Promise Me This Page 5

  Jessie

  As Nate rifled through my CD collection, I wondered why he seemed so dang uncomfortable about my question. It was like all the play had gone out of him as soon as I mentioned his family.

  I’d met his brother on a couple of occasions and he seemed like an arrogant ass, but I’d never tell Nate that. Instead, he called him out himself. And included his own father in the mix. Even going so far as to call him a prick. I couldn’t help wondering what their history was and what it would be like to grow up with that kind of father—a drastic difference from my own.

  I figured this whole time that Nate was just going to college on his daddy’s money and having a good time. He was cool to hang around with and he never seem to mind that I called him Square, but now I was even further intrigued that there was more beneath the surface.

  My brother and I were raised in a loving home where money was always tight. My mother practiced Reiki at a wellness center and my dad was a freelance photographer, taking jobs where he could, usually for the local newspapers. When it came down to it, having money was nice but it wasn’t everything. I’d turn down a million dollars in a heartbeat to have my daddy walk back into my life.

  As Nate held up an older CD he said, “You like Nirvana?” I needed to ask myself why the hell I cared about Nate’s past. Sure we were friends, more casual than anything, because we hung around the same circle. Truth be told, I guess I really didn’t know very much about him. And now I was on a road trip with him and more curious by the minute.

  As I slid the CD from his fingers and glided it inside the stereo slot, I felt the urge to push him for more information but I didn’t want to seem too nosy. Stepping into his apartment this morning, where he seemed to be just another messy boy, made him even more endearing. I’d admit that while using his bathroom, I pictured myself in in that girl’s place again—Nate busting through the door and pushing me up against the sink.

  It wasn’t like I hadn’t been with dominant guys before. I’d met plenty. But it was the combination of Nate’s clean-cut side with that roughness I’d witnessed in the bar that completely threw me for a loop and had my stomach in knots while I was just sitting beside him.

  As he fumbled around and replaced my CDs in their cases, barely making eye contact with me, I had this impression that he was standing on the edge of a crevice and considering whether to open himself up—show himself to me. It was as if he just didn’t know how, or even whether he should. Something about that made me want to be the one to push him over the brink.

  What the living hell was wrong with me? I had never been attracted to a guy like Nate. But his blond hair looked all messy today, like someone had run their fingers through it, his thick eyelashes were blinking away at my musical taste and his full lips were screaming to be licked. God, I was a hot mess.

  And when he’d admitted that not one trace of a tattoo peppered his skin, I couldn’t help wondering what a body like that looked like in the flesh.

  What was one to do with such a blank canvas? I might want to do something drastic, like mar him with my teeth. That thought made a bubble of laughter spring up inside my chest, because I was being absolutely ridiculous.

  “What’s so funny?” Nate asked, his fingers tapping a beat against his thigh. In fact, his knee had been jiggling away practically the whole time we’d been in the car.

  “Nothing,” I said trying to contain my ridiculousness. “Overactive imagination.”

  I studied him out of the corner of my eye, my hands fisting the steering wheel.

  “I have that affliction as well,” he said, running his hand across his mouth. I could feel him staring hard at my profile, specifically my mouth, which now felt dry.

  When my tongue darted out to lick my lips, he inhaled sharply through his nose, and I considered asking him about those kissing rumors. Because right now I wanted to pull off to the side of the road and show him exactly how I liked to use my tongue.

  Maybe this was the appeal that he had with all of those girls—and now I was becoming one of them. As the air became thick in our enclosed space, I realized I had somehow convinced myself that Nate had a wild side that involved handcuffs and who knew what else. The question was: why would I want to be the one to bring it out of him?

  It wasn’t like we had a future. But hell, that’s never stopped me before. I wasn’t shy about getting to know someone if I was curious about them. The worst that could happen was that I’d have to eventually kick him to the curb. But given that Nate and I shared the same friends, it might prove to be awkward later. And what of our friendship now? Didn’t I enjoy our easy and casual banter? Why would I jeopardize that?

  A change of thought process would be a wise decision right about now. “So Square, how do you know so much about Bridgeway?”

  “I actually grew up there,” he said, after clearing his throat. “And then later, we moved to the city.”

  “That makes perfect sense.” I nodded. “I just figured you studied about it in one of your classes. Or maybe had a fascination with it or something.”

  “Nope,” he said, and then hummed along to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” his foot crossed over his ankle.

  “So where did you live?”

  “In the rural part,” he said, and I could almost picture it. “Decent-size house with a wraparound porch and a huge yard.”

  When I didn’t say anything, because I was trying to picture a younger Nate living in a house like that, he continued.

  “It’s a quieter town. The steel mill that drove the city’s income shut down, so a lot of townsfolk lost their jobs.”

  The way he described it made it sound like a completely different way of life, as if from a different era.

  “So you’re a country boy at heart?” I grinned. “I thought I heard a twang in your voice.”

  “Maybe,” he said with a smirk. “Is that a bad thing? You know what they say about country boys and all of their large equipment.”

  I snorted a laugh. “That they’re very acquainted with the farm animals?”

