Promise Me This (5 page)

Nate

I couldn’t tell Jessie that the reason my family moved away from Bridgeway was because the neighbors started talking after an exceptionally brutal altercation between my parents.

My father had beaten my mother pretty badly and he had no choice but to drive her to the emergency room. Luckily for him, they believed my mother’s lie about falling down the stairs. But I’ll never forget that night—it’s been forever burnished into my brain.

My mother’s keening cry, the dull thud of a fist, the crisp slap of a palm. My brother bracing my shoulders tightly, whispering that we couldn’t interrupt or he might beat us, too.

“But what if he kills her?” I had asked my brother, as my entire body shook head to toe.

“He won’t,” my brother said, shushing me. “She shouldn’t have talked back to him.”

And that night was the turning point for me in two different ways. My father had become someone I absolutely hated with all of my being. Before, he was an enigma, a larger-than-life person. He wanted my respect, demanded it even. But you couldn’t respect a person whom you feared might kill you with their bare hands.

In addition, I had begun to see the signs of who my brother would ultimately become. He began siding with my father and viewing my mother as something else—an object, almost. A thing. Someone unworthy.

But wasn’t that exactly how I viewed women now? I rushed my fingers through my hair in frustration. My internal struggle was definitely that, a struggle.

I wouldn’t allow a girl close enough to me to become real; that was my problem. The difference was, I would never scare them or abuse them. I took care of their physical needs and mine, too—up to a point—and then I walked away.

Luke was older, and as a teenager began disrespecting my mother and her rules. When my dad went out of town, my brother would stay out until all hours of the night. My mother would threaten to tell my father but never followed through because she didn’t want him to terrorize Luke the same way he terrorized her.

But as it turned out that would never happen because Luke had become my father’s favorite.

“Hey,” Jessie said, her warm fingers on my arm. “Where did you drift off to on me?”

“Sorry,” I said. “You just got me thinking about my childhood.”

“Was . . .” she sounded hesitant. It was true we never had deep conversations before. But we also had never been alone in a car for hours before. “Was it a happy childhood?”

I felt a shot of pain stab through my chest. How did I respond?

“No,” I said, honestly. “At least not always.”

She scrutinized me under thick eyelashes, looking somewhat concerned. Guess I’ve been ruining her preconceived notions of me one frown at a time.

She pulled into a service station off the exit for some gas. “Sorry, forgot to fill up last night.”

“Let me do it for you,” I offered.

“Nope. I’m a big girl, thanks,” she said, her eyes still softened by my earlier comment. “But you can go in and get us more coffee from their fancy cappuccino machine. I’ll even take a French vanilla.”

Grinning, I took off into the store, pushed the button on the machine, and waited for our drinks. Jessie was sitting on the passenger side with the door open when I emerged. It wasn’t until I got closer that I noticed she had her camera raised and was aiming at me.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Relax, just taking a test shot,” she said, her fingers curling around the edges of the sleek device. “You’re not one of those pretty boys who has to have his hair perfectly coiffed before he gets his photo taken, are you?”

“Very funny,” I said, before setting the coffees on the hood of the car and running my fingers through my hair so that it stuck up all over the place. Then I mugged for the camera, flexing my muscles and making crazy faces. “Make sure to get my good side.”

After a good laugh, we got on the road again. I tried to jump in the driver’s seat but she wasn’t having it.

“Tell me one amazing memory,” Jessie said after a few minutes of silence. “You know, from your childhood.”

She was intent on going back there again. I shut my eyes momentarily and took a deep breath. Did I even have any amazing memories? Of course I did, I just needed to dig deep.

“There was a pond near our house where my brother and I always hung out,” I said. “A tire hung from this huge tree and the two of us would swing high over the water and jump in. We did it over and over again all damn day.”

“That sounds amazingly cool, Square,” she said. “And completely country. I mean, I didn’t have some random body of water by me in the city. I had to use the public pool.”

“Well, at least it was sanitized,” I said, shrugging. “We’d find all kinds of crap floating around in that lake, especially after a good rain.”

