Chapter 10 #2
The pain in his voice makes me want to stand up and hunt her down so I can strangle her.
His wife left? What was wrong with her? He’s .
. . well . . . I don’t want to admit that the thought currently crossing my mind is that Nico’s one of the best men I’ve ever met.
He’s kind and gentle and brilliant and so fucking handsome it makes me insane sometimes.
“I’m sorry,” I finally say, “I just find that extremely hard to even fathom.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re you!” I blurt out, and I’m once again grateful for the lack of light because I’m cringing at my total lack of tact.
I mean, I never have tact, but usually it’s in the context of being everyone’s boss in a kitchen.
Not delving into the personal lives of sweet men who don’t need me making them feel worse.
But he chuckles softly, almost as though what I’m saying is so ridiculous that he finds it funny. And that makes me so sad it aches. How can I look at him and see someone so wonderful, while he truly believes there’s no surprise in someone falling out of love with him?
“Seriously, I know I haven’t been here long, but come on. Something must have been deeply wrong with her,” I finally say, wanting desperately to forcibly banish the seeds of doubt his wife left him with.
“It wasn’t her fault,” he says, and that cracks my heart even more.
I’m ready to start yelling at him, to make him believe he’s better than that, but he senses my rising indignation and holds up his hand.
I wait. I can see he has more to say but that maybe it’s hard to.
He sweeps a hand through his hair again, another gesture of trying to find comfort somewhere.
That longing to help is palpable. It’s such an unusual feeling for me, that kind of desperation to solve something for someone else. But I force myself to give him the space he clearly wants. Until finally, he speaks again.
“Staying felt easy to me once we were together. I loved the land, I loved my grandfather, and I loved her. It never occurred to me to live anywhere else. But we did travel a lot, showcasing the oil internationally. And she’d never really done that.
I think the more she saw of the world, the more she realized she didn’t actually want this small life.
And it just happened that she came to that realization right around when my grandfather died and I was taking everything over.
I couldn’t leave. And she couldn’t stay. ”
“So she just . . . left?”
“I don’t blame her,” he says. And that makes me the saddest of all. “At least Gia was pissed enough at her that she’s kept me on as a surrogate grandson. I didn’t lose everyone.”
He goes quiet again, and I know the only thing I can do for him is give his misery some company.
“John left me, too, if it makes you feel any better,” I share, surprised once again that words I keep in with everyone else slip out around him.
“The breakup that just happened. We’d been together for almost five years, and I thought things were fine.
I mean, we didn’t live together and we didn’t really have much in common outside of work, but it worked for me.
My job’s a little insane . . . Anyway, my restaurant caught on fire, and he decided that was the moment to dump me. ”
“That’s pretty shitty,” he says with a sigh.
I pick a stick up off the ground and fiddle with it. “Is it clichéd if I also say I don’t blame him?”
“It’s not clichéd if it’s true.”
I nod, recognizing that this conversation has become a safe space for us both now.
“I always thought he would leave,” I admit, now tracing patterns in the dirt so I can keep fidgeting. “And I wasn’t the easiest girlfriend. So without a restaurant, I can get why our relationship wouldn’t have worked anymore.”
“Something must have been ‘deeply wrong’ with him,” he says with a small smile, purposely echoing my words back to him.
“Unlike you, I’m not going to argue with that,” I reply with a laugh.
But I’m stunned into silence when he reaches out a hand and takes mine. His is warm and rough; my hand fits completely inside his. He moves his thumb over mine, like it’s the most natural thing in the world, like he doesn’t see or care that mine are as calloused as his.
I can’t help but stare transfixed, burning up from the contact.
It feels so intimate, this little piece of comfort he’s gifting me, or that maybe we’re gifting each other.
Two abandoned souls finding solace in each other and in the purity of protecting the animals around them.
The indisputable chemistry that exists between us makes it hard to breathe.
It makes me wonder what he’s going to do next.
But something shifts, and he gingerly disentangles our hands. We’re silent for a long time, as though that silence can help us ignore the hand-holding and confessions, if we just give it long enough.
“You’re really kind to me,” he finally says, and I wish I could reach back out to him again, but I get the sense that the moment is gone. “I’m extremely grateful we’re friends.”
I know he means it as a compliment, but the word “friends” lands with a thud between us.
“Me too, Nico,” I whisper. Because it’s true, even if after only a month of knowing him, I already feel like he’s so much more; that word feels so small compared to the lifeline that his friendship is for me right now.
“Promise even when you go home at the end of the summer, we can still be friends?” he says. “I don’t think I’ll find anyone else to talk to about olive yields depending on water alkalinity.”
I snort a laugh at that. We did spend the better part of an hour debating that the other day.
It’s hard to shake off the confusion of everything that’s unsaid. Whatever tension sits with us whenever we’re together, whatever the spark is that I constantly feel with him, whatever kernel of truth sits inside every conversation we have . . . he deliberately ignores it.
And maybe it’s better that way. I don’t need to suddenly turn into the kind of person who pines and confesses my woes to a new friend—someone I didn’t even know a month ago. Being in a new place doesn’t mean I need to go completely soft.
I’m here for the summer, we are friends, but I need to get back to my regular version of myself that doesn’t need to say so much.
So we sit. We sit up and protect Gia’s cows. We take turns sleeping in the night. And when the sun rises, we’ve got a whole new day ahead of us.