  His shoulders shook with laughter. “You’ve really got to get out more if that’s what you think.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said, still smiling. “I’ve always been a city girl.”

  He looked me over appraisingly from the top of my head down to my bright purple Converse kicks, while my pulse skittered in my veins. “Not sure I could ever picture you growing up in town like that.”

  “The blue hair wouldn’t go over well?” I said, swallowing thickly. Not sure why his scrutiny was sending my stomach into a free-fall.

  “Nah, it’s that damn sneaker collection,” he said, grinning. I had an assortment of colorful ones, some I’d even asked the guys at the shop to doodle on, freehand. My favorite was a limited edition Blondie pair—she was my favorite icon.

  “Oh, you’re right,” I deadpanned. “I might get run out of town because of those.”

  We drove a couple more miles in silence before I said, “Do you miss living in Bridgeway?”

  As he thought about it, I saw a flash of pain in his eyes. There was definitely a story there.

  “Not really,” he said in a quiet voice. “Small town living is different.”

  “Tell me how.”

  “You definitely have more space to move around in, less people,” he said, his knee rattling a mile a minute again. “The downside is, more people know your business.”

  “I don’t like that at all.” I said, grimacing. I enjoyed the anonymity of a large city, even though I’d never quite considered that before. I wasn’t even sure the fishbowl of campus life could compare to what he was describing. “Though my dad used to talk about the smaller town he and his parents lived in for a while.”

  I was amazed by how comfortable it felt to bring my dad up around Nate. I had stayed away from the topic forever because it was just too painful. But now it just seemed natural to blurt out little stories about him. As if Nate was someone who would keep t
hem safe.

  “Looks like you might have small town living in your DNA, after all.”

  “Yeah right.” I laughed. “So why did your family move?”

  There was a long dramatic pause before he said, “Because of my father . . . he, uh, got another job.”

  Chapter Eight

  Nate

  I couldn’t tell Jessie that the reason my family moved away from Bridgeway was because the neighbors started talking after an exceptionally brutal altercation between my parents.

  My father had beaten my mother pretty badly and he had no choice but to drive her to the emergency room. Luckily for him, they believed my mother’s lie about falling down the stairs. But I’ll never forget that night—it’s been forever burnished into my brain.

  My mother’s keening cry, the dull thud of a fist, the crisp slap of a palm. My brother bracing my shoulders tightly, whispering that we couldn’t interrupt or he might beat us, too.

  “But what if he kills her?” I had asked my brother, as my entire body shook head to toe.

  “He won’t,” my brother said, shushing me. “She shouldn’t have talked back to him.”

  And that night was the turning point for me in two different ways. My father had become someone I absolutely hated with all of my being. Before, he was an enigma, a larger-than-life person. He wanted my respect, demanded it even. But you couldn’t respect a person whom you feared might kill you with their bare hands.

  In addition, I had begun to see the signs of who my brother would ultimately become. He began siding with my father and viewing my mother as something else—an object, almost. A thing. Someone unworthy.

  But wasn’t that exactly how I viewed women now? I rushed my fingers through my hair in frustration. My internal struggle was definitely that, a struggle.

  I wouldn’t allow a girl close enough to me to become real; that was my problem. The difference was, I would never scare them or abuse them. I took care of their physical needs and mine, too—up to a point—and then I walked away.

  Luke was older, and as a teenager began disrespecting my mother and her rules. When my dad went out of town, my brother would stay out until all hours of the night. My mother would threaten to tell my father but never followed through because she didn’t want him to terrorize Luke the same way he terrorized her.

  But as it turned out that would never happen because Luke had become my father’s favorite.

  “Hey,” Jessie said, her warm fingers on my arm. “Where did you drift off to on me?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “You just got me thinking about my childhood.”

  “Was . . .” she sounded hesitant. It was true we never had deep conversations before. But we also had never been alone in a car for hours before. “Was it a happy childhood?”

  I felt a shot of pain stab through my chest. How did I respond?

  “No,” I said, honestly. “At least not always.”

  She scrutinized me under thick eyelashes, looking somewhat concerned. Guess I’ve been ruining her preconceived notions of me one frown at a time.

  She pulled into a service station off the exit for some gas. “Sorry, forgot to fill up last night.”

  “Let me do it for you,” I offered.

  “Nope. I’m a big girl, thanks,” she said, her eyes still softened by my earlier comment. “But you can go in and get us more coffee from their fancy cappuccino machine. I’ll even take a French vanilla.”

  Grinning, I took off into the store, pushed the button on the machine, and waited for our drinks. Jessie was sitting on the passenger side with the door open when I emerged. It wasn’t until I got closer that I noticed she had her camera raised and was aiming at me.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Relax, just taking a test shot,” she said, her fingers curling around the edges of the sleek device. “You’re not one of those pretty boys who has to have his hair perfectly coiffed before he gets his photo taken, are you?”

  “Very funny,” I said, before setting the coffees on the hood of the car and running my fingers through my hair so that it stuck up all over the place. Then I mugged for the camera, flexing my muscles and making crazy faces. “Make sure to get my good side.”

