by Leach, Kiki
She was startled by the sudden boom in his voice but not completely unnerved. She folded her arms even tighter across her chest and peered.
“I’m not here to give you the third degree for what happened back then, alright?” he said, though Vanessa remained skeptical thanks to how harsh he sounded. “I just want to talk to you about the here and now. More specifically about the part I played in bringing Adrian to the Hamptons in the first place.”
That made something inside of her snap like a twig.
“The part you played?” She reached forward and unlocked the door, purposely yanking it back as hard as she could. Nathan stumbled forward but quickly straightened himself and cleared his throat. Vanessa rested one hand on the door and arched a brow. “You mean the sole reason he was even able to find my house on a map in the first damn place. Are you here to apologize for the bullshit stunt you pulled in parading him out in front of us like cheap cattle?”
He shifted his eyes to the corner and with a somewhat guilty look plaguing them, tilted his head and soured. “Not exactly.”
“Then goodnight, Nathan.”
As she attempted to slam the door in his face, he stopped it with the toe of his shoe. “V, wait,” he said, kicking it back. “I said ‘not exactly’, I didn’t say I wasn’t here to apologize about what happened at all.”
“What you did has really fucked things up for me again, do you realize that?”
“I figured that it would, and I’m sorry about it,” he said. “I wasn’t before, but I’ve had time to reflect on what I did to you. Now can I come in so that we can talk about why I did it in the first place?”
“I know why you did it, because of my relationship with Maurice. No need to talk any more about it when it was clear the moment you showed up that night that you were looking for a fight between the both of us. You found it in me and rightfully so. Now, goodnight.”
She tried slamming the door again, but this time, Nathan shoved it back with his hand.
“Vanessa,” he said, stern. His eyes bore down into hers and she quickly dropped her hand from the door and took a step back. “You need to hear the exact reason why I felt pushed into doing what I did that night.”
“Felt push--?” She stopped almost immediately and pinched the bridge of her nose to keep from backhanding him across the face and forcing him right down the stairs and into oncoming traffic. “You know what, if it will get you the hell out of my house and one step further from my life, then fine. Come in and tell me what you feel like I need to hear then get the hell out.”
He moved past her and shuffled into the living room. Vanessa watched as he moved and shook her head. He still looked damn good in a pair of fitted slacks and a white button down; his body remained as sick as ever.
Nevertheless, she wasn’t in any mood to deal with him or his shit.
After closing the door, she made her way into the room and leaned back against the frame of the wall. Nathan took a seat at the center of the couch and bent forward, resting his arms on his knees and interlacing his fingers. Vanessa glanced over at the clock. It was almost 11:15 now and she was more than annoyed at how much time had already been spent in dealing with him before even making it inside.
Nathan nervously fiddled with his hands and stared up at her, deliberately waiting for her to speak first. She could feel it in her bones and tell from the look in his eye that this wasn’t going to go as smoothly as she would’ve liked.
She groaned at the thought of him spending more time there than necessary and clucked her tongue.
“You said that you wanted to talk, right?” she told him. “So talk. Why did you see it fit to fuck up my relationship with Maurice, or at least attempt to?”
“Because I was angry.”
She knit her brows. “No shit. It still doesn’t give you the right to be an asshole about it.”
“That’s not what I--” Growing frustrated with her blatant flippancy, he sat up straight to readjust himself at the edge of the couch and dragged his hands down his face and to his throat. “When I first realized that you two were together, it made me feel some kind of way about it. Maurice and I may not be much now, but he was my boy at one time when we were kids. I knew he always had a thing for you – everybody did. But I never thought that you two would actually become something solid.”
She scrunched her face and shook her head, confused. “Why is that?”
“Cause I thought, maybe, that you’d always belong to me.”
“What, like I was your property?”
“V… Shit.” He dropped his face in his hand and exhaled. “You’re making this difficult as hell.”
“I’m not the one being cryptic as hell,” she replied.
“Alright.” He sighed, straightening himself again. “What I meant in saying that is, even though we weren’t together and I was with Sheila, I still thought there was a chance for us to be the endgame of this story.”
“Nathan, we are a walking, talking Grimm’s fairytale, which is probably something I should’ve realized long before you came back. Besides, you already knew that this wasn’t happening again by then so what the hell made you suddenly flip your shit to the point that you needed to prove just how much of an asshole you can truly be? Not only to me but to everyone else who told me so from the very beginning?”
“I’m getting to that,” he snapped.
“Well make it snappy.” She bent forward and popped her fingers. “I’ve got a deadline, a photoshoot in Central Park that I need to organize since I won’t be there for it, and I still need to finish cleaning the dishes for this stupid dinner I’m forced to give for Felicia on Friday. I don’t have all night to play a damn game of charades with your ass.”
Nathan jumped up from the couch and roamed around the room. His fingers grazed everything from her bookshelf to the silk curtains covering her floor length windows.
He slapped his hands together and rubbed them back and forth, then took a deep breath and spun on his heels.
