Page 84 of Without a Clue

“Pip,” he says. He shakes his head. “I didn’t resist because of honor. I resisted because you wouldn’t have listened. I saw that from the beginning. You were all in. He got you to lock yourself in and throw away the key a long time ago and nobody could get you out. Even if we pried the door open ourselves, you would’ve stayed. Right. There.”

He was right.

Michael had so twisted me up over all the years, flipped rights and wrongs upside down, shaken up my certainties until