Chapter 20 #2
He was quiet for a long moment, his arms resting on his bent legs, his gaze on the horizon.
“I’ve never really thought about the label, honestly,” he said.
“I mean, I always knew I wasn’t straight.
But I didn’t grow up in the most gay-friendly environment.
One of my uncles came out while I was living there—in Greece, I mean—and my grandparents…
they didn’t take it well. And Florida wasn’t much better.
I definitely knew I liked girls, so it felt easier to act like I just liked girls.
It wasn’t until I moved here that I started to think I had any other option. Maybe that’s cowardly of me.”
“No, I get it,” she said. “Even though LA is supposedly so progressive, most of the queer people I knew in the industry were closeted because they were worried it would hurt their careers.”
“Were you?”
She laughed under her breath. “No, but nobody was happy about it. Luckily, it ended up aligning with my ‘brand,’ so I was able to get away with it.” She punctuated the word brand with air quotes.
“My first girlfriend was, though. She was an actress, and her career was just starting to take off. We were together for a year, and we fought about it all the time. I just wanted a normal relationship, where I could hold her hand walking down the street and not have to worry about who was watching us.” She sighed, stretching her legs in front of her.
“I probably should’ve been more understanding. ”
Niko shifted so his legs were flat, too, then drew hers across his lap as she angled herself to face him. “Is that why you broke up?”
Merritt groaned and rested her forehead on his shoulder. “I’m embarrassed to tell you,” she said, her voice muffled. He squeezed her shin comfortingly, and after a beat, she lifted her head, meeting his eyes.
“She was off somewhere shooting a movie, and I saw these pictures…a bunch of her costars were out at a bar together, and she was being super flirty with one of them. I think she was sitting on his lap. And I just…lost it. I was jealous that she might be cheating on me, sure—and she was, by the way, not that it excuses anything—but mostly I was jealous that she was able to act like that with him without thinking twice, when we couldn’t.
I blew up her phone, kept calling her over and over and over, and then when she finally turned it off, or blocked me, or whatever…
” She swallowed. “I got drunk, and went to a party, and slept with someone else.”
Niko was silent next to her, his gaze downcast. Merritt’s stomach twisted.
She’d spent a lot of time regretting her past decisions, but something about this moment made her wish she could go back in time and make every opposite choice she could, just to avoid having to confess it to him now.
It had taken her too long to understand that she was creating the blueprints of her life, one careless, impulsive mark at a time.
When he did look back up at her, though, she was surprised to see his mouth curled in amusement. “Well, it’s nice to know you probably won’t try to pressure me into a throuple, at least.”
Merritt stared at him, dumbfounded, then burst into relieved, shocked laughter, hard and long enough that tears sprang to her eyes.
“That’s the glass-half-full way of looking at it, I guess,” she said, wheezing and dabbing at the corners of her eyes with the sleeve of his flannel.
“And just to be clear, this was all more than a decade ago. But, no, I’m way too possessive to ever be poly.
Any of the group sex stuff I was ever a part of, I was always a distant guest. Less messy that way.
Or, if there was mess, at least it wasn’t my mess. ”
“That’s probably smart. I’m not against trying it again, though. There were parts of it that I liked, and the jealousy wasn’t a problem for me. But the way it all ended up, it made me feel…unimportant. And like I was stupid for being so trusting.”
Merritt reached out and found his hand, his calloused palm and strong fingers, and intertwined it with hers. “Trusting someone with your heart isn’t stupid.”
He held her gaze, his brow creased with emotion, and a battering ram of yearning knocked into her sternum with the knowledge that that someone wouldn’t be her. Eventually—and probably sooner than she’d like—he’d be looking at someone else exactly the way he was looking at her now.
His jaw flexed, his hand trailing up and down her thigh. She wished she could tell what he was thinking, but she had a feeling she already knew.
She had to tread carefully. They both understood there was no real future here.
“I know you’ll find that person one day. Or people. And hopefully they live in Tucson,” she said, exhaling hard from her nose in a humorless laugh. The corners of his mouth ticked up, too, but in a rueful way—not much warmth there, either.
“More likely than here, I guess. I’ve even downloaded dating apps before and set my location to Denver or Boulder, just to see what was out there. But I never got many matches.”
Merritt scoffed. “I find that extremely hard to believe. Let me see your profile.”
