20. Nina
— ? —
Nina
Cole is stable, and I can’t stop shaking.
The hospital releases us into the rain - the same rain that soaked me through the night everything fell apart, the same rain that never seems to stop in Newport like the sky itself is mourning something.
Adrian walks beside me through the sliding doors, his hand hovering at the small of my back without quite touching, and I can feel the heat of him through my ruined dress.
Everything is too bright and too clean and too quiet. Everything feels fragile.
“The car’s this way,” Adrian says quietly.
I follow him across the parking lot, heels clicking on wet asphalt, the champagne stain on my dress turning cold against my skin.
Somewhere behind us, in a room full of machines and monitors, Cole is sleeping off the worst night of his life.
The doctors said he’d be fine - dehydration, exhaustion, his body rebelling against the treatment - but for ten terrible minutes on that ballroom floor, I thought I was watching him die.
I thought I was losing everyone.
Adrian opens the passenger door for me. I slide in without speaking, and he closes it carefully, like I’m something that might break.
***
The drive is silent.
His hands are steady on the wheel - always steady, those hands, even when everything else is falling apart.
I watch them without meaning to. The way his fingers curve around the leather.
The way his knuckles flex when he shifts gears.
The way the dashboard light catches the edge of his wedding ring, the one he never took off even when I moved out.
I remember when those hands meant safety. I remember reaching for them without thinking, knowing they would catch me.
I remember when I didn’t have to fight myself to trust him.
“You should eat something,” he says.
“Not hungry.”
“Nina-”
“I’m fine.”
I’m not fine. I’m running on adrenaline and champagne fumes and the terror of watching my best friend collapse in front of the entire gala. But I don’t know how to say that. I don’t know how to say anything that matters, so I say nothing at all.
The silence stretches between us, filled with everything we’re not saying.
***
We pull up to the cottage. Adrian parks but doesn’t turn off the engine.
The rain drums on the roof, steady and relentless. Inside the cottage, the lights are off. Everything I built for myself is sitting there in the dark, waiting for me to come back to it.
“I can go,” Adrian says quietly. “If you need to be alone.”
I should say yes.
The word is right there, sitting on my tongue, ready to be spoken. Yes, Adrian. Go home. I’ll see you at the next appointment. We’ll talk soon.
The boundaries exist for a reason. I made them carefully, deliberately, brick by brick.
They’re the only things keeping me from drowning in a man I’m not sure I can trust. The only things keeping me from becoming the woman I was before - the one who believed so completely, loved so recklessly, that his doubt nearly destroyed her.
I should say yes.
But I look at his face in the dashboard light - exhausted, worried, still here after everything - and the walls don’t feel like protection anymore.
They feel like punishment.
This will cost you, the voice in my head whispers. You know it will. You let him in tonight, and tomorrow you’ll have to rebuild everything you’ve broken. The boundaries. The distance. The careful armor you’ve spent months constructing.
He’ll think it means something.
Maybe it does mean something.
That’s the problem.
“I don’t know what I need,” I hear myself say.
Adrian nods. Doesn’t push. Just waits, the way he’s been waiting for months - patient, present, asking nothing.
The rain keeps falling. The engine keeps running. And I sit there in the passenger seat of my husband’s car, fighting a war with myself that I already know I’m going to lose.
Don’t do this, the voice says. You’re not ready. You’re scared and exhausted and you just watched Cole almost die. This isn’t a decision. This is desperation.
But I’m so tired of being strong.
I’m so tired of lying alone in that cottage, listening to the rain, pretending I don’t miss the sound of his breathing beside me. I’m so tired of the careful distance, the measured conversations, the way I have to think before every touch.
Tonight, Vivienne threw champagne in my face. Tonight, Adrian stood up in front of everyone and told the truth. Tonight, Cole collapsed and I thought my heart was going to stop along with his.
I don’t want to be alone. Not tonight. Not with all of this sitting on my chest like a stone.
“Stay,” I hear myself say.
Adrian looks at me. In the dashboard light, I can see the question in his eyes - the hope he’s trying to hide, the fear that he’ll do something wrong.
“Are you sure?”
“No.” I laugh - a broken, terrible sound that’s more sob than anything else. “I’m not sure about anything anymore. I just... I don’t want to go inside by myself. Not tonight.”
He searches my face. Looking for doubt, maybe. Looking for permission.
Whatever he finds, it’s enough.
He turns off the engine.
***
We run through the rain to the cottage.
By the time I unlock the front door, we’re both soaked through - again.
My dress is plastered to my body, the silk clinging to every curve, and his shirt has gone translucent across his shoulders.
We stand in the entryway dripping onto the hardwood floor, and I flip on the lights and stare at my secondhand furniture and my painted walls and the life I built without him.
It looks different with him in it. Smaller. Fuller. Like the cottage has been waiting for something and didn’t know what.
“You’re shaking,” Adrian says.
“I know.”
“Let me get you something dry.”
He disappears into the bedroom before I can stop him. I hear drawers opening, fabric rustling, the particular sound of someone who knows where things are even though they haven’t lived here.
He comes back with an old t-shirt and sweatpants - clothes I stole from him years ago, clothes I kept even after everything because they still smelled like him.
“These were in your drawer,” he says. “I didn’t mean to-”
“It’s fine.”
I take them. Our fingers brush.
And something shifts.
I feel it like a physical thing - a crack in the wall, a door swinging open.
