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“Yes.”
“Can I tell you what happened?”
“What happened? What do you mean?”
“With Nate.”
Jesse goes stiff as a board. “What happened? When? I’ll kill him. What happened?”
I brush my fingers over his chest, appreciating how broad it is, how warm and good it feels when I touch him.
“When I was young. After my dad died. The break up.”
He relaxes, but only a tiny bit.
“Yes. If you’re ready to tell me, Angel, I’m here to listen.”
My stomach flutters, and I take a deep breath. I’m going to need it after this.
“Nate and I dated publicly for a while, but everyone thought we broke up way sooner than we did,” I say. “He— God, this is hard.”
“You don’t have to do this.”
“I want to.”Why I’m struggling. Why I’m afraid of loving you.“Nate and I agreed that we would publicly break up after my father died,” I say. “He told me that his fathermadehim agree to do that, so all we had to do was play pretend until things had blown over.”
“Fuck.”
I keep stroking him, and he strokes my arm too, pressing a kiss to my forehead again.
“So, I agreed because I felt… I felt like I didn’t have anyone. I had my friends, sure, but they had their own lives, and I wanted support. I wanted to feel loved. And I thought that Nate and I were in love. So I agreed. We used to meet—” I cut off. “We used to meet in his car. And then, eventually, in his squad car once he had joined up. It went on like that for over a year before I started getting annoyed. He kept feeding me the same story that it was his dad we were hiding from.”
You can do this. It’s not that bad.
“Until I found out that he had been lying to me.” I suck in a breath. “And that he’d been dating around for years. We had spent years fooling around in his squad car, with me hoping that it would lead somewhere. He promised me a ring. A place in his family.”
“That’s fucked up.”
“Yeah. So I spent years with this guy, the only guy I’d ever been with, only to find out it was a lie. I confronted him when we met in his damn squad car that weekend, and he?—”
“If he touched you, I’ll fucking kill him.”
“He didn’t touch me,” I say. “He told me that if the news gets out about us, he’d make my life a living hell, and he’d make sure that my brother never saw the light of day. He married Helen two months later. I’m not even sure about the logistics of how he kept us apart, but I’ve always wanted to tell her. She deserves to know, but I feel like it’s too late.”
“He has no power over you anymore.”
The words make me feel good.
Natedoesn’thave power over me. And Billy’s made his choices.
“I wish things were different,” I say. “I wish I’d never met Nate. I wish?—”
“Your dad?”
“Yes. Yes. I wish that,” I reply. “But I can’t go back in time and change things. I have to live in the present. It’s not a bad place to be.”
Jesse kisses the top of my head, strokes a finger along my cheekbone.
“You’re more than what you’ve been through. You’re more than what he said you were. You have a steel spine, Marci. You hold your head tall when most people would crumble, and I— You’re amazing.”
