Chapter 10 People Like Us
PEOPLE LIKE US
NATE
The leather gives beneath my fists with that deep, dull thud that rattles straight up my arms. It’s the only sound steady enough to quiet the noise in my head.
Sweat is running down my jaw, stinging the cut where I split my lip earlier, but I barely feel it.
Physical pain I can work with. It has rules. It stays where you put it.
Three days since Nora walked out of this place, and somehow everything in here still smells like her.
My sheets.
My shirts.
Hell, even my own skin feels wrong without her hands on it.
“If you hit that bag any harder, you’ll send it through the wall,” Javier calls out from somewhere behind me, voice rough and amused.
I ignore him and keep going—jab, cross, hook—because stopping means thinking. And thinking means remembering. And remembering means wanting something I don’t have the right to want.
“Nate.” His tone changes. “You’ve got someone waiting inside.”
My hands go still mid-combo. The bag swings lazily. For a second—an insane, stupid second—my chest tightens like I’m about to see her walk through the door. I already know it won’t be.
Hope’s a dumb thing.
It sneaks in even after you kill it.
When I step into the main room, unwrapping my hands, it’s not Nora standing there. The figure at the wall has broader shoulders, familiar posture, hands shoved in his pockets like he’s trying to look casual and failing.
Nick.
“What are you doing here?” slips out harsher than intended, but I don’t take it back.
He turns, grinning like no time’s passed at all. “Well, that’s one hell of a greeting. I missed you too, kid.”
Something loosens in me without permission. I pull him into a hug, and he claps my back with enough force to shift my ribs. The man’s steadiness hits me harder than the punch bag ever could. He was there when no one else was.
Not by blood—just choice, which counts more.
“You look good,” he says, stepping back, scanning me like he’s checking for cracks. “Healthy.”
I snort. “Speak for yourself. So you finally grew a pair and asked her to marry you, huh?”
His laugh fills the room—warm, surprised, stupidly happy. The kind of laugh you don’t hear often from people who’ve lived through the shit he has.
Javier slips out with a wave. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes. Don’t break anything.”
Once he’s gone, Nick’s smile fades into something quieter.
“He says you’ve been doing well here.”
I lean against the wall, crossing my arms. “I get why you came out here years ago. This place lets you breathe."
“But breathing isn’t living forever,” Nick says finally.
I swallow that down. It lands too cleanly.
“How’s… everything?” I ask, though I’m not sure I want the answer.
He sits, folding his hands.
“Sonder’s thriving. Jay’s stepped up, he’s running the place like a well oiled machine. We moved him into his own apartment. Your mom? First big client for events.”
He gestures at himself.
“And Kat’s clinic is open. Massive pain in my ass with council paperwork, but it’s been worth it to see the smile on that woman’s face.”
There’s something else hiding under all that good news. I can hear it in the gaps.
“Nick.”
He exhales.
“South Side’s changing. Not naturally though. Families are disappearing. Houses are being vandalized and random fires have been burning down small businesses everywhere. Danny thinks someone’s pushing people out.”
That old instinct—the one that lived in me long before I had the language for it—stirs.
“Why are you telling me all of this?”
“Just thought you should know what’s going on back home, that’s all.”
Home. I don’t know if that place is home anymore after last summer.
“I’m not sure I can go back yet,” I say before he can ask. “What if—”
“You know what this place taught me?” Nick cuts in. “You don’t know what you can handle until you're in it.”
Then he leans forward, eyes locked with mine.
“And I need you back in Eden. I’m getting married and you’re my best man.”
“Me?”
Christ, I sound like a kid.
“Of course you,” he says, softer now. “You’re family.”
And then—
“Besides, Nora’s gonna need someone to walk her down the aisle.”
Her name does something ugly and immediate to my chest. Like someone reached inside and twisted. I have to clench my fists just to stay upright.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea. I might’ve fucked it up again,” I manage.
Nick just watches me for a long moment. "I don't think she thinks that."
Nick’s smile shifts—small, knowing, the kind he gets when he’s holding more cards than he’s showing. “Actually, I think you’ve got more reasons than you realize to come home now.”
And that’s when the dam breaks. Everything I’ve been swallowing down—fear, self-loathing, the quiet terror that sits in my chest like a parasite feeding on anything good—spills out before I can stop it.
"I'm scared I'll hurt her again. You’ve seen what I’ve done, what Scott is like. I can’t—"
“Then don’t be him,” Nick says simply. Like changing the wiring of my DNA is as easy as putting on a different shirt. “Change the outcome.”
I start pacing without meaning to, running both hands through my hair—a nervous habit I’ve never managed to break.
“Nick, she’s like a song stuck on repeat and it fucks with my head.
I thought I was doing the right thing letting her move on with her life, start fresh in London, build a career.
Then she shows up here and I put it in her head that we could be something more, but I don’t know if I can give her more. ”
“Songs get stuck because they mean something,” he says, voice softening before he lets out a breath of a laugh.
“You know what I’ve realized about people like us that carry the weight of every problem on our shoulders?