“I’d still take the fresh smell of a lake after a hard rain over hard-core chlorine that always made my eyes burn.”

“Point taken,” I said, jiggling my knee again. I just needed to keep moving. It was how I organized my thoughts, my brain. Of course, my little tick was also magnified by how amped up I felt, being around Jessie like this, in close quarters. I could smell her and it wasn’t some kind of sugary perfume.

She had this exotic scent—like when my mother picked a bouquet of wildflowers from the garden. A concoction of eucalyptus, baby powder, and honey all melded together. It was intoxicating and made me want to move closer to that soft patch of skin in the hollow of her throat, in order to take a deeper lungful.

The night she stumbled in the bathroom was the closest I’d ever gotten to her and it was the first time I’d gotten a good whiff, that’s how subtle the scent was. But now it was all I could think about.

“Why do you think that day by the lake was one of your favorites?” she asked.

Again, that deep ache in my chest. “Oh you know, because it was the freedom of being a kid. Not a care in the world.”

I remembered how some nights in my room, when I could hear my parents arguing a floor below, I’d take out my sketch pad and get lost in the feeling of my fingers dragging across the page—I’d draw buildings, bridges, and other structures that interested me. I also had many pages of darkness—caves, pits, eclipses—so I’d be sure to sketch the pond and the sun, added light and balance to the black.

When she didn’t respond I continued, recalling how easy it was to walk out the front door into the sunshine and forget all of it, every single part, for the next few hours.

“When I was a kid, I didn’t care that my knees were scratched or my shins had an entire landscape of bruises across them. Or that I was completely filthy and my hair was matted to my head with sweat. I wasn’t even sure where in the hell my shoes were half the time,” I said, laughing and shaking my head. “All I knew was that sometimes I felt light as a balloon drifting off in the warm summer breeze and I wanted those days—those good days—to last as long as humanly possible.”

“Wow, Nate,” she said, the words floating from her mouth on a gust of air, her eyes round and wide. “Now you’ve made me feel nostalgic.”

“I want a redo of one of those carefree days. There weren’t many of them.” I gave her a quick sidelong glance, surprising even myself that I had admitted all of that. But it dislodged the rigidity in my chest, just a little. ”Before everything in the entire fucking universe went to shit and began to matter.”

“That’s about right,” she said, softly, her gaze focused on the road but really a whole world away.

“What makes you nostalgic?” I asked.

The bittersweet look in her eyes deepened and I figured she was thinking about her dad. She twisted her bottom lip with her fingers and glanced at me, almost hesitant. “There was this one time it was just my dad and me. He had taken me to the beach to shoot pictures of the waves.”

“Where was your mom?”

“At work. My parents always had odd jobs and work hours. My dad would go off on photography assignments because he worked freelance and then he’d come back with all kinds of stories.”

“That’s really cool.”

She nodded. “But this was just a quiet afternoon we shared and the water was so gray. There was no wind kicking off the lake and it was so peaceful.”

“Huh,” I said. “So you
do
have a water tale after all, Blue. This wasn’t some public pool with chlorine.”

“Got me there. He drove us up the freeway to Coe Lake,” she said, her lips curving at the memory. “Anyway, my father told me some things that day about life. He was such a brilliant and poetic man.”

Now my interest was piqued. I tried picturing this great man who probably walked along the beach holding his daughter’s hand. “Like what?”

“He would say all kinds of things, really. My parents were very spiritual, very connected with nature and inner beauty. But that one day really stuck with me,” she said. “Because he told me, ‘It’s important to spend time alone and get to know the whole of yourself.’”

My eyebrows creased together. “What did he mean?”

“I remember asking the same thing,” she said, smiling at me. “He said, ‘Jessie,
promise me this
: Explore all the different sides of you. We all have darkness and brightness inside of us. You won’t know exactly what you’re made of until you embrace all of it, feel it, live it. Only then will you be able to face all that life has to offer, head-on.’”

