Chapter Seven #4
“Bailey,” Nash replied. “Eight years, three months, and thirteen days ago.”
There was a blink of surprise, then realization. “You must be Nash.”
Nash laughed. “I guess my reputation precedes me.”
“Reputation.” The man grinned. “That’s a good word. I’m Jesse.”
Nash took the offered hand just as Chloe came swinging through the kitchen door.
She glared at Jesse. “What did I just say?”
Jesse dropped his hand, but kept the grin. “I’m just being polite.”
“Well, stop.” She turned to Nash. “Are you eating?”
With an internal sigh, Nash decided a little spit never hurt anyone. “What’s good?”
The smile she gave him was so sharp it could’ve cut glass. “Oh, it’s all good.”
Jesse disguised a chuckle as a cough, and Nash picked an item off the chalkboard at random. “I’ll take a Reuben.”
“That sounds good,” Jesse chimed in. “I’ll have one, too.”
“Fine. Drinks?”
“Just water for me.”
She nodded at Jesse, eyes warm, then looked back at Nash. “You?”
He wondered idly how frost could grow that fast. “I’ll have that beer. Whatever’s good in a bottle.”
Looking annoyed, she reached into a cooler and came up with a bottle.
She popped the top, plunked it down in front of him, then added a bottle of water for Jesse with markedly less violence.
When she walked away to stab at the screen on the register with an angry finger, presumably to put their orders in, Jesse raised an eyebrow.
“You know she’s going to spit in your food, right?”
Nash lifted the beer. “Oh yeah.”
“It’s pretty rare for Chloe to be this mad,” Jesse mused.
“Well, I was a jackass.”
“That must have been some first-class jackassery.”
Since it was true, Nash just shrugged. “Bailey’s forgiven me.” Mostly. “I guess Chloe hasn’t.”
Twisting the cap off his water, Jesse drank. “Well, she loves Bailey.”
“Can’t argue that.” Nash turned to Jesse. He’d intended to go through Chloe for Sawyer’s contact information, but that looked like a dead end. And Bailey had said that Sawyer was more Jesse and Knox’s friend than Chloe’s. “I know this is going to sound odd, since we just met, but I need a favor.”
Jesse looked pained. “You don’t want me to go to bat for you with Chloe, do you?”
“No.”
“Because you seem like a nice guy, but I don’t want to sleep on the couch.”
Nash chuckled. “No, it’s not that. I was hoping to get your friend Sawyer’s contact information.”
Surprise flashed in Jesse’s eyes, followed closely by wary suspicion, and Nash continued.
“I was going to ask Chloe, but…” He nodded down the bar, where she was slicing limes with a savagery that the fruit surely hadn’t earned.
Jesse chuckled. “Yeah, you’re not getting anywhere with her.” He looked back at Nash. “This about Bailey’s birthday wish?”
Relieved he didn’t have to explain, Nash lifted his beer again. “You know about that?”
“Chloe gave us the gist,” Jesse confirmed. “You’re in charge of that, right?”
Nash nodded.
“And you want Sawyer?”
“He was Bailey’s backup plan, if I said no.”
Jesse grinned, dimples flashing as humor danced in his eyes. “Hard to blame her.” His gaze turned speculative. “He’s got a website, you know.”
“I know.” He’d looked it up on his phone that morning, during a Zoom meeting that should’ve been an email. “I can go that route, but I thought a personal referral might hold more weight. And…”
“You hoped asking Chloe for help might thaw the freeze.”
Nash shrugged philosophically. “It was a long shot.”
“How about this?” Jesse pulled out his phone. “Give me your info, and I’ll pass it on to Sawyer. If he’s interested, he can contact you.”
“Fair enough.” Nash rattled off his phone number and personal email.
“This is for a…” Jesse paused as though looking for an appropriate-in-public word.
“Group project,” Nash supplied.
Jesse’s grin flashed. “Right. He’ll probably ask about the other…participants?”
“So far there’s just me. And Bailey,” Nash added.
“Naturally.” Jesse glanced up from his phone. “You don’t have anyone else lined up?”
“I was hoping he might have a couple of colleagues who could fill out the roster.”
“That’s going to get pricy.”
“I know.”
Jesse lowered his phone. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Why?”
“Why do the…group project?” Nash thought back to when they’d first hatched the plan to live out each other’s fantasies. God, they’d been so young. It seemed like a lifetime ago. “You want the long version or the short version?”
“Let’s start with short and go from there.”
“I owe her,” Nash said simply.
Jesse’s eyes narrowed. “Because you were a jackass?”
“She’s had this ‘project’ on her to-do list since college. I was putting it together, and then…”
“Jackassery,” Jesse finished, and nodded. “So you’re making good on a promise.”
“Partly,” Nash admitted.
“What’s the other part?”
Nash just looked at him, and Jesse sat back, surprise lighting his gaze. “You still love her.”
“Never stopped,” Nash confirmed.
