Ellen smiled. “Years of practice.”
He ran his hand over his face. Where to start? Jenny? The way he was feeling? The TV show? All of it. Fuck my life.
Jumbled thoughts filled his brain, preventing him from forming a coherent thought to tell Ellen. “I feel like I’m on a precipice. I can’t describe it better than that, Ellen. Everything used to make sense. I felt like I had a purpose and now . . .” Now what? “I don’t know. Everything is just a mess in my mind. I just want to . . .” He let the words hang, unable to articulate what was going on in his head.
“Just want to what, Nik?” Ellen encouraged, placing the popcorn garland down onto the table.
“I just want some space to collect my thoughts before the next thing I am responsible for demands another minute of my life.”
Ellen sighed. “Do you remember when Adam died?”
Of course he did. How could he forget the death of a boy Nik had claimed as part of his own family? His suicide while still living at the home had hit them all hard, especially Elliott who was closest to him and had found his body.
“Do you remember what you did first?” Ellen asked without giving him time to respond.
It was a blur, finding Elliott on his knees next to Adam’s body.
“Not really.”
“Well, I do. You were sixteen, maybe seventeen years old, Nik. And yet you took charge of your brothers. You arranged Adam’s body so he wouldn’t be exposed to the paramedics and police. I was encouraging Elliott to leave Adam’s side, but he wouldn’t, and it was you who finally pried Elliott’s hand away and took him upstairs. You guarded the hallway to save anyone else from seeing what no young child should ever see. And you made tea, Nik. You made me a fucking cup of tea because you’d heard it was good for shock and you brought it to me in Adam’s room.”
Had he? Faded memories of coaxing Elliott away came back to him. “I can vaguely remember that, but I don’t get why it’s relevant.”
Ellen sighed and looked out of the sliding doors into the garden.
“You’ve always looked out for everybody else, Nik, but when it gets too much, you’ve always exploded. Things build up, and build up, and build up. And you don’t know how to stop being there; you don’t know how to stop being needed. You don’t know how to put yourself first, to do anything other than care for everyone else. You’ve been heading up that precipice for a long while.”
“So what do I do about it, Ellen?”
“Sometimes you just have to jump. Do the thing that scares you.”
Nik shook his head. “This coming from the woman who used to yell at me when I got too high in the old tree in the backyard.”
Ellen smiled. “But unlike the times you climbed that tree, now you know how to fall. And now there are people to catch you.”
CHAPTER NINE
“Bye, guys,” Jenny shouted as she left the home. “Be good.”
She looked up at the sky as she stepped out onto the porch. Finally, the awful rain that had been pounding down on them for what felt like a week straight had finally cleared up, but the darkness reminded her that even though it was only four thirty, winter sucked.
“What are you studying all the way up there?” Nik said, pushing his foot off the garden wall and coming to stand at the bottom of the steps to look straight up at her.
Would her heart ever not skip a beat when she saw him? With his dark coat, dark jeans, dark hat and hair, he reminded her of one of those spy movie heroes, the ones who could disappear into the background but had the class of James Bond. “I was thinking how winter is just around the corner.” She wondered if she should say something, apologize maybe for not responding to his messages on Monday, and pretending to be too tired on Tuesday. She should have known when he had asked her when she would be finished today that he would come and find her.
“Come here,” he said and held out his hands toward her.
Taking the two days to herself to figure out what exactly Nik meant to her had proven only two things. They still had unfinished business between them, and it was unfair to herself to pretend otherwise and not explore what they could be. She’d been planning to call him that evening to explain it to him, and perhaps apologize for not communicating with him. So she took his hand and joined him at the bottom of the stairs, for the first time fully embracing the way his skin felt against hers without worry or fear of what she was letting herself in for.
“Are you done hiding from me?” Nik asked.
He knew exactly what she’d done. Of course he had. She hadn’t even tried that hard to hide it. “I think I am,” she answered truthfully. “But you need to know, it isn’t going to take much for me to decide this is a bad idea. I don’t even know how I’ll handle pictures of you meeting fans, going on tour, girls crawling out of the woodwork selling your stories.”
“You’re off work tomorrow, right? When do you have to be at work on Friday?” Nik asked, placing his thumb and index finger around her wrist. His touch scorched in ways such a light touch shouldn’t.
“I’m on the later shift on Friday, but I’d like to be there by noon. Why?” She held her breath the way she had when she was fifteen and Nik had slid his hand into her hair and cradled her gently as he’d kissed her in Queen subway station the day after they’d first gotten together.
“Come away with me. Just you and me. I promise I can have you back in plenty of time on Friday, and I have a million dates to make up for. Please let me cram a couple of them into the time you have off.”
When he looked at her like that, with his eyes so wide and honest, she was lost. “Okay.”
“Okay?” he asked.
“Okay.”
Less than two hours later, Jenny was strapped into a helicopter wearing headphones with a microphone, a small bag tucked into the tiny hold. Muskoka Airport was coming into view through a break in the trees. “Was I a sure thing when you planned all this?” she said, taking in the tail end of the fall show as they passed over another small lake.