Niko shook his head bashfully at first but eventually gave in, pulling his phone out of his pocket. “I haven’t used any of them in forever,” he mumbled, tapping on the screen a few times before handing it to her. She glanced at it, then let out a half laugh, half groan.
“Oh, Niko…”
His profile had two pictures, no text. The first was a low-angle selfie clearly taken in the front seat of his truck.
The second seemed older, ten years if she had to guess, his eyes glowing red like he’d been possessed—but it was hard to tell, since it was so blurry, and he was so far away.
At least it was candid: outside at a party, backward baseball cap on his head, beer in hand, looking off to the side like someone had just called his name, his mouth open in mid-sentence.
Even though it was impossible to camouflage his baseline hotness, nothing about either of these photos was doing him any favors—not to mention the blank profile, revealing no trace of the personality she’d delighted in uncovering, layer by layer.
“What?” he asked, hovering over her shoulder, his tone threaded with self-consciousness. “Is it that bad? All my good pictures were taken by exes, or with them. It felt weird to use them.”
Merritt shut the screen off and handed it back to him, laughing as she leaned in to twine her arms around his neck.
“I changed my mind. I actually don’t want to help you with this.
It works better for me if everyone thinks you’re an extremely low-effort catfish.
I’m just surprised you don’t have a mirror selfie of your abs on there. ”
His arms wrapped around her waist, leaning her back until she was lying flat against the pillows, his heat and weight settling over her. “Gotta save some surprises for the first date,” he murmured into her mouth.
“The first date? You slut.” She punctuated this by gently pulling his bottom lip between her teeth.
“That’s just when I show them the painting. Worked on you.”
Once the sun slipped low enough in the sky for them to no longer be able to cuddle away the cold, they disassembled their makeshift bed, shaking the circulation back into their limbs.
On the drive back, she glanced over at him. “Olivia and Dev are coming back tonight.”
He nodded, his eyes fixed on the road, but she could see the tension in his neck. “Do you need to pick them up?”
“No, they parked at the airport.”
At a stop sign, he finally met her eyes. “Are you going to tell them?”
Merritt rolled her bottom lip between her teeth.
Obviously, keeping secrets only led to things blowing up later.
But at the same time, as soon as Olivia knew, the two of them would be under a microscope, everyone’s breath held, waiting for Merritt to screw up.
She couldn’t bear to face that yet—not when things with her and Niko felt so delicate and fresh, so easily crushed.
Inviting that cloud of disapproval to hover over them seemed the fastest way to ensure that they would never have another day as perfect as this one.
Plus, the darkest, pettiest part of her whispered, she didn’t even tell you they were trying to have a baby.
“I think we should wait to tell anyone,” she said at last. “At least until…until it’s not so new. We don’t need everyone’s opinions. And you know everyone will have one.”
He was silent for a moment, and she felt a stab of remorse. Was it unfair of her to ask him to do this, when his last relationship had been a secret, too?
“Okay,” he said. “But I think Jo and Simon already know something is going on, since I told them I was going over to your house for fifteen minutes and then didn’t come back all night.”
Merritt fought back a smile. “Can you ask them to not spread it around?”
He nodded without looking at her. Even once they pulled up to the house, he was still facing straight ahead, his eyes downcast.
“Hey,” she said softly, and he turned to her, his expression unreadable.
She leaned in, sliding her hand up his jaw and into his hair, kissing him slowly, with purpose.
He kissed her back but didn’t push it further.
“Thank you for today,” she murmured when she pulled away, their foreheads still pressed together.
“And last night. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He nodded again, slightly dazed from the kiss, and he looked so cute she had to press one more to his lips for good measure.
Luckily, the power had come back on by the time she let herself back into the house, and when Olivia and Dev dropped their bags in the foyer with matching exhausted sighs a few hours later, she had already cleaned out the fridge, made another trip to the grocery store, and had a vegetarian lasagna cooling on the stove.
They loaded their plates and ate in the living room, Olivia and Dev filling her in on the wedding—one of Olivia’s college friends—the highlight of which was the DJ accidentally swapping the “must play” and “do not play” lists, subjecting them to “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” “Sexy and I Know It,” and “Y.M.C.A.” before someone alerted him to his mistake.
“Sounds like we missed an exciting time here, though,” Olivia said, after Merritt had stopped laughing long enough to tell them about the storm, conveniently excluding any mention of Niko’s role in coming to her rescue.
“Mmm,” said Merritt, swallowing her last bite of lasagna into a stomach suddenly tight with guilt, “you really didn’t miss much.”