Bombora (14 page)

A part of me has to admire how Nate hasn’t bothered with pleasantries and small talk, as if to pretend this chance meeting of ours is anything less than what he said—fucked up—but I think it has far more to do with his defense of Hugh than anything. Before I knew who Hugh was, I always got the sense Nate was fiercely protective of his little brother; there was something in the way Nate spoke about him, or
didn’t
speak about him, combined with his reluctance to share identifying details, that suggested that to come between them would be a mistake. It’s good to know my read of the situation wasn’t completely off, even then.

That doesn’t mean I’m deaf to the one very important piece of information Nate has accidentally let slip. “You
almost
came out and told him?” I shoot back. For a moment I’m glad my own anger seems to have finally overridden my instinct to curl up and have a panic attack in the sand. “Why the hell didn’t you, then? If Hugh and his emotional well-being are so damned important to you, why didn’t you just lay everything down so he can know exactly how it is? Exactly why you’re
here
?”

As I knew he would be, Nate is cowed by my challenge; he tilts his head back and looks at me from down his nose like an animal on the defensive, trying to protect its face from harm while still maintaining eye contact. “He doesn’t deserve to be dragged into the middle of this,” he grates out.

“And I did?” I don’t meant to shout, but it feels good, weirdly, to be launching into this outburst without preamble, without being allowed to think of all the whys and wherefores and whether or not this is what Willa would recommend. “Like I deserved any of the shit you heaped in my lap, Nate? A year of lies and deception and broken promises? Your
marriage
?” My throat closes off around the last word and I look away, pressing the heels of my palms into my eyes to block out his face.

Nate, damn him, catches it right away. “Phel,” he says again, and his voice is gentler now, pleading. He doesn’t say anything else until I look at him. Whatever I’m feeling must show on my face like a tragic mask, judging by how he frowns and rocks abortively onto the balls of his feet like he wants to come closer. “This isn’t how I wanted to do any of this. I never thought I’d see you again, but even so, this isn’t what—” The tension lines around his eyes and mouth seem to have deepened dramatically over the last minute. Those green eyes meet mine with all the force of what we left unsaid between us. And, I see now, he is miserable with it.
Good
, I think.

Nate’s voice grows more insistent, but thankfully he doesn’t try to touch me again. “For months I’ve been thinking about what I’d say to you if I had the chance, man, and now you’re here? We
do
need to talk. Fuck knows how any of this happened, how we wound up in the same place, but that don’t matter. Don’t storm off again, not before we’ve had a chance to figure things out.”

The anger that bubbles up inside me is, I find, more than a match for Nate’s own, catching like a spark to gunpowder at the suggestion there’s anything left to figure out, anything that hasn’t already been destroyed. Our relationship is a razed landscape. It should be clear that Nate and I are finished, washed up like seaweed on the beach. He seems, mysteriously, to feel otherwise, but I’ve no choice but to disabuse us both of the notion before either of us can get any ideas. Same as at Hugh’s house, I’m too petrified to keep looking at him and too petrified to look away.

A laugh bordering on the hysterical breaks from my throat, and I remind him, “You had a year to speak to me, Nate. A whole year with just us, alone, when I would have listened to anything you had to say if you’d only been honest. But all you did was bullshit me. And not just me, either—your wife, your son, your brother. Everyone. What interest could I possibly have in what you have to say now? It’s done. Whatever cosmic joke brought us here doesn’t entitle you to a second chance. It doesn’t even entitle you to this conversation.”

Much as I’m convinced of this, I’m both surprised and confused we’ve gotten this far at all. Nate might be the one with the temper, but we’re equally stubborn and, to top it all off, I am hopeless when it comes to confrontation. While I’d never known Nate to welcome an emotional discussion about anything—it truly was like pulling teeth—he was always the one ready to stick it out to the end and see a conversation through. I, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to run at the first sign I might lose an argument. Nate liked to call this habit “drive-by fighting,” wherein I’d say the most unconscionable thing to come to mind, then immediately flee the scene. It’s how my last conversation ended with my parents, how Nate and I broke up without ever talking about it—I just ran and ran and didn’t look back. Shows how well that worked out for me.

