Provocative (Tempting Book 3) (12 page)

T
he following morning
, I ate my cereal at the island, looking through my upcoming assignments in my planner. Nathan studiously ignored me all morning, and I was still deciding how I felt about that. Should I be relieved that he wasn’t being amiable with me, acting like nothing happened? Or should I be upset that he hadn’t apologized to me first?

Instead, I distracted myself with assignments, mentally prioritizing which to do first and which could be set aside when my phone buzzed.

I hadn’t talked to Leo in a week or two due to our busy schedules, so seeing his name made me feel the first bit of lightness I’d felt in a while.

I laughed lightly at that, because it was true—especially since I’d quit the campus coffee shop earlier in the summer to focus on school.

“Who’s making you laugh?”

I turned on my stool, eyes catching on Nathan in the corner of the kitchen.

It speaks
, I thought. “Leo.” I turned my attention back to bowl of cereal and frowned at the soggier pieces. I watched as Nathan moved through the kitchen and poured himself a large cup of coffee. The skin around his eyes was dark and a tad swollen, a product of the alcohol he’d had. He said nothing else before he took that first big sip.

I’d left the box of cereal on the opposite side of the kitchen island, next to where he stood. I waited for him to say something, to acknowledge that it wasn’t tidily put away. But he simply ignored it—as I was becoming accustomed to.

Where was my Nathan? I’d had barely a glimpse of his disarming smile, only a taste of his desperation for me. I ached, deep in my gut, for who we were when there wasn’t so much darkness between us.
Come back to me,
I screamed in my head.

But we both stayed silent as he drank his coffee and read from the paper in his hands and I checked off items in my planner to pay attention to.

My phone buzzed again and I glanced at the notification that spread across my screen. Another text from Leo.

The missus was Leo’s girlfriend, Scarlet. They were disgustingly perfect for one another, and while I was warming to Scarlet, I wasn’t keen to spend time with both of them at the same time. Witnessing their relationship only made mine feel darker, heavier.

“What does he want?” Nathan asked, his voice hoarse and his eyes still trained on his paper.

Setting my phone down, I said, “He wants to go out with me tonight, to catch up.”

Nathan didn’t say anything, just made some kind of grunt in the back of his throat and still didn’t look at me. I was starting to feel like the bust of Alexander the Great he kept in the hallway—just there for decoration.

“I don’t speak caveman,” I said. “Grunts don’t translate well.”

“I was just thinking…” he began, and an uneasy feeling settled in my chest. This was going to be an argument. “Do you really need to do that?”

I set my spoon down and pushed the bowl of soggy cereal away from me. “What is it you object to? Me going out, or me going out with Leo?”

He glanced up at me from his paper. “Mostly the first part. Maybe a little bit of the latter.”

“Why?”

“You just had…” His eyes dipped to where my stomach was concealed by the island counter, and I sucked in a breath. He cleared his throat before saying, “And Leo likes to get you drunk.”

“So do you,” I said with a lifted brow. “And as for the other thing, it shouldn’t affect me.” Almost as soon as I said it, I wanted to sarcastically laugh.
It shouldn’t affect me.
It was the only thing that did, these days.

“Right.” His voice was curt and he lifted the paper higher, to conceal his face.

“In case you’ve forgotten, I’m twenty-two years old. Going out with friends is kind of what people my age do.”

“Well, people my age…” he didn’t continue. He dropped the paper enough so that I saw his face for a brief second.

“What? What do people
your age
do? Tell me, Nathan. Because I don’t think it was made painfully clear what people
your age
do last night.”

“Don’t start this,” he said, a thread of anger in his voice. He was controlled, but I didn’t miss the subtle shake of the paper in his hands.

“Don’t start what? Whatever ‘this’ is, it’s been brewing for some time now. Tell me—just be honest. You want me to be like those women, don’t you?”

“You’re being ridiculous.” He brought the paper up to his face, concealing himself from me again, so I lunged across the counter to rip it from his hands. His features were made of stone.

“Ridiculous is you ignoring me last night at your colleague’s holiday party. Ridiculous is you coming home last night and waiting until you were deep into the liquor to touch me.” My voice trembled and I paused to gather my courage. He reached for the paper and I yanked it farther away.

“That’s what you want, isn’t it?” I spat. “The wife, the kids. Well, I almost gave you one of those things. But I’m not fucking
them
. I’m just not.”

He winced and turned away. The surge of emotion in my face burned white hot and I trembled from my toes to my fingers with suppressed tears. I swallowed three or four times, just trying to clear the ball of sadness that had affixed itself to my esophagus.

His silence was wrenching my heart from my chest.

Silence.

Silence was what my father had given me. Quiet disapproval. A turn of his back, to shield his eyes from me, his biggest mistake.

