29. Most Important Things to Nathan Hunt

TWENTY-NINE

#1 Isla

"Some of it is true," Nathan said after we had scooted back to lean against a mirror, side by side under the barre. He stretched out his long legs, big feet flopping to the side. "She was a dancer like you, yes. And I did meet her in the strip club where she worked." He looked adorably bashful. "Some of the players on the baseball team took me when I turned twenty-one."

"Carrick told me that part," I said. "And no judgment, really, if that's your thing."

I received a sidelong glance. "It's not."

I chose not to fight him on that. I found I liked him better for it. "So, what, you fell in love?"

Nathan immediately shook his head. "Definitely not. I…" Almost unconsciously, he picked up my hand and started tracing his thumb over my knuckles while he spoke. "I wasn't very good with girls. With women. I'm still not."

"I don't know about that."

For that, I only received another very dry look that made me giggle. Nathan cracked a smile, which made me laugh harder.

"Maybe there is some truth to Carrick's version," Nathan admitted. "But I don't know if Lindsay knew I had money when we first met. I doubt it. I would have just looked like another college student."

I sincerely doubted that, but didn't say it. Even in casual clothes, Nathan carried himself with the confidence and poise that I suspected only came from the highest levels of breeding. A quiet pedigree, but a pedigree, nonetheless.

"I think she liked that I was the only person in our party who didn't order a lap dance," he went on. "When my teammates bought me time with her in a private room, we just talked. She didn't seem to mind that I wasn't outgoing or that I was content to let her speak. When she asked at the end of the time if I would be interested in a date, I said yes."

"You didn't care that she was a stripper?"

"It's a job," he replied with a shrug. "As long as she was happy and treated well, why should it matter? Although, to be fair, when I turned twenty-one, I still hadn't had intercourse with anyone yet, and I really wanted to."

I blinked. A few months ago, I would have been shocked by that information. If Nathan had been one of the nerds at my high school, I probably would have cornered him under the bleachers and never let him go.

But now that I knew him, I could easily imagine how hard it would have been for him to talk to girls at that age. Flirting was all about innuendo and facial expressions and unspoken hints—all things he struggled with.

He kept going without an iota of shame. "We saw each other for a few weeks before she told me about her daughter. And at first, I thought it wasn't a great idea to date a single parent. Additionally, even before I realized that Lindsay struggled with addiction, I knew she wasn't someone I would ever have a serious relationship with. We were too different."

I frowned at our joined hands, now resting on Nathan's thigh. "We're different."

"In some ways. But…I believe I understand you, Joni. And I think you understand me."

My knee-jerk reaction was to argue, but I couldn't. In the space of a month, Nathan had transformed from an abrupt, imperious doctor and grumpy customer into one of the kindest, most genuine people I'd ever met. He said what he meant and meant what he said. He expected and even valued the same from others. He didn't need flashy fashion or flirtatious grins or suggestive comments to make him happy.

He just needed the truth.

Huh. Apparently, we did have something in common. Something big.

"I was going to break up with her the day I met Isla. Lindsay and I were meeting at a park, and she brought her daughter. This very small, very smart little girl who seemed to struggle with certain things, like new spaces and certain noises."

Isla, it turned out, was autistic. As Nathan told it, she also struggled with a lot more than the communication issues he dealt with, although that was certainly part of it. She also had intense sensory issues that often prevented her from eating enough, could not tolerate many changes to her routine, and suffered from extreme anxiety for someone so young, among other elements of the spectrum.

But she liked Nathan. A lot.

"I didn't think I could break up with her mother with her there. But every time I saw her after that, Lindsay always had Isla with her. And eventually, Isla became attached."

"Of course she did," I said. "Who wouldn't?"

"Most people," Nathan said dryly.

"Then most people are idiots." I gave his hand a shake. "You don't know how wonderful you are."

He was quiet a moment. "Thank you."

"You're welcome. Now tell me the rest."

He sighed. "At some point, it became clear that Lindsay had a drug issue, which wasn't good for Isla for obvious reasons that were even more intense because of her ASD diagnosis. I finally figured it out when I got a call from Isla's school asking me to pick her up because her mother couldn't be found. I was listed as the emergency number." He huffed. "We found Lindsay at her apartment. She was in the middle of pulling her car apart on the street. The dashboard had been pulled up and was on the sidewalk." He looked at me. "She was searching for a rock."

"I'm assuming you mean meth." People didn't tear apart their cars for pebbles.

Nathan nodded. "That was when I knew I couldn't just leave her. Isla, I mean. So I stayed. I tried to help her and her mother too. Lindsay and I even got engaged so I would be able to provide them both with healthcare as a domestic partnership. Rehab for Lindsay. Occupational therapy for Isla."

"So…that's who you said you were going to marry?" I said.