Vanessa was turned away from him, her eyes much like her mind now on something else entirely. But Nathan couldn’t help staring at her. Even with her hair a mess, and wearing another man’s shirt, she was still the most beautiful woman he had ever known.
“I wanted to destroy you that night in the Hamptons.” He nervously chuckled and pressed the palms of his hands together as hard as he could. “I was so angry that I couldn’t see straight…” He stopped and rubbed his index and thumb across his eyebrows, using the method as an attempt to keep his shit in check and from completely blowing his fuse. “Do you remember our first date back in high school?” he asked. “The first time I actually took you out to a dinner that wasn’t cooked by Alexander?”
Vanessa’s eyes shifted toward him and she sneered. “Not anymore, not like I used to, no.”
“I took you to a sushi restaurant in SoHo that’s closed down now, The Wok, or something. You wore a blue silk dress that a designer friend of your mother’s made especially for that night. You told me about that dress all week over the phone and said that you couldn’t wait for me to see it ‘cause it showed off your legs, and you wanted me to see just how good your legs looked in that dress.”
He cracked a small smile, as did she.
“And you had on a pair of black platform shoes that were covered in glitter or some shit. You said they belonged to your mother, and that she had never let you wear them before our night together. Your hair was down and around your face, and you were wearing the necklace that I had gotten you for Christmas the year before as your ‘Secret Santa’. I remember the look on your face when you opened that box and saw that diamond in the center. And the way you kissed me after I told you that I was the one who had bought it for you…” He paused and crinkled his brows recalling that exact moment between them. He’d never say it aloud, but it still took his breath away. “I remember that night like it was yesterday and I’ve been playing it over and over and over again in my mind since coming back here.”
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Vanessa might have smiled at the memory, but it wasn’t one she was so eager or quick to recall for herself.
“Why do you think about that night so much?” she asked, genuinely curious.
“Because I’m starting to wonder if it might have been the beginning of the end for us, not just as friends, but as everything.”
She turned away and slightly rolled her eyes. “You’re starting to sound like a babbling drunk--”
“We had sex for the first time that night,” he said. “Remember? Before I took you back home, I brought you back to my house first because I wanted to show you the remodeling of my bedroom. But I could tell from the look on your face that you had figured out why we really took that detour. After you sat down on my bed, I sat down beside you. And I slid my hand beneath that dress, all the way up between your legs, and told you that my parents wouldn’t be back from Pittsburg for another week, and that I wanted you to stay the night. You said you couldn’t because Alexis would kill us both, and so you didn’t.” He eyed her up and down and gulped. “But you kept my hand there, so I pushed it further. And when I hit that spot, you told me that you could stay long enough for us to be together. Do you remember it now?”
“Yeah, sure.” She swallowed back the pain of that memory, and tried to shake the warmth that she felt in his hand being there for the first time, from her mind entirely. “It’s all coming back to me now in a tortuous flood – what the hell does any of this have to do with the stunt you pulled in the Hamptons?”
“Everything, V,” he said, his voice softer. “It’s got everything to do with it and you don’t even know.”
“No, I don’t know! Because you keep dancing around what you should actually be telling me. Reminiscing about another night that I don’t even want to remember isn’t exactly my idea of a poppin’ Wednesday night, Nathan -- !”
“Look, you told me that I was the first person you had ever been with,” he interjected. “That I was the only person you ever wanted to be with. You told me all of this while I was still inside of you and that made me feel…” He paused and exhaled sharply. “It made me feel like a man, Vanessa. You made me feel like a man for the first time in my life that night.”
“Good grief,” she murmured.
“I didn’t ever want you to be with anyone else in the same way after that, not in the same way you were with me.”
She turned her eyes up and sighed. “That was an unrealistic expectation,” she said.
“I get that now,” he retorted. “But that night mattered a hell of a lot to me V. It’s been one I have carried around with me for years and I knew, or at least I thought I knew, that it was special to you too and that maybe… maybe you felt the same way about it to the point where you--”
“Carried it around with me too?” She bobbed her head back and forth and sighed. “I mean it was special to me at the time, for a long time actually. But truth be told, if I had known that it would’ve turned into a complete mess not long after that, I would’ve kept my legs closed and waited until I was thirty or at least for somebody I was sure I’d never see again.”
“Why for someone you would never see again?”
She threw her arm out to the side and tilted her head. “To avoid shit just like this, Nathan.”
He nodded in response, his face now somber.
“Right.”
“Now can we move this along because I still have shit that I need to do and all I’m starting to feel aside from annoyance with this entire conversation, is that you’re just here to waste my damn time--”
“Alright,” he disrupted. “Alright.” Placing one hand in the palm of the other, he took a deep breath and continued. “Vanessa that night we were together, is the night that I thought you’d be mine for good. And that everything you had, belonged to me in some way.”
“Did you still feel that way after being with Sheila?”
“About you?” He was quick to nod. “Yeah, I did.”
