Chapter 26 #2
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Fuck, I’m so sorry. I just—all of this has really messed with my head. I heard someone say something about a church and the diner, and I was scared you were one of them. You must think I’m a crazy person. I’m sorry.”
Okay, it is now Shut Up Time, Nova, I hissed internally to get myself to stop blabbering on and on.
Wes sighed. “I do not think you are a crazy person. However, as you have seen, I may not be the best judge of that,” he teased. “As a crazy person myself.”
“Recovering crazy person?” I offered.
“In the most important way, yes,” he said. He put his hands in his pockets. “Five years.”
“Congrats,” I said with a wobbly smile, rocking on my feet. “Okay, I’ll go home now, and if you never want to speak to me again, I understand. Have a nice meeting with your kind of cultish non-cult.”
Wes smiled. “Take a breath, please.” He chuckled, reaching for my waist to stop me from turning. “Let’s go talk.”
My skin tingled from the contact. I halted. “But what about your meeting? Aren’t those important?”
“Yes. I’ll pick up an extra one this week.” He shook his head, reaching for my clammy hand. “Come on, Nancy Drew.”
I glared at him, forcing my trembling legs to finally start moving again.
“I don’t blame you, Nova. Believe it or not, I’ve had similar paranoias about you.”
“Me?” I balked. “An angel who has never done one morally questionable thing in her entire life?”
Wes threw me a dry look. “Yes, you. A little temptress perfectly designed to ensnare me.”
My mouth fell open. I was grateful when he steered us into the shade. The weight of his words was slow to penetrate my shame haze. He thought the cult was using me to ensnare him?
“I’m not perfect,” I mumbled.
“Clearly.”
“Hey!” Damn him, I had to smile. But I soon cringed again at the painfully recent memory. “That was the most humiliating moment of my entire life.”
“It definitely looked like it.”
I tried to pull my hand from his out of spite, but he tightened his grip.
“Kind of turned me on.”
“You’re sick.”
“Thank you, baby,” he said, thumbing my hat. He walked a few more paces before speaking again. “Okay, if we’re being honest, it really turned me on.”
“Urgh!” I huffed, looking away from him and his stupidly beautiful face.
“Would it help the embarrassment if I punished you for it?”
At the sudden throb between my legs, I had my answer. “No.”
“I’d have to punish you for that lie too.”
Wes took a deep breath, as if to refocus. We walked for a couple blocks in silence before reaching a townhouse—a classic three-story red brick with black cornices.
He glanced at me one more time before he led me up the stoop. His jaw ticked as he let go of me to twist keys into the locks.
Why was he nervous? Was his place messy? Or—
“Oh.”
I stepped inside and immediately knelt to take off my shoes, as this felt like a no-shoes situation.
Exposed brick dominated the right wall, where several tall bookcases and a record player sat.
A small couch and two chairs were positioned atop a beautiful burgundy rug facing the window.
The wall closest to me was a gallery wall, displaying paintings and shelves with small sculptures and vases.
I straightened to face the full dining room table and chef’s kitchen, where tall windows and a door with black frames overlooked the terrace and garden below. In front of us, a staircase led down to the garden level, then up to the third floor.
Wes watched me gape at his home with what could only be described as mild discomfort.
“So the subway is how you atone for your chef’s kitchen?”
His discomfort melted with a grin. “Exactly.” He placed a hand on my back, gently guiding me to sit on the couch. “Can I get you anything? Water?”
“Water would be nice, thank you,” I said, twisting to watch him approach the sexy wraparound marble counters. I drooled at the glass canopy chimney vent hood over the stove in the center island.
If I had a kitchen like that, I would cook, like, all the time.
“So… you cook?” I remembered after the question had left my lips that he’d said he would cook for me this week.
Wes lifted his brows from his massive double-door stainless steel fridge. “I think I’d need to do far more rigorous atoning if I didn’t use this space to cook.”
“Well, you never know with rich people,” I said.
Wes’s humor vanished, and he gave a single nod as he returned with two glasses of filtered water.
Okay, so Wes clearly had a complex about his wealth. As someone who had a negative net worth, it was difficult to be sympathetic to that.
“Yeah, you’re right,” he said finally.
He handed me my water, and I made a mental note to use one of the sleek black coasters on the coffee table. Wes had coasters. I didn’t know men knew about coasters. Or Brita filters.
The space was cool and crisp from the central AC, and that might’ve been the most luxurious feature of Wes’s life thus far.
We turned to each other, and Wes’s previous nervousness had returned.
It was strange to see—so different from controlled, ruthless Wes inside The Circle.
I traced the black tattoos peeking out from his plain white t-shirt—the snake that crawled up one side of his neck, and the mirrored skeleton snake that crawled up the other.
The alchemical symbols on his knuckles, and the trees, stars, and other natural and cosmic imagery up his toned arms.
Wes’s mysticism and edginess had been cast in a new light. I wanted to know more, to finally understand who this man was at his innermost layer.
“I guess I’ll start at the beginning,” Wes said.
“I didn’t grow up like this.” He gestured vaguely to his Architectural-Digest-worthy townhouse.
“My parents married young, far too young, in their hometown in North Carolina. My dad had big dreams, and my mom supported him—thanklessly—as he pursued them. He was far more interested in his newfound ambitions than he was in fatherhood. Or my mother, for that matter. While he went to school and tried and failed his way through various side hustles, my mom took care of me and the home. It was never her dream to be a homemaker, but that didn’t matter to him.
He said it would all be worth it one day. His favorite promise.”
Wes’s eyes flashed with anger. I shifted toward him instinctively, reaching for his hand.
“She helped him brainstorm over breakfast, over dinner, at my baseball games—any pocket of time he spent with us rather than on his computer or at school. She was so fucking smart. I remember thinking that before I could understand what they were talking about. And while my dad profited off her help, I think he ultimately resented it. He didn’t want a collaborator, an intellectual equal. He wanted someone easy to control.”
When Wes spoke of his mother, his eyes shone with so much emotion, it squeezed my heart.
“He resented us. The life he’d fallen into before he realized his true destiny,” Wes spat.
“Once he started taking trips to New York, a part of me knew it was over, maybe even before my mom did. I knew, one day, he wasn’t going to come back.
” Wes shook his head, glancing out the window in front of us as he spoke his next words.
“When I was ten, my dad left my mom, moved to New York full-time, and married a nineteen-year-old model. All in the same year.”
“Oh, Wes,” I said, squeezing his hand.
“By the time my mom got her diagnosis five years later, it was too late. The doctors said it was ovarian cancer,” he said softly. “But I was convinced my mom died of a broken heart.”