Page 75 of Sublimate
“That’s something. It’s a positive.”
He looked over. “Let’s not talk about this on your birthday. I just didn’t want you to worry about some PI sneaking around and taking notes.”
Good, although once I’d determined that it wasn’t paranormal, that it wasn’t someone who wanted to harm me, and that I was pretty sure his mom was behind it, then I hadn’t been overly concerned. As he’d said, it was from an odd, twisted love…or maybe just her need for control. I preferred to think of it as the first thing.
I hugged my picture as we drove and thought about where I would put it—anywhere, since Nolan considered that his house was also mine. Maybe I would hang it in the library. That had become the room where I studied and worked in to get my high school equivalency. It might also have been the room I would work for more, like a college degree? He thought I could do it, if I wanted.
It was like there were no boundaries, not any of the bad ones. As he opened the garage door, I leaned over and kissed his cheek and he turned to me, smiling. “What was that for?”
“I’m happy,” I told him. “You said once that you only gave me the minimum, but it’s so much more.”
“You liked the party.”
“I like everything,” I said. “Everything about you.”
“Damn.” He sighed and turned off the car. “When you say things like that, it makes me feel wonderful, but it also makes me feel so guilty.”
“Why?”
“Because I should have done something for you on the day we met. When I saw that dumpster where you were living, I should have said, no, you can’t go back there,” he answered.
“You didn’t even know me.”
“But I liked you right away. I remember waking up the next day with no clear idea of what the hell was going on, but I wanted to find you. I kept bothering you even though—”
“You didn’t bother me!” I interjected. “You paid for meals and you were so nice.”
“Yes, I was great. I bought you a few cheeseburgers because I knew you were hungry. I ordered scones and hot chocolate when you had gotten yourself a cup of water.”
“You mean when we met for coffee? You knew that I did that I was faking a hot drink?”
He smiled, the one I didn’t like because it made him look so unhappy. “I went to get you a refill and the server told me what you had, water in a coffee cup to hide it. That day, I had been on my way to Morrocco and I didn’t get on the plane because I wanted to see you. But then the only thing I did was to provide some baked goods,” he told me. “I could have really helped but I was afraid of mixing myself up with you and dragging you down to my level.” He sighed. “My fiancée was an amazing woman.”
“Yeah, that’s great.” I got out of the car and he followed right behind into the kitchen.
“Viv, hold on. I’m not saying that I miss her and want her back, because I don’t. We were not compatible, not even if I had been sober. My drinking probably smoothed over some of the issues between us because it was what we both focused on. We didn’t have time to deal with anything else.” He put his hand on my arm. “I almost ruined her life with my problems and I didn’t want to do that again. I was afraid.”
“How could my life have been worse?”
“I thought I could manage it,” he answered. “I did, didn’t I? When Kolter found out that we had gone out to eat and seen each other, he assaulted you.”
“He was just looking for an excuse.”
“I didn’t see any solutions. The years in front of me seemed horrifically empty and dark. It wasn’t one thing, it was everything.”
“You said that to me in Roy’s Tavern on the night we met,” I remembered. “I asked you what was wrong and you said that it was everything.”
“There were many reasons that I went into rehab, like crashing my car and like getting stranded on the road in a snowstorm. Another was meeting you. I thought that I needed to do better and I hope I am.”
“You are!” I put my arms around him. “You’re doing great every day.”
“It’s not just day by day anymore,” he told me. “At first, yes, I was counting up the minutes and the hours that I had beensober, but now, I’m also looking ahead. I started thinking about it a lot when we were decorating the Christmas tree and you said that we could collect ornaments. We could. We could do that for years, together.”
“You want us to be together for years?”
He pulled off my coat and his, too, and then took my hand. “Come open your birthday present.”
I thought for a moment that he himself was the present, and that was why we were removing clothes and also why he was leading me up the stairs toward our room. But then he told me to sit down and went to get something out of his closet.