She turned and looked straight into my eyes and I felt sucker punched in the gut. My breaths were coming in short gasps and I tried disguising it by looking at the landscape out the window. What in the heck was that speech her father had given her?

“Well hell,” I mumbled. “The only advice my father ever gave was to stop letting people crap all over me. That was after I let two goals through in my one and only season of soccer.”

Just recounting some of those memories got me all fired up.

“And oh yeah, to stop crying and being such a pussy.”

That was in front of my teammates and the parents on the sidelines. But there were plenty of other times I didn’t feel like recounting.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“Me, too,” I said. “Mostly that your dad is gone.”

Suddenly I felt the gentle pressure of Jessie’s slender fingers on my arm and my chest constricted excruciatingly tight.

I glanced down at her hand and next into her eyes. A silent connection had been solidified between us, of something shared and something lost.

I looked up and saw the sign that said,
BRIDGEWAY, SIX MILES
.

“Is this the exit, Nate?” Her voice was soft and tender.

“Yeah,” I said, sitting up and clearing my brain of all of those heavy thoughts.

Jessie took the exit ramp and followed the curve until it dumped us on onto a state route I was all too familiar with.

“Where to first?” she asked.

“I know just the place.”

Jessie

I’d admit it was way cool getting to know Nate better on our car trip. He had many more layers to him than I had ever given him credit for. I couldn’t believe I shared my favorite memory with him. But it didn’t make me sad like it normally would when I was alone with my thoughts of my dad. Nate’s response had been so organic, so consoling that I knew it had been the right thing to do.

Besides, after seeing that wounded look in Nate’s eyes, I wanted to know him even more. Past the attraction, past the flutters in my stomach, I wanted to ask him what troubled him and then soothe any broken parts inside him. I wondered if he had ever been able to talk to someone—really talk to them. I had that—always had that with my parents. But maybe he hadn’t.

As I drove down the state route, Bridgeway looked like any other Podunk town, with a strip of motels and fast-food places off the exit. But then Nate had me take two right turns and then a left. Gradually the landscape began transforming into this pretty and charming part of town.

The houses were one or two stories with large porches. Given that the fall leaves were just beginning to turn, we’d been given a picturesque backdrop. It could have been a postcard of some coastal town in the eastern part of the United States instead of the ordinary and unremarkable Midwest.

“Is the house you grew up in around here?” I asked.

He hesitated a moment and then said, “Yeah.”

“Will we be passing it?” I wasn’t sure if that was a reasonable question to ask or not. Nate seemed different since we’d gotten off the exit. He was wound tight as a coil of rope—his hands clenched at his sides, even his knee had stopped shaking, as if all of his energy was needed to hold the pieces of himself in place.

It made my heart drop to my stomach because for the first time, I realized that Nate’s decision to come on this trip with me must’ve been huge. But he’d still agreed to do it, for me. I had no idea what memories this town held for him, but I knew they must’ve been heavy. Because that’s how the air in this car felt now—thick and substantial.

I was just about to voice my concerns out loud. To tell him that we could turn around or go a different route but then he said, “Another quarter of a mile, it’ll be coming up on your right.”

The houses were becoming larger, the yards roomier. We passed a few sprawling lawns that were well maintained before his arm flung past my shoulder and he pointed out the driver’s side window. “It’s coming up. Two more driveways. Right . . . there.”

For some reason, my heart was pressing against my chest, swelling and thumping. As if I was experiencing this right along with him. “Do you . . . do you want me to stop?”

“Please,” he said on an intake of breath.

I slowed the truck down and pulled over on the side of the road.

His eyes were bulging as he stared at the light yellow house with the huge wraparound porch and several tall willow trees in the front. It seemed modest in comparison to the way his family lived now—not that I’d seen his family estate, only heard of it—and I wondered if his parents had come by their wealth later in life. Or maybe this was just how country folks lived. You didn’t need much out here except fresh air and space. Even still, that house was larger than two of my childhood homes put together.

“Haven’t been back here in so many years,” he said, still staring at the house where he grew up. “It looks smaller somehow.”