His skin against mine, just that small touch, and suddenly I’m aware of everything.
The heat coming off his body. The way his wet shirt clings to his chest. The way he’s looking at me like I’m something precious, something fragile, something he’s afraid to hope for.
Don’t, the voice in my head whispers. You’ll regret this. You’ll hate yourself tomorrow.
This will cost you everything you’ve built.
But I’m so tired of building walls.
I don’t know who moves first. Maybe both of us. Maybe neither. One moment we’re standing in the living room with wet clothes and careful boundaries, and the next moment his mouth is on mine.
***
The kiss is not gentle.
It’s desperate and hungry and full of everything we haven’t said for months. His hands are in my hair, on my face, sliding down my back to pull me closer. I’m grabbing fistfuls of his wet shirt, trying to get closer, trying to climb inside him.
“Nina-” he gasps against my mouth.
“Don’t talk.”
“We should-”
“I said don’t talk.”
I pull his shirt over his head. He reaches for the zipper at my back. The ruined dress falls away, pooling at my feet in a puddle of champagne-stained silk.
And then we’re moving - stumbling toward the bedroom, hands everywhere, mouths everywhere, ten years of marriage and three months of distance collapsing into a single point of contact.
The bedroom door closes behind us.
***
After, I lie in the dark with my head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat slow.
The rain has stopped. Gray light is starting to creep in around the curtains, announcing a morning I’m not ready for. My body is still humming with the memory of his touch - his hands, his mouth, the way he said my name like a prayer.
You did this, the voice in my head says. You let him in. Now what?
I don’t have an answer.
“This doesn’t change anything,” I say.
The words fall into the silence between us and stay there. I feel Adrian’s chest rise and fall beneath my cheek. Feel his arm tighten slightly around my shoulders.
“I know,” he says quietly.
“I mean it, Adrian. One night doesn’t erase what happened. It doesn’t rebuild trust or fix what’s broken.”
“I know.”
“Then why didn’t you stop?”
“Because you didn’t want me to.” His voice is rough, honest. “And because I’ve missed you so much I can barely breathe.”
I close my eyes. My body aches in the best way - muscles I forgot I had, places that remember him even when my mind tries to forget. The intimacy of lying here, skin to skin, his heartbeat under my ear - it feels like coming home.
That’s what scares me.
“I panicked,” I say quietly. “Seeing Cole collapse - I thought I was losing him. And then you were there, defending me in front of everyone, and I just...” I trail off. “I needed to feel something that wasn’t fear.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?”
“More than you know.” He turns his head, presses a kiss to my hair.
His lips linger there, warm against my scalp.
“The last few months have been the worst of my life. Watching you pull away. Knowing I caused it. Learning what a complete ass I’d been.
” He laughs, but there’s no humor in it.
“And then tonight, when Cole went down - for a second, I thought I was about to lose someone else. Someone you love.”
“You care about Cole?”
“I care about you.” He shifts slightly, tilting my chin up so I have to look at him.
His eyes are dark in the gray light, full of something I’m afraid to name.
“And Cole matters to you. That makes him matter to me.” He pauses.
“Besides, he showed me what loyalty looks like. What it costs to stand by someone no matter what. I owed him more respect than I gave him.”
Nothing I could say would be enough. So I just lie there in the gray light, feeling his heartbeat against my cheek, feeling the warmth of his body, feeling everything I’ve been trying not to feel for months.
“This doesn’t change anything,” I say again. A reminder. A warning. Maybe a prayer.
“I know.”
“The boundaries still matter. The trust still has to be rebuilt. This was-” I stop. Try again. “This was one night. It doesn’t mean I’m ready to come home.”
“I know that too.”
“Then what does it mean?”
He’s quiet a while. His fingers trace patterns on my shoulder - idle, intimate, the kind of touch that comes from years of knowing someone’s body.
“It means we’re still connected,” he says finally. “Even when we’re broken. Even when we don’t know how to fix it.” His hand stills on my skin. “It means there’s something here worth fighting for.”
I want to argue. I want to tell him that connection isn’t enough, that love isn’t enough, that I’ve learned the hard way that wanting something doesn’t make it safe.
But I’m lying in his arms, and my body is still warm from his touch, and the sun is coming up over the harbor, and for just this moment - just this one small moment - I don’t want to fight anymore.
“Adrian?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t make me regret believing you again.”
His arm tightens around me. I feel him press another kiss to my hair, feel his breath warm against my scalp.
“I won’t,” he says.
And I want so badly to believe him.
***
He leaves before the sun is fully up.
I ask him to - not because I want him to go, but because I need space to think. Space to figure out what last night meant, what this morning changes, what happens next.
“I’ll call you later,” he says at the door. He’s dressed in yesterday’s clothes, rumpled and rain-dried, and he looks exhausted and hopeful and terrified all at once.
“Okay.”
“Nina.” He pauses with his hand on the doorframe. “Whatever you decide... whatever you need... I’m not going anywhere. You know that, right?”
“I know.”
He nods. Doesn’t kiss me - doesn’t push for more than I’ve already given.
He just leaves.
I stand in the doorway and watch his car disappear down the street, and then I close the door and lean against it and press my hands to my face.
My body aches. My heart aches. Everything aches with the particular weight of wanting something I’m afraid to have.
This will cost you, the voice says again.
But for the first time, I’m not sure I care.