Chapter 15
15
Nick
“ I am fucked!”
“Calm down,” Wyatt said, as he stretched his arms across the back of the couch where he’d been sitting when I burst into his place – or rather his brother’s place.
Of all the places I could have gone, I had no idea why I’d come here. To Wyatt. Wyatt who got me into this mess.
Wyatt, who was also the only person I could talk to about Nora.
I paced between the floor to ceiling windows and the edge of the big harvest dining room table. Liam and his girlfriend bought the place, but hadn’t moved in because his season was in full swing. Wyatt was staying here while he scouted for property.
“This is your fault,” I told him, jabbing my grease-stained finger in his direction. I’d come here after I closed up the garage for the day. The conversation with Nora this morning, followed by her being in the office and - I swear to God – she was walking differently. More swish. You know?
“So you’ve said.”
He was sitting on the couch, barefoot, wearing sweats and a t-shirt. There was a book on the couch cushion next to him. He looked like the picture of relaxation. Retired at thirty-four was a hell of a thing.
“I mean it. All that crap about testing the waters. What the hell was I thinking?”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
“What are you talking about? Do you think I would be here if it had worked?”
Wyatt crossed his arms over his beefy chest and scowled at me. “You took her to the wedding and realized you had the hots for her. You’re both single, consenting adults. What’s the issue?”
“Hots? Did you literally just say hots? Are you twelve?”
I stomped back and forth like I was going to come out of my skin. I’d worked through every possible scenario in my mind to get out of going to this next wedding with Nora, but nothing stuck.
I couldn’t talk to Antony. Or Birdie. Or Roy. Dear God, if Roy knew what was going through my head. He’d already warned me.
“The issue is, her father will kill me.”
“Her father doesn’t need to know,” he said.
“You don’t understand!” I shouted. “I have known this woman, this girl, her whole life. Her family is my family. My family is her family.”
“Then I should meet her,” he said.
“What?”
“I’m family adjacent. If she’s your family, I should meet her.”
I stopped in my tracks, about to tell him what he could do with his adjacent family when his cell phone rang.
“Wait, hold that thought,” he set the phone down on the coffee table between us. “Okay, Liam’s here too.”
“Why is Liam on speaker?” I asked Wyatt.
“Because we’re doing the brother thing. I didn’t want to miss out just because I have an away game tonight. How is my house, Wy?”
“Awesome,” Wyatt said. “Syd’s bummed you snatched it up before we could buy it.”
“We’re not doing a brother thing,” I protested. “This is not a brother thing.”
“Fine. We’ll call it a bro thing.”
“A bro thing.” It was official. I was going to lose my mind.
“Either works,” Wyatt said. “Now fill Liam in on what’s been happening so we can do this together.”
I scowled at Wyatt, then at the phone. They were two men, in their thirties. Each of them recently in serious relationships. Maybe they actually had some advice to offer?
How the hell did I begin?
Then it occurred to me. These were two guys I could actually tell my secret. There would be no judgement. No reaction. They had no skin in this game like every other resident of Calico Cove, who had watched Nora grow up, did.
“So whatever we talk about. Stays confidential.”
“I’m a vault.”
“He’s not,” Wyatt countered. “He’s actually the biggest mouth on the planet. But he’s got no one to tell. Neither do I, so I think you should be okay.”
“Fine. Here it is. Six years ago, on her eighteenth birthday, Nora-”
“Life long family friend of Nick and his family, Liam. Also super cute.”
I glared at Wyatt, but he didn’t flinch.
“Got it. Proceed. On her eighteenth birthday…”
This was tough. This went against every mental guardrail I had to take this secret with me to the grave. “She showed up at my apartment thinking…well she had this idea that our friendship was more than a friendship. She said she was in love with me and that we should…we should…”
“Duuuude. Did she proposition you?”
I dipped my chin once.
“That’s an affirmative,” Wyatt told Liam.
“Of course I told her she was wrong about us. That she was having some teenage crush moment and that it would pass,” I rushed to explain. “That I didn’t think about her like that. Ever.”
“Ever? Not even a teeny little bit?”
“Never,” I barked into the phone.