Nik raised his hand to her lips and kissed her fingers. “If it makes you feel any better, I only arranged this an hour before I showed up to meet you.”
For the first time since they’d been reunited, she wondered exactly what kind of financial freedom Nik actually had. Not that it mattered. In fact she wasn’t entirely certain that money wasn’t going to be one of their ongoing problems. They’d both started with so little, and while she was financially stable, she was nowhere near Nik’s level of earning. There was no parity between them—and she certainly found surprises like this a little overwhelming—but if she was going to be honest with herself, she needed to unpack all the baggage that they had, including where they were at in their lives. Instead, she reached over and placed her hand on Nik’s cheek. “Thank you,” she said, her stomach flipping as they came in to land.
“Just made it,” a member of the ground crew said as they entered the terminal. “Your car is waiting outside, Mr. Monture.”
“Thanks,” Nik said as he took her hand and led her toward the door. “The airport closes in five minutes, but I didn’t really want anybody here when we arrived.” He stopped in front of a black town car. “For the next day and a half, I want it to be just you and me.”
Jenny had just begun to doze against Nik’s arm, lulled by Michael Bublé’s teeth-hurting Christmas carols, when the car pulled to a stop. “We’re here,” he said, nudging her gently.
The driver opened the door, and she stepped outside to find a beautiful cottage set back against the trees. The wood-clad building was small and welcoming, with warm orange lights illuminating the pathway to the door. Nik came around the car with both of their bags, which he placed at her feet, pulling her into his arms as the driver reversed out of the driveway.
“Nobody knows we’re here except a couple of people paid remarkably well not to tell anyone. It’s just you and me for thirty-six glorious hours.”
She looked up at him and was struck by all the good in him that
she’d forgotten over the years. Her memories blighted by the pain of having been abandoned by him, she’d forgotten his capacity to take care of others. “That sounds perfect,” she said. A cool breeze wrapped itself around them in the darkness. “I think it might be a bit too cold for a dip in the lake though.”
Nik laughed and slipped his jacket off before placing it around her shoulders. “I brought a few extra hoodies, just in case you needed one.”
What had once been a bad memory, the packing up of his hoodies when she’d left, had the makings of being a good one again. “Do we need to meet someone to pick up a key?”
“No,” Nik said as he bent down and grabbed both bags again. “The door should be open, and the key should be on the table. And I arranged for food to be brought in along with wood so that we could make use of the fireplace.”
They walked up the path, and quickly let themselves inside.
Jenny stood speechless in the entrance hall. For a cottage whose exterior looked so unassuming, it was surprisingly beautiful inside. A tall vaulted ceiling ran the length of the main floor, lit up periodically by beautiful golden glass light fittings. The walls were white and the furnishings a pale blue, but the main feature was a giant ceiling-to-floor series of windows at the opposite end of the room. It was too dark to see anything right now, but she could only imagine how beautiful it would look in the morning.
“Nik, look at that fireplace. It’s huge, and it’s open on both sides so you can see it from the kitchen and the living room,” she said as she took in the large stone fireplace with baskets of wood, paper, and kindling on the floor next to it. “It’s stunning, absolutely stunning.” She turned to look at him, but found him staring at her.
“I was thinking exactly the same thing,” he said roughly, reaching for her hand.
His words hung between them as she tried to figure out a response. The heat of his gaze had left her throat dry. She stepped closer toward him, willing him to kiss her, to show her the storm that swirled behind his eyes.
“Let’s go explore,” he said, shaking his head as if to clear it.
She did as he asked and tried to pay attention to the marble counter in the kitchen and the light fittings that looked like huge goldfish bowls that hung above the island. But instead, she found herself studying the way his jeans hugged his butt yet hung low on his hips. And when they opened the doors out to the large patio that was linked by stairs to a dock they couldn’t see properly, she attempted to make all the right murmurs of appreciation while trying not to think about the way his hair, which currently was flipping around in the wind, had looked spread across her thighs.
“Maybe I should get that fire going,” Nik said as they stepped back inside out of the cold. “And there’s a games room on the lower floor. Want a game of—”
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Nik said, returning to the entrance and picking up the bags. “Maybe I should put these in our bedroom first and . . . fuck. Shit. I don’t mean we should fuck. I mean, I’d like to, but I don’t want you to feel like you have to. And that all came out wrong. Never mind. I’m gonna drop these in our room.”
This time she stopped him. “Nik. Talk to me.”
Nik closed his eyes and sighed deeply. “You know that saying about squeezing a bar of soap? How if you squeeze too hard it will pop out of your hands?”
Jenny nodded and stepped toward him. He enveloped her in his strong arms before kissing her gently on the top of her head.
“I feel the same way about you, Jenny. Now that you’re back, I’m terrified you’re going to go again . . . that I’m going to say the wrong thing, or do the wrong thing. I knew when I dropped you off on Monday that you needed space, but by Tuesday when I didn’t hear from you, I . . . Well, nothing is making sense in my world right now but you.”
She wrapped her arms even more tightly around his middle. “And I’m scared that you are going to head off on this tour of yours and you aren’t going to come home to me. Again.”
