10. Nate
10
NATE
I t was weird to miss Rachel when she was working in my building. It was weirder yet that she’d always lurked in the background back home but was out of reach because she was so much younger. Here in New York, it was like a reset, getting to know each other as adults, together.
All I knew about her so far was how hard of a worker she was. That and what she shared about herself and her supposed cluelessness the last time we had lunch. It was enough to make me want to know more. To know everything about her. The draw was an addicting one. So when the hours passed and we lingered at the BBQ pub, I felt completely content.
She was enjoying it too, laughing more and more easily the longer we dragged out this lunch.
“I’m telling you,” she said, “it’s the Mandela effect. I swear that house at the end of Main Street had the exact same ghost figures that were there when I was little.”
“Nope.” I shook my head, smiling and amused that we’d been talking about everything and nothing. Just catching up and reminiscing about Rockton. “I swear there was a fire at that place. Those goblin things and?—”
“Oh!” She pointed at me, like a lightbulb went off over her head. “Those witches, too. Remember those hanging from the tree.”
“Yeah, the tree that burned down.”
“No way,” she argued. “Next time you go home, you look at that property and it’s the same tree.”
“It is not.”
She laughed again, charming me with the sound. I could tell it wasn’t easy for her to lower her guard completely, but I was working on her. She was opening up, even if it took critiquing Christmas décor, which somehow led to Halloween decorations, and then the rumor that Rockton had spirits from beyond the grave.
It was fun . We teased each other without a hitch. No awkward pauses popped up between us. Like friends, with the hint of something more, we had lunch, hung out, and just talked.
When I sought her out at the office, annoyed with how busy we’d both been to the point that I’d missed her, I intended to merely spend some time with her. Whiling away most of the afternoon was a much better outcome.
We quieted while the server came—again—and asked us if we needed anything, but we both said we were fine. Our plates had been cleared away a while back, and our drinks were still refilled, untouched because of how much we were talking and laughing.
“Yikes. We’ve been hogging this table for hours,” she said after checking her watch.
I didn’t mind. Because it meant I could hog her.
“It’ll be fine.” My tip will make up the difference. “It’s nice to break out of the office like this.” With you.
“You can say that again.” Her brow creased as she lowered her gaze.
“What do you mean?” I hated the possibility that she might not be having a good time at the office. Julie was dismayed that she’d only be there temporarily, but I got it. She came to New York for a slight escape. Not a relocation. I wouldn’t expect her to change her life for me or that job just like that.
As far as I could tell, though, she was enjoying her employment.
“Nothing.” Still, she didn’t look up. The mood had changed from the light-hearted banter.
“Aw, come on. What is it?” I didn’t want to push, but she had to be joking if she thought she could shift moods like that and expect me to believe nothing was on her mind.
“Is something wrong? At the office?” That seemed to be the trigger that made her quiet.
“Nothing is wrong, per se.” She sat up and faced me directly. “But I overheard a little bit of gossip before you found me on that floor doing the copies.”
“Gossip?” I arched a brow. “About you?”
“No.” She grunted a weak laugh. “How could anyone gossip about me? I’m a nobody. No one knows me to gossip about me.”
“Then what kind of gossip?” I laughed once. “If people are spreading that ridiculous story about Juan being an extra in that Christmas movie being filmed down the block, it’s bogus. He was just talking crap.”
She laughed lightly. “He couldn’t be an extra. He’d steal the stage.”
“I know, right?”
She cleared her throat. “Gossip about you,” she finally answered.
“Me?” I pointed at myself. “Oh, that’s nothing new.”
“It isn’t?”
I shook my head. “I’m one of the few with the CO rank. The bosses always get crap.”
“Huh.”
She didn’t seem convinced, and I hated that the fun mood had been killed. “All right. Spare me. If it’s bothering you, I’m only going to stay curious.” I rolled my hand at her. “Lay it on me. What’s the damage? Or non-damage. Gossips aren’t going to make or break my day, Rach.”
“That you have a habit of drinking a lot at the holiday party.” She cringed.
I nodded. “That’s more true than not. It’s a night I don’t enjoy much.”
“Then why go at all?”
I frowned. “Are you trying to get out of being my plus-one to it?” I hated that possibility. That was how much I was stuck on wanting to be near her.
“I’d only be your plus-one to it if you are my mentor and so far, no lessons have occurred.”
True. I hadn’t even thought about making up a lesson. I just wanted to be with her.
“If it pains you to revisit the memory of Yasmin breaking up with you, why put yourself through it at all?”
“Because I’m the CFO. All the COs go to it. It’s expected for management to be there.”
She rolled her eyes. “You can’t take one year off from it?”
“I did. Or I tried to. The second year after that one, I didn’t go. And I think it made more people talk about me.”
She folded her hands on the table top and leveled a stern glare at me. “Do you really care what people say about you, though?”
“No.” I licked my lips, amazed that she had gotten this far in making me squirm. “But I would say that your desire to leave home is fueled by the same thing. You don’t want to hear what your family and Kyle’s will say about your being broken up.”
“It’s kind of different…”
“How so?”
She shook her head. “We were talking about you, Nate.”