“Probably seemed bigger when you were just a tot,” I offered.

“True.” He reached past me and pushed the button to unroll the window. Then stuck out his hand. “See the window on the far end of the house?”

I was still adjusting to the fact that Nate had leaned over me, brushing past my chest, and now was so close to me that I could scarcely breathe. I forced my eyes to follow his hand. “Uh-huh.”

“That was my bedroom.”

Undoubtedly without realizing it, he had propped himself even further over my lap to get a closer look at that section of the house. As his hair tickled my cheek, I inhaled his scent. It reminded me of something clean and citrus, like lemons or perhaps apples. Must have been his shampoo. I had spotted some generic drugstore brand while using his bathroom. I wanted to lean forward and run my nose along his hairline, but instead I held in a breath.

Nate straightened his torso just slightly as he continued to stare out my window. His shoulder was brushing my arm, his other hand resting on the ledge of my window. He turned his face slightly to glance at me and then his eyes focused in on his current surroundings. It was as if he’d dragged himself away from the collection of images flashing through his head.

As if he’d just realized how near his body was to mine. His face. His lips. So damn close. I inhaled a lungful of air through my nose, so it didn’t seem like I was bothered by his proximity and then I simply stared into his whiskey-colored eyes.

He sat there unmoving, seemingly mesmerized by my eyes as well. We’d never been this close before, outside of our bathroom collision, and the strangest, most astonishing thing about it was that it didn’t feel uncomfortable or even unnatural.

Neither of us moved away but we were definitely both hyperaware of each other. His breaths were short and choppy and I could feel the wisps of air against my lips. All he had to do was slant forward and our noses would meet, our foreheads, our mouths.

He studied my lips corner to corner and then his gaze slid up to my eyes. I tried to keep them wide open instead of closing them on a sigh. Because the intensity of his gaze was all consuming, devastating even. There was so much written there, behind those amber beauties. So much darkness and brightness, pain and splendor.

So much I wanted—and now,
needed
—to know. If only he’d allow me that privilege.

There was a flash of color in our peripheral vision and a blur of sound. We turned simultaneously to look at his childhood home.

It was a small boy on a bike travelling unsteadily down the driveway. He was smiling and singing a somewhat familiar tune. When I glanced at Nate, he was staring raptly at that boy, as if he could see something else there. Maybe he saw himself at that age.

His eyes glazed over and I could feel him softly panting against my cheek, as he zeroed in on something—maybe a recollection. His breaths become harsher and he seemed to lose himself to some memory in the distance.

“Hey.” I placed my hand on his arm. “You okay?”

For a moment, he looked at me like I wasn’t even there, and then a ruddy color washed over his cheeks.

“Yeah, I’m cool.” He straightened his back and inched away and I immediately lamented the closeness.

Nate’s childhood home held evocative memories, no doubt about it, and a week ago, I never would have guessed that this carefree guy had such a quiet intensity, a bottomless well of pain. It made him more alluring, more authentic, more real.

“Um, anyway . . .” he said tearing his eyes away from the kid in the driveway who was now staring back at us. “If you go to the end of the street and turn left, I’ll show you the first bridge.”

My tongue felt thick in my mouth. I felt strangely sorry for him, for that little boy who grew up in this house.

“Wait, give me one more second.” I lifted my camera from the bag that now sat on the backseat floor and removed the lens cap.

“What are you up to?” Nate said in a tight voice as I aimed the lens out the window.

“I’m taking a quick photo of your childhood home.”

I snapped away even as I heard him inhale a sharp breath. “Don’t do that for my benefit. I don’t want it.”

My head lifted back to look at him but I refrained from asking why. I could see so much turmoil in his eyes. “Well you might . . . maybe another time. A later time.”

He shook his head almost violently. “I won’t . . .”

And then he seemed to rein himself in. Maybe he realized that he was giving too much away, that I could see everything on his face. That something about that house made him miserable and infuriated and fearful.

And fuck, I wondered just what in the hell it was and whether it had anything to do with his prick of a father.

