The Ingredients of You and Me

by Nina Bocci

  I took the longest bath I could, draining all of the hot water out of the tank. Epsom salts replaced my trusty bath bombs and provided some relief to my aching bones, but the aches I felt elsewhere weren’t so quick to melt away in the warm water.

  The ladies were who I was the most excited and worried for. They were riding the energy rush from earlier, but were they okay now? Feeling the same soreness that I was?

  I decided to give them a break tonight and check on them first thing in the morning, before I opened the bakery with Clara.

  As I drifted off in the warm, salty water, I could have sworn I heard a truck rumbling over gravel, but decided I surely must have imagined it. No one would be visiting now. It was probably someone turning around in the driveway on their way back into the heart of town.

  And then a little what if presented itself. The rumble sounded like Nick’s truck. I checked my phone and didn’t see any messages from him. There was no way he would pull a no-show for the grand opening and then have the audacity to show up here.

  Then I heard a little rap, rap, rap at the door and I sat bolt upright in the tub, sloshing water over the sides. “Shit,” I grumbled and angrily stood, wincing when my muscles revolted against me. “This is not happening.”

  Was it too much to ask to enjoy a bath in silence?

  I grabbed my fluffy white robe hanging from the bathroom door and twisted my long blond hair up in a towel before I stormed out of the bathroom, wishing I had the knife from Nick’s last impromptu visit with me. It probably was a good thing that I didn’t have it.

  Carefully, I marched determinedly down the stairs. I was angry, of course, but cautious enough that in my haste I didn’t slip thanks to wet feet. The last thing I needed was to beg Nick to take me to the emergency room for a broken ass.

  At the door, I took a deep breath before swinging it open. Nick was there looking a bit worse for wear. He looked exhausted, with bloodshot eyes and some shadows under them.

  “Nick,” I breathed over the whistling wind that zipped through the porch. It was positively freezing, and being in the doorway wet and barely dressed was not how I wanted to end this night.

  He turned quicker than I expected. When he saw me, he smiled, but it faded almost as soon as it lit up his face. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  He held up something long and wide and wrapped in white paper, but didn’t say anything.

  I was freezing, my hair was soaked, and I was still dripping from the bath, the droplets icing over on my legs. “It’s too cold.” I pulled the robe tighter around me and backed away from the door, leaving it open.

  Once he got to the door, he stayed on the porch, the package hanging limply at his side. “Nick, I’m not kidding, either come in or leave,” I said through chattering teeth.

  I walked into the kitchen, wishing I’d put on socks because the hardwood was cold on my bare feet. Once there, I put on the coffee, even though I knew it would be a mistake at this hour and likely keep me awake long after he left. I dug around in the pantry for something hearty to warm me up and settled on oatmeal.

  When Nick came in through the kitchen’s swinging door, he stuck close to the wall, almost as if he was going to bolt. He set the package on the counter and returned to the wall, looking even worse.

  “Why are you here?” I asked, not in any mood to mince words. “I’m tired, physically exhausted, and I have a headache, so if you’re here for another round of you telling me that you want to be friends, then go screw off.” I paused for a breath, but then I realized I had more to say to him. “You let me down. And more than that, what about the Golden Girls? They dote on you for years, and the one day they have a big moment, you’re nowhere to be seen. How do you think that made them feel?”

  When I turned, he had moved to the island to sit on one of the stools. He was playing with the edge of the paper from the package. I hadn’t even heard him move the chair to sit. His head was resting on his other hand, his fingers twisted in his brown hair, which stood up on all ends wildly. It looked like he hadn’t brushed it in days.

  “Nick?” I asked again, annoyed but also worried that he wasn’t answering or looking at me.

  I took a deep breath and went to him, placing my hand on his shoulder. His hand slid up and rested on top of mine. His skin was shockingly cold, and I wondered how long he’d been outside waiting for me.

