Chapter 44 Nate
NATE
The restaurant was small. Stone walls, low ceilings, candles on every table throwing warm light across linen. The menu didn’t have prices and the wine list was longer than my arm. I’d picked it anyway, because tonight needed to mean something, and a burger joint wasn’t going to cut it.
Maya sat across from me, her cheeks flushed, her hair loose around her shoulders. She wore a dark green dress that did something devastating to her eyes. She’d caught me staring twice already and smiled both times like she knew exactly what she was doing.
“Okay,” she said, reaching for her wine. “Top three things about Iceland so far. Go.”
“You in that dress.”
Her dimples appeared. “That’s one.”
“You in the hot springs.”
“We haven’t been in any hot springs.”
I leaned forward, dropping my voice to a rough murmur. “No, but we will and I just know it’s going to be amazing.”
Heat flared in her eyes, but she pushed on. “Okay, I guess I can give you that. That’s two. What about three?”
“You, generally.”
She laughed. “You’re a terrible list maker.”
“Never claimed otherwise.”
Nudging my foot under the table, she was still smiling as she reached for the menu.
She scanned the options, her bottom lip caught between her teeth.
A quiet ache settled in my chest. Six months ago I couldn’t have sat here like this.
A year ago I wouldn’t have believed it was possible for a woman like Maya to look at me and see someone worth choosing.
Someone worth crossing an ocean for. The sheer weight of that realization cracked something open inside me, leaving me entirely exposed.
And my mind, as always, had to correct the record. As though it was saying, actually, sir, per our records, you are not worthy of love, please see exhibit A: the hallway.
The restaurant faded. The hallway was there. White paint and numb legs and his voice behind me, low and patient. Stand up straight. Did I say you could move?
The warmth of the restaurant couldn’t quite reach the part of me that was still standing at that wall.
“Hey.” Maya’s voice, gentle and sweet. “Where’d you go?”
I blew out a breath. “Sorry, just, uh...”
Fuck. The words were lodged in my throat like shattered glass.
“Nate?”
“Did I ever tell you my dad tried to join the army?”
Confusion flared in her eyes, but she quashed it quickly. My girl was sharp. She set the menu down carefully and rested her chin on her hands. “No, you didn’t. What happened?”
“Failed the physical. Flat feet, if you can believe that. Something that shouldn’t have defined his whole life but did.
” I turned my water glass in a slow circle on the tablecloth.
“I guess he never got over it. The one thing he wanted more than anything, and they told him he wasn’t good enough for the dumbest reason. ”
Maya was quiet for a moment. “It really fucked him up, huh?”
“Seems like. Or he was always like that. Who knows? Either way, it meant that he brought the army home instead. He couldn’t be a soldier, so he made me one.”
I leaned back in my chair, pushing my hands into my pockets like this was a casual conversation.
Like I was telling her about the weather or what I’d ordered for dinner.
“He ran the house like a barracks. Routine for everything. Rules for everything. Physical training an army major would be proud of.”
Her gaze was locked on mine, like wherever I was going, she’d still be sitting right there when I got there.
“It started with drills. Push-ups, sit-ups, running laps around the yard. I was seven the first time he woke me up at five a.m. and made me do burpees until I threw up in the grass.” I sounded like I was talking about someone else, and maybe that’s the only way I knew how to do this.
Clinical. Factual. Keep the feeling at arm’s length and just get the words out.
“He had a tone. Never raised his voice. He didn’t need to.
You learned to hear what was underneath it.
And what was underneath it was that if you didn’t do exactly what he said, exactly when he said it, there would be consequences. ”
“What kind of consequences?”
The couple at the next table laughed. Glasses clinked somewhere behind me. The world continued, oblivious, while I peeled myself open under candlelight.
“The wall was his favorite.” I stared at a point just past Maya’s shoulder.
Easier that way. “If I did something wrong, left a dish out, tracked mud on the floor, talked back, he’d make me stand facing the wall.
Nose to the paint. Hands at my sides. And I’d stay there until he decided I’d learned whatever lesson he thought I needed. ”
“How long?” The words scraped out of her throat, tight and frayed.
“Hours.” The confession sat between us like a stone.
“My legs would go numb. My shoulders would shake. And he’d sit behind me in his chair, reading the paper or watching TV, and every now and then he’d say something.
Just to remind me he was there. Just to make sure I knew I couldn’t move until he said so. ”
I could still feel it. The muscle memory of it, the phantom ache in my legs. The way my spine wanted to straighten even now, decades later, bracing for a voice that wasn’t there.
“And the drills got worse as I got older. Longer, harder, more physical. By the time I was twelve, he was running me like a recruit. Full packs, timed runs, the works.” I swallowed. “And when I missed his marks, it stopped being drills.”
The silence at our table was absolute. I couldn’t stop now.
“He hit me.” Three words. The simplest way to say the most complicated thing. “Not where anyone could see. He was careful about that. I learned how to take a hit before I learned how to drive.”
“And your mom? Where was she in all of this?”
I shook my head. “She’d hear it happening, and she’d turn the TV up or go to the garden or find somewhere else to be. Afterward she’d look at me like I was the one who’d done something wrong. Like if I’d just been better, he wouldn’t have had to…”
I couldn’t look at her in that moment. Couldn’t stand to see the pity, the horror, the involuntary flinch that told me this was too much. That I was too much. That the thing I’d been carrying all these years was as ugly as I’d always suspected and now she could see it too.
“Nate.”
I forced my gaze to hers. A heavy, iron band locked around my ribs, stealing the air from my lungs.
Tears glistened in her eyes, but there was no pity in them. No disgust. Just a fierce, shining ache.
She pushed her chair back and stood, rounding the table and sliding into my lap. Her arms slipped around my neck and she held on. “I’m so sorry, Nate. Your dad’s a raging asshole.”
Her words were a soft murmur against my skin, unspooling a tight, cold knot of shame buried deep inside my chest. All the fight drained right out of my muscles.
I wrapped my arms around her and closed my eyes, dropping my head to her shoulder, and just breathed.
The scent of wine and that vanilla thing she put in her hair washed over me.
It mixed with something underneath that was just her, just Maya.
I held on like she was the only solid thing in the room.