We think we have way more power over other people’s lives than we actually do.
Like we get to control their choices. Decide their outcomes. But we can’t.”
He leans forward, elbows on his knees.
“A person makes their own choices. Nora makes her own choices. And we both know that girl is more than capable of making her own decisions.”
“I know she is.”
God, I know.
“But I still feel like I’ve given her this false sense of hope that we’ll get some happily ever after. And I’m still walking on the edge of reason here.”
Nick tilts his head. “Have you heard of Pablo Neruda?”
I shake my head.
“There’s a line he wrote—‘Love is so short, forgetting is so long.’ But I think he got it backwards.”
I stop pacing. “Yeah? How’s that?”
He sets down the water bottle he’s been turning in his hands, making sure he has my full attention.
“Forgetting isn’t long at all. It’s just the moment you realize the love didn’t disappear—it just changed shape”
“Into what, exactly?” I ask.
I hate how desperate it sounds for an answer. Like a man dying of thirst asking for water.
“Into something that belongs to you instead of something that owns you,” he repeats softly.
I sink into the chair across from him, staring at the concrete floor like maybe it’ll start offering answers. Like a kid hiding from the truth that’s already got its hands around his throat.
“Everyone keeps telling me to ‘move on.’ Or let go. But I fucking can’t.”
“People say that because they’re scared,” Nick says, leaning back. “It’s never a waste to try and see where things go next. Whether they work out or not.”
“So I’m just supposed to be grateful for the pain?” I snap, bitterness slicing through every word.
“No. You’re supposed to be grateful for the capacity you have to hold it based on what you experienced and survived through.”
His voice deepens with conviction—the tone he only gets when he’s talking about something he’s lived, not just learned.
“Do you know how many people sleepwalk through life never feeling anything real? Never experiencing feelings that rewire their entire understanding of what it means to be human?”
“Then why does it feel like dying?”
“Because it is in a way,” he says softly. “The version of you that loved her that way—that version is gone. But the person you’re becoming? He gets to love differently. Maybe better.”
I don’t know what to do with that. The truth sits between us like a challenge I don’t have the strength to accept. Knowing doesn’t kill the wanting—it just makes the wanting feel pointless. That’s the cruelest part.
“I thought after everything that happened last summer I was finally out of the woods. But everything fucking hurts all over again.”
“Yeah,” Nick says. “Unfortunatley, acting like you don’t have feelings doesn’t protect you from them.”
His tone sharpens, just slightly.
“And for someone who’s survived half the shit you have? The real problem isn’t that you feel too little. You feel too much. All the time.”
I look up at him, and something shifts in his expression—like he’s seeing the part of me I’ve spent years burying.
“You know what Javier once told me about people like us?” Nick continues. “The ones who were broken early and often?”
His voice drops low, intimate.
“We don’t feel things normally. We feel everything at maximum volume. Love isn’t just love, it’s obsession. Sadness isn’t sadness, it’s a bottomless pit. And pain becomes its own living thing—sets up camp in your chest and pays rent in sleepless nights.”
Something cracks open in me—quietly, but unmistakably.
“The drugs weren’t about getting high, were they?” Nick says. “They were about turning down the volume. Making everything manageable.”
I can’t speak.
Because it’s true.
When everything is at eleven, zero starts looking like peace.
“The fucked-up part,” I whisper, “is that even dulled down… even through all that haze… I still felt her. Like she was carved into my DNA.”
“That’s because she probably was. Is.”
Nick spreads his hands. “People like us, when we love someone, we don’t just give them our hearts. We give them our entire nervous system. And when they’re gone? We’re left with all these exposed wires sparking around with nowhere to go.”
He pauses, letting the weight of it settle.
“At some point, you have to take that power back. Own it.”
Silence stretches long and heavy.
“So what now?” I ask quietly. Done being a battlefield for my own emotions.
“Now,” Nick says, gripping my shoulder firmly, grounding me, “you learn that feeling everything isn’t a flaw. It’s a superpower you haven’t learned how to control yet. But you will. Because that’s what you do, Nate. You survive. You figure shit out.”
He starts toward the door, then stops.
“One more thing.” He pulls a slightly wrinkled envelope from his pocket and hands it to me.
My name is written across the front in Nora’s handwriting.
“I’ll head back in two days,” Nick says, voice gentle. “Take your time.”
When he leaves, the silence is deafening. I sit on the gym floor, staring at the envelope like it might detonate. My hands shake as I tear it open.
Nate,
You always made me mixtapes of my favourite moments.
So I made you one.
Track 7 is my favourite.
Leni x
Two photos fall out—one of us, back when forever felt possible in the streets of Malaga and the photo I took of her on the night of her eighteenth birthday at the gallery.
I walk to Javier’s old stereo, slide the CD in and skip to track 7.
“For Me This Is Heaven” by Jimmy Eat World fills the room, and suddenly I’m seventeen again, loving her like it was oxygen.
When Javier comes in an hour later, I haven’t moved.
“So,” he says, crossing his arms, a knowing smile creeping in. “When do you leave?”