Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
PAIGE
“I feel like a spy,” I say, slipping under Nate’s blankets.
He wraps his arms around me and pulls me against his bare chest before I even think about where I might get comfortable. I don’t mind, though. Not at all.
Nate buries his face in my hair and hums. The peacefulness of the sound swirls around me. If this isn’t how life is supposed to be, I don’t want it.
Moonlight streams into the room, creating a cast of shadows on the walls and ceiling. I watch them move, interrupted by the tree limbs that brush the window softly as I’m nestled in Nate’s arms.
“It’s cold in here,” I say, pushing closer to him.
“Want me to get another blanket?”
“No. Just don’t move, and our body heat will warm us up. Two people can get much warmer together than one.” Add a dog, even better.
He snorts sleepily. “Okay. Do I want to know how you know that?”
I still.
It’s an innocent question. But it’s a question that stirs something deep inside my soul.
My life has always been delineated from pre-Carmichaels and post-Carmichaels, and the two sides didn’t mix. Talking to them about my past felt like I was dirtying up my new life. Not talking about it made me feel like I had shame, and that hurt too.
But could anyone understand the things I had to share? Would I be judged for it? Would they look at me differently?
Hollis didn’t. And the more I think about it, the more confident I am that Nate wouldn’t either.
The idea of opening up to him about the darker parts of my life terrifies me. I’ve said things before—just sort of thrown things out there and then changed the subject. But intentionally talking to him about these things, giving him details, and maybe allowing him to respond? To hold space for me?
Bile creeps up my throat, and I have to talk myself out of throwing up. But on the heels of the fear comes a rush of something else—the comfort of knowing Nate will be here anyway.
My throat tightens. My mouth goes dry. I wrap my hands around Nate’s forearm for support.
“Do you really want to know?” I ask, my voice timid.
He lifts his head slightly as if he picks up on my hesitation.
“Of course,” he says.
I rewrap my fingers around him. “I only have vague memories about most of this. Hollis has helped me fill in some blanks.” I clear my throat.
“We lived in a three-bedroom house in Indiana. We all had a bedroom, but Mom would often ask me to sleep in Hollis’s room.
It was fine with me because Hollis was the coolest person I knew. ”
Nate smiles against my head and presses a kiss at the crown. I don’t think about it too much. I might flip out and stop talking. And I need to tell him. I want to.
“We’d lay there in his bed and wait. Sometimes, we’d hear a scream or a voice muffled down the hall. Hollis would tell me these knock-knock jokes to distract me. I have flashes of memories about this.”
Nate blows out a breath. I wonder if he’s nervous about where this is going, but I trek on.
“Hollis apparently went back to our mother for a while in his teenage years. I had already been adopted or was getting adopted—I don’t quite know how all of that played out. She ended up losing custody of him again, but he was with her long enough to figure out that Dad was pimping her out.”
“Holy shit.” He squeezes me tighter.
I close my eyes and remember huddling with Hollis in his bed.
“It seemed like we never had heat—or when we did, it was random, I think. But I have these memories of being cold. And in the winters, if I was in my bed, Hollis would come and get me so we could sleep together.”
I pause and take a deep breath. God, I’m so thankful to have had him look after me. I wonder if it was good preparation for the new big brothers I ended up with.
“Anyway, it was always warmer when we were together. Everything was just … safer.”
Tears fill my eyes, and I blink hard so they go away. But they don’t.
“We had a dog for a while, and we’d bring him in and put him on the bed too. He’d keep our feet warm,” I say, my voice cracking.
Nate hugs me so tight that I can’t breathe. But it’s perfect. It’s exactly what I need him to do. He doesn’t say anything, just holds me, and whispers something against my hair that isn’t for me.
I take the deepest breath that I can and blow it out, releasing a load off my heart that I’ve been carrying my whole life. I can feel it lifting off my shoulders and dissipating into the night.
“It’s why I want to be a social worker,” I say, wiping my cheeks. “I want to help little Paiges and little Hollises—kids who don’t deserve to grow up like we did.”
He exhales. It’s sharp and heavy.
“I’m so fucking sorry that happened to you, Paige. Like … I can’t even process that.”
“It’s over, and I made it. I found a wonderful family to love me. I had it so much easier than my brother, and I feel a little guilty about that.”
Nate rolls me over to face him. He dries my face with the pad of his thumb. It comforts me to know he cares.
“Listen to me,” he says, staring into my eyes. “You can’t feel guilt or shame for anything that was done to you. But you can be proud of the woman you’ve become because you did the work to be her. No one else.”
He kisses the tip of my nose.
“That’s easier said than done,” I tell him. “You’re really the first person besides Hollis who I’ve even talked to about all of this. I’ve always been afraid of opening this wound. Afraid people would think I’m tainted or something.”
He drags his finger down the side of my face. “You have no idea what it means to me that you opened up to me. Thank you for trusting me with that.”
“Thank you for making me feel safe enough to share that with you.”
“It makes sense why you want to do social work now. I get it.”
