29. Claire
twenty-nine
I’mafraid to knock on his open office door and I don’t know why.
Nathan and I didn’t just cross the line this weekend, we jumped right over it and lofted ourselves into the deep end. Apparently, it’s easier for me to spread my thighs and let the man call me his dirty girl than ask him how his day was. The backwardness of it all is mind-boggling. And yet, despite how very aware of it I am, I’m still chewing on my thumbnail after Rocco’s after-school tutoring session, hesitant to knock. To ask him how his day went. Because sharing your feelings is one hundred times more intimate than stripping down for someone.
I debate for a second if I should just recreate the little show from my knees when one, I can still hear athletes and other teachers in the hall, but more importantly, I can hear Nathan’s fingers tap-tap-tapping against the solid oak of his desk. I slither just a fraction to peek into his space.
He’s drumming his fingers on his desk, cell phone in hand, staring at it like the device has grown arms and feet and a face. The color has drained from his skin, leaving him a flushed eggshell, and he ceases the errant finger drumming to tug at the tight collar of his necktie, where he actually loosens it.
Anxious tapping? Loosening his tie inside the school building?
“Hey, are you okay?”
I’m inside his office, closing the door behind me before my earlier nerves can catch up.
Nathan blinks up at me, and it’s almost as if I’ve startled him from a dream. His eyes are glassy, his features tight like someone pulled them back and hooked them to a peg like a rubber band in a slingshot.
“Claire. I didn’t know you were still here.”
I smile tightly.
“It’s only four-o’clock.”
He gulps, blinking rapidly as his gaze flares to the clock.
“Oh. Yes. It sure is.”
He swallows again, and I check that the lock on his door is secured before I go to him, gently crashing into his lap. I cup his cheek, directing his eyes to me. But he won’t meet me there. He’s facing me, but his eyes fall to my lap.
“Nathan, what’s wrong?”
He sighs, a breath so long that goosebumps fall over my skin like dominoes, but still says nothing. I feel the shift behind me, where his arms are still caged on his desk, his cell phone in hand. He’s tapping it, those errant drumming strokes.
“Did you get bad news or something?” He blinks. Says nothing still. “Nathan, I can’t help you if you don’t tell me how.”
I lift his face, dipping mine at the same time so that the dark brown of his eyes has no choice but to meet mine.
“We’re friends, right?”
This is the first true reaction from him that I’ve received.
Well, I guess that’s not entirely true. The moment he saw me, after I shut the door, I convinced myself that he hadn’t relaxed. I ignored the way tension seemed to slip slowly from his shoulders the moment I curled myself there. At that word friends, though? He stiffens. His body is hard beneath mine, a rigid deterrent of that syllable. My eyes soften, and I stroke his clean shaven face with my thumb, offering him a smile that I hope conveys that I’m not going anywhere.
His arms move between us, and he unlocks his phone, opening it to his missed calls.
“The doctor called with the results from my brother’s cancer scan. I’ve never done this alone before.”
My body experiences a whirlwind in that moment. Shock is absorbed by sadness, which melts into a river of anger and a flood of uncertainty. Questions pile up as high as Mount Everest, and I don’t know whether I want to hug him, hold him, or drag him far far away from here first.
“I…”
“He has been in remission since before our parents died, but it still doesn’t get any easier.”
I deflate like a balloon, exhaling so strongly that my forehead falls to his chest.
He shouldn’t be supporting you right now, Claire! Be more sensitive!
I start to lift my head, but suddenly, Nathan holds me there, the other laying over my back.
“No. I need this. Just for a minute though, okay?”
“Okay.”
We finagle ourselves on his big desk chair so that I can wind my arms around his back, so that he can hold me. So that for just a moment in time, we have nothing to worry about except each other.
“The doctor’s office closes at five.”
He says it to the crown of my head, letting his lips linger there before he lifts heavy hands between us.
“Do you want me to?—”
“No. Please, stay.”
I shift in his lap so that I’m sitting sideways across him.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
I cup my hand over the back of his as he clicks the screen to return the call. He doesn’t put it on speaker, but being in his lap like this, I can hear it as clear as a bell. As clearly as I can hear every stutter that his deep breaths skip over.
On the third ring, someone answers, though it doesn’t sound like a receptionist. I can vaguely make out a joyful, Nathan, my boy! Good to…
The air is somehow thick and hollow, like we’re suspended in the in between. His brother has been in remission for years? That question is at the tip top of a miles deep iceberg. I slide my hand up his chest, resting it over the racehorse of his heartbeat, and squeeze there.
The moment I hear the voice on the other end of the line say He has a clean bill of health, Nathan, it’s like coming up from the bottom of a swimming pool. Sounds are no longer muffled, my lungs fill with oxygen, and the world becomes a technicolor array instead of a hazy blur of shades and shadows.
Nathan’s heart stutters beneath my palm, kicking up as he exhales the capacity of his lungs, and then slows as his body deflates like a popped balloon. As his body sags, he rests his forehead onto my shoulder, somehow stuttering his way through the rest of the short phone call. I catch, Been too long, and, Come for dinner soon, but by the time he hangs up, the only words I cling to are clean bill of health.
The second his phone is hung up and placed on the desk behind us, I wrap my arms around his body in a bear hug.
We don’t speak. Words don’t belong in this place with so many questions and not enough answers, so many emotions and not enough windows open to air them all out. It’s me and Nathan and a magnitude of relief that somehow doesn’t quell the aching in my chest that he was about to do this alone.
His parents are dead and he cared for his brother alone, and that brother also had cancer?
