Bombora (28 page)

I think I expected Nate to pick up the nearest plate and smash it, or maybe throw a punch at my head. That’s not what happened. Instead he left the room and came back carrying his jacket, motorcycle keys in hand. I stared at them mutely and then up at his face, unsure what to say because I knew it would sound like a challenge for him to leave. But I also couldn’t say I didn’t want him to, the words catching on my tongue like lead.

In the end, my silence probably pushed him halfway out the door as much as another cruel taunt would have. Nate walked to the exit and wouldn’t look at me at first. He fiddled with his keys, twisting them over and over in his hands. “Tell you what, Phel,” he said, and I knew from the tears in his voice this was going to hurt. “I’ll come out to my kid when you come out to your father, okay? You criticize my priorities, but from where I’m standing? The only reason you haven’t done it already is because you’re more attached to your trust fund than anything else. Whatever you say, you’d rather he give you a pat on the head for a lie than be true to yourself, when that’s something I wish for every day.”

From his key ring came the key to my home, which he flung at me across the floor. His eyes flickered up to meet mine for a second, and then he was gone. The door slammed after him.

Once I’d roused myself enough to throw the deadbolt behind him, I picked up Nate’s key from the tile, I thought it was the last time I’d ever see him. I maybe even prayed for it a little.

But here we are, nearly two years after we first met. Nate telling me I make good choices when his very presence is irrefutable proof I absolutely
don’t
. He makes me, to use his word, retarded, a fact over which I always end up hating myself, no matter my best intentions. Right now I can’t seem to decide whether I feel more wretched for being able to look at him at all, or that I for a moment chose to share with him something of my private hopes for my future.
Stupid Phelan. That future doesn’t exist, not with Nate in it. Can’t stay with him here, can’t ask him to go—Hugh will never give him up for you.

This conversation is over, and he doesn’t even know it yet. It shocks me, really, how easily the words to push him away come to me.

“I’ve been wondering about something lately,” I begin, and I lean back a little into Nate’s loose embrace, the one he’s trying to pretend isn’t happening on purpose.

Predictably, he rests a hand against my forearm to indicate he’s listening, gives a gentle squeeze. “Yeah?” I can actually hear the hope in his voice, the tightening of his groin against my lower back as he responds to the tenor of my voice like an invitation.

“Is this what it was like for you the first time around?” I ask. “It’s kind of like we’re carrying on an illicit affair all over again, doesn’t it? There’s risk, excitement.… We could get caught at any time. Did cheating on Emilia and sneaking around fill you with the same sense of exhilaration as throwing yourself at me now?”

Nate stiffens against me in an entirely different way, muscles rigid, and on my lips there’s a smile that won’t come, no matter how hard I try. Silence crawls over us in what feels like an endless haze, cloying, but then Nate shifts backwards into the cushions, trying to put space between us without shoving me out of his lap altogether.

“Well?”

He clears his throat. When he speaks, I can barely hear him even from a few inches away. “Lemme make something clear,” he murmurs, but we both know I’m listening. I asked, after all. “Every time I cheated on Emilia was the saddest I’d ever been in my life. Much as I wanted to lose myself in how happy it made me to be around you, I never forgot what I was doing to my family without them knowing. Not a day went by that I didn’t dream about coming clean to Em and ending the whole charade, but I was fucking weak.”

To my horror, I try to speak, but nothing comes out; something grips my throat so hard I have to stop and wonder if it’s a panic attack, here out of the blue, but I know it’s not. No, this is something else, and I fight against it until I find my voice again and ruthlessly suppress Willa’s words surfacing in my head. Still, it penetrates that I do not, in this moment, feel proud. “We agree on that much, at least,” I force out.

“Phel.” However reluctantly, I turn to look at Nate, then immediately away when I see tracks of moisture on his cheeks, wiped hastily away. “I wasn’t sure whether or not I should say anything to you about it, but I’m thinking of coming clean to Hugh.”

The non sequitur makes my body go cold, and I pull myself up off the couch to face him. “That’s kind of petty given the circumstances, isn’t it? You might think you’re upset at me, but telling your brother we’ve been fucking on his good leather sofa isn’t the right way to express your anger.”