He flinched at her words. “We’re going to fix us.”
“Let’s just take it slowly. Like you said. Let’s date. We can’t go from where we are to somewhere like we were in on giant step.” She took his hand and led him to the living room. “You start on the fire, I’m going to see what food was left for us. We’ll eat and go from there.”
From behind her, Nik playfully slipped his hands around her waist and under her light sweater. “Do the dates have to happen in the right order?” he asked.
Jenny grabbed his hands and removed them. “I’m pretty sure they should.” No matter how badly she had the same urges, their sex life wasn’t what needed attention. It was everything else. She wasn’t ready to open her heart to him just yet.
Nik nudged her head to one side with his nose and ran his lips along the side of her neck. “I like breaking rules.”
“Well, I’m hungry and you promised me food,” she said, tugging away from him and laughing as he groaned.
The fridge was packed with all sorts of goodies. She pulled out steaks along with some vegetables. “Do you feel like lighting up the grill outside?” she asked.
“Sure thing, babe. Just let me get the fire going.”
As she watched him arrange the crumpled paper, kindling, and a couple of the smaller logs in the fire place, she prepared the vegetables, chopping them and covering them with olive oil and seasoning so they could be grilled too. The familiar rasp of a match being dragged along the box edge was the only sound she heard. This felt normal, domesticated even, and it made her smile. Perhaps they could find their way back to an even footing.
As the fire began to take, Nik came into the kitchen. She pushed the steaks and veggies over the island. “If you want to grill those, I can make a salad.”
Nik placed his hand over hers for a moment longer than was necessary, and she looked up at him. He smiled, a genuine one that reached his eyes, and she could see the happiness coming from him.
She felt it too.
Once the food was prepared, they sat down at the wooden table. She’d found some candles in a drawer and some glasses for their sparkling water. While she’d been making the salad, she’d made the decision to tell him about her dad.
“My father has been in touch with me recently. He sent me a letter through my lawyer,” she said. “You remember he tried when I turned eighteen and then he tried again when I was twenty-one, both of which I ignored. But he wrote me again about a week ago.”
“What did the asshole want this time?” Nik asked.
“Same old. Wanted to talk, felt like he changed, and was being transferred to Millhaven Institution, a max-security prison. I wrote back to him and told him that I wasn’t interested, and now I’m questioning why I even did that much.”
Nik waited until he had finished chewing. “Why are you second-guessing?” he asked.
“Honestly? I don’t know. It’s not like I said anything mind-blowingly interesting. Just that there would never be enough water under the bridge between us. That I didn’t want any kind of relationship with him.”
His hand reached for hers. “I don’t know if I ever told you, but I once got a letter from the man who stabbed me and killed my mom. Said the same kind of thing. How he was sorry, that he’d suffered from mental health issues, and that he wanted to know how to make amends.”
Jenny loaded some of the roasted vegetables onto her fork. “How did you handle it?”
“I didn’t. It happened when I was thirteen, and I honestly thought somebody was going to try to make me see him. I guess with all the other shit that was happening in the foster home I was living in the time, it just felt like the last straw. It was part of why I ran.”
“Oh, Nik. I hate that that happened to you.”
“Neither of us had it particularly easy.”
They ate the rest of their dinner in a comfortable silence. As they cleaned up the kitchen, she decided to tell him the truth. “I think I do know why I repl
ied to him,” she said. “I know it’s totally messed up, but it’s been a long time in my life since somebody has wanted me for being me. I’m not looking for pity or anything like that because we’ve all had pretty messed up lives, but I’ve never really been enough for anybody. I was the odd one out at the commune, and then I suffered from those dissociative episodes at school, and everyone thought I was a freak. Then you and I . . . so many examples. I mean . . . I don’t want to speak to him, but for a second it felt like someone wanted me or . . .”
“Jenny, stop,” Nik said. “Come with me.” He led her outside and pointed up to the sky. “What do you see up there?”
Jenny shook her head. “You know me better than that, Nik. I try not look up there unless I’m trying to figure out if it’s going to rain. When we lived at the compound, I had to spend hours looking up at the sky waiting for the comet that was supposed to save us.”
“Humor me. Just look up.”
She did as he asked and saw a million bright white stars in the inky black of the sky. She shivered as she did so, partly in memory of all the nights she’d been part of the watch—the women sent out in thin white dresses to act as sentinels to watch for any unidentified comets—and partly because it was cold out by the lake and her sweater too thin.
“Those stars have been in those positions on this date and at this time for, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of years,” Nik said, pulling his hoodie off over his head. “Every culture has different names and stories about them, but regardless of what we call them, they’ve always been there.”
He slid his hoodie over her head, and she immediately felt the benefit. It smelled of him. Then he surprised her by taking the T-shirt off he’d worn underneath. “Nik, you’re going to freeze.”
He ran his hand over the tattoo on his shoulder. “See these lines and dots? They are those,” he said, pointing upward while keeping his focus completely on her. “They’re star maps, the location of stars on a certain day and time.”
Jenny gasped. “Why would you do that?
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