Dammit. I hated that she’d clammed up. Maybe she’d tell me more later. “Okay. So the holiday party. Yes, I tend to drink a little more and seek liquid courage. It’s the one time of the year I do.”
“They also gossiped that Yasmin wouldn’t want you back because you have a small dick.”
I fought not to smile.
And cue her blush in three, two, one. Bingo.
She cleared her throat, looking away. “Or that you didn’t know how to use it.”
I opened and closed my mouth, debating how to reply. What waited at the tip of my tongue was not the answer. Offering to show her wouldn’t be right.
“Which,” she said quickly and loudly, furrowing her brow, “is not something anyone should know or speculate on. That’s highly inappropriate.”
As are the things I want to say to you right now.
“And it’s just as inappropriate for me to be tattling this to you. Or talking about it at all. Or… yeah. Moving on. Next topic.”
I loved seeing her so flustered. But I wasn’t cruel to torment her. I sighed and sat up. “Everyone witnessed how Yasmin and I ended, Rach.”
She nodded. “So you said.”
“We had been married for six months,” I said.
“How long did you know each other? Before that?”
“Seven years. We dated for seven years, then all of a sudden, she wanted to get married. It seemed like we were bound to do that someday, so we did. All six months, I suspected that she was cheating. It started as a tiny voice. A nagging thought. But by the time that holiday party came along, I knew it wasn’t a hunch. One of my colleagues saw a video of her from our wedding, cheating on me, and he told me about it at the party. He wanted to tell me in person, given the nature of the topic, and he’d been traveling a lot.”
“Wow.” She frowned, showing me how hard she felt about this for me.
“I confronted Yasmin at the party, hoping to ask her to just talk with me in another room. Instead, she said she wanted everyone to hear this. She took the stage, stood at the podium?—”
“No!” She covered her mouth.
“She claimed she wanted everyone to hear it from the source.” I nodded. “She got up there and announced that it was her biggest mistake to marry me. And that she wanted a divorce because I cheated.”
“Huh?”
“She turned on the waterworks, saying she heard that I was cheating. In hindsight, I think she saw that colleague talking to me and guessed that he might have spotted her cheating on our wedding night. I don’t know. Whatever motivated her, she told everyone that I was a cheater.”
When she stared at me, unmoving, I rushed to add, “I didn’t. I wasn’t. I could never cheat.”
She blinked. “No. I wasn’t thinking that. I was just… picturing it. My God.”
“That wasn’t the worst of it.”
“What could’ve been worse than that? Being lied to, accused. In front of so many people…”
“My colleague, who had the video? He’d gotten it from the man she was sleeping with. He’d taped it on purpose, and my colleague got ahold of it. He was so upset with her accusing me that he aired the damn video on the screen.”
She gasped and covered her mouth again.
“So there she was… in graphic detail, on our wedding night…” I shook my head, hating to even talk about it. “It was awful for her to lie and accuse me of cheating. But then to witness the evidence of her doing it? It was, hands down, one of the worst nights of my life.”
“And now you just have to repeat that night every year.”
“Yeah. The same venue. Same people and crowd.” I shrugged.
“Damn.” She shook her head. “No wonder you don’t want to go alone.”
“And it shouldn’t be any wonder that I haven’t moved on for years afterward. She hurt me,” I admitted plainly.
“I can see that.” She took my hand and squeezed my fingers. It didn’t feel like a show of pity, but of sympathy. Of support. “I know how it feels. Being dumped is bad, but in a public setting? That’s cruel.”
“Yours was at Thanksgiving. Mine was at Christmas.”
“It hasn’t been long, not six years, but I know how it feels to move on from an ex. At first, you can’t.”
“I can’t say it’s at first for me anymore. I doubt I’ll ever be committed to a woman like I was with Yasmin for a long time.”
“You mean marrying again?”
I nodded, then changed to shaking my head. “Marriage. Or even settling down long-term. I always thought I’d be married and have kids by now, but she burned me that badly.”
“All it takes is one bad experience, and it’s enough to change your perspective.”
I laughed once. “Oh, come on. You’re going to swear off men since Kyle?” I shook my head. “You’re too young to commit to loneliness.”
“And you’re going to swear off women since Yasmin?—”
“I have sworn off women,” I corrected.
“Then I say you’re old enough to know how dumb that is too.” She squared her shoulders, confident. “When I say that I might as well be single forever, that’s because I highly doubt I’ll ever meet a man who will really want me. For who I am.”
I smirked. “That’s ridiculous.”
“So is the thought that you should settle for loneliness for the rest of your life.”
I refused to let her turn this back to me. “Rachel. You’re a sexy, smart woman any man would be lucky to have. You got that?”
She licked her lips, looking anywhere but at me.
I gripped her chin gently, tipping her face until she captivated me with those sparkling baby blues. “You got that?”
Her soft sigh of an exhale whispered over my knuckles. “Okay.”
And just like that, I was a liar. Nothing was okay anymore.
Because as I considered the words I told her, I realized that I wanted to be that lucky man.
I wanted to have this woman. I wanted Rachel all for myself. Something about staring into her doe eyes, feeling the pull of desire between us… it was undeniable how much I was lured to her.
She could end my spell of swearing off women.