“I think I understand,” Wyatt said, pinching his chin between his fingers. “You probably thought you said all the right things, but I’m guessing you crushed her eighteen year old romantic heart.”
“Something like that. It didn’t exactly help that I was with another woman at the time.”
“Double whammy!”
“Okay, enough commentary, please,” I said to the phone. “Anyway, she left for college not long after that and we just sort of stopped talking.”
“And now she’s back, a super cutie, and you realize you fucked up.”
“No,” I shouted again. “No. I just like having her back. I like her in my world again. She’s always been important to me. Then you told me all that bullshit about testing the waters and it wasn’t supposed to work. I wasn’t supposed to…”
“Want to fuck her,” Wyatt said bluntly.
I closed my eyes. How did I communicate this properly? “Putting the word fuck and Nora in the same sentence makes my brain want to explode.”
“Ha! I get that, my brother. I would have told you no one hated Kit more than me. I was lying to myself the whole time.”
“I’m not lying,” I insisted. “This is complicated as fuck. I’m not supposed to want my friend. My significantly younger, known her since she was three years old, friend.”
“But you do,” Wyatt said.
“Will you stop with the blunt shit.”
“Wyatt excels at the blunt shit, Nick. Listen to him. He won’t let you lie to yourself.”
“There’s no point,” Wyatt confirmed. “You tested the waters, and the waters were hot. How did she react?”
Should I tell them about the swish? Or how mad she got? Should I tell them I was a little bit scared of her right now?
“She’s basically smarter than anyone else in the room and she got me all turned around and now I’m taking her to another wedding.”
“You are so fucked, dude!”
“That’s what I said!” I plopped down in the rocking chair next to the couch, my head in my hands. “She was all like, it shouldn’t be a big deal, because I basically told her it was a one-off.”
“What was a one-off?” Wyatt asked.
“My reaction to her at the wedding.”
“The dick twitch?”
“It was a little more than a dick twitch.”
Liam howled with laughter.
“How do I stop my reaction at the next wedding?” I waited a beat, but there was nothing. Not from Wyatt. Or Liam. “Oh sure, now you both go silent.”
“There’s only one thing you can do.”
“Agree,” Wyatt said. “You’re not going to like it.”
“Tell me!”
“You have to fuck her out of your system.”
“You have to fuck her out of your system,” Wyatt repeated.
“I liked it better when I didn’t know either one of you existed,” I replied.
“You know it’s true,” Wyatt said. “There is no way out. Once you’re attracted, you can’t be un-attracted unless she gives you the ick. Which, let’s face it, if it hasn’t happened yet, probably won’t. So you like her, you like spending time with her, otherwise you wouldn’t have hired her to work for you…”
“Oh man, you did that too? I hired Kit and after that it was all over for me.”
“I don’t know why I bothered to come here,” I said and stood up.
Wyatt stood too and reached out to drop a heavy hand on my shoulder. “You came because you knew we would listen, and we would not judge. Look, I know we can be stubborn assholes-”
“Not me. I’m delightful!”
“Goodbye, Liam,” Wyatt said and hit the button on his phone to disconnect the call. “And I know we’re shoving this brother thing down your throat when you’re probably not ready. But the reality is, Liam and I aren’t going anywhere. And all we want, is to know you.”
This feeling. This pressure in my chest. I’d felt this before. I didn’t like it.
After I was adopted, Antony made me see a therapist. The guy would go on and on about acknowledging my feelings. Was I mad? Was I sad? Was I happy?
He’d said kids who grew up in abusive households lost touch with their feelings because everything was about survival mode. There was no point in wondering how you felt, because it wouldn’t help you stay safe.
There was no doubt I spent a lot of years being angry. And there was no doubt in my mind that getting help from a professional back when I was a teenager, helped to check that anger.
Control it. Release it.
Except he’d said that was only part of the work.
If I was being honest with myself, I’d bailed before it got too intense. Antony told me it wasn’t healthy. He’d held all his shit in until it exploded on him.
Me, I just denied I was feeling anything. Ever.
“I hate feelings,” I muttered.
“They’re a bitch. But eventually you realize, you can’t run away from them.” He patted my shoulder. “Have fun at the wedding.”
I pulled my truck into the parking lot of my garage. It was pouring rain and the garage bay doors were down, but I could see someone leaning against one of the doors, under the overhang, his phone pressed to his ear.