Nate shrugs, hands curling around his ankles as he pulls his knees in to his chest. His eyes glitter in the low light of the room, and I realize, too late, that the look on his face isn’t the same need for blood I’ve found in my own reflection of late. He looks tired, which is perhaps most frightening of all. “Tired” often means “done.” But the flash disappears quickly, shoved beneath the surface as Nate’s mouth quirks in a sad smile that’s just for me.

“I wasn’t gonna tell him about us,” he explains. “Just that I’m gay. It’s time, and the way I figure, only fair. Liam knows, and Emilia knows—Hugh should know too. But I can see how you’d be worried it might give the rest away.” He pauses. Then he suggests, “You could just tell him yourself.”

“No.” It would break Hugh’s heart; I know this. Nate knows it. He loves his brother, but he’s not volunteering to be the bearer of that information either. But it does, for the briefest of seconds, make me wonder why it would be so bad if Hugh knew, before I remember how much I actually care. The thought of Hugh ending our friendship makes my stomach twist, but that isn’t what terrifies me so much.

It shouldn’t surprise me that Nate’s thoughts are running along similar lines. “It’d be over if he knew. All this, what we’ve been doing.” Meeting my eyes, he asks the one thing I could stand here all night wishing he wouldn’t, begging him with my silence, willing it with every fiber I possess: “Do you not want it to be over?”

Suddenly my blood is pumping fast, a sharp surge past my ears like the knee-jerk response to a hand placed on a hot element, contradictory desires striking through me to flee, to scream and lash out and
hurt
. I refuse to run, legs sore and lungs exhausted from how far I’ve fled already. This isn’t like that time on the beach, when I was still so petrified and weak. “Fuck you,” I choke out and launch myself at him. Seemingly of its own accord, a fist swings out that nearly catches him in the jaw before he grabs my hand in midair.

“Phel, what the fuck?”

As I’ve proven before, I’m not much of a fighter, and this time I don’t have the element of surprise; Nate’s body shifts to simultaneously avoid the blow and curl itself around mine, his arms and legs snaking around my limbs as he rolls me onto my back. The ice pack rattles between us and then falls to the carpet. I land with all the grace of a sack of potatoes, grunting with indignant, impotent anger despite the thrill of excitement that rushes through me. Our bodies press flush, heavy and breathing hard.

Nate feels it, too, his cheeks going scarlet, and his mouth drops open in a near gasp. “Stop it,” he orders, hands tightening painfully around my wrists. “Stop fucking doing this, you’re like a goddamn child—hitting me because you don’t know what to say.”

I fight the urge to spit at him. “I have nothing
to
say,” I growl. My voice comes out breathy and choked from his weight on top of me. “I’ve been telling you, Nate, there’s nothing left to this goddamned conversation you insist on trying to drag out. Why can’t we just fuck and have it not mean anything?”

Nate’s jaw clenches. “Because that’s what you want, not me—even if it’s like trying to put a square fucking peg in a round hole, but who am I to tell you otherwise? You obviously don’t give a shit what I have to say, or if it means anything to someone other than yourself. I’m trying to make things right.”

“You
can’t
.”

“I didn’t just say for you.” Hesitating, Nate lets go of my wrists and sits back a little. “I’m coming out to Hugh for
me
, because it’s the right goddamn thing to do.”

I reach out to grab him before he can withdraw too far and wrap my arms around his torso. “Nate, leave it alone,” I beg him, disgusted by the tremor in my own voice and the fact that I’m proving him right the more I try to fight against him, answering his question with a “no” so resounding I might as well shout it out loud. I
don’t
want it to be over, damn it, but neither do I want him to know how badly the thought shakes me. “Just leave it alone. Fuck me and stop trying to ruin it.”

I snake my fingers into his hair and pull him to me. Our lips crash together as I kiss silent whatever he might have said in response, licking the denial right out of his mouth. Tumbling us over so he’s once again on his back, I drag my hand down to the crotch of his jeans and squeeze at his half-hard cock, making him moan into me and reluctantly arch for more. With us it’s always more and more until we’re scraping the bone with nothing left to give. I flick the button fly open and work my fingers inside, grasping at skin and the first few drops of wetness from the tip of his shaft.