Nathan's eyes swerved to me, dark and sharp. "I said we were engaged. I never said I was going to marry her. It's different."

"Not to most people."

"Well, it was to me."

What did that mean?

"You couldn't just…pay for the health insurance?" I asked instead of the question I really wanted to know. My thoughts were dancing all over the place. This story had me reeling.

Nathan shook his head. "My parents have the money, not me. They had cut me off just for going to Duke, so at that age, I was surviving on scholarship funds and what I earned working at a stable in Durham. I didn't come into my trust fund until I was thirty, and even then, it was most stocks in the company. The apartment and everything else I have now belong to me. It's what I have earned for myself."

"That's a lot for a twenty-one-year-old to handle," I remarked, though I couldn't help thinking of my brother or Lea, taking care of the rest of us when we were small. Or Frankie, who had Sofia on her own at twenty-three. "Your parents wouldn't help you?"

Nathan shook his head. "Absolutely not. We weren't speaking much during those years anyway. They definitely didn't approve of Lindsay."

Jerks. I hadn't even met Nathan's parents yet, but I had a feeling I wouldn't like them when I did. This was a little girl we were talking about. Someone their son obviously cared about, and they hadn't lifted a finger for her.

"It wasn't enough, though," he said. "Isla was with her mom when Lindsay died. She took her with her to her dealer, some man in a trailer in the woods that I guess Lindsay was also working with. There was an explosion. Isla managed to get out, but she was badly burned. She's had several surgeries over the years to repair the damage, but it was quite disfiguring."

So that part was true too. Jesus.

"None of this sounds that different from the story Carrick told me," I admitted.

"There are some differences."

"Like what?"

"For one, I didn't love Lindsay." He looked at me, his brown eyes wider than ever. "I never loved her. At all. I told you I was engaged in college, and it's true. But it wasn't because I loved Lindsay. It was because I came to love her daughter."

I digested that for a moment. Went back over the relationships he'd listed. If Lindsay and the fiancée were one and the same, that meant the woman I'd imagined was the one who was fake. A complete figment of my overactive imagination.

So, who was he asking for in his sleep?

Was it still this girl's mother? This woman he never really wanted to be with?

It didn't make sense.

"So what happened to Isla?" I pressed. "Where is she now?"

Nathan sighed. "She's seventeen. I pay for her to attend a boarding school in Virginia for autistic children. She's doing well. Enough that I think she'll be able to attend college with some accommodations." He looked at me with a pride that could only be described as paternal. "She's very bright."

"So you said," I said. "Seems like everything is all right now."

"It will be after she turns eighteen." Nathan sighed. "Until then, things are…complicated."

"Complicated, how?"

He turned. "After Lindsay died, my parents used their connections in the North Carolina court system to become Isla's foster parents. And then, eventually, her legal guardians."

"They adopted her?"

Nathan shook his head. "No. They just make her decisions officially since when her mother died, the courts said I was too young to become her guardian. I pay for everything, but they have to consent and sign the papers. And right now, they are proposing to send her back to North Carolina to live with some of Lindsay's distant family. In a trailer park. The effect of that kind of change on someone like Isla, being ripped from everything she knows, placed in an environment like that, would be disastrous."

Suddenly, everything made sense. The strange hold Nathan's parents had on their thirty-four-year-old son. The fact that this man, who so staunchly marched to the beat of his own drum, was willing to go so far as to fake a relationship to appease them. Isla's guardianship was clearly the tool they used to get what they wanted from the son, who otherwise wouldn't come to heel.

No wonder he was so intent on giving them what they wanted. It wasn't for them. It was for her.

If only I didn't mess it up.

I turned. "Nathan, I think you need a different fake girlfriend. Or fiancée. You know."

His head whipped around. "What?"

"I think…no, I know…I can't…the stakes are too high." I scrubbed my face, willing myself to find the words that just wouldn't come. "I don't want to mess things up for you, and I think I already have. Your brother knows what I do, and obviously, your parents won't be thrilled with it either. You need someone they won't find issues with, you know?"

"Joni."

"Maybe that Charlotte person," I rattled on. "We already know she likes you, and she's pretty. I bet she'd play arm candy in a hot second, even if she knows it's just a ruse, and then maybe you'll come to?—"

"Joni, stop."

"I won't!" I was practically shouting now as I jumped off the ground and started pacing around the studio. "It's too important. You can't tell me a story like that, show me that a girl's whole future literally depends on me playing a part, and then expect me, of all people, to not fuck it up."

"Why?" Nathan demanded as he stood himself and started pacing with me. "Give me one good reason you can't do this."

"I don't have one reason, I've got a million."

"Tell me."

"No," I said as I whirled around in a corner.

"Why not?"

