"Then I didn't know you as well as I thought, Abby," he said with a smirk. "I thought you were innocent."
"Oh, no. Far from it," I laughed, rolling my eyes.
"Maybe I should leave more often if that's how you welcome me back," he joked. "Again. What I said that night... I would give anything to take it back," he said seriously.
I sat up, crossing my legs and looking down at him. "Why did you tell me to leave that night?" I asked.
He sat up against my bed's headboard and pulled me into him so I was leaning on his chest. His big, warm hand rested on my hip, playing with the fabric of the t-shirt.
"I didn't want to. I had been planning this amazing night for the two of us. When we were at dinner, I kept getting those phone calls."
"I remember," I said.
"When I went outside to talk, I told you it was someone from LA. That wasn't the whole truth. It was Kirsten…my ex-wife.” He paused like he wanted to give me time to digest that. I gently stroked his chest, feeling his fine chest hair under my fingers.
“We were married for three years before getting divorced earlier this year." He paused again, taking a deep breath. I felt his chest rise and fall under my face.
I knew that he had had a wife. The relationship hadn't been that public; no wedding special on E! or anything like that, but it wasn't a secret that Nate Stone had been married. My focus had been more on his music than his personal life, but some details I had been aware of. I kept quiet, though, so he would keep talking.
"She and I... We have a pretty bad relationship. There's no nice way to put it. She was one of the people I was running from when I came here. She hadn't contacted me in a while, but the last time that she had, she had been laying into me, telling me I wasn't worth shit and that the band was better off without me.
“This time on the phone, she was all nice, saying she wanted us to get back together when I went back to LA." I stiffened, lifting my head to look up at him.
"Are you still seeing each other?" I asked.
"No. We haven't lived under the same roof for months," he said. "I don't want to get back together with her. I told her to fuck off, that I was on a date. She wasn't happy about that," he said, scoffing darkly.
"What did she say?"
"She called me a bastard for leading you on because I'm leaving the island at the end of the summer," he said. I lay my head back on his chest so I wasn't looking at him anymore.
There it was. The truth that was somehow a little worse than him simply not wanting me anymore because he was done with me.
"You aren't leading me on. I know you have to leave," I said.
"That doesn't make it better. I really care about you, Abby. I know I've hurt you already, but I didn't want you to believe I could give you something that I couldn't. I still don't," he said. I sighed, touching his chest.
"But you came back," I said.
"I couldn't stay away knowing I still had you close enough to touch," he said quietly.
"Then that's all that matters," I whispered. I closed my eyes concentrating on the feel of him under my hands and warming my body. He was here. Here and now, this moment was what mattered.
I didn't want to keep having this conversation because I already knew he wasn't mine to keep. I didn't need to spend the precious moments that we did have basically planning to lose him. I wasn't going to do that. I was going to be present in these moments because they were what I'd have to hang onto even when he had left. They were mine. I had them even if I wouldn’t always have him.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Nate
Abby was really beautiful when she slept. Since getting off the dope, I had gotten a lot better at waking up early. Today, I had woken up in Abby's bed, at her place, which I realized I liked a hell of a lot more than waking up in my suite.
Though, it was more that she was with me and less the place we were, really. I just wanted to be near her. It had been a long ass time. What the fuck had taken me so long to come back to her?
I watched her face. Peaceful and smooth. Really pretty. She didn’t have freckles anywhere else besides her nose and cheeks.
This was so creepy. I knew that, but I couldn't stop. I hadn't had her this close in so long. My eyes ate her up. The slope of her nose, chin and jaw. I touched her there softly; the soft skin where her throat met her neck.
There was that scar. I touched it lightly, feeling the tougher, raised skin. She didn't seem to have any others, at least none as noticeable as that one. It wasn't ugly or anything, it was just in a place that was hard to ignore.