Chapter Nineteen
When I wake up, I’m cold, lying on top of the covers in his bed. Though, I suppose it’s my bed, no matter how I look at it, since the motel is mine.
I don’t know why, but that thought amuses me and gives me some measure of levity. Enough that I manage to sit up. If I didn’t let myself think absurd things, I might get dragged back down, through the mattress, through the floor, into the darkness.
I look over at him. He’s sleeping, but not peacefully. He’s going to have a murderous hangover when he wakes up.
It’s barely five in the morning, and I decide I’m going to go have a shower and get the day started.
I open the door to his room cautiously and slip outside. The sun isn’t up, and none of my residents are outside.
I realize they will have seen me go into his room and not reappear. I didn’t even bring my phone.
I left everything sitting out in the courtyard.
I cautiously tiptoe back to my room, which is unlocked, so stupid.
I push the door open and see my purse, my phone, and my keys sitting on the table. I pick my phone up and see I have a text from Elise.
I collected all your things. I assume something happened. I hope it was good. Text me when you get in so I know you’re okay.
I send a text back.
I’m okay. He wasn’t in a good space. I didn’t feel like I should leave him. I’ll explain everything later.
Even as I send the text, I’m not sure I can explain everything. I’m not sure I can explain his pain or mine. I’m not sure if I even should.
What he told me is clearly something he has a difficult time with, even all these years later. He chooses not to talk about it for a reason, and it feels wrong to do it for him.
I also don’t want to lie to my friend.
I am gouged beneath the ribs for a moment by the realization that I haven’t been honest with Elise. I’ve never really thought of it that way.
I thought of it as editing. Leaving my backstory out of it.
It seems reasonable, in many ways.
It’s beginning to feel less reasonable.
I strip my clothes off and make my way into the bathroom, standing beneath the hot spray of the shower until I’m satisfied that I won’t be able to wash away everything that happened last night.
I won’t be able to find that place again. Where Rancho Encanto doesn’t contain my past and I’m not carrying it with me.
There’s so much more I want to know. About him.
My brain is spinning with the implications of everything.
I get out of the shower and slowly get dressed. I look at myself in the mirror and feel horrified by the face staring back at me. That woman, with her limp dark hair and wide brown eyes, looks exhausted. The circles beneath her eyes are a new feature.
I suddenly feel every one of my years and then some.
I know I’m only thirty-two. It feels old right now.
I go back into the living area of my room and stare at my tree. It’s half-decorated. I haven’t worked on my book for a couple of days.
I feel like I have stepped out of my real life and into something else. It’s not my life in LA, not the one I left behind, but it isn’t the life I’ve been living for the past three years either.
I wrapped myself around Nathan Hart, and he wrapped himself around me, and it was like nothing else existed.
Except it does.
It all exists.
I’m overwhelmed by that thought. It tumbles down on top of me like a load of bricks.
It all exists. LA and Christopher. My loss, and this place. Nathan, who he is here, and whoever he is when he isn’t.
I move to the Christmas tree and look at the half-assembled ornaments that are around in an array.
I have to get it finished. It won’t take long, but with everything else going on, I’ve been slow. All the little flamingos have hooks in them, and they are ready to be placed. I know that transit will disrupt some of the decor, but I want everything as mapped out as possible. To be sure I have enough to fill in all the empty spaces. I’ve tied one hundred perfect pink bows.
I pick up one of the flamingos and place it on one of the pink tinsel branches.
When I hear the knock at my door, I know exactly who it is.
I close my eyes. I bitterly regret that he’s going to see the tired woman I was just looking at.
When I open the door, I’m hit by several realizations. The first is that he looks exhausted. But he’s still beautiful. His dark hair is pushed back off his face, and there are shadows underneath his green eyes. He isn’t clean shaven—dark whiskers cover his square jaw. He’s dressed in a white shirt tucked into olive-green pants. He looks rugged. Sexy.
Maybe I look okay to him too.
He is also holding two cups of coffee.
“Can I come in?”
“Please,” I say.
I move away from the door and take one of the coffee cups from his hand. “I assume that one of these is for me.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I brought that to go with my apology.”
“Apology?”
“Yes. I shouldn’t have gotten drunk like that. I shouldn’t have ghosted you. I shouldn’t have trauma dumped on you.”
I’m shocked by that. I laugh. “I think I was the one who trauma dumped, actually. You were clearly going through something, and I decided to hit you with my personal tragedy.”