  “They’re for you,” he said quietly, pushing flowers toward me. I could see the blooms peeking out of the haphazardly wrapped bouquet. Carefully, I unwrapped them and held in the gasp that nearly escaped me. They were… ugly, and while I recognized the paper lining from Charlotte’s Late Bloomers, these were clearly not done by my friend.

  “What are these for?” I asked, irked that Charlotte didn’t tell me he was coming with flowers. Unless she didn’t know. That might explain the poorly done bouquet.

  “They’re to say I’m sorry, because I don’t know if you’d believe the words if I said them to you again.” His voice was strained and gravelly in a way that made me think he was yelling before he got here.

  “Why are you apologizing this time, Nick?” I wasn’t trying to be aggressive or overtly mean, but how many times was I expected to go through this song and dance with him?

  “About being MIA. About letting you down. About letting that woman into everyone’s lives. About everything,” he said, smothering a hiccup with his hand.

  When he looked up, I took a step back. “Nick,” I gasped. His eyes were so bloodshot that he looked like he’d been swimming with his eyes open in a too-chlorinated pool for hours. “What happened?”

  “Jillian,” he said. And by his tone, I understood that WWIII had happened over the last two days in little Hope Lake, Pennsylvania. “I was so wrong about her. I heard what she said to you, Parker, and I saw her. Really saw her, for the first time yesterday. I had no idea…” He was all over the place.

  “Nick, why don’t you start from the beginning.”

  He let out a sigh. “I’m not stupid. I’m sure you think that I am for falling for what she was selling, but I did see some things. Some cracks in the façade, but—”

  “You didn’t want to believe it?” I asked, knowing what it was like to defend someone who you knew in your heart wasn’t a great person. Insert all my ex-boyfriends.

  He shook his head. “I didn’t. I thought maybe it was just in my head. She wasn’t really bad,” he sighed. “I met her the week of Thanksgiving.”

  I gave him a nod to continue.

  “We don’t need to rehash what happened between us, but I was in a pretty shitty place. I was at HLBC having a beer, trying to figure out what to do about you, and she approached me all doe-eyed and the epitome of sweetness. She said all the right things and laughed at all the right times. It was just easy. And with how hard it was for the two of us to get on the same page, I guess I just…”

  “Took the easy road and gave up on us,” I finished for him. I should have been upset with him, but at least I was getting honesty.

  “So I… I decided to go all in with her. She was here. You weren’t, and when you were, we were hiding, and that bothered me more than I ever admitted. Looking back, what I did was a real shit thing. To both of you, actually. I bailed on you because it was getting hard and I used her as a rebound to try to get over you.”

  He took a deep breath. “She was never like that around me. Moody and aggressive is the opposite of her personality, or at least I thought so. Did I know she manipulated me with her doe eyes to get what she wanted? Yes, but she was always so sweet.”

  I felt the heaviness seeping into my bones. I was exhausted, and as much as I wanted to hear this, I was losing my spark. “Nick, I understand that you need a friend right now, but I needed you today too. Friends are there for each other.”

  “I know that,” he said, the contrition evident in his voice.

  “Okay, then why didn’t you show up or do anything you promised you would? If not for me, then for the Golde
n Girls?”

  I was angry we were depending on him, and he bailed on us all.

  “I didn’t want to miss it. Believe me, I wanted to be there, but Jillian went nuts when she realized I brought her back to my house to end things. Like, actually nuts. She threw all of my shit around my house. It’s trashed. She trashed my place because of you. My feelings for you. She said they ruined us from the start. She insisted that we would have never worked because I was still hung up on you.”

  I sucked in a breath. “She trashed your place?” I said, trying to ignore the rest of what he said.

  They

  Broke

  Up

  “So, you’re saying your house is trashed and she went nuts because of me. I don’t understand, Nick.”

  “Remember the email you sent me a while ago? Where you called me out for avoiding you and mentioned that you saw me naked?”

  Mental note: Don’t write angry emails. Guess the same rules for drinking and texting applied to emailing. I nodded.