Jesse pointed a finger. “This is your second chance.”
The tightness in his chest was familiar to Nash, so he just nodded. “The one I’ve been waiting eight years for.”
“What?” Chloe demanded, and the plates she was holding hit the bar top with a rattle.
Shit, Nash thought.
“Careful, babe,” Jesse cautioned, and tugged the plate she’d plunked in front of him away from the edge of the bar. “Don’t spill the fries.”
“What do you mean, the one you’ve been waiting eight years for?”
Before Nash could decide how to answer that, Jesse chimed in.
“Second chance,” he clarified helpfully. “You got any malt vinegar?”
“With Bailey?” Chloe asked, her eyes fierce. “You want a second chance with Bailey?”
“I do.” He said it calmly, but inside he was cursing a blue streak. If she spilled the beans to Bailey, he was fucked.
Or not fucked. Whatever.
“But you dumped her,” Chloe reminded him in a voice sharp enough to have several heads turning their way. “And you were mean about it. You threw her out.”
“I was wrong.”
“What?”
“I was wrong,” he repeated. “I was young and scared and I was mean and wrong, and—”
He cut himself off when she held up a hand. “What do you mean, you were scared?”
Taking a slow breath, because the only person he’d admitted this to up to this point was his therapist—and because Chloe was a lot scarier than Dr. Samuels—he ignored the hole in his gut, opened his mouth, and prepared to bare his soul. “She loved me so much, Chloe.”
If he’d expected that to garner sympathy, he was doomed to disappointment. Her gaze went sulfuric again. “I know. And you broke her heart.”
Though his own heart ached at the reminder, he continued calmly. “I loved her just as much, just as hard, and I didn’t know what to do with it. It had such weight, her feelings as much as mine. It just got overwhelming.”
“And your answer to that was to dump her?” She sneered. “Coward.”
“I was a coward,” he admitted, and almost smiled when she jerked in surprise. “When Kyle told me about seeing her behind the student union with Graham—”
“Another fucking asshole.”
He couldn’t disagree. “I just thought, well, there’s my out. And I was so relieved.”
“Relieved?” she echoed, steam all but coming out of her ears.
“For about a day,” he added. “Then I realized I’d thrown her away—thrown us away—because some asshole told me a lie, and I was too much of a pussy to face my own feelings.”
She jabbed a finger at him. “You knew he was lying.”
He nodded. That was something else he’d had to own up to in therapy. “Yeah. I took the easy out, Chloe. It’s the biggest mistake I’ve ever made, and I’ve paid for it.”
“Not enough,” she snapped with zero sympathy. “Do you have any idea what you did to her? She didn’t get out of bed for weeks. Didn’t go to class, barely ate. She almost didn’t graduate.”
The hole in his gut widened. “I know.”
“And now you’re, what, trying to make up for it by doing this…this…”
“Group project,” Jesse said helpfully.
“I’ll be damned if I let you.” Her face was flushed, her eyes blazing. “I’ll be damned. She says she’s over you, that it’s just sex and it doesn’t mean anything. But I know her, and you’re going to break her heart again, and—” She stopped abruptly. “Let go of me.”
He unclamped his fingers from her forearm—he hadn’t even been aware of grabbing it. “Sorry. I’m sorry.” He reached for his beer with a shaky hand.
She frowned at him. “What’s wrong with you?”
He sipped the beer to wet his suddenly dry throat. “You think she still has feelings for me?”
“Of course, she does.” Chloe shook her head in exasperation. “You’re the goddamn love of her life, but I’m not letting you break her heart again.”
He gulped the rest of the beer while hope, wild and dangerous, stampeded over his heart.
“Chloe,” Jesse said gently. “Look at him.”
“I’m looking.”
“No, look at him,” Jesse urged. “He’s in love with her.”
“He is not,” she began heatedly, then her eyes widened. “Oh, my God. Are you?”
“I never stopped,” Nash rasped, his heart lodged in his throat. “Never stopped loving her, never stopped wanting her.”
“Well, fuck.”
Since she hadn’t dumped his food in his lap, he pressed on. “I’d give anything to go back and undo what I did, but I can’t. All I can do is try to make it up to her, and show her that this time, I’m not afraid. No, that’s wrong,” he corrected before she could speak. “I’m terrified.”
“Of what?” Chloe asked, and though the suspicion remained, the venom had faded from her voice.
“That it’s too late. That I killed whatever we might have had eight years ago, and there’s no way to get it back. That this time,” he went on over the pain in his chest, “she’ll break my heart.”
For a moment, there was only the pounding of his heart and Chloe’s ragged breathing. Then Jesse said, “He’s hiring Sawyer.”
Nash had the pleasure of seeing her jerk in surprise a second time. Too bad, he thought drily, he was too much of a wreck to enjoy it.
Her gaze went speculative. “I figured you’d be tagging some of your buddies for this.”
Her words so closely echoed Bailey’s, he almost smiled. “In college I would have. Not now.”
“Why?”