“No,” he says. “That’s not ... I didn’t intend to drag you into my shit. This wasn’t ever supposed to be that.”
“Come on, sit down,” I say, moving over to my small bistro table and taking a seat, shoving the chair across from mine out with my foot.
He sits. But he looks too large for this room. Too tall. His shoulders too broad.
“So what was this supposed to be?” I ask.
“Good fucking question, Amelia.”
A muscle in his jaw tics, and he looks down at his coffee.
“I have time. Elise is working the front desk.”
“Right. Well. I don’t know. I don’t know what it was supposed to be. I know what it wasn’t supposed to be. I wasn’t supposed to do this but ... I’m tired. I’m tired of feeling heavy all the time. I’m tired of grief. I’m tired of living a life I didn’t choose. Mostly, though, I got tired of not having something I wanted.” He lets out a long, heavy breath. “I want you , even though I didn’t want to want you.”
I feel like he has taken a very small razor and sliced a part of my heart. Not really in a bad way. I hurt for him , for what he’s been feeling. And the inconvenience of wanting me, because I feel exactly the same way.
I didn’t want to feel something for the gorgeous disaster of a man who checked into my motel that first summer. I felt something for him all the same.
It had been the wrong time. It all still feels like the wrong time.
If it were the right time, he and I would both be a little bit less ... this . I think.
“I have to start at the beginning,” he says. “Except ... I don’t want to pile all this on you.”
“It’s not piling anything on me,” I say. “Nathan, I feel a lot of empathy for you. I care very deeply about what happened to you. It doesn’t make my grief worse, though. I’m not scared of your grief either. I’ve already felt the worst ... the most hopeless, dark feeling that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I get why people can’t handle it when they haven’t experienced that. Because they don’t want to know. They don’t want to know what you can go through and survive. They don’t want to know how horrible it can be. The stuff you have to keep on living with. But I already know. You’re not traumatizing me. Life did that already.”
It’s true. I’ve never realized how true that is. I can remember clearly one of my friends saying to me afterward that she would never have been able to be as strong as I was. It didn’t feel like a compliment, even though I knew she meant it as one. I had no choice but to keep breathing. To keep going. I didn’t feel strong; I felt weak and broken. I still do.
That’s the real tragedy of it. You go on.
Nathan already knows that.
“Okay. I’m not exactly sure where to start.”
“Start wherever you want. I’ll put it together. I’ll ask questions if I have them. You just ... Tell me whatever you can.”
He’s silent, but then he sets his coffee on the table, moves it one inch to the left just slightly. Then looks up at the ceiling. “My wife and I went to Joshua Tree for our honeymoon. Nine years ago. We stayed here. It was different then. She wanted to go somewhere that was different than Bainbridge Island. I couldn’t understand why she didn’t want to go to the Bahamas. She wanted to see the desert, so we did.”
Joshua Tree.
That was why yesterday had been so difficult. He didn’t need to connect those dots for me. I am all too familiar with what it’s like to wish the grief were old enough to not intrude and to have it push its way in anyway.
“She’s ... she was an Olympic horse jumper. One of the youngest to ever win a gold medal. She did it while she was sick. She didn’t tell anyone. Nobody but family. She worked her whole life for that. Her life ended really shortly afterward. One thing she asked me to do was to write her story. She didn’t want me to be sad, she just wanted her story to be out there. I told her there was no way I was going to be able to do that at home. With all the ... the ghosts of the memories and everything. She told me she would find me a place. So she did. You had the rooms listed, newly refurbished. The Hemingway Suite. She thought that was hilarious. She told me not to drink myself to death. She told me to work on it here. Between my other deadlines. That’s what I’m doing. That’s what I’ve been doing. I didn’t choose this place, she did.”
He sits there for a long moment staring straight ahead. “And when I walked in and saw you behind the counter, I thought it was some kind of cosmic joke, except I have a hard time believing in anything cosmic at this point, because what was the purpose of any of this? I don’t know.”
I have as many questions now as I did before. More. They’re bubbling up inside me. He’s given me a small piece of his story. His devastating, destructive story that turned his intensity to anger, that turned his depth into a pool that’s drowning him.
I can only imagine that before he loved as fiercely as he does everything else.
He lost his wife. Of course it destroyed him.
Because he is the decent hero of a man I believed him to be. Not a cheater, not a basic, sorry excuse for a husband. He’s wrecked, though, because of that, and it kills me.
“I’m sorry,” I say. Because again, I know that sometimes it’s the best thing. The only thing. Everything is insufficient, but saying something is better than saying nothing. “She sounds amazing.”
