Chapter 37
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
NAT
Nash was killing time, and it was annoying the hell out of me. I had flown enough that I no longer got nervous, but there was no denying the fact that I was sick to my stomach. Which meant I sure as hell didn’t want anything to eat before my flight, but Nash still kept trying to ply me with food.
“How about some eggs?”
“ Nash !” I snapped. Okay, so, I yelled. “I swear to fuck, if you don’t stop tryin’ to stuff me with food, I’m gonna kill you.”
“If you kill me, how’re you gonna get to the airport?”
“Steal your keys and drive over you on my way.”
“Harsh,” he said. “I’m gonna whip some up. Sure you don’t want any?”
I folded my arms on top of the table and rested my head on them. I wasn’t a crier—as Nash had so eloquently pointed out last night—so I didn’t know spending hours blubbering into my pillow meant I’d wake with a headache that rivaled any hangover I’d ever had. “I’m ignorin’ you now.”
“And I’m missin’ work for you, so show me some love.”
“Don’t pretend like that’s a big deal for you. You own the company.”
“Correction,” he said, stabbing a fork in my direction. “I co-own the company. With your sister, I might add. Take a minute to think about how much she loves that I’m skippin’ out when we’re already on a tight schedule.”
“So, what you’re sayin’ is she wears the hard hat in that relationship?”
Nash flashed me a grin and poured the eggs into a skillet. “How about instead of talkin’ about my relationship, we talk about yours?”
“You know all about my relationship with her because I’m certain she fills you in on every little detail.”
“Cute,” he said flatly, clearly not finding it cute at all. “You know damn well I’m talkin’ about your marriage .”
I sat upright and dropped my hands into my lap, twisting my ring around and around my finger. I hadn’t wanted to leave it for Asher when I’d gone. Hadn’t been able to bring myself to do so.
Actually, it went a little deeper than that. The thought of removing it, never to wear it again, filled me with so much dread, my stomach had churned because of it.
“The marriage was fake, Nash. Y’all talked about that, right?”
“Asher told me what it was supposed to be, but I can guarantee you that’s not what it turned out to be.” He picked up his phone for the hundredth time in the past ten minutes.
“Why do you keep checkin’ your phone?” I snapped. “If you were worried about me runnin’ late, we’d already be on the road.”
Never mind that I didn’t actually have to be at the airport for thirty-six hours, and he’d already called me on that. It just made me antsy to be in Havenbrook when I wasn’t with Asher, and that was a shocking thought. Maybe that had been the problem every other time I’d visited without him—that I hadn’t had him to ground me. To calm my storm and let me settle into my skin.
Nash walked over carrying two plates full of eggs and set them on the table. “You sure you want to do this?”
“Eat these eggs? No, I already told you that.”
“Fucking hell, Natalie. You are the biggest pain in my ass.”
My mouth dropped open on an incredulous huff. “Did you just Natalie me?”
“Damn fucking right, I did. Quit bein’ so obtuse. You know I’m talkin’ about you and Asher and what a mistake y’all’re makin’.”
I blew out a breath, my shoulders sagging as I rubbed the heels of my hands against my eyes. “Rory already tried this this mornin’, you know.”
“Oh, this mornin’ when she was off and runnin’ before six?”
“Yes…?”
“You have no problem sleepin’ the night before a flight and hate wakin’ up before noon.”
“I hate scrambled eggs, and yet you insist on feedin’ them to me. What’s your point?”
“Some reason you couldn’t sleep?”
“I slept just fine.” If crying into my pillow could be counted as sleep. “I’m finally goin’ to Ireland. Why wouldn’t I be thrilled?”
“I don’t know, but you’re clearly not, so you should probably ask yourself that question.”
I was just rusty, was all. Because it’d been so long since I’d traveled, I needed to get back in the swing of things. It had nothing to do with the gigantic Asher-shaped hole in my heart I was going to have to walk around with for the rest of my life. I needed to get used to it, so I might as well start now.
“Nash, please. Can we just go?”
He looked at his phone one more time, his eyes lighting up briefly before he tamped it down, and then he nodded. “Fine. Let me just eat both of these,” he said, scraping the contents of my plate onto his own. “And then we will.”
Fifteen minutes later—I’d never seen a grown man eat so fucking slowly in all my life—he grabbed my bags and held the screen door open for me. I shuffled my way down the porch steps and to the gravel driveway where Nash’s old truck was parked. It felt like I was walking through quicksand, each step a little harder than the previous. But I intended to keep that to myself. Nash didn’t need to know how much I didn’t want to go.
No, that wasn’t quite true. While I’d grown to like Havenbrook much more than I’d ever thought possible, it wasn’t the town I was desperate to stay in. I was certain I’d be feeling the same way if we’d lived in San Francisco or Miami or Atlanta.
Nash carried my bags to the truck, then placed them on the gravel instead of tossing them in the back. He pulled out his phone once more.
“Seriously, Nash, I’m tired of this. What has you stallin’?”
He glanced up at me, and then his gaze fell on something just over my right shoulder, a smile sweeping across his face. “That,” he said, tipping his head toward whatever was behind me.
I turned around, lifting my hand to shield my eyes from the sun, and looked in the direction Nash had gestured. I’d filled my life with the kind of adrenaline-seeking that meant I’d experienced nearly every kind of high there was—some illegal varieties included—but none of them compared to how I felt in that moment when my eyes connected with Asher’s.
He stepped out of the car and walked toward me, carrying something in his hand. His eyes darted over my face, his brow pinching at whatever he saw. He swept his gaze over the rest of me and to the bags at my feet that Nash still hadn’t put in the truck.