“I can’t think of anything else that I ever wanted to do,” I say. “What about you? What did little Nate Hughes want to be?”
He chuckles, grinning. “Oh, everything. I wanted to be the guy in Bloodsport. I wanted to be a drummer in a band.”
“Really?”
“I have no musical talent, so that didn’t last long. What else? I wanted to be a physical therapist for a while. Mom had to see one, and I thought it was interesting.”
“Why didn’t you do that?”
His jaw sets, and he looks at something over my shoulder. I give him the space I think he needs while ignoring the churn of my stomach.
What did I say?
“My life took a turn,” he says, flexing his forearms. “I …” He sighs.
I kiss him on the nose. The gesture makes him release his jaw.
“I was nineteen,” he says. “Dominic was sixteen. It was summer. Super humid out. I remember that. I was in my room just getting ready to go to sleep, and I heard this boom upstairs. And then I heard my mother screaming.”
My chest tightens so hard it pinches. I take Nate’s hand in mine and lace our fingers together.
“Dom met me at the bottom of the stairs, and we went up to their room, right? I opened the door, and Dad had Mom on her back with a gun pointed at her head.”
“Nate,” I whisper, unable to formulate a sentence.
My heart breaks for the man who’s holding it together in front of me. He keeps his gaze steady on the point above my shoulder, and I wish so much that he’d look at me.
“Mom put her hand out like she was telling Dom and me to stay back while Dad held her in place by the neck, pinning her to the bed. Dad looked at us and yelled for us to stay back. And we did. We didn’t know what to fucking do.”
Tears pool in the corners of my eyes again as I watch him relive the horror.
“Dad started screaming all this bullshit—that doesn’t matter. Then he pointed the gun at Dom.”
I gasp, a chill running down my spine as I imagine the terror of the moment.
Nate swallows. “The gun went off. The sound was so loud. Mom screamed again.” He closes his eyes and swallows again.
“Like I hate movies with gunshots because of this. It just echoed through the house.” He looks down at me.
His eyes are glassy. “It was supposed to have hit Dominic. But it hit the wall instead.”
“Oh, Nate,” I say, tears flowing down my cheeks.
“I lunged for Dad because I knew if I didn’t, he was going to kill all of us.
I held him down while Dom tried to work the gun out of his grip.
Dad just stared at me with this cold cruelness as he overpowered my brother.
” He closes his eyes. “The second shot would’ve hit me if Dom hadn’t moved the gun at the last fucking half of a second. ”
The tears are impossible to stop as I watch the man I adore, the man I just might love, struggle through his pain. I bury myself as close to him as I can get without crawling inside his body and hold him as tightly as I can manage.
“I have absolutely no idea how this happened—by the grace of God, maybe—how Dom moved my dad’s arm the direction he did, but the shot hit my father …
and not me.” His chest shakes. “Dad died. Right there. In a pool of blood in his own bed next to his wife and in front of his sons.” His voice wavers. “It was the worst night of my life.”
Oh. My. God.
He saw his father … his brutal father … nearly kill his mother. And then kill himself.
How? How does someone bounce back from that? How do they overcome that and become the great father he is now?
I have so many questions and wonder so many things. But all that really matters is that he shared his pain with me.
He pries me away from him and looks at me. He smiles.
“Don’t cry for me,” he says, drying my face again. “I’m tough.”
“I can’t help it.”
“Well, help it because seeing you cry makes me feel worse.”
I grin, sniffling. “We’re a pair, aren’t we? I have childhood trauma, and you have teenage trauma. Maybe we can do the next decade of trauma together.”
“That would work, but I’m in my thirties.” He laces our fingers together. “And if you have any more trauma at any age, I’ve fucked up somewhere.”
I bow my head against him. I don’t want him to see this smile. This one is silly, maybe even happy.
And if you have any more traumas at any age, I’ve fucked up somewhere.
He really wants us to be together. To protect me. To make sure I’m happy.
For the first time, I believe in the idea of … maybe not forever but a long damn time. And that’s progress.
My mind creates ideas of what Nate would’ve looked like as a child. Was he gangly as a teenager or built as solid as he is now? Did he always keep his hair short, or did he do the middle part that some boys did? Was he energetic and funny like Ryder, or more methodical like he is now?
Maybe someday I’ll know.
What?
I still against him, holding my breath as I rethink that through. Maybe someday I’ll know.
The idea doesn’t terrify me like I thought it would. Actually, I sort of like it. A little Nate to protect from the world. To break the chains of generational trauma.
“What?” he asks, lifting my chin. “I just felt your whole body tighten.”
Do I tell him what I was thinking about? I stare in his eyes and feel a warmth cover me.
“I hope you take this the right way,” I say, biting my lip.
“Tell me.”
“I was just thinking about how if you and I had a baby someday, like eighty-six years from now, how special that might be. Like a victory for humanity in a very dramatic way.”
His eyes widen, the greens turning to gold. A slow smile graces his lips before he flips me on my back.
He doesn’t answer me. Just slowly kisses me until I forget what we were talking about.