  After a good laugh, we got on the road again. I tried to jump in the driver’s seat but she wasn’t having it.

  “Tell me one amazing memory,” Jessie said after a few minutes of silence. “You know, from your childhood.”

  She was intent on going back there again. I shut my eyes momentarily and took a deep breath. Did I even have any amazing memories? Of course I did, I just needed to dig deep.

  “There was a pond near our house where my brother and I always hung out,” I said. “A tire hung from this huge tree and the two of us would swing high over the water and jump in. We did it over and over again all damn day.”

  “That sounds amazingly cool, Square,” she said. “And completely country. I mean, I didn’t have some random body of water by me in the city. I had to use the public pool.”

  “Well, at least it was sanitized,” I said, shrugging. “We’d find all kinds of crap floating around in that lake, especially after a good rain.”

  “I’d still take the fresh smell of a lake after a hard rain over hard-core chlorine that always made my eyes burn.”

  “Point taken,” I said, jiggling my knee again. I just needed to keep moving. It was how I organized my thoughts, my brain. Of course, my little tick was also magnified by how amped up I felt, being around Jessie like this, in close quarters. I could smell her and it wasn’t some kind of sugary perfume.

  She had this exotic scent—like when my mother picked a bouquet of wildflowers from the garden. A concoction of eucalyptus, baby powder, and honey all melded together. It was intoxicating and made me want to move closer to that soft patch of skin in the hollow of her throat, in order to take a deeper lungful.

  The night she stumbled in the bathroom was the closest I’d ever gotten to her and it was the first time I’d gotten a good whiff, that’s how subtle the scent was. But now it was all I could think about.

  “Why do you think that day by the lake was one of your favorites?” she asked.

  Again, that deep ache in my chest. “Oh you know, because it was the freedom of being a kid. Not a care in the world.”

  I remembered how some nights in my room, when I could hear my parents arguing a floor below, I’d take out my sketch pad and get lost in the feeling of my fingers dragging across the page—I’d draw buildings, bridges, and other structures that interested me. I also had many pages of darkness—caves, pits, eclipses—so I’d be sure to sketch the pond and the sun, added light and balance to the black.

  When she didn’t respond I continued, recalling how easy it was to walk out the front door into the sunshine and forget all of it, every single part, for the next few hours.

  “When I was a kid, I didn’t care that my knees were scratched or my shins had an entire landscape of bruises across them. Or that I was completely filthy and my hair was matted to my head with sweat. I wasn’t even sure where in the hell my shoes were half the time,” I said, laughing and shaking my head. “All I knew was that sometimes I felt light as a balloon drifting off in the warm summer breeze and I wanted those days—those good days—to last as long as humanly possible.”

  “Wow, Nate,” she said, the words floating from her mouth on a gust of air, her eyes round and wide. “Now you’ve made me feel nostalgic.”

  “I want a redo of one of those carefree days. There weren’t many of them.” I gave her a quick sidelong glance, surprising even myself that I had admitted all of that. But it dislodged the rigidity in my chest, just a little. ”Before everything in the entire fucking universe went to shit and began to matter.”

  “That’s about right,” she said, softly, her gaze focused on the road but really a whole world away.

  “What makes you nostalgic?” I asked.

  The bittersweet look in her eyes deepened and I figured she was
thinking about her dad. She twisted her bottom lip with her fingers and glanced at me, almost hesitant. “There was this one time it was just my dad and me. He had taken me to the beach to shoot pictures of the waves.”

  “Where was your mom?”

  “At work. My parents always had odd jobs and work hours. My dad would go off on photography assignments because he worked freelance and then he’d come back with all kinds of stories.”

  “That’s really cool.”

  She nodded. “But this was just a quiet afternoon we shared and the water was so gray. There was no wind kicking off the lake and it was so peaceful.”

  “Huh,” I said. “So you do have a water tale after all, Blue. This wasn’t some public pool with chlorine.”

  “Got me there. He drove us up the freeway to Coe Lake,” she said, her lips curving at the memory. “Anyway, my father told me some things that day about life. He was such a brilliant and poetic man.”

  Now my interest was piqued. I tried picturing this great man who probably walked along the beach holding his daughter’s hand. “Like what?”

  “He would say all kinds of things, really. My parents were very spiritual, very connected with nature and inner beauty. But that one day really stuck with me,” she said. “Because he told me, ‘It’s important to spend time alone and get to know the whole of yourself.’”

  My eyebrows creased together. “What did he mean?”

  “I remember asking the same thing,” she said, smiling at me. “He said, ‘Jessie, promise me this: Explore all the different sides of you. We all have darkness and brightness inside of us. You won’t know exactly what you’re made of until you embrace all of it, feel it, live it. Only then will you be able to face all that life has to offer, head-on.’”

  She turned and looked straight into my eyes and I felt sucker punched in the gut. My breaths were coming in short gasps and I tried disguising it by looking at the landscape out the window. What in the heck was that speech her father had given her?

  “Well hell,” I mumbled. “The only advice my father ever gave was to stop letting people crap all over me. That was after I let two goals through in my one and only season of soccer.”