Reverse (Bittersweet Symphony Duet #2)

FIFTY

FIFTY

Easton

S torming into the villa, Dad steps around me to go head-to-head with Nate, and I palm his chest, his outrage tangible.

“Dad, don’t,” I press in and can physically feel the anger in Dad’s shaking frame as he barks around me while I try to step between them. “What the fuck, Nate? Were you seriously going to strike my son?!”

Nate scoffs, “I’m not the man to take the underhanded route, Reid. That’s more your fucking specialty, isn’t it?”

“Didn’t look that way to me,” Dad grits out, frame still coiling beneath my hand. As they weigh each other, I glimpse a view of the history between them before Nate claps back.

“Well, we both know things aren’t always what they seem, don’t we, Reid? I prefer to use my intelligence over my fist to make a point, which may be a foreign concept for you.”

“Sure seems like your fucking IQ is lacking today,” Dad grits out, rare anger in his voice.

“Because you’re an authority on controlling your temper, right?” Nate shakes his head with a scoff. “Don’t insult me by acting like you’re okay with this.”

“I won’t, but this is news to me, just as much as it is to you.”

Joel, who’s already standing behind Dad, speaks up. “Reid, do you want me to call security?”

“We all need to take a breath,” I say as calmly as I can muster, pushing at Dad’s chest again, this time with more force. Dad steps back, eyeing Nate with a disdain that borders on hate.

Joel speaks up again. “Reid?”

“No,” Dad barks in reply. “We’re good.”

Natalie involuntarily shudders from where she stands, her tears coming faster as I try and fail to catch her eyes.

“What the fuck did you do?” Dad barks, and I look over to see his venom is meant for me.

“I fell in love,” I admit unapologetically as Nate speaks up, eyes still on Dad, his order for Natalie.

“Natalie. We’re leaving. Right fucking now.”

“What?” She croaks, her eyes meeting mine as I whip my attention to Nate.

“That’s not happening,” I say, slicing my hand across my throat.

“They’re getting it annulled,” Nate fires at Dad.

“Couldn’t fucking agree more,” Dad concedes with just as much aggression as they attempt to take the fight away from Natalie and me.

“The hell we are,” I bark between them. “We aren’t a bunch of lovesick teenagers, and this isn’t some rebellion against you. You both need to check yourselves and your personal issues. Your story is history . She and I, our marriage, are in the here and fucking now .”

“Is that so?” Dad turns to me. “Well, in the here and now , son, your mom almost had a fucking episode.”

All the wind gets knocked out of me, and Nate’s hostile posture collapses in the same breath, his attention instantly on Dad as he speaks up. “Jesus Christ, Reid, did she?”

“Easton,” Natalie rasps out, briefly stealing my attention as the weight of Dad’s words settle in my stomach. “What does that mean? An episode?”

Dad speaks up, his reply for me, and surprisingly, for Nate as well. “She’s okay, but they’ve had to sedate her for nearly two days as a precaution.” He fixes his glare back on me, “Because she’s inconsolable .”

Two days. We never had a chance.

“As is your mother ,” Nate relays to Natalie, who looks helplessly between the three of us.

“What episode, Easton ?” she presses frantically, “What does that—”

“She’s got a rare condition,” I speak up before Dad can, “when she gets too upset, is under a tremendous amount of stress, or goes from one extreme temperature to another—or a combination of both—it can cause her to stroke.”

“ Stroke? ” Her eyes widen as they continually spill over.

“She’s only had three episodes in her life,” I admonish quickly, “twice before I was born, once when I was young. It was the mildest. She’s on medications now—”

Dad speaks up, condemning us. “That number got pushed too fucking close to four with headlines her only son married the daughter of her ex-fucking fiancé!”

Nate steps back and cups his neck, staring up at the ceiling as Dad’s words reverberate throughout the room. Feeling my resolve start to slip thanks to the outrage of our fathers and the intense emotions flowing from all sides, I run a hand through my hair at an utter loss for what words to say. Right now, no matter how we plead our case, our actions feel indefensible, and there’s no way to curb that. Not at present.

“How the fuck did this happen?” Dad demands between Natalie and me.

Nate crosses his arms and drops his gaze as if bracing himself to hear Natalie’s confession a second time.

“It was me . . . I-I s-started this,” she sniffles.

“Natalie, don’t,” I object, but she ignores me by walking herself directly in front of the firing squad.

“I found years’ worth of personal emails between my father and Stella while searching our paper’s archives. I contacted Easton under false pretenses,” she twists her hands nervously in front of her, the sight of my ring on her finger bringing a surge of brief relief before I again attempt to stop her.

“Beauty, don’t,” I jerk my chin, knowing that she’s not going to let me take any of the brunt of this.

“It’s the truth,” Natalie says softly. “We owe—”

“What, son? You don’t think we deserve the fucking truth, especially now ?” Dad scoffs as Nate shakes his head in clear contempt.

“It was me,” she confesses. “I found the emails, read them, and then used a tip-off from our paper’s gossip columnist, Rosie. She got word from a credible source that Easton may be releasing a debut album without so much as a press release, so I used it . . .” Natalie rushes out the rest of her confession as Nate’s head snaps to her, his arms going slack in disbelief. “. . . I used it to catfish Easton into a false interview.”

“You fucking what! ?” Nate growls. “Jesus Christ, Natalie!”