  “She had her suspicions about us, but when she saw that it was like the nail in the coffin. She grilled me for hours about what happened between you and me. And I might have admitted some things that I shouldn’t have.”

  My eyes widened, my heart sped up, and though I was cold and wet from the tub, I was feeling warm all over.

  “Like what, Nick?” I kept repeating his name, more for myself than for him. I was forcing myself to remember that I was mad, that this was Nick, the person who was at the root of my hurt feelings.

  “The fact is that when I met her, I was pretty much getting over you. And that you being here was bringing everything back up. Let’s not even start on when that video of us went up.”

  I cringed at my contribution to his misery. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have uploaded it.”

  “No, it was fine. Remember that day at the diner when Emma said she was pregnant? I was so happy and yet I was so hurt that they didn’t include Jillian in the announcement. I was so mad that they couldn’t wait. Parker, do you know how angry at myself I am for being mad at Emma and Cooper? I can never get that moment back. Now I realize that I was an ass for putting her before them. Always. Lost part of my friends, and I let the Golden Girls down because of her. Because I wanted to prove that I could have this normal, easy relationship. Now that I think about it, I don’t think I did it because I loved her. I was doing it to prove I could. Prove I could sacrifice.”

  With that last sentence, everything fell into place.

  “Do you not think you’ve sacrificed in previous relationships?” I asked, hoping to coax it out of him.

  “Parker, I resented you for a while. For not putting us first. For keeping us a secret. It was easy to blame you for the downfall of our relationship, if that’s what you want to call it. But then at the same time, I knew I wasn’t willing to sacrifice, either. I always wanted you to come to Hope Lake. I was more hesitant to pick up and come to New York. I did a couple times, but I wanted you here. I was being selfish. So I was mad at myself for not trying harder. For not sacrificing.”

  “So with Jillian, you tried to do everything you felt you didn’t do with me.” Wow, I was not expecting this.

  “Fuck, I’m so stupid.”

  Part of me wanted to agree, but I couldn’t be so cruel. He was obviously beaten up over this, and as a friend, I needed to help him as best I could.

  “Nick, what did she have to say? I mean, why was she playing all these games with you?”

  “It was all a game to her. When she finally stopped screaming, she said she had been using me to get back at an ex of hers who had moved on and was engaged. It wasn’t even for sex, because that ended weeks ago, which was probably another problem between us. She was dangling the life I wanted in front of me, making me think that she would be a part of it, and all she did was toss my hopes into a blender and hit puree. I think she was just very unhappy with her life. I have no answers. I don’t want to ever see her again, but I still have so many questions. Why me?”

  Nick was at a place where I wasn’t sure that I was qualified as a friend to help him dig out from. Henry, Emma, or Cooper were probably more equipped to deal with this level of melancholy. They were his friend longer and knew his ups and downs. While I wanted nothing more than to help him, I was worried that I’d only make things worse.

  “Nick, can I call someone for you? Maybe one of the guys can come get you and you can fix up your place a bit?” I offered, reaching for my cell phone, which was near his hand.

  He shook his head. “I have to talk to you. No one else understands me like you do. I honestly thought we had a connection and then—”

  “What? We went through this already. You gave up. I’m not going to apologize for something I had nothing to do with. I can admit I might not have communicated my feelings for you clearly, but you gave up. That is on you.”

  He choked out a laugh. “I misread things. It’s hard to read your intentions when you’re always avoiding seeing my friends. I mean you hid in a closet so you wouldn’t run into Henry. How was I supposed to read that?”

  “You’re mad because I hid in the closet when Henry came over?”

  He was referring to the night that I ventured to Hope Lake as a surprise. I rented a car after I made sure that I had the morning shift at D&V covered. My plan was to stay over and maybe talk about what we were doing, but Henry knocked on the door looking for sugar and I panicked and ran naked upstairs, leaving Nick to explain to his friend why there were women’s clothes strewn about his living room. “I barely got out of there without flashing him! Is that what you wanted?”