What more has this man been carrying alone?
I hold him. This quiet, serious man, whose edges don’t seem to align anywhere, fits perfectly into the palm of my hands, perfectly into the angles of my body. I don’t know why or how, but in all the ways that it matters, I have molded to him in this time of need and I’m not letting him go. I run my fingers through his hair, massaging his scalp until he purrs. His arms are dead weights between us, though the way they twitch, I wonder if he’s longing to wrap himself around me too.
Eventually, his stomach growls. My fingers still, my hands sinking to his shoulder to squeeze before I cup his chin, tilting it to lift his gaze to mine like he’s done so often for me.
Redirected me to his center. Reminded me that I am valued.
Distress and relief exist in his eyes, lassoed by exhaustion in the heavy blink that begs please don’t pity me.
“How does homemade grilled cheese sound tonight?”
A crease forms between his brows, and I trace my thumb over it, dispelling any doubt with my fingerprints.
“I have to admit though, my tomato soup is definitely Campbell’s.”
I smile. Small, but bright. His eyebrows pinch up in gratitude so tender, I’m afraid if I make one more joke about soup, he might shatter.
I place a grocery order for the ingredients we need, and wait ten minutes in the parking lot to head to Nathan’s. When I arrive, he disappears to his bedroom after letting me in, and I put on a pot of tea. The way I’m becoming familiar in his space should have my nerves on end, but it doesn’t.
I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the anxiety I have about inviting someone new into a place where I don’t have room to ramp up. It’ll have me halfway across town before he can return from changing into the joggers I’m also becoming used to. Instead, I get out the necessary pots and pans, along with a few spices that I know he has hiding in his lazy Susan. Nathan still hasn’t emerged after the Dasher drops off the groceries, so I prep our sandwiches and wander down the hall.
I’m torn. On the one hand, I want to make sure he’s okay. On the other, he just received clearance of his brother’s cancer, and for the first time, a stone of anxiety settles in the bottom of my stomach.
Did he want to be left alone?
I invited myself here.
I’m invading his personal space, with a very personal topic, and now he has no idea how to politely tell the freaking substitute teacher to get out of his house?—
“Claire?”
When I blink back into focus, I’m standing at the top of the stairs, somewhere in his house I haven’t yet been, and Nathan is eyeing me cautiously.
I’ve never seen him look so…young.
The scent of cedar and vanilla, along with the damp hair, tells me he’s just showered. He has traded his work attire in for a pair of black joggers and a plain white undershirt. He looks so soft. So handsome. I want to cuddle up behind him and hold him until every worry he has melts away.
“Sorry. I was just checking on you. If you want me to leave?—”
He closes the feet of space between us, cutting me off with his arms around my waist, his forehead resting in the space where my shoulder and neck meet.
“No.”
Nathan is a man of few words. This one somehow weighs a ton and carries off all of my nerves at once.
“Grilled cheese?”
It’s mumbled into my neck, and the way he says it is just so… un-Nathan-like. I’m immediately met with flashes of a sick little boy who had to stay home from school. The caregiver in me warms.
“Why don’t you hang out in the study with some tea while I cook? It’ll only be about ten minutes.”
He does come to the kitchen for his mug of tea. He doesn’t take it to the study. He perches on a stool and watches me, silently, while I work. I’d thought that something about Nathan had changed in the last hour, but as I warm a can of Campbell’s tomato soup on the stovetop, I realize that nothing about him has changed.
It’s his walls that have shifted. This Nathan, the soft, relaxed, yet exhausted man sitting at the kitchen island has been in him the entire time. This is simply the first time that he has let me in this deep. As I slide a warm sandwich and bowl of soup to the place setting in front of him, he opens that crevice a little wider.
“Cal was diagnosed with leukemia when he was three years old. It was pretty hard on all of us. Treatment worked the first round, but he relapsed when he was five. At that point, my parents looked to a stem cell transplant. I volunteered. I helped save my brother. And then, after our parents died, I took over as his sole provider. I can’t fail him, Claire.”
My heart has stopped, swelled to a hundred times its size, and is now sitting in my throat.
He hasn’t touched his dinner, and neither have I. But his breathing is heavier, his gaze pinched as it trains on his clasped, white-knuckled hands that are rigidly laid across the island. He sits like a marble statue; David, the independence and strength that comes straight out of a childhood of trauma like this.
When I lay my hand over his forearm, it’s warm but stiff. He doesn’t flinch, but I can hear the sharp, shallow intake of breath.
“Do you want to keep sharing, or take a break?” His arm flexes beneath my touch, the muscles in his face twitching either to keep things in or keep things out. “This is really heavy, Nathan. I just don’t want you to exhaust yourself.”
He nods, so stiffly that I can hear the whine of metal against metal, and he finally lifts the sandwich to his mouth.
As he takes the first bite, he moans.
“Good?” I ask, tucking my hair behind my ear. Nathan finishes chewing and swallowing, and I watch the muscles of his jaw and throat work as he does so. He nods, the slow up and down pull of his chin a little less robotic.
“I haven’t had a homemade meal this good since… Well, since my mom.”
That single sentence deflates Nathan. He doesn’t seem fragile anymore. Just tired. Worn down by the uprooting of his trauma, stemming all the way back to the phone call in his office.
I move behind him, snake my arms around his waist, and fold my upper body over his back, resting my cheek against his shoulder. We inhale in tandem, and after our long exhale draws out, I kiss his shoulder blade, squeezing gently around his waist.
I let him lead me. I didn’t think that my first time in Nathan Harding’s bed would be holding him while his demons circled, but here we are.