“So basically what you’re telling me is that it was okay for you to screw around, but not me. Gotcha--”
“When I saw you with Maurice at the opening for Angelino’s, even before we talked, it fucked something up inside of me. And then when you told me that you weren’t afraid of exploring something beyond your friendship with him, I wasn’t prepared for it; not as much as I probably should’ve been. Sheila had been trying to push up the wedding date and up until that night, I had been hoping to keep it as far away as possible, if only to completely cancel it at some point in the hopes that we’d…” He pointed between himself and Vanessa, then stopped turned his head.
Vanesa became uncomfortable and began to squirm in her own skin.
“But after that night, I agreed to move up the date just like she wanted. I considered that being miserable with her was better than being alone, or without you. But then something happened,” he said. “I saw you with Maurice again. And I heard how you called out his name in a way that you had never called for mine before. You two were so wrapped up in each other that you didn’t even realize I was here.”
“What?” A mixture of anger and revulsion began to encapsulate her from the inside out as she slowly came to realize exactly what he meant. “‘Here’ as inside my house?” He remained silent. “What the hell were you doing inside my house – ?!”
“I came by to see you, to talk about Adrian. After talking to Joan earlier in the day, I felt like I needed to know how it all started with him and why. If it was because of me and what I did to you--”
“If it was because of you? Arrogant, selfish, piece of shi--”
“I’m not finished--”
“Well get to it!” she yelled out. She rested a hand on her head, so nervous to hear what he had to say, she began shaking. They both noticed and when she saw him reaching out for her hand, she immediately dropped it and stepped back.
He exhaled and spoke as calmly as he could. “I came out here that night, after having dinner with Sheila, because I couldn’t get to you earlier in the day, knowing that you were working. And I didn’t want to disrupt you at the office again.”
“Gee, thanks.”
He shook his head. “And so I waited when I thought that you were home. I wanted to get you alone, but I knew that wasn’t likely, so I tried calling instead, but no one answered.”
“So you thought showing up here would be a much better idea?”
“I thought there was a chance you could slam the door in my face, but it was a chance I was willing to take to get the answers I needed.”
“What answers?! So far it seems that the only reason you even wanted to know about my relationship with Adrian was to boost your own damn ego.”
“That’s not true, V.”
“Oh yeah, it is. Otherwise, you would’ve left it alone because my relationship with him had absolutely nothing to do with you, which is something you would’ve realized had you been able to pull your oversized head out of your own damn ass long enough to understand that my love life doesn’t revolve around you and ‘what we had’. If anything, my relationship with Adrian was in reaction to the relationship that had originally fizzled out between me and Maurice. I didn’t start seeing Adrian until THAT blew up in my face when I was in college, long after you and Sheila flew New York’s coop.”
Nathan dropped back down to the edge of the couch. His heart sank down deep to the fiery pool of acid in his stomach. He ran his hand down his face again, then stopped to cover his mouth and turned his hazel eyes back up to Vanessa. She still looked like an angel to him, one who now possessed the sweet tongue of the devil.
“You were with Adrian…” He took in a breath. “Because you couldn’t make things work with Maurice?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“It sounded like that’s what you meant.”
“What the hell difference does it make now, Nathan?!” she asked him. “I want to know what the hell you saw between me and Maurice when you came here on the night you’re talking abou
t.”
“I saw you together,” he said, jumping back up. “Too wrapped up in each other to realize I was even here, just like I said.”
Vanessa leaned away from the wall and dropped back on her heels. While staring into the rage filling Nathan’s eyes, she covered her mouth and sank her shoulders.
“Oh my God.” She placed a hand on her chest to keep from hyperventilating. It was no use as the breaths came quicker and harder. She bent forward to try and reduce how many she took in.
Under any other circumstance, she might have told him it served him right to see her making love to a man who actually seemed to give a damn about how he made her feel and not the other way around. But after everything that happened, and finally understanding that it was the trigger of seeing them together which had sent Nathan over the edge, she couldn’t help but be both mortified and livid that he had stolen such an intimate moment between them and used it to his own advantage to screw them out of eventual happiness.
“Do you even realize what the hell you’ve done?” she asked him. She covered her face and bent forward again.
Seeing the woman he loved struggling to breathe because of his own actions was like a direct punch to the gut with a steel iron. Nathan wanted her to feel the pain he felt that night and then some, but he didn’t expect it to be so harrowing for himself as well. He moved up behind and slid his arms around her shoulders and down her arms, trying to calm her. He pulled her back against him and pressed his face into her hair.
“Vanessa, I--”
“GET OFF OF ME!” She scrambled out of his arms like a wayward child and turned to look him in the face. Her eyes were as wild as her hair, her fingers were clawed as if she had been ready to dig hard and deep into his skin had he gotten any closer.
Nathan backed away. “V,” he said again.
“What you did…” she told him, seething; her chest rose slowly and lowered as her breathing increased. “…what you did in watching us together was incomprehensible. I don’t want to hear any more of this trash – I want you to get the hell out of my house.”