“She was.”
I’m surprised I don’t remember a news story about this. Nathan is relatively famous, and she was an Olympian, and young, and there have been large swaths of time in my life where I’ve clicked on a lot of sad news articles, crying over strangers. I’m inherently interested in people, and curious about things even when they might make me sad.
I couldn’t be, though, when I lost the baby. I wasn’t reading sad news stories, or any stories at all.
I think we were both losing everything around the same time.
I want to ask him so many things. How he met her. Who he was before. I don’t want to push him away either. We have two weeks left. I want every minute, but I want him .
This is all part of him.
“Can I ... ask you about yourself?”
He clears his throat. “We’ve slept together, Amelia.”
“Okay. So. Were you . . . Did you used to be . . . ?”
“More fun?”
“Sure, that’s one way of putting it.”
“No. Something about my humorless military father and never living up to his standards. Being a kid who’d rather read than do a ten-mile ruck didn’t really make me his favorite.”
“Do you have siblings?”
“Two brothers. Older. Not disappointing.”
“You look like you could run for ten miles,” I say.
“I can. But I’ve learned that you can do things you aren’t suited to, and you can do things you don’t like. You can even become great at them. Even if it never really fits.”
I sit with that for a moment, thinking about my old life. I liked it. I’m not sure I could say it didn’t fit. I don’t think it would now, and that makes me feel strange.
“Do you have children?” I ask.
I’m trying to get a picture of who he is. He’s been a fantasy object for me. An author photo. I know what he does, and I know some of the ways he is now.
I think, if I’m honest, I didn’t really think as deeply about him as I pretended to. Because I didn’t want to imagine who the man was beyond the walls of my courtyard. I wanted him to be this extraordinarily sexy, grumpy, complicated man I couldn’t have. Now he is here, a whole man. One with wounds and the life and pain I hadn’t known about. One who had been in love.
I study the lines on his handsome face, knowing that. He isn’t just rugged to be a fantasy for me. He has lines on his face because he’s lived a whole life that has caused him pain. And so have I.
I look tired because I am.
Because I packed up everything and moved to this place and tried to keep my reality from intruding, but it does, and it is. I haven’t actually left anything behind.
It’s all here with me, at my bistro table.
“No children,” he says. “It wasn’t ever the right time.” He laughs. “God, that seems so stupid now. I mean, it’s not a big regret I have, it’s just the arrogance that we all have about time.”
I nod. Except my loss didn’t make me feel that way about time. I wonder if I’m sitting in the arrogance of believing I have an endless amount of time to be here in this place, in an emotional stasis, because I’ve certainly never thought beyond the motel. I’ve never thought deeply about how I would change and grow.
I’ve just been in this eternal present.
“Why wasn’t this ... I mean why wasn’t it in the news? I know you keep your name separate, but I have a hard time believing this didn’t get dug up.”
My questions seem fractured, out of order. But I’m trying to fill in the holes of the story he gave me.
“The success came after things went to hell,” he says. “Which is ... not to say I had none before, but no one gave a shit about me personally. My wife got diagnosed with cancer, and suddenly the next book had a concept that was hardcover worthy, and then it got optioned, and even more shockingly got made. All in that eighteen months she was getting treatments, and horrible prognoses, and put on hospice, and I was in fucking hell. The show started airing two months after she died. She got to see a couple of episodes before, though. She ... she really liked the lead actor too.”
The things he’s said about success make the worst kind of sense now too.
“God,” I say. “That’s ... horrible. Actually, that is really horrible.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I mean, I guess I could have lost everything instead.”
“I guess at least with the success you knew what to keep doing.”
“Yeah, that’s true. I think if I had lost everything, there was a time when I might have just stayed at rock bottom. I can see another version of myself working at a bar and drinking myself to death.”
So can I. It scares me. It guts me.
“I’m writing Sarah’s book as Jacob Coulter because that’s what the publisher thinks will sell. That’s the bargain I made to be able to do it. My name and my pseudonym are going to be unavoidably connected when that happens,” he says. “Some documents just got unsealed that were sort of the last of my legal worries and ... there’s no point keeping them separate anymore. That’s part of why I decided to go ahead and just finish the book. Her book. I mean, also, the publisher was after me for it. I’ve taken a little bit longer than I was supposed to. I’m trying to do an honest job. I don’t want to write about her through the lens of husband, who had certain opinions about who she was, but I need to tell her story. She left behind a lot of journals. Some of them are about my failures.”
