Chapter 26
TWENTY-SIX
Emmett
People mill about the office in what looks like double the numbers of any usual day; chatting with each other and hurrying to get whatever task is on hand finished.
With the amount of people in here now, and my dad’s unwillingness to fire anyone unless they’ve done something egregiously wrong, we’re going to have to expand the building or move in the next year.
Thankfully, while the masses flock to and from with endless tasks, my day is relatively simple. The biggest thing on my agenda is a meeting with Logan and his team in regard to a gala we want to host in the next couple of months.
“How are we looking in here?” I ask the crew as I step into the conference room.
The table is damn near full, covered in plastic scale models of light fixtures and décor pieces the event planner won’t be able to get for us.
They finally got that 3D printer Logan has been going on and on about, I guess.
Among the models, there are about a thousand different papers with various plans laid out on them.
“I mean, you have a lot of choices to make here,” Logan chuckles. “Figure we’ll shut the place down a few days before and get to work on it.”
“Awesome.” I grab a few of the models, turning them over in my hands, and I work to make a ‘yes’ pile and ‘no’ pile with them.
We spend the next hour and a half going over the plans, which also go into the designated piles.
I’m going to have to go through and narrow down the ‘yes’ pile before they actually get started on it, but I have time.
I’m not worried about that at all. This event is my chance to show everyone that I’m serious, not just the boss’s kid who won the game of favorites. I want everything to be perfect.
While the rest of the crew gets things hauled out to their big-ass F-450, Logan hollers “I’ll meet you out there, get everything loaded up and we’ll head out in a sec!
” Closing the door behind him, he reaches into his pocket for something.
“I’ve been trying to find the chance to give you this,” he tells me. “Take the damn thing.”
Confused, I reach my hand out to accept what he’s handing me; it’s just a little memory card, the kind that you’d find inside a digital camera or something.
“The hell is this?” I laugh.
“The only existing video of you getting a handy from a certain nightclub owner, dude,” he whispers at me through gritted teeth.
I swear to god my heart stops.
Panic swells inside of me, my blood pulses through my body like a riptide, and I know that it shows all over my face. My hands go clammy and suddenly my mouth is drier than the goddamn Sahara desert.
“Wh—” I stammer. “How did you get this.”
“I have more than one job, Em,” he tells me. “I don’t just install the damn cameras, I watch them, too.”
“Listen, it’s not— I don’t—” Christ, it’s hot in here. I’m on fire. I’m almost entirely certain that my entire body has burst into flame. “You didn’t— Nobody else—”
His finger taps the front of the memory card, still sitting in the palm of my now sweaty hand. “That’s straight from the camera,” he assures me. “I wiped the digitals. I pulled it as soon as I realized who the hell it was on there.”
I scrub a hand down my face, covering my mouth tightly as I stare down at the tiny plastic card in my hand.
Logan is one of my closest friends. I’ve known the guy for years and we’ve gotten into more trouble together than I think anyone knows.
Definitely more than my dad knows. All those lessons I was supposed to have learned?
He was there for at least half of them, and Uncle Davis quietly bailed us out of most of them.
“You can’t tell anyone,” I whisper through my hand. “No one can know that I—”
He levels a look at me as if to say I’m an idiot for even thinking it. “How long ago was that?” He reminds me. “I’ve been holding onto the damn thing so it would only go to your hands.”
“Sorry. Thank you.” I clap a hand over his shoulder. “Seriously. Shit.”
As he leaves, I stuff the card into my breast pocket, trying desperately to stuff down the shame and terror swirling in my gut right along with it; but the pocket’s too damn small to fit it all.
Walking back to my office, I can’t breathe. It feels like there are hands wrapped around my throat, choking the life out of me. I stop into the bathroom, heading for the sink, and I use a shaky hand to turn the water as cold as it will go.
I cup my hands under the flow of the faucet, collecting the icy water, and I throw it over my face in an attempt to shock my system. Once, twice, three times. I try to catch my breath as I grip onto either side of the sink, my chest heaving as I rest my forehead against the mirror in front of me.
This was not supposed to happen.
This was never supposed to fucking happen.
·
“What the hell are we listening to?” I ask Nash.