“Fuck me,” I say again, hopefully this time. I pull away and hold his eyes as I skin out of my shorts and turn my body on the couch, laying myself out on my stomach beneath his gaze. Glancing back over my shoulder from where I’ve pushed up onto my elbows, I let my legs fall open in blatant invitation. I close my eyes and moan softly at the audible hitch in Nate’s breath as he looks at me, then push my tongue out to lick at lips that have suddenly gone dry. “I want you to. I want it so badly.”

“Phel,” Nate chastises. I can hear the resistance in his tone, but he crawls toward me, crouches on his hands and knees over my legs and dips his head to nuzzle into the small of my back. It’s a bit forceful—he knows what I’m trying to do, and doesn’t like being manipulated. Nor does he like his own acquiescence to so obvious a play for his silence.

“Come on.” I arch and shift back onto my knees, pushing my ass into him so he’s forced to take my hips to avoid being shoved off-balance. The feel of his palms grabbing hot and rough against my skin makes me groan in genuine need, and I drop to my chest against the sofa, hips still thrust in the air. My actions are a bit selfishly motivated, I admit—I’m essentially trying to buy Nate’s obedience and an end to this topic of conversation, but the hot flush of desire for him is never forced, never reluctant. If anything it’s like a brush fire, whooshing out of control if I so much as bring a match within sparking distance, devastation just waiting to catch.

Two fingers slip down the crease between my buttocks, dragging hard over my opening—they’re wet, Nate seemingly having slipped them into his mouth when I glanced away, and one presses inside me so easily we both cry out, me perhaps the more raggedly. A soft
“
Oh, oh, oh
” falls from my lips as he works in and out, the second finger joining the first and making me sob when he presses into my prostate, rushes of fireworks licking through my whole body. He withdraws. Nate unfastens his jeans the rest of the way and pushes them to midthigh; I feel the brush of his erection like velvet against my exposed hole as he rocks into me, rides my crease for a second and sighs.

“Baby,” he says and presses against my body until his hips are flush against my ass and I’m groaning nonsense, trying to rock into him. He keens, “Baby,” again, and I’m not even coherent or sane enough anymore to reject the endearment.

“Isn’t it so much better this way?” I gasp. Nate’s teeth bite down on the flesh between my neck and shoulder, and I feel him shaking, tremors that match the ones in my arms. I rub my face into the smooth leather beneath my cheek. “So much better this way, Nate, when you fuck me.” Echoing my thought from earlier, almost deliriously at this stage, I tell him, “Don’t spoil it, please don’t spoil it again.”

The movement stalls, Nate’s whole body going tense and still above me while I try to arch and thrust back into him, a deep whine pulling from my throat. Just when I expect him to stop teasing and fuck me deep, or think maybe he’s just getting a hold of himself, Nate, impossibly, withdraws, pushing himself up and off me.

“What are you doing?” I demand. My stomach churns with unpleasantness as I roll to my side and see Nate rise from the couch on unsteady legs, pulling up his jeans. The flagging erection he tucks away with trembling fingers, wincing in discomfort, but for a moment he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even look at me from the spot on the carpet he’s studying so intently. “Nate! Come back here.”

Green eyes drag up to meet mine, and I know that look, Nate’s soft, broken little-boy face that says he might be dying on the inside, but isn’t going to budge an inch.

Body still thrumming with arousal like an overwarm engine, I shiver and swing my legs underneath me, sitting up but not trusting myself to stand. Sudden pressure against the place Nate’s fingers so recently vacated makes me squirm, makes me ache and want to pull him to me, my mouth already open to beg him back. How can I beg, though, when he promised to do whatever I ask? How the hell can he get up and leave when for once I am trying to give something to
him
?

With shocking coldness, I shudder at the thought that Willa’s prediction is coming true, and Nate is starting to realize he’s not so powerless against me after all, not even if he wants to be. He can say no; he
is
saying no.

“You’re leaving,” I splutter. Scooting closer, I catch his hand before he can back away. “I don’t—I don’t understand. I’m not the one who—you
said
you would do—”

“What, whatever it took? Yeah.” Nate curls his fingers around mine briefly but ultimately withdraws, looking no happier for it. “I’m sorry, Phel. You don’t even know what you’re asking, but turns out I can’t do
that
.”