42. tallulah
TALLULAH
ONE OF US HAS TO BE COMPOSED
I was talking to Max when someone grabbed my elbow, tugging me away. If I’d been blindfolded, I would’ve known who it was. The feeling of his hand, his palm on my skin, his fingers pressing into me, I knew Nick without seeing his face. His dumb, handsome, emotionally immature face.
He led me out of the ballroom and into a dark hallway. He didn’t stop until he found the nearest empty room—a storage closet, a swinging lightbulb offering the only light. I barely had time to think before the door closed behind us. The walls were paper thin, the band’s music just as loud in here.
I stared at him.
When I’d originally walked into that ballroom, I’d been so upset with him.
Him in that amazing suit tailored to his body, his wide shoulders, his tousled hair, his perfect lips—I’d been so angry with him.
Either he didn’t have feelings for me, and I was falling in love with another checked-out man, or he’d said ‘I love you’ and took it back for no good reason.
Both reasons were grounds for me being upset.
But my anger vanished when I saw Tomasini in action.
Tomasini had an unnerving two-faced approach.
He could be a charming, retired athlete one minute, and in another, he was opening obvious wounds from those around him, finding where to hurt the most. His mood swings, his apparent favoritism, his barely concealed disdain for the people who worked underneath him honestly scared me.
How he treated Nick scared me.
Maybe I was upset with Nick, but that seemed so small when it came to him being mistreated. I couldn’t stand it. It made my blood run cold to see what Tomasini was comfortable doing to him with an audience.
“What are you going to do?” I whispered, my words barely heard over the music.
“Me?” Nick gestured to the door. “Are you going to the party with Max?”
Flabbergasted, I stared at him, willing his words to magically mean something else. Nick couldn’t be serious. The whole reason I thought he brought me in here was to discuss Tomasini. Why was Nick focused on Max again?
The probability of Nick liking me bumped up to ninety-seven and a half percent. That didn’t make his question any less ridiculous.
“Are you joking?” I finally said.
“This isn’t a joke, Tallulah.”
“I thought we came in here to talk about Tomasini—”
“I don’t care about him.” Nick dismissed my worry with a wave of his hand. “Are you avoiding the question? Are you going to Max’s party?”
“The jealousy routine is done,” I told him, exasperated. “We need to focus on—”
“Jealousy?”
“Yes! You’re jealous!”
“You don’t know what jealousy is,” he said, his voice flat.
“I don’t know what jealousy is?” I demanded. “Uh, jealousy is right here! Standing in front of me! Panicking over some stupid cyclist who doesn’t even matter—you’re jealous!”
“You don’t know how painful jealousy is,” he insisted again. “You don’t know how much it hurts—”
I was at a loss for how to talk to Nick.
His words were either too hard or overflowing into each other.
One moment, he was so animated, and in another, he was unmoving, like he was holding himself back.
I couldn’t understand why he was doing this.
Why was he freaking out? It didn’t make sense!
His reactions were nonsensical, absurd, asinine, he was so anxious that—
Oh…fuck.
I made Nick anxious.
Suddenly, I saw our fight through a new lens. Was this what anxiety was like when it came to me? Was my anxiety like this? Harboring destructive self-doubts, spiraling into worse situations, and making it everybody else’s problem because I had a hard time communicating my discomfort?
Oh my god, it was.
I felt horrible for Nick, I knew how much anxiety eroded my decision-making skills. I empathized. But, fuck, on the receiving end of an anxious spiral, this shit was exhausting.
I sucked in a deep breath. We couldn’t keep going like this. My plan to wait until the day before Niagara Falls had to be scrapped. We couldn’t put it off anymore. One of us had to be composed and open the conversation.
“Why don’t you just be honest and tell me that you like me?”
“Because I don’t ‘like’ you, Tallulah. Goddammit, I love you!”
There it was, out in the open.
My face burned with the blush. I didn’t think he’d blurt it out like that, like it was eating away at him. From ninety-seven and a half percent to one hundred percent. We were in complete affirmation now. Nick loved me—I loved Nick.
I swallowed hard. “Oh.”
“Why do you think I came to Canada?” he said, his voice raw. “Why do you think I’d work with Tomasini again?”
Shock rocked me, making it impossible to respond. Nick came to Canada for…me?
It was like picking up a thread that I’d already suspected was there, following its natural course. The mystery had been hounding me for weeks.
Why did Nicholas Kurosawa, recent champion of the Gulf Coast Cup, decide to work with Joe Tomasini for an offshoot amateur hour hockey team?