To his credit, Nate must anticipate I’m planning my exit, despite the limited options available; either I fling myself into the sea or dig myself a hole in the sand. He advances a few steps and makes like he wants to take my arm again before thinking better of it, but is close enough to block my escape with his body. I inhale at the proximity, the subtle smell of sweat and sea salt on him, and hope to high hell he doesn’t notice the flare of my nostrils and my tongue darting out to wet my lips the same way he notices every other one of my tells.

“Do you hear me denying any of that stuff, Phel?” he asks with a shake of the head. “I’m not—I know I fucked up royally. But just… I never meant—”

My hands tighten into painful fists of their own accord. “So help me, Nate, if you say you didn’t mean to hurt me—”

His eyes drift shut in resignation, because we both know my guess is correct. With Nate, they always are, just as I’m not dense enough to believe he doesn’t know me equally well. It’s been months, and I don’t doubt we could still carry on a conversation with just our eyes like we’ve been doing since Day One. That’s part of the problem with feeling you know someone so well—it’s all the more devastating when the farce is revealed.

Nate has to know how far he’s pushing me out of my comfort zone, but still, he insists, “I didn’t. Fuck, Phel, I lo—”

Without warning, my first flies out and catches him on the chin, close enough to his mouth that I feel my knuckles split against his teeth, the painful collision with bone. The whole thing happens so quickly. I wonder if I haven’t blacked out, seconds lost between thinking,
Please don’t say those words, anything but that
, and finding both of us bleeding, Nate from the lip and myself from the hand. I have never punched someone in my life, and it shows. Belatedly, I remember Hugh commenting, in the midst of some shitty action movie we found on Netflix, that only amateurs go for the face, since the stomach is an equally effective target and far kinder to an assailant’s fists. At the time, I dismissed this information as useless, but apparently there is a point where even an adamant pacifist will resort to physical violence to shut someone up.

Appearing as shocked as I feel, Nate stumbles back with a curse and reaches up to touch his split lip. He glances between his blood-smeared fingers and my face with an expression of utter bewilderment, but the sight of him hunched over and breathing hard, face flushed, doesn’t move me to pity or regret. Instead it inspires the only real reaction of which I’m capable—the one thing I’ve been trying to suppress since Nate hurtled back into my life with all the subtlety of an apocalyptic disaster.

Sometimes I think my mind isn’t my own. Judging from the speed with which I can go from in control to the grips of a panic attack, this more or less is consistent with how I’ve come to view my body when adrenaline floods my system and the fight-or-flight instinct kicks in: a vessel occasionally at my disposal, but with significant override functions to which I do not hold the key. Over the past few months, I’ve come to accept these feelings of helplessness, since I do not, after all, have much say in the hormonal revolt my body might display in the face of anxiety. Other behavior, however, escapes even my considerable powers of rationalization—the only explanation is that I simply don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.

Striking faster than a fist, I lurch forward and collide with Nate’s body as I grab at that startled face, pulling him forward until there are a dozen surprise points of connection leading up from our hips and ending at our mouths. At first Nate is too stunned to do anything but grunt, the sound immediately swallowed by my kiss, lapped up like his blood upon my tongue. But then his hands are moving, gripping at my hair, my waist, everywhere they can reach, bruising, possessive, greedy. Familiar. Nate’s grip is hot in contrast to the clamminess of our sea-chilled skin; I push myself into the touch, pressing our bodies together, his chest as smooth and muscular as I remember.

Teeth and tongues dominate the kiss, my lips burning from the force with which we fight one another, and take and take and take. A groan of frustration, barely recognizable as my own, wrenches from my throat at a bite of particular violence from Nate. While this bit of roughness in all likelihood splits my lip, the tang of my blood is impossible to distinguish from Nate’s own. He moans into me, a guttural sound deep in his chest, and the sting of his nails in my back punches a noise of similar urgency from me.