Silence.

I didn’t think I could take it from Nathan, too. If Nathan continued to treat me like a ghost, I’d become one.

I curled my fingers into the newspaper, needing to feel something tactile, something to ground me.

“What is wrong with you?” I asked, my voice raising louder and louder. “What’s wrong with me? Why won’t you fucking talk to me?” I sounded desperate—because that’s exactly what I was. I couldn’t reach through and pull from him what he wasn’t saying.

And still, all he gave me was silence.

“Are you mad? Do you blame me for losing the baby?

He didn’t turn around right away—he kept his back to me as he spoke. “I’m mad, Adele, that I had to mourn alone.”

He sounded broken, like even getting to admit this much was hurting him. But it was hurting me, too. “Do you think I wasn’t hurting, Nathan?” My voice cracked on the last note and my stomach clenched. Leaving the island, I walked to where he stood. If he wasn’t going to turn to look at me, I was going to make him see me—finally, in front of him.

“Look at me,” I pleaded.

When he finally did, I saw a hundred storms in his eyes, deep anguish etched into the lines around his eyes and mouth. Eyes I loved so much. But he looked at me like I was hurting him even more.

“Do you think I wasn’t hurting?” I asked again. I had to say it twice, because my voice was so thin the first time, I could hardly hear it over the roar in my own head.

“Say something!” I yelled, because the silence was too much, too heavy—worse than if he had physically hit me. “I can’t take silence from you, Nathan. You have to talk to me. You have to tell me, yell at me—anything, but please,” I swallowed and it hurt the whole way down. “Please, don’t give me silence.”

His eyes burned and his hands reached for me—his first instinct being to console me. But he stopped just an inch from touching me and pulled back his hands. It was akin to a slap—when he deprived me of himself.

He opened his mouth before closing it right away. There was turmoil in his face, and he wore it as honestly as he wore his passion. Which made me ache all that much deeper.

Finally, he spoke. “How would I know? You never
once
said anything—you never seemed happy, or excited, for the baby. I was alone in my excitement, and then alone in my grief.” He shook his head and pounded his fist on the counter. “I was alone, Adele.”

I squeezed my fingers into a tight ball and pressed my hand against my lips. The sob was in my mouth, ready to be released, but I couldn’t give it weight. I took three deep breaths before I said, “How could you think I wasn’t hurting?” I shook my head and turned to run up the stairs. I needed out—away from him.

“Where are you going?” he asked, following me into the bedroom. I wanted to laugh. I had to pry how he was feeling out of him, but now he was asking questions like he hadn’t just made me suffer through his silence.

“Out.” I grabbed a pair of jeans, a bra, and a t-shirt before closing myself in the bathroom. I didn’t want him to look at me undressing and try to touch me.

I shot a quick text to Leo,
Do you think we could start the day a little early? Go to lunch, pregame before Paddy’s tonight?

As I brushed my teeth, I listened for noise outside of the door but heard nothing. The silence was all-encompassing. I needed my best friend, I needed Leo to talk to me, distract me from the mess that was the life Nathan and I had built and then let crumble before our eyes.

When my phone buzzed, I snapped it up quickly.

Oh, Leo. You had no clue just how complicated this was. I replied,
I need to spend a day with my best friend.

I pulled my hair into a ponytail and was splashing water on my face when Leo’s text came through.

I replied
yes please
and waited in the bathroom, not wanting to spend another minute with Nathan and his silence. When I heard the roar of Leo’s new truck, I bounded down the stairs and out of the house. I registered Nathan standing to follow me to the door, but I was already climbing into Leo’s truck when Nathan stood outside on the porch.

“Should I wave or something?” Leo asked, looking at Nathan as I did. “So he wipes that look off his face?”

“No.” I buckled my seat belt. “Let him be pissed.”

“Is this girl code or something? I’m supposed to rah-rah and support you by shunning him?”

I gave Leo a look as he pulled off the street. “Are you my girlfriend?”

He laughed and shook his head. “No, but if you need that, I can lend you Scarlet.”

I made a face. “No offense—because I’m happy that
you’re
happy—but I doubt there’s much Church Girl can help me with. She’d likely douse me in holy water and baptize me in her bathtub or some shit.” Leo shook his head at me and I felt bad for teasing him about his preacher’s daughter girlfriend. “If I needed girlfriends in general, I wouldn’t be spending time with you.”

“So where do you want to go then, before Paddy’s?”

“Somewhere with lots of alcohol. Because I’m going to drink all of it.”

I
was just tired
. So fucking tired of the back and forth, the tiny moments of forward progress before one of us did something to knock us the hell backwards again. Maybe this was simply what happened when you were in a relationship with someone who was a decade younger than you, who’d barely had time to experience life as an adult before being in an adult relationship.