After Tomasini had washed out Nick and publicly embarrassed him?
Nick must’ve discovered Tomasini’s temper problem and hierarchy of bullshit two years ago, so why did he come back?
The invisible answers had always been just beyond reach. Now, the realization ballooned in my chest, making it hard to breathe.
“You—you came to Canada for me?” I whispered.
“You told everyone you were going to Canada for the internship.” Nick was embarrassed at his unexpected confession, but we were in too deep now for him to stop. “I knew I could get you away from Fridge, away from everybody, to show you me. To show you who I am.”
My mouth fell open, my pulse racing in my veins.
“I hit up every team I could,” he continued, shaking his head. “Ottawa wanted me for their summer camp, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver—the actual Toronto Tigers wanted me. I couldn’t sign on with any of them. They had too much traveling, I wouldn’t have been able to see you.”
“And…Tomasini had the Blades…”
“Tomasini had a glorified beer league, only a five-minute drive from the Olympic Village. Five minutes from you. I knew it was my best chance.”
“You—you joined the Blades because…?”
“Because you were close.”
I stared at him wordlessly.
“I’m getting paid pennies and I work triple the hours my teammates do, all because Tomasini’s taking fucking advantage of me. He doesn’t care why I want to be on his team so badly, he just knows I’ll put up with whatever he wants.”
“You…you…”
“Everything I’ve done this summer I’ve done because I love you.”
I gazed up at him in wonder.
“I fucking love you, Tallulah,” he confessed.
“It’s too intense for you, you can’t handle it.
I—I feel like I’m going to pass out looking at you in this dress.
I can’t stay away from you, I can’t stop looking at you—” He was desperate now.
“I’m sorry I told you I love you and took it back, I panicked, and—and don’t you know me?
Couldn’t you read it on my face? Did you really not see it? How could you not see it?”
Nick was spiraling again, his words clashing, warring with each other, struggling to say what he needed to while my face warmed with every futile attempt he made.
It was obvious he didn’t know how to do this. He was awkward, uncomfortable, out of his depth, he was drowning…
And he’d been putting himself through hell for me. Every time he’d come home exhausted, every time he’d taken a shitty phone call, every time he’d gotten screamed at, all of that was for me.
He traveled to another country on the off chance we could be together. I was dizzy from the revelation.
I took steps forward, cutting the distance between us. He didn’t stop talking, rambling now, his words nonsensical while I looped his tie around my fingers, slipping it from its tucked and proper place in his suit jacket.
“I—I’m in love with you,” I managed.
His eyes dropped to my hand in surprise. “What?”
“I love you,” I said it again, testing out the words, humming in pleasure. “I love you. You and all of your rough edges and ridiculous decisions and your weird ideas of romantic gestures—I love you.”
It was his turn to be silent. I tugged him to me against the wall and he stumbled closer.
I tipped my chin to the ground. “Get on your knees.”
“I—I—” His Adam’s apple bobbed with his swallow, hesitation hanging in the air. “You—you’re asking me to—?”
“I’m not asking.”
The walls pulsed with the music from the ballroom and Nick’s face softened, his worry crumbling away, until he had that same dreamlike, dazed look he’d had at the scavenger hunt. He dipped down and crushed his lips to mine, pressing me against the wall.
My fingers went to his hair, he held my face, we did everything to touch each other. He pulled my bottom lip between his teeth, the kisses turned rougher, messier. Needier. Lust pooled in my lower stomach, like gasoline for a fire, waiting to ignite.
Nick dropped to his knees, his dark eyes on me.
In seconds, his hands disappeared under my dress. There were so many layers, he ducked under, pulling down my panties. His frustration was evident, he couldn’t pull them down fully, and a harsh snap of the fabric at my hip fixed that.
He ripped my panties.
My heart lurched, words tumbled out of my mouth. Nonsense, unintelligible. Nick propped up my thigh on his shoulder and buried his tongue inside me.
“Oh, fuck!” I yelped.
I couldn’t see him, but I could feel him. His powerful muscles, shoving me against the wall, his thick hair against my thighs, his tongue bringing me to heights I’d never experienced before.
Nick lurched up, forcing my other thigh on his shoulders, sliding me along the wall.
I was so turned on, my body trembled in his grasp.
I struggled to dig in the skirts, to thread my fingers through his hair and pull him closer.
He was fucking me with his tongue just the way I liked it, it was perfect.