“I’ll just keep them—until you ask me to see them or pitch them. No harm done.”

Nate stilled his breaths and his limbs. As he sat there quiet and motionless, I realized he could be quite energetic, animated, almost jittery in his everyday life.

But when he was anxious, sad, or contemplative, he became quite static and silent—almost unobtrusive. And it was that vulnerability that was most appealing to me now.

Sensing we had stayed well past our welcome, I carefully laid my camera back in the bag and jerked the car into drive. The little boy from the yard had long since disappeared into the back of the property, but Nate gave the house one final glance as he instructed me to turn left at the end of the road.

A few hundred feet more on this dirt lane and it dead-ended into a quaint and tranquil pond. There were a couple of large willow trees that hung over the water and sitting in the backdrop was a covered bridge. Painted a deep cranberry red, the color appeared to be fading and peeling, which only lent to its charm.

“This is really pretty,” I said, taking in the every square inch from my position in the car. “Is this the pond from your good memory day?”

He nodded and then pointed to this huge thick branch that hung over the water. “We swung from that tree.”

We exited the car—me with my camera, him with his coffee. We stood next to each other in silence and I could hear birds chirping and dogs barking and the soft sound of the water lapping against the rocks.

It was one of the most serene places I’d ever been.

I lifted my lens and focused in on the bridge, taking multiple shots in quick succession, given the light reflecting off the water was perfect this time of day. I stepped further back, adjusted the shutter speed, and then took a photo of the entire picturesque scene before me, including the lake and the tree.

Bet Nate wouldn’t mind having that shot. The one of his happy memory.

I squatted down on my knees to get a different shot. “Want to be in the frame, Square?”

“No thanks,” he said, holding up his hands. “Unless you need a point of reference.”

“Sure, go stand over there by the pond,” I said. “Let me put you to work. You can be my assistant.”

He placed his coffee on the hood of the car and strolled to the water’s edge, his hands shoved deep in his pockets. He turned and grinned and I focused in on a tight shot.

This was my opportunity to gaze at him shamelessly. His legs were long and his waist was lean, but it was his chest and arms that were broad and defined. I never cared for that kind of build before—I liked my guys slim, but could appreciate the effort it took to look that way.

I wondered if his thighs and ass and well . . . the rest of him were just as muscular. Sure, he liked to joke about it, but given how enormous his others parts were . . . I was more than curious.

Nate folded his arms, looking at something in the distance and my lens edged in on his face. His full lips, slightly off-center nose, and large eyes, framed by long and lush lashes. Yep, he was definitely a pretty boy.

For the first time I noticed a light smattering of freckles that dotted his cheeks and I had the urge to lick them all, one by one. I adjusted the hair that was now sticking to my neck, because I was getting all hot and bothered while picturing Nate naked.

“Dude, you done with the shot or what?” he said, startling me out of my thoughts.

I panned the lens away from him. “Don’t rush me.”

He grinned and then stuck out his tongue as I zoomed back in. Seeing that tongue in high definition made me nearly swallow my own. All my girly parts went liquid as I imagined what it would feel like inside my mouth and then travelling down my skin.

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were just fucking with me now,” he said. “Getting some evidence to blackmail me with or something.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I said. “What evidence?”

“Who knows—of my nose hairs,” he said, smirking. “Or maybe my extremely large package. That must be it. You needed a tight shot on that.”

“What package?” I said, aiming my camera lower while grasping at the ground for a stick. “I can barely find it.”

Then I flung the twig at him and he knocked it out of the way, laughing.

“Okay, I’m done,” I said, standing up. “Now get the hell out of my shot.”

After a few more snaps, I lowered the camera and headed toward the water’s edge. I sat on a large rock and he joined me on the other side, his one knee up, his elbow resting across it. He no longer looked distressed, only at peace. And it must have had to do with this location, this pond, and his memory.

After a minute more of staring into the water, I said, “How can I get closer to that bridge?”

“Hop in the car, I’ll show you.”