Maybe if Adele was dating a boy, someone who thought keggers were cool and whose messy apartment was shared with four other guys, she’d have more fun.

Nope.

The soul inside of Adele didn’t fit with a typical college student. She’d always felt older than that to me, which was what got us in this mess in the first place.

The house was too quiet, too dark, too empty since she’d slammed the door on her way out, so I grabbed my keys and got in the car without even knowing where I was going.

Like sitting in the house and watching the clock until she got home safely would make our argument worse somehow. Not that it wasn’t bad. It was. It had been bad and completely necessary. I was almost embarrassed that it took us this long to finally swap harshly spoken words about the baby.

Actually, she had spoken most of the words, much to my embarrassment now. In that moment, it was like my tongue had been nailed to the roof of my mouth. Seeing her so desperate about what had had happened
, finally
, should have opened up the floodgates. Instead, I’d been rocked by the fact that we’d been so blind to each other’s struggle.

Six months ago, I would have bet every cent to my name that I knew Adele inside and out. That I’d be able to catch a glance of her across a packed room and I’d know precisely how she was feeling.

Now I didn’t feel like I knew anything.

And in return, I’d shut down on her. The worst possible thing I could have done in that moment.

My car drove down side-streets, some empty, some not. By the time I found myself pulling into the main entrance of Northern University, I couldn’t even be surprised. I’d spent the first six years of my teaching career on that campus. The tree-lined main drive was bustling with students, all bundled up to walk down the snow-scattered sidewalks. Since the trees were empty of leaves, I could see everything. See all their faces as they walked and talked and laughed.

There was an empty spot in front of the Student Services building, so I pulled in, not quite sure what I was even doing there.

Sitting in my car felt more pathetic than getting out and walking around, so I zipped up my leather jacket and pulled a stocking cap out of the console to put on my head. As soon as I opened my door, a blast of cold air hit me, along with the sound of laughter. A group of girls walking arm in arm passed my car, two of them giving me a blatant once-over.

It simply settled the exhaustion even deeper into my bones.

She’d done that before. In the beginning.

I remember pacing the front of one of my classrooms and feeling her eyes on me in a way that had been thrilling and completely indecent.

I cupped my hands in front of my mouth and blew warm air on my fingers while I walked. No one stopped me, probably because no one recognized me. Or maybe they did, and I simply looked like a creepy former professor wandering the grounds of his old school.

Two guys yelled, and I looked up to see them greeting a group of women outside of the coffee shop that Adele used to work at.

Given that my hands were quickly getting numb, and I was feeling pretty fucking nostalgic about the earlier days in our relationship, I walked through the glass and steel doors.

It looked the same as when Adele worked there. Generic tables and booths, a gas fireplace surrounded by rocks, and the hushed conversations from seated groups were all the same.

I placed my order, watching the two baristas work with quick efficiency and felt a pang. With robotic movements, I took my coffee from the bored-looking worker and found an empty table along the wall.

The coffee was so hot that it scalded my tongue, but I took another large drink anyway. By the time it was almost gone, I could barely taste anything.

I didn’t even know how Adele and I had gotten to this point.

Maybe we burned so brightly, so early in our relationship, that this was the consequence. That we’d been destined to reach this kind of fallout, with or without the baby.

I swallowed against the rush of emotion, picturing her anguished face when she told me that she’d been mourning alone too
. I’d
done that to her. Just me. I’d been so wrapped up in my own grief that I had placed her in a box that she never wanted to be in.

“Can’t stay away, can you?”

My head snapped up to see my father bracing his hands on the back of the chair opposite of me. I lifted my eyebrows and traced the lip of my coffee cup with my thumb.

“Apparently not.”

We were quiet for a moment, me not offering him a chair and him not asking if he could take one. It was an apt description for our entire relationship.

“May I join you?” he asked quietly.

I held his eyes and searched for rancor or ill-intentions and saw only genuine curiosity. So I nodded. “Of course.”

He didn’t have coffee, so he fiddled with his phone for a second before taking a deep breath. “Things going well at Harvard?”

I breathed out a laugh. “As well as I imagined, I guess. I work longer hours, and sometimes I’m afraid that my upper-level students are smarter than me.”

For a second, he just stared at me, then his lips curved in a small smile. Me leaving Northern for Harvard was a Big Fucking Deal in the Easton family. I was the only son, and the Eastons had been attending or teaching at Northern for as long as I could remember. When I’d told my father that I was leaving, he’d merely sneered and told me I was a disappointment.

Good times.

We hadn’t had a civil conversation since then. So this also felt like a Big Fucking Deal. The fact that he was asking and actually seemed to care about my answer. Maybe my mom put him up to it.

“That probably means you’re doing your job well if they surpass you at some point.”

