"I'm sorry." The words are still so soft that I have to strain to hear them.
"Jessica." I place my hands on her knees. She doesn't pull back. "Jessica. I'm sorry too."
I expect her eyes to dart to mine for confirmation of the words but that doesn't happen. Instead, she pulls her head closer to her chest.
"Please look at me," I coax. I'm scared. I've pushed her into emotional places in the past but it's never been this way. She's never shut down so completely on me before. I regret bringing him up the way I did. I regret not asking about him right after the wedding, when she was so happy, open and composed.
"No," she says through a sob. "I can't."
I want to grab her shoulders and shake her. I want her to come back to me and talk about this. I want her to hold my face in her hands and tell me that she's overreacting and that all of it is just a simple misunderstanding. "I need you to listen to me, Jessica."
Her head darts up. I watch as her eyelids slowly open. She stares at my face, her eyes sweeping across my forehead, before settling on my mouth. "Please, Nathan." Her hand dashes from her leg to my arm. "Please."
"I'm not going anywhere." I reach forward to run my lips over her cheek. "I'm staying right here." I know I mean it right now. If she tells me she's been fucking the guy who was at Axel, I can't promise her anything.
She nods. Her hand moves up my arm. "Who told you?"
I pull her hand into my own and graze it across my lips. "I was talking to a woman at the wedding. Her name was Charity. She told me you were involved with a senator."
"Charity," she repeats the name as she stares past me to the wall. "Who is Charity?"
I can't say I'm surprised that she doesn’t remember the woman. She was completely forgettable. "She looks like a librarian." I have no other point of reference so that's what pops out. "She said you went to school together."
Her brow furrows. "Does she have brown hair and glasses?"
"No glasses." I shake my head from side-to-side. "She has short brown hair."
The edge of her lip quivers slightly. "I think I remember her. What did she say to you?"
I decide that this moment calls for me to temper my unending need to tell Jessica everything. She doesn’t want to hear about how Charity wanted to ride my dick in the back seat of her Cadillac. "She mentioned that you used to be involved with a man who was in the senate." It's a foreign statement, even now when I've had time to process the information. I'm not about to tell Jessica that after she went to sleep the first night we got back to New York that I spent hours online trying to decipher what senator Charity was talking about. I came up empty handed.
Her hand leaves my arm and jumps to her face. She rubs it across her eyes. "It was so long ago."
I feel instantly relieved. "Charity said it happened right after high school."
"That's when it started." It's a subtle correction but it's open ended. "I met him after high school."
I have so many questions floating from every corner of my mind at once. They're colliding. My senses are overwhelmed. "When did it end?"
"It was over before I met Josh."
I don't need the reminder of her ex-boyfriend. Hell, I don't want to talk about any of this. I want her to go back to being the Jessica Roth I seduced at the club that night I first laid eyes on her. I was the one who seduced her, right? She wasn't preying on me, was she?
"When's the last time you saw him?" It's a selfish question. I'm not asking because I want to give her an opportunity to cleanse her soul. I'm asking because I want to know when the last time the fucking senator drove his cock into my beautiful Jessica's tender body.
"Today."
Chapter 10
I recoil on my heels. My hands leap from her body at the same time. Fuck. She just fucking said she saw the goddamned senator today.
"Nathan?" Nothing follows my name. What the fuck kind of question is that?
"What?" I'm on my feet now. I can't breathe. I blindly reach for my tie, pulling on the knot. I throw it beside her on the couch once I get it free. I still can't get enough air in my lungs. I rip open the first two buttons of the white dress shirt I'm wearing. They tumble silently to the hardwood floor.
"I didn't do anything." It's weak. It's so goddamned weak that I don't fucking believe it.
I turn so my back is to her. I can't look at her right now. My anger is right there. It's right at the surface and if I don't temper it, I'm going to say things that I'll never be able to take back. They're the things she said to me back when she discovered a cell phone I had filled with the names of hundreds of women I'd fucked. How the hell did she get over that? I can't even think straight right now. "What the fuck does that mean?"