  “No!” he roared, tugging at his hair. “I just wish that you didn’t take off. Or make me lie to my friends about who I was seeing because you didn’t want anyone in town to know about us.”

  “I didn’t ask you to lie to anyone, Nick. I just said that we should keep things between us until we knew where it was going. I didn’t want anyone, especially Charlotte, getting their hopes up that we were going to be rounding off their little sextet. And I’m glad we didn’t tell them, because look where we are. No matter how much responsibility I am willing to take in this, you need to own up to the fact that you didn’t give me the opportunity to communicate with you because you gave up. You walked away to find the ‘easier’ route. Don’t you dare blame that on me.”

  Nick slid off the stool and stepped to the wall, taken aback by my words. He toyed with the wrinkled paper from the flowers.

  “Don’t be mad at Charlotte for the flowers. I begged her to make something and she wouldn’t. I think she thought they were for Jillian, not you. That’s why they look so sad. I did it myself.”

  “Nick, I’m not sure what you hoped would happen by coming here. It’s not just me you disappointed, but Mancini, Clara—the lot of them. They were counting on you. I don’t want to add insult to injury, but you’ve got to settle things up with them first. Me—well, I guess we’ll just have to try to work our way back to being friends someday.”

  I wanted to believe what I said. I needed him to believe too, because even after everything, I still wanted to have him in my life somehow. It just had to be on terms that we could both agree on.

  “Parker,” he said quietly, and when he looked up, I felt a rush of emotions toward him. None of which was something that we could discuss tonight. I was too tired, and he was too emotionally and physically drained from everything that had already happened.

  But when he looked at me, at all of me, I felt something else that I wanted to drown with the hot coffee. He eyed the knot in my robe. The exposed skin above my breasts, the towel that covered my hair.

  He stepped forward, slowly at first and then more determined. He stopped just before he reached me. “Nick,” I whispered, again saying his name to remind myself that I was mad at him.

  “Parker, what will it take for you to forgive me?” He sounded so pained that I wanted to hug him and say that everything was okay, but it wasn’t. He wasn’t, an
d I didn’t want to be his rebound.

  Still, we were only a few inches apart, and seeing him this close made my heart skip. Not from the rush of old feelings but from new ones. Sympathy, anger, and a little bit of lust rolled in. All of them, plus sheer exhaustion, made me rise up and ruffle his hair. “We’ll talk another day,” I promised.

  I reached up and kissed him on the cheek, my lips lingering a bit longer than normal. Nick’s chest was rising and falling with shuddering breaths, and when I glanced up at him, his eyes were darker than I had seen them in months.

  Hungry.

  Slowly he leaned down, and I was certain that he was going to capture my lips, but instead he brushed his cheek against mine and dropped a solitary kiss near the birthmark behind my ear.

  My hands slid up and my fingers gripped his biceps, curling themselves into his shirt. “Nick,” I whispered, and dragged my lips across his cheek.

  His hands moved lower until they rested at my waist.

  “Parker.”

  I turned the last few inches until my lips grazed his. It was just a touch. A slight push of our lips together. Our eyes were open, wide, and in shock over what we were chasing.

  It was innocent—the words, the hair ruffle, a simple kiss on the cheek—but it reminded me of that first night we were together on the Fourth of July.

  “You’re in a bad place right now,” I said, still leaning the slightest bit closer.

  “You’re right. You’re always right, and it’s driving me crazy that you’re in that robe, and that I have to leave,” he said, leaning in until I could feel his warm breath on my cheek.

  He placed a tiny kiss just on my jaw. A spot where he once pointed out I had the tiniest birthmark that I never knew about. Whenever we got together, he would kiss that spot just before leaving. I melted into him just enough that his hand rested on the bathrobe knot.

  It could have been so easy to pull it open, but what would that have accomplished? “I won’t be the rebound,” I said honestly, placing my hand over his on the knot.