He’s silent for a moment.
I can’t imagine how difficult that would be. I can also understand that as a writer, as someone who loved her, he wants to be honest.
“Nothing major,” he continues. “But it might surprise you to learn that I’m sometimes emotionally unavailable.”
I can’t help it, I laugh. “I’m shocked to hear that.”
I don’t know why, but I feel a little bit validated that even the woman who married him found him difficult to access sometimes.
Sarah.
He’s writing her story, and I can’t imagine what that’s like. To immerse in your own grief like that, in the life of the person you lost.
Of course, the person I lost hadn’t even lived a life yet. It was all hope extinguished before it could ever really ignite.
“So you’re finishing the book,” I say.
“Yeah. Just ... feels a little like another death, that’s all.”
“So it was the perfect time to sleep with some random motel girl,” I say, trying to keep my tone light.
He looks at me. “You’re not a random motel girl.”
Tears fill my eyes, even though I wish they wouldn’t. I wish that my emotion weren’t so close to the surface. I wish it didn’t mean so much to me that I wasn’t random.
“We’re grief magnets,” I say. “The perfect foundation for a fling.”
This feels a little bit fake. This feels a little bit like we’re both trying to find a way to muscle out of the heaviness that’s settled between us.
There has been so much honesty between us, and now a little bit of a lie. But I allow it, because it feels easier.
Maybe I don’t really want to know all of this. Maybe I want him to go back to being a fantasy.
He’s still gorgeous to me. That’s not the issue. It’s just now that I know this, I want to know more.
“Are you still going to read one of my books?” he asks. “For the event.”
“Yes.”
“Then you have to give me one of yours.”
“Happily,” I say.
I go to my closet and pull a box of one of my books out, selecting one of my forty-eight author copies. Honestly, it was exciting at first, and now it just feels like too many. I hand him one of the slim paperbacks.
“Looks interesting,” he says.
“Spoiler alert, she doesn’t stay a virgin secretary for very long.”
He raises his eyebrows. “That makes me wonder why I haven’t been reading romance all along.”
It’s strange. Because now I have all this context for him. There’s a little more ease between us in some ways. Like we were able to just shed a layer.
I think maybe we have a chance at saving this. I don’t want to let him go. I’m not ready for that. I need him right now. I’m not going to examine how deep a thought that feels. I want him with me when Christopher shows up.
I just feel like I want him with me.
I know him now. Much better than I did. I want him still.
I move to him. He puts his hand on my hip, and his eyes are hot, and I know. He feels the same way. We didn’t break this with our grief, with our reality. I feel new because of that. I was so sure everything here would be ruined. That this perfect pink place would disappear, like the nursery I painted over before we sold the house.
But it isn’t. I want him.
I don’t have to sleep with him to forget. I remember. All the difficult things we just talked about. I also remember what it feels like when he touches me.
I sink down onto his lap, and I press my hands against the sides of his face, his whiskers sharp against my palms.
Then he’s kissing me. Not tentatively. He gives no quarter, and I’m glad for it. He doesn’t treat me like I’m broken. That is the most beautiful thing of all.
Because I don’t want to feel broken. I don’t want to feel like something less than the woman he wanted before he knew the truth. Something inside me feels like it puts itself back together as he kisses me.
I don’t feel hollow anymore. I don’t feel broken.
Not in every way.
He stands up, taking me with him, and he presses me against the wallpaper. He strips my clothes off, even as he holds me firmly against the wall. My heart feels like it’s going to punch its way through my chest.
I push my hands beneath the hem of his shirt.
There’s an edge to this now.
But it’s a different one. It isn’t the edge of mystery; it isn’t the air of all these unanswered questions. I know the answers. And he knows mine. Whatever he was to his wife, he’s this to me. Whatever I was to Chris, this man still wants me.
That, I find, is even more powerful than mystery.
Everything has been exposed. Everything has been brought out into the light. Here we still are.
I want to be marked with it. I want to be changed by it. I bite his lip, and he growls. His rough hands move to cup my breasts, his thumbs moving over my nipples. I’ve never felt anything like this. This deep, unending need. It’s like being suffocated. Lungs burning with the need to draw breath. That’s how badly I need to come. My body aches with it. I’m suspended on the edge of a knife, and when has it ever been like this? Never.
He lays me down on the bed naked and goes to his knees on the floor. He drags my body to the edge of the mattress and licks me like he’s never tasted anything so sweet.
