"What if it was?"
"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 int
o 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.