone I had loved so much—and I had loved them both, him and Beth—reopened again. That, and the wound of knowing I’d lost them both forever because I would never be able to forgive them because they didn’t deserve it. And the worst thing was the fear—the fear that I wasn’t strong enough to keep away from him.
I rested my head on Nick’s bare shoulder, and he held me. This was the first time we’d ever shared a moment like this. His smell was entrancing—it must have been one of those fancy colognes models advertised on TV—and his chest was warm and comforting, and even though I felt frozen, somewhere deep inside me, a small fire had started to burn.
“It’s not like I don’t love holding you, Freckles, but if you don’t tell me what happened, I might draw the wrong conclusions, and I’ll wind up pounding the shit out of the wrong guy.”
Despite my mood, those words got a smile out of me.
I started to pull away, but he walked me backward and sat down at his desk with me in his lap.
“Please God tell me you didn’t fuck my other car up, too, and now you’ve come to me because you feel bad about it because I swear, all the kisses in the world won’t help that…”
I didn’t know this side of the normally cold and standoffish Nicholas Leister—the side that cracked jokes, that tried to get people to laugh—and I admitted that I liked it. A lot.
So I decided to tell him why I’d come to his room. Because, believe it or not, I hadn’t planned to hook up with him or anything like that.
“Dan’s here,” I said. He took a second to absorb what I’d said. Then his body tensed.
“That motherfucker who cheated on you is here? Where, in Los Angeles?”
“Uh…he’s here. In this house.” I knew as I said it how pathetic and ridiculous the situation was. Nick seemed to be waiting for the punch line. I tried to explain.
“My mother invited him. She doesn’t know anything about what he did, has no idea we’ve broken up…but he’s here, Nicholas, and I feel like I’m completely losing it…”
I got up and started pacing around the room. I had no idea why I was telling my stepbrother this, but Nick was good at getting you to think about other things.
He took a cigarette from his desk and put it in his mouth. I didn’t know if he was angry or disappointed.
“Why are you telling me this?” he said, taking a curt drag. That old coldness in his eyes was back, the one I’d seen many times before, the same one that made us hate and insult each other. Trying to put aside my feelings for him, things that I myself didn’t understand, and I told him what I really needed.
“As soon as he sees you, Dan will know who you are,” I said, trying to hide behind that armor I always used to defend myself, even if it seemed to have disappeared since Dan arrived. “He’ll recognize you from the photo of us, from when we…kissed.”
Who’d have thought a simple photo would bring me so many headaches? If I’d known that kissing Nick would mean that the desire to do it again would invade my body and mind, I would have avoided it from the beginning.
Nicholas laid his cigarette in an ashtray and looked at me with contempt.
“What do you want, Noah?”
“I just want him to be gone and to never have to see him again.” It was true; that was what I wanted, no matter how much it hurt. I didn’t want to be around someone who had deceived me.
That seemed to relax Nicholas, and I continued:
“But I don’t know how to make it happen.” I wiped my forehead with my hand. “He came here for the sole purpose of getting me to forgive him…and there’s a part of me that wants to, but I know I can’t, I shouldn’t…”
“So this is where I come in?” he asked.
I nodded.
“It’s just a couple of days. If he sees that I’ve moved on, that I’m not interested in him, maybe he’ll leave me alone.”
He nodded, picking his cigarette back up. I didn’t like people smoking, but when Nicholas did it, it was sexy.
“So we’ve got to make out in front of him,” Nicholas concluded.