I am lost in this, in him. Nathan Hart turns edging into an art form. A glorious form of torture that I need to end, but that I also need to continue.
He is taking every thought in my head and unraveling it. He is turning me into a creature of feeling, and not one of words. I find this to be the most freeing thing of all. Because I live my life with such a strong narration. I’m a writer, and I find a way to tell a story all day every day. There is no story here.
There is Nathan, and there is me.
And everything he’s doing to me.
I dig my heels into his back, and he pushes two fingers inside me as he continues to torment me with his wicked mouth.
I let go.
I’m falling, and I don’t even want to catch myself. I shatter then, and he is there.
I push myself off the bed with trembling arms and sink down onto the floor in front of him, undoing the button on his jeans, lowering the zipper.
“My turn,” I say.
I move him onto the bed and then position myself in front of him. I wrap my hand around his cock and lean in, swallowing him. He is the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. I’ve never wanted a man more.
Not in spite of everything sharp, hard, and ugly.
Because of it.
This is something beyond reason. Something beyond desire as I previously understood it.
I can do this. I’m great at it. I can make him growl. I can make him forget. I can make both of us forget. That there’s anything beyond this room. That there’s anything beyond what we share here. That anything could be more important.
We didn’t ask for the things that happened to us. We didn’t choose it. We can choose this. We can revel in it. Luxuriate in it. So I do.
I move my tongue along the length of his shaft. I take him in deep.
He grips my hair and pulls.
I take it all in. The taste of him, the way my scalp stings. The deep, hollow feeling inside me as I anticipate more. Everything.
He pulls me back. His eyes burn into mine. I reach for a condom, thankful there’s one close enough, and he puts it on as quickly as possible as he drives himself into me. As he tortures both of us with slow, measured thrusts.
I bite his neck. And he loses it. There is no sound. Nothing beyond our bodies, our fractured breathing. My desperate pleas that he give me what I need.
When we shatter, we do it together.
When it’s over, he presses his forehead to mine and kisses me. It’s so different from last time.
He doesn’t turn away from me. He doesn’t leave.
Instead, he gets up off the bed and goes into the bathroom, and I hear the sound of the shower.
I lie there on the foot of the bed. Naked and satisfied. But already hungry for more.
He returns a second later. “Shower?”
I feel a strange rush of euphoria. “Yes please.”
There’s something unintentionally intimate about this. Showering with someone is part of sharing a life with them. But there can be something commonplace about it, and this isn’t commonplace. I’m so aware that I am standing there looking at his naked body. So aware of growing slick and hot from the water. He puts his hands on me, slides them over my curves. I do the same to him, my fingertips tracing the lines of his well-carved muscles.
When he kisses me, it’s deep, his tongue sliding against mine. His body fitting against mine perfectly. I’m pressed against him from my lips down to the floor.
Suddenly, neither of us can take it anymore. Both of our hands reach for the faucet, we turn it off, and we find ourselves in bed again, tearing desperately at a condom packet. I roll it on him, and he’s inside me before I can take my next breath. It’s fast, and furious.
We’re both undone by the time we finish.
“I guess the shower was pointless,” he says, his chest rising and falling heavily with his breath.
I laugh. “I don’t know, I would say it was pretty productive. Even if I’m sweaty again.”
I don’t say it, because it’s a little bit terrifying, but I don’t mind having his sweat on my skin.
I want to bury my face in his chest and inhale the scent of him.
I want him closer. Inside me without a barrier.
This is unhinged thinking, and I know it. This is me being drunk on sex, and on the emotional release of dredging up old trauma.
Maybe that’s what this is. The two of us acting like survivors of a natural disaster engaging in life-affirming fucking.
I find that to be the most comfortable explanation available.
We have survived three natural disasters. Death is natural. Still, much like a fire burning down your house, it doesn’t feel natural.
It feels wrong. It feels too hard.
But this doesn’t.
I’m suddenly drawn back to the moment. To the clock on my nightstand and the time.
“I actually have to go man the front desk so Elise can take Emma to school.”
“Yeah. I have ... you know, deadline.”
I look up at the ceiling. “Right. Those.”
“I pity your hero. Didn’t you leave him unsatisfied?”
“Saving all my love for you,” I say, flippantly, but it lands heavy, and I feel my face get hot. “You know. Metaphorically.”
He clears his throat. “Right.”
He gets off the bed and starts hunting for his clothes.
I do the same.
“I’ll see you tonight,” he says.
And I smile. “Yes. I’ll see you tonight.”