Chapter 3 #2
As I unlock the door, I ponder why it didn’t occur to me to stop and see him and Lauren on my way home since they live just down the hall.
Oh wait. Shit! Double shit! While I was gone, they moved into the house they were building up on one of the mountains overlooking the valley.
I think I forgot to respond to the message Lauren sent with pictures while I was in Italy!
I’m a terrible friend! No wonder he didn’t bother telling me he was retiring, I didn’t even respond to his wife’s text.
I throw open the door, ready to start groveling.
My breath catches in my throat. Standing there in my doorway, with a plate of brownies in his hand, is the man I’ve spent most of my life alternately loving and hating.
At first I’m too stunned to speak, but I can’t help my eyes roaming down Nate’s body. He’s wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt that molds to the hard planes and ridges of his upper body, and fitted sweat pants that show off his huge, muscular thighs. He’s also wearing shearling slippers. What the hell?
“Peace offering?” One of his eyebrows is raised and a cocky half smile graces his lips as he holds the plate of brownies toward me.
His hair, which used to be blond, has darkened to a shade closer to light brown.
It’s damp and a little on the wild side right now, as if he’d gotten out of the shower and forgotten to brush it.
I just stare at him, not even acknowledging the plate. “How are you in my building?” He’s not wearing a jacket. He looks like he came from next door, not from wherever he’s living now.
“I live here.” He shrugs, a movement that is so classically Nate. The familiarity of it pulls something deep inside me, like an ache in my heart that’s also connected to other regions which have a decidedly happier reaction to Nate’s physical presence.
I’m having a hard time forming words. Usually the opposite is true, and it’s only through practice that I’ve gotten good at controlling my reactions.
“Pick your jaw up off the floor,” he says, but his voice is kind. “I’m subletting Josh’s place.”
“You’re WHAT?” Given the volume of my voice, I’m surprised my neighbors aren’t opening their doors to see what’s going on.
“I’m pretty sure you heard me.” He looks past me, his eyes glancing around my condo. “Are you going to invite me in?”
“Absolutely not!” I draw back a bit in shock that he would even suggest it. Having to see him at work is one thing, but this is my home—the place I come to escape everything else.
“Why?”
“Are you for real? Five years without a word from you. Not one text, not one call.” I was in the ICU after my crash at Val d’Isère, France for a week after he left, and he didn’t even come back to see me.
My brutal tone reflects my anger. One thing I’ve figured out very clearly since he’s been gone is that it’s easier to be angry with him for walking away from what we had than it is to focus on how completely he shattered my heart.
“Now you show up here with no notice and I’m supposed to work with you?
And come to find out, you’re living down the hall from me.
And you don’t know why I’m not inviting you into my home? ”
“Could you give me a chance to explain? I want to make things right.”
If he’d come back four years ago with a good excuse, I may have listened—but I promised myself then that one year was enough time to obsess about where he was, if he was okay, and if he was coming back.
Wasting any more than a year on him was pathetic, so I willed myself through it then and every day since.
“Making things right is literally impossible.” I don’t say what I’m really thinking—there is nothing you can say to undo the damage you have done. I don’t need to give him the satisfaction of knowing how completely he destroyed me.
I pause and consider the amount of time we’d spend together if I were his physical therapist. “And there’s no way the two of us could ever have the kind of partnership you’ll need with your PT.
Take that idea you have about us working together and put it out of your mind.
I won’t try to get you taken off the team, but I’ll never work with you.
” I start to shut the door, but he puts a hand on it, just enough for me to stop and listen to his parting blow.
“Jackson, you’re not going to throw away your whole career just because I’m here.
” He lifts one eyebrow like he’s challenging me to disagree, and I just want to wipe that look right off his face.
If he thinks his newly minted place on the team affords him more weight in this decision than my years on the team combined with my years working there, he’s insane.
It’s not my career that’s at stake here, I think to myself as I slam the door in his face and slide the deadbolt into place.
I listen to his retreating steps down the hallway, left with nothing but questions.
Hundreds of them that I’ve collected over the years, and a few new ones that have sprung up with his reappearance today.
Questions Nate could have answered, but because I don’t ever want him to know how badly he hurt me, I refused to let him explain.
I make my way back to my couch and close the folder with Nate’s medical files, setting them on the ground.
Even though I know they might have some of the answers I’m looking for, they aren’t what I need.
Only Nate can tell me why he walked away from a seven-year relationship over a seemingly minor argument we’d had many times before.
What made that night, that fight, different?
It wasn’t relationship-ending stuff, it was typical figure-out-your-future-together stuff.
I glance at the oversized wooden clock on my wall and do the math.
It’s still only 4:30 a.m. in Italy. Marco won’t be up, and yet I eye my phone wondering if I should just call him anyway.
But that wouldn’t be fair to him. He’s started his daily training sessions on snow now and he’ll need his sleep to recuperate. I can wait another hour or two.
I lose track of how long I lie there, memories of Nate and me running through my head. Part of what makes it so hard is that most of the memories are good. Really good. Finally, I pick up my phone that’s been resting on my stomach and dial Marco.
His voice is groggy when he answers.