“I suppose.” I shook my head and took the last drink from my cup. The bitter aftertaste of the coffee was the only thing that made me know that this was actually happening and I hadn’t been dropped into the Twilight Zone. “No coffee? That’s new.”

He shook his head. “Saw you through the window on my way back to my car. I had a committee meeting and I was about to head home.”

“So you came in here just to talk to me?” I sounded skeptical, because I was feeling pretty fucking skeptical. He even had the decency to look chagrined. A group of students chattered and laughed their way out the door, blanketing the coffee shop in an eerie silence. Besides the baristas and our table of two, there were only three other girls reading quietly in the opposite corner.

Would that have been Adele, without me in her life? Sitting in a coffee shop with friends and studying, maybe to avoid a crappy roommate or a quiet apartment? Going to a basketball game with a group of people and heading to a frat house afterward to celebrate?

I dropped my head to take a couple of deep breaths. I’d chastened her for wanting to go out drinking with Leo on a weeknight, but that’s what normal college seniors did.

More often than not when we argued, we always circled back to our roles. I was the patronizing older boyfriend, and she was the irresponsible younger girlfriend.

She wasn’t irresponsible, she was simply young. Doing the same things that I did— with Diana, actually— when I was in my early twenties.

“You look like you’re thinking awfully hard over there,” my father said, interrupting my pointless train of thought. Pointless because I couldn’t do anything about it right now. Probably not until tomorrow when she was home and
sober
. She certainly wouldn’t be coming home that way.

“I am,” I admitted and leaned back in my chair. “It’s about my girlfriend.”

“Ah.”

I gave him a rueful smile, still a bit thrown that I was having this normal of a conversation with my father. “You probably didn’t even know I had one, huh?”

He scratched the side of his face and leveled a considering look in my direction. “No. For how long?”

“Almost a year.”

With an answering nod and lifted eyebrows at the length of time, he blinked a few times before talking again. “What’s her name?”

“Adele,” I answered without thinking, the way I said her name sounding pathetic with how full of longing it was. I kept my eyes on my empty cup, because it’s not like there was much he could say. And I certainly wasn’t going into any details.

“Where,” he cleared his throat and lowered his voice, “where did you meet her?”

Something in his voice made me look up. It was suspicion. And suddenly I remembered being in this exact same coffee shop with him. Adele had been working that night. And they knew each other from my father being on the scholarship committee that had selected her.

Fuck.
Fuuuuuuuuuuck
.

“At a restaurant,” I answered far too late. His eyes were looking around, and he started shaking his head slowly.

“Adele.” His eyes closed and I tipped my head back to stare at the ceiling. He couldn’t possibly piece it together with so little. “What’s
Adele’s
last name?”

Keeping my face carefully blank, I waited for him to open his eyes. When he did, I didn’t say a word. Because what could I say?

“Goddamnit, Nathan,” he ground out. “What’s her last name?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said simply. I wouldn’t lie about it. And I wouldn’t give him the truth right now.

Not there. Not yet.

She and I never talked about our families or how we’d broach the subject of our relationship with them. One of the things we had in common was a shocking level of apathy to the people who gave us life. I didn’t want to spend any of my free time with my family just about as much as she didn’t want to hang out with hers. Not once had I given consideration to explaining Adele’s presence in my life to either of my parents. Not one single time.

“I don’t want to be right about this.” He said it so quietly that I almost had to lean forward to hear him.

“You’re probably not,” I replied with a casualness that I did not feel. “There are many women with that name, so I’m not sure who you
think
it is.”

His eyes blazed and he braced his folded hands on the table, pinning me with a look that made me feel like I was stabbed to the wall with butcher knives. “What I think is that I recall a very beautiful student by the name of Adele, who worked here and was in one of your classes. What I
think
is that the semester after she had that class with you, you pursued a job teaching elsewhere. And
what I think
is that if I’m right, you’re the biggest embarrassment that I could have possibly conjured for a son.”

“Strong words for a really fucking big ‘if’, Father.”

Everything I said came out even and unaffected, but my heart was pounding. She was still a student here, and with my loose tongue, I could very well screw something up for her. Just because I was gone, didn’t mean she might not feel any ramifications. Our eyes still held, and after a long minute, he pushed back from the table and stood.

But he didn’t leave.

Taking his time, he walked around to my seat and leaned over so that his mouth was right by my ear.

“If I’m right, then it makes me sick that I ever felt a moment of pride about you.
If
I’m right, then you’re the biggest fucking cliché in the books, Nathan.” Then he clapped a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “But please,
son
, feel free to prove me wrong at any time.”

As he walked away, I stared at his back with a rock in my gut and couldn’t help but feel like we’d slipped back into our typical relationship.

But even that couldn’t distract me from the horrible realization that he was completely right.