Peter. What the fuck was he doing here?
I ran through the parking lot, avoiding puddles. Whatever conversation he was having, it was engaging enough that he hadn’t heard me pull up.
“I know. You think I’m not trying? There is more than the advance on the line. We’re talking movie options too. I gotta go,” he said and disconnected the call. He turned to me with a big fake smile. “Hello Nick, just the man I wanted to see.”
“Car problems?”
I wasn’t like a doctor or anything, I didn’t take an oath to help everyone who needed it, but I hated turning away people who were in a bind. That said – I’d make an exception for this asshole. If he needed help, my schedule was going to be fully booked. For months.
“No,” he said. “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about Nora.”
I laughed in the guy’s face. “She’s not doing that book with you and I’m not changing her mind.”
“Nora’s not out. She’s just on the fence. It’s my job to convince her.”
It wasn’t worth my time to argue with him. I knew Nora too well. There wasn’t going to be a book.
“What did you need, Pete?”
“It’s Peter,” he corrected me.
“Like I said, what do you need?”
“Background. On Nora. I only knew her for a few summers, but you two have been tight for a long time.”
“I’m not talking about Nora with you.” I nudged him aside to open the padlock on the bay door. It was Sunday. The garage was closed but there was always work to do and I was trying hard to stay busy and not let thoughts of Nora creep in.
Poundtown. Honest to God.
“I’m not asking for family secrets,” Peter said, holding up his hands as if to show his innocence. His phone was still in his right hand. Waiting for whoever he’d been talking to, to call him back? Was he recording? I wouldn’t put it past him.
“That’s good because I don’t have any to share.”
Pete, Peter, flashed what I imagined most people found to be a charming smile. I was unmoved.
“I’m not the bad guy, Nick,” he stepped into my garage with me and I turned, barring his way. This guy wasn’t getting any deeper into my life. “This is a fascinating story about a small town girl who struck fame and fortune in Paris only to be robbed of all of it by a con man who also stole her heart. The story practically writes itself.”
I thought about what Roy said. How he could tell she never loved Rene. This wasn’t the story of a broken heart. It was the story of a stupid mistake. Nowhere near as compelling.
Roy wanted me to convince Nora to go back to doing what she loved, making videos, talking to people, telling stories. Was that even going to be possible if her story blew up into a bestselling book and movie?
I folded my arms across my chest. “Got nothing to tell you.”
“Nothing?” Peter asked, his head tilted in a manner to suggest he didn’t believe me. I did not give a shit. “Things looked pretty intimate between you two on the dance floor.”
He was baiting me. Trying to get me to react. “I don’t know how you would know that. You were in your car getting high.”
“Talked to a few people at the wedding after you both left. They said you both looked very into each other. Nick and Nora back together again. You see, when I do ask folks about Nora, nine times out of ten, they mention you too. Nick and Nora at the diner, competing together at the Fall Festival, surfing at the beach, watching the plays at the bandshell. You two are quite the pair.”
I took a step forward. Not in his face, but crowding him. The guy was taller than me but I had him by at least twenty pounds of muscle.
“You’ve got a point to make, Pete. Make it.”
“All I want to do is get to know Nora better. What makes her tick? What makes her the type of woman to fall victim to a con man?”
“Bad luck.”
His eyebrow quirked. “Bad luck? Or maybe a broken heart that led her into the arms of a nefarious con man . ”
I was a foot away from him now, my hands in fists.
“You’re going to want to be careful with making shit up. This is a small town. We care about each other here. Everyone loves Nora. And we all know her stories. So if you make something up, if you lie or infer something that isn’t true, this whole town will have your number and you won’t be very popular anymore.”
“Is that a threat?” Peter asked, lifting his chin, his charming smile dropped from his face.
“Fuck no. Why would I need to do that?” I squeezed my fists so my knuckles cracked.
“I’ll be going,” Peter said, like it was his own idea.
“You do that, Pete.”
He stepped sideways to get space between us before he hightailed it back towards the town square. I watched him go until I couldn’t see him anymore, his stupid words worming into my head.
“ Or maybe a broken heart that led her into the arms of a nefarious…”