Moving on autopilot, I shove once, hard, against his chest, and then again. We both make surprised sounds when Nate’s heel catches on the piece of driftwood and sends him careening backwards, arms flailing for a moment before he grabs back onto me and takes me down with him. The sand barely cushions the landing. My weight crashes on top of Nate and forces the air from his lungs in a huff, warm against my lips, but hardly a second passes before we’re mauling each other’s mouths again with me perched heavily across his lap, straddling his hips.

Though neither of us are strangers to passionate lovemaking, Nate and I have never been rough to the point of discomfort. As such, my fingers surprise me by tightening in his hair to what is surely a painful extent, tugging as far as my grip will allow until his head is jerked backwards at an angle. I continue kissing him in a fury, and it elicits a sound of such open need from Nate’s throat that I feel my cock harden in my shorts, twitching against his erection. I realize I want more. I want that rush of fear and adrenaline and uncertainty flooding through
his
veins for once instead of mine.

I find his wrists and pin them above his head in the sand. Nate is the larger man, but all the time I’ve spent surfing, paddling out through rough water and building the muscles in my back and arms—I’ve gotten strong, strong enough to hold him down so he will have to struggle to free himself. If he so chooses. He doesn’t, not really, bucking against me for a moment before he gasps into my mouth and arches his whole body instead, letting me savor the thrust of his pelvis and the bump his ribs against mine, sharp protrusions from the awkward angle of his arms.

The feeling is powerful, heady. In fact, I haven’t felt this way since the night I met Nate in the bar, when anything I did would surprise him, draw him in, keep him off-balance. I so badly want to feel that way again, and I dig my nails into his skin a little harder, pressing into ligament and bone. My mouth detaches from Nate’s long enough to find the pulse in his throat and bite down until he cries out, distinctly, with my name. The flash of his eyes shows only want, surrender, and that’s what I need to keep the balance in check. I’m too afraid to give anything of my own, unsure if that side of me still exists.

“Phel,” he says over and over, “Phel, please.” I want to ask him what he’s begging for, since I’ve never known Nate to beg, but then he rolls his hips and arches against me again and moans, “Baby, yes.”

Something in my chest snaps so hard at the word and the need in his voice that my ears ring. I shove him back into the sand with all the force I can muster, then push myself upright and off him altogether, as if an invisible hand has yanked me back by the scruff of the neck. Whatever sense of power I felt recoils like a rubber band that’s been stretched too far and then released, cracking back against my skin with a sting I can feel all through my insides.

“What?” Panting, Nate struggles into a half-sitting position with his elbows dug into the sand. I watch his chest heaving for a few seconds and follow the intense flush that travels down from his face, proof of the same rapturous burn I felt not a moment ago. “What was that?” he asks in a gruff voice. He licks his lips and I see his tongue emerge to prod at where the flesh is torn.

To distract myself, I waffle a moment before I begin to shove the rest of my belongings into my bag, not bothering to check if it is all mine or if I’ve forgotten something. My plan to wait around for Hugh is a thing of the past, because right now I want to be as far away from Nate and my recurring insanity as possible. I need to go back to where it’s safe and I don’t fear my own behavior so much. Obviously I’m not to be trusted.

Nate sits up a bit further. “Where the hell are you going?” he demands.

I ignore him, but all this does is make him try harder—of course. He’s pursued me every other time I’ve tried to run away; it’d make no sense for him to stop now. But when that word comes again, “Phel,
baby
,” the fog dissipates completely and I stumble back farther, finding myself more or less where I began when he showed up. The only difference is I’m through trying to shield myself from him; I just need to
go
.

“I am
not
your baby,” I spit. His face crumples in surprise at the vehemence of my words, but I want so much more than that. I want him to feel as deeply shaken as I’ve felt the past few months, like nothing will ever be right again. I want this so badly, I worry it’ll never be enough. “I’m not your anything.”

With that, I start to jog back across the beach, away from him, and I don’t look back despite the several times he calls out to me in that heartbreaker’s voice. He sounds pretty heartbroken himself. I can’t look; it’s all I can do to keep going before something gives out and I can’t run any more.