“Delayed flight?” he asked.
Well, I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him that my big plan was to sit at the airport for half a day until I qualified to fly standby on my original flight just to get out of there earlier. So instead, I just nodded.
“What’re you doin’ here?” I glanced down at the book he carried—it was fairly large, maybe twelve-by-twelve, an album of some sort.
“If you’re gonna go, I wanted to make sure you saw this before you did.”
I took the album with shaky hands and opened it, my eyes welling up at the first photo inside—Asher and me on our wedding day, the two of us laughing, our heads close together, our eyes sparkling as we regarded each other. As if we already knew the crazy journey we were about to embark on—the laughter and the tears, the late nights and early mornings. Cleaning up vomit and reading approximately twelve hundred bedtime stories and making memories through just living.
I stared at the image until I could no longer see it through my tears. I’d managed not to cry more than a handful of times in my adult years, and yet I couldn’t seem to stop now. Maybe that was because I’d never had something like Asher on the line.
I’d spent my life fleeing from place to place, escaping everything before it got too hard. Before I got too attached. Before I fell in love. All the while, pretending like that was some great life.
But I was already attached to Asher. Had already been halfway in love with him before I’d ever stepped foot back in Havenbrook. I’d just needed a little push.
Maybe I’d had this all wrong. Who said I had to fly all over the world to experience what life had to offer? What rule said I couldn’t do that right here in my hometown? Or Memphis? Nashville, New York, Portland, or any of another dozen other cities? As long as he and the kids were there with me, I’d feel like I was on the adventure of a lifetime.
I gasped as something registered, my head snapping up to frantically search the yard, then the car, which was empty. “Oh my God, did you forget the kids at home?”
He breathed out a laugh as if he’d been holding his breath and shook his head. “First of all, the kids are safe. I dropped them off with Gran on my way here. Second, I’m really fucking glad to hear you call our place home.”
“You are?”
“Yeah.” He stepped up to me, so close I felt the heat of his body seeping into mine, and brushed my hair back from my face. “Because I don’t want you to leave, Nat.”
I sputtered, blinking at him in the blazing sun. “Well—I can’t just?—”
He pressed his thumb over my lips to stop my garbled words. “That came out wrong. I do want you to leave, to keep doin’ what you do. But only if you promise to come back to me and the kids and this life we pretended we had. It doesn’t have to be pretend, though. It wasn’t—not for me. And I don’t think for you either.” He cupped my face, his fingers delving into my hair as he swept his thumbs along my jaw. “I let you go because I thought that was what you wanted. You couldn’t wait to escape Havenbrook—it was always too small to keep you, and I didn’t want to hold you back.”
“You don’t. You wouldn’t.”
“I know that now. If you could’ve gotten that through my thick skull yesterday, I could’ve saved us a lot of unnecessary angst,” he said wryly as I breathed out a laugh. “Our jobs are both gonna take us away from here, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make this work—that we can’t make us work. I want our house to be your home base. I want to be your home base.”
My breath caught, and the tears welling in my eyes finally spilled over as he told me everything I’d wanted to hear, everything I’d been secretly hoping he’d say.
He wanted me to stay.
“How do we make that work?” I asked, heart in my throat and hope clinging on for dear life.
“I don’t know the logistics, but we don’t need to yet. We’ve got a year till June starts school, and there’s a whole stretch of highway I’m pretty sure you’ve been wantin’ to capture.” He smiled and traced the outline of my lower lip with his thumb. “I can write songs anywhere. All I know is we can figure it out…we can make anything work if you’re mine.”
I was basically a fountain now, my tears free-flowing as Asher handed me everything I never knew I wanted. But I wanted him. And I wanted those kids. And I wanted this life we’d had together. We could figure everything else out along the way.
“And you’d be mine?”
“I already am, wifey.” He leaned forward as if to kiss me, but before our lips could connect, a car door slammed, startling us apart. The two of us glanced toward the sound and found Nash strolling back from Asher’s car.
With a grin, Nash waved. “I figured I’d save y’all some time and tossed Nat’s bags in the back seat. I’d invite y’all in the house, but Rory’d lose her shit if you two boned on the couch, and I can see where this is goin’. Call me when you get back from wherever the fuck, and we’ll hang out.”
The screen door shut behind Nash as he disappeared into the house, and Asher breathed out a laugh against my smiling lips.
“Guess he told us,” I said.
“Guess so. It’s probably better he disappeared. He’d be unbearable to be around since he’s probably feelin’ pretty fucking cocky about bein’ right.”
Gazing up at him, I clutched our wedding album to my chest with one hand and tucked the fingers of my other into the pocket of his jeans. “Oh yeah? What was he right about?”
Asher hummed and brushed a lock of windblown hair away from my face. “He might’ve insinuated that we had our heads up our asses and didn’t realize we were both in love with each other.”
“We are, huh?” I asked, my head tipped to the side. “You sure it’s not just for show?”
“It might’ve started that way, but I can promise you that’s not how it’s ending.”
Closing the distance between us, he pressed his lips to mine. Tentatively at first, until I reached blindly behind me and placed the album on the truck bed and then wrapped my arms around him and clutched him to me as if I were afraid he’d slip through my fingers again. But I’d be damned if I let that happen.
How was I lucky enough to find this love? A love that wasn’t suffocating or confining. It wasn’t demanding, only accepting. Being with him had never felt like I’d been locked up tight, trapped with no way out.
The two of us together—the four of us making a life—felt like nothing but possibilities.