After what happened last night, all of the strides we’ve made together will be for nothing if he can’t trust me with his heart . . . with the secret I dread he’s been keeping since he was a boy.
“Avery,” he says gently, catching my chin on the edge of his hand. “We’ll talk some more. I just . . . give me a little time to sort it out, all right?”
I nod, relief leaking out of me in a heavy sigh. “All right.”
His palm curves along the side of my face, his eyes filled with tender regard. “All right.”
Mesmerized and so in love my chest aches with it, I watch him stroll toward the bathroom. He’s just disappeared into the spacious en suite when his phone goes off again.
“I got it.” I reach over and grab the device, thinking I’ll just run it to him in the bathroom and he can decide what to do with the persistent caller who’s apparently not about to give up anytime soon.
But then I glance down at the screen and my heart does a small freefall when I see the Florida area code. It could be anyone, but given the way Nick has been acting—given the awful way I found him last night—I know this call isn’t coming f
rom just anyone.
He’s already come back out of the bathroom by the time I take a handful of steps away from the bed, the phone held numbly in my hand. I lift my head and our eyes meet. I’m sure that mine look confused, questioning.
His look is rueful. Haunted.
Resigned.
The phone is still ringing when I hand it to him.
He silences it without even glancing at the display. “My father had a stroke five years ago. I understand it was debilitating. He never recovered, and since then he’s been living in a nursing home south of Miami.”
Nick’s voice is toneless, as if he’s talking about the weather, not the man who raised him, mistreated him . . . nearly killed him the day Nick and he fought for the last time.
“They tell me his dementia has gotten worse in recent months. Apparently he doesn’t remember anymore that we hate each other. Or, hell, maybe he does. For the past couple of months he’s been calling me, but since the bastard can’t talk anymore he just sits there on the other end of the line. Breathing. Waiting. Fucking with my head.”
I walk toward him, trying to find a way to reopen our earlier conversation without pushing him too quickly. I don’t want him to shut me out. “Does the nursing home know this?”
He nods tightly. “His caregivers at the home think it would do him good to have contact with family. Lucky me, I’m it.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I told them I don’t give a damn about what might be good for him. I told them they could tell the son of a bitch I said so.”
A memory niggles at the back of my mind. Something I’ve hardly thought of until now. “That morning at my house, Nick . . . after you spent the night. When I came downstairs you were on the phone with someone and those were almost your exact words. That’s who you were talking about? Your father?”
He clutches the phone in his fist, his expression taut with leashed anger. And pain.
I look at the torment in his handsome face and there’s no need to ask how long he’s been suffering night terrors again. I have no doubt they started around the same time his father began trying to reach him.
“What the fuck does he want from me, Avery? After all this time, does he think we can patch up a lifetime of despisement?” He scoffs brittly. “Does he actually expect he can mistreat me for the first eighteen years of my life then come looking for sympathy because he’s rotting away in a nursing home somewhere? Or isn’t he satisfied that he already fucked me up enough?”
I close the distance between us as he speaks, yearning to ease the agony that’s festering inside him. I want to obliterate the demons that are destroying the man I love.
But in order to do that, first Nick is going to have to face them.
“Maybe those are questions you need to ask your father.”
He glares at me as if I’ve betrayed him just with the suggestion. “Ask him?”
It’s not easy to hold his outraged glower. Our connection is too strong. I feel his anguish and fury simply by looking at his face. And I know something of what he’s going through because I’ve been in a similar hell. One that Nick helped see me through at a time when I was certain I’d never fully heal. I had an ugly secret, too, and if not for him it would still be eating me alive.
“I know what it’s like to carry pain and hatred in your heart,” I remind him. “It’s corrosive. It’s self-administered poison, Nick. The only one it harms is you.”
“I can’t face him again, Avery. I don’t care what he thinks he wants or needs from me now that he’s on death’s door. We’ve already said everything we have to say to each other. I’ve got the goddamn scars to prove it.”