"Because you don't want to hear them all!" I shrieked. "Trust me, you don't. You don't want to hear that I started school a year late because my grandma thought I was too stupid for fucking kindergarten. You don't want to hear that I made out with at least three different teachers just to pass high school or that I lost my virginity at fourteen to a twenty-three-year-old man who still holds more power over me than the IRS. And you don't want to hear that, yes, I let rich men look at my tits while I serve them drinks because if I can't dance, it's the next best thing my body is good for in a world that didn't give me anything else to work with."

Nathan remained silent. I waited for him to answer. To say anything. And when he didn't, I collapsed against the mirror as I wrapped my arms around my waist.

"But here's the main reason," I said, voice choked through my quiet, chest-wrenching sobs. "I can't pretend anymore with you because it's not pretend for me. I will mess this up. I will. And then Isla's life will be ruined, and so your life will be ruined, and I won't do it, Nathan, because I lo—because I c-care about you too much to hurt you that way."

We stood like that for a long time, each at a different side of the studio, our reflections bouncing off into a million different versions of the same horrible impasse. The same space between us, filled only with my silent tears and the feeling like my chest was being ripped apart from the inside.

God, what I wouldn't give for that space to close. For one more night in his arms, even if I never got anything else. These feelings were too much to bear otherwise.

Please, I begged God, the universe, anyone who was listening. I'd said what I needed to stay. Now, I just wanted this pain to stop.

And by some miracle, the universe heard me.

Nathan started to walk across the studio, one step at a time, until he was standing in front of me. Then he took me by the shoulders and wrapped his big arms around me, one hand at my waist, the other cradling the back of my head as he pressed it into his shoulder and rocked me lightly until my sobs subsided into the occasional hiccup.

A low hum vibrated in his chest. Not music per se, but just as melodic and calming. At least to me, while I poured my heart out into that broad, sandalwood-scent chest.

Finally, when I had stopped crying enough to speak again, I pressed back to look up at him.

"You don't need another burden," I whispered. "And that's all I am. That's all I'll ever be to anyone."

Slowly, Nathan reached out and, with his thumb, wiped away a final tear I didn't even know was falling down my cheek.

"You're not a burden, Joni," he said almost as softly but clearly. "You're a gift."

"A gift of what?" I couldn't find it in me to joke. But I couldn't for the life of me see what he meant.

He was quiet a moment more, which I was learning just meant he was gathering his thoughts. I wondered if he was like me, and they ran crazy in his head too. I wondered if I could learn to pause like that one day. If it would make me a comfort to someone else the way he was to me right now.

"All my life, I've known I wasn't like others," he said at last. "It's the first thing people say about me. How serious I am. How unfeeling. There have been exactly two people I've ever met who never cared that I was different or said anything about it because they accepted me exactly as I am. One of them was a four-year-old child with autism. And the other is you." He reached out to cup my cheek. "I think I give you the same, don't I?"

I thought about it as I blinked back tears. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized he was right.

There was one thing that we could both give freely to each other. Something that was nearly impossible to get in this cruel world. Something I'd never had from my family or my friends, let alone boyfriends.

Acceptance. Simple, pure, and true.

Somehow, in this crazy process, Nathan and I had become something even more important than lovers.

We'd become friends. Deep and real friends. The kind I'd never had.

But as soon as the warmth of that realization wrapped around me, a different realization sliced it away. Something truly awful. Something that would end this friendship as soon as it had started: acceptance wasn't enough.

"Do you say everything you mean to me?" I asked, mostly because I had to. "Really and truly, all the time?"

Nathan looked at me for a long time. "Not all the time," he admitted. "There are some things I keep to myself."

"Good things?"

I was sort of teasing, but he nodded, serious as ever.

"When you think them, you should say them," I said. "Rule number three, remember? ‘If you see something you like, tell her. Every time.'"

Nathan's eyes were deep. Mournful.

"You don't want that," he said. "No one would want that."

Heart thumping, I clasped his face, forcing him to look at me. Forcing my hands not to shake while I asked, "Why is that?"

His chin quivered. "Because with you…" He swallowed thickly. "With you, I think them all the time."

"You—you think what?" I stumbled. It couldn't be. There was no way.

But he only pulled me closer so he could frame my face with his hands just as I was doing. Making sure I was listening. Making sure I heard him.

"I don't care what you do for work," he said. "And I don't care if you can't clean up a kitchen. I don't care if you were good at school, or dance, or anything else you tried. I just want you to be exactly as you are. I like you—honestly, I'm kind of obsessed with you, Joni, just the way you are."

I sucked in a breath but found I was shaking so hard I could barely exhale.

"You—you are?"

Nathan's eyes glimmered with promise. "I am. And I'm not pretending anymore either."

Then he kissed me. Without an audience. Without a single soul to convince.

And this time, he didn't stop.