“I know it was wrong,” Natalie utters as Dad’s expression zeroes and hardens on her.

“Dad,” I grit out, my patience running thin as he shifts his gaze to mine. “Don’t.”

“You know it was wrong ?” Nate repeats, fisting his hands at his sides. “Is that the word you’re choosing?”

“She came clean to me in Seattle,” I speak up as Dad’s expression morphs into one of livid accusation.

“You flew to Seattle?” Nate prompts her, his tone bone-chilling.

Natalie’s face falls. “Daddy, I was—”

“You had no right! No goddamned right!” His snarl has Natalie flinching as I struggle not to go to her, knowing it will only escalate things. My only solace is knowing that no man in this room will lay a hand on her, but it’s doing fuck all now as she’s battered by condemning glares from both our fathers.

“I’m so sorry.” Face crumbling, she cups a hand over her mouth to muffle her cries, and all at once, I feel helpless, my dad’s behavior turning up the heat on my simmering anger.

“And then what?” Nate presses as Dad remains silent, seeming just as intent on more explanation.

Natalie’s neck splotches red as I fist my own hands to remain idle. “I was . . . I wanted to see if Easton knew—”

“She told you, Easton. You knew?”

“Yes,” I nod. “She did.”

“So, you knew she was off-limits and still fucking pursued a relationship with her?” Dad shakes his head, his question rhetorical, as Nate gapes at Natalie, equally as mortified.

“How long has this been going on?” Dad asks between us.

This time, I answer for us both. “Four months.”

Searching for the right words to explain the truth of us and how we came to be, I fail us both. What the hell can we say right now? We didn’t mean to hurt them?

Too cliché and more insult to injury as I grasp for anything I can think of to temper them both—because I knew this fight was coming. I just didn’t know it would be coming so ferociously. It’s when Dad eyes Natalie suspiciously that I start to boil over.

“Stop looking at her like that ,” I explode at them both as Natalie continues to shudder with her cries. “Need I remind you both that you’re happily married?” Two sets of hostile eyes fix on me, and I’m thankful for it. I shoot Natalie a reassuring look as her chest heaves, and sob-induced hiccups escape her lips.

“Yeah, you’re a real fucking wealth of knowledge, it seems,” Nate quips dryly. “You could write the book.”

“My mom did write the fucking book, and you weren’t in it ,” I snarl over his blatant insults.

“Only the version you know of.” To my surprise, that reply doesn’t come from Nate but from my own father, as my anger starts to best me.

“You know what? Both of you need to ease up, or we’re done here. We might owe you an explan—”

“Easton, it’s ok-kay,” Natalie says in assurance. It’s the involuntary jerk of her chest that makes my patience run dry.

Dad chooses that moment to turn and lay into me. “An explanation,” he scoffs, “you two are fucking with a history you have no business becoming a part of.”

“That’s probably the attraction,” Nate adds sarcastically.

“No doubt,” Dad agrees.

“Fuck this,” I yell, fury taking over. “You two don’t get to assume shit about us. We might be privy to some of your history, but you sure as hell don’t know ours, and this situation right here is why we’ve been seeing each other behind your backs for months. As it is now, you are the ones acting like children.”

“Don’t try to turn this around, Easton. We aren’t at fault here,” Dad fires back.

“The fuck, Dad?!” I shout.

As it seems, on this, he’s siding with Nate, which is the worst imaginable fucking twist of fate. I expected his anger. What I did not expect was for him to take sides with my wife’s father. The two of them seem hell-bent on their own agenda—which is to end us, swiftly . Fed up, I make my stance clear.

“Don’t belittle what we have to justify your attempt to control what you don’t want happening. It happened. It’s still happening. We’re married. We’re staying married.”

“Because you’re too fucking selfish to realize just how over the line you leapt!” Dad belts as Natalie’s soft sobs start to echo throughout the room. Unrelenting, Dad looks her over, “But you know how far over the line you went, don’t you, Natalie?”

“Dad, that’s enough!” I shout before I move to console Natalie as Nate speaks up, his tone barely above a whisper.

“Please, Easton, please don’t touch my daughter.” His eyes redden as he chokes on his next words and turns to Natalie. “I asked myself a thousand times on the plane how I could have fucked up with you so horribly that you could find it in yourself to deceive me this way. To hurt your mother this way.” Natalie crumbles where she stands, her eyes overflowing as Nate turns to my dad, devastation coating his voice. “Is this my fucking life, Reid? Is a Crowne man destined to swoop in and take everything that’s precious to me?”

Dad blows out a harsh breath as his eyes drop.

Nate speaks up again, his voice a plea. “Please . . .” He cups his jaw, “I’m asking you both , just give me and my daughter the room.”

Dad glances over to me and then to Nate before nodding, giving in way too easily. “Come on,” he says, pulling at my shoulder in an attempt to usher me out with him.

“I’m not going anywhere. We aren’t children,” I snap at Dad before looking to Natalie, whose face is buried in her hands. “Natalie,” I implore with as much tenderness as I can muster. “Baby, look at me. Please look at me.”

Natalie lifts her red-rimmed blue eyes to mine, her expression defeated as Dad continues to usher me toward the door.

“We aren’t wrong,” I tell her. “Baby, we aren’t a mistake.”

“Goddamnit, Easton, now !” Dad barks out as he shoves me out the door.