An airy, dramatic melody floats through the air, echoing against the walls of his house, which almost works to make the vocals sound even more haunting than they would otherwise. There’s an instrumental track in the background, but the focus is clearly on the voice.
“It’s called an aria, pretty boy,” he tells me. “It’s from an opera. He’s telling a story.”
Catching me by surprise, he takes my hands in his and pulls me closer to him. Pressing our foreheads together, his nose rests just above the tip of mine.
“Taller one leads,” he croons, which doesn’t seem entirely fair; he can’t be more than an inch or so taller than I am. I feel like we could flip a coin and be fine.
He takes my hand in his with the other wrapping around my back, and I follow his lead, doing the same with my own hands.
We take a few clumsy steps until I get used to following someone else’s lead, and eventually we find a fluid rhythm, our pace matching that of the music playing around us as we step through the main room of the house.
“So, what kind of story is he telling?” I finally ask.
“A story about love and madness,” he tells me. “A confession from a desperate man.”
My stomach tightens, and his hands on my body feel like hot coals. “Nash…”
“Just listen to it.”
I do; I don’t need to understand the language to understand the emotion behind the performer’s words. It’s practically tangible, filling the room almost enough to drown me in it. As the angelic voice ricochets off of the walls, it slams back into me, making my eyes burn.
Nash is like his opera music; powerful, fluid, and haunting.
I’m more like my metal music; chaotic, volatile, and sometimes too hard to understand.
I’ve been here for hours and all I’ve been able to think about, even now, is the goddamn memory card sitting in my pocket, burning through to my skin like acid. The secret threatening to get out and ruin everything.
The fact that Logan saw us.
Saw me liking it.
Panic rises in my gut again like bile, threatening to wrap its hands around my throat, but Nash beats it, trailing the hand that was holding mine up my chest until he has a gentle grip around my jaw.
His mouth meets mine in a kiss so tender that it makes me think that maybe the song got to him, too.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” He asks me.
I close my eyes, focusing on the music instead of the darkness threatening everything inside of me.
Nash’s lips meet mine again, slow and tender like the tempo of the song, and I melt into him.
I’ve only ever felt this way about one other person in my life, and that was so long ago that I’m not even sure it could count.
I wasn’t even an adult yet. Dad kept calling it ‘puppy love.’ He accidentally said the words in front of the girl once, and I almost elbowed him in the face for it.
There’s more to this, though, but I can’t exactly place it. Whatever it is, it’s almost enough to drown out everything else fighting for dominance in my mind, but…not quite.
“I have to talk to you,” I tell him.
“About?”
“I—” I stammer, trying to calm my thoughts long enough to get them out. “Shit, I don’t know how to do this.”
“Spit it out.”
A tsunami of emotion swirls inside of me; guilt and fear, shame and heartache.
I care about him more than I ever expected to, and the last thing that I want to do is hurt him.
My fear and my shame don’t belong to him.
It isn’t fair of me to expect him to carry them in the hope that someday, maybe, I’ll be ready to really do this.
It isn’t fair to make him wait on something that isn’t a sure thing.
I’m not worth it.
Looking at him, I can feel it coming. The same self-loathing that I drowned in months ago, alone on my couch. It’s right there, and I deserve it. I’m about to break his heart.
“I wish I was more like you,” I tell him. “You aren’t afraid of a lot of things, and I’m learning that I am. It’s—”
Nash’s features change in the blink of an eye, as if someone else’s face has slammed down in place of his own.
All of the light behind his eyes goes dark and his body tenses, stopping me mid-sentence.
The man sitting in front of me isn’t the Nash that I know anymore; he’s the Nash that everyone else knows. The Nash that I used to know.
“You should leave,” he tells me.
My brows pinch together. “What?”
“Don’t delude yourself here, we both know what this is,” he says. “I say a few nice things to you and you cling to me like a lost fucking puppy desperate to be loved. I fuck you a few times and you’re like putty in my hands. It would almost be laughable if it weren’t so fucking tragic.”
My eyes burn. My chest goes tight. My heart comes to a screeching halt and plummets into the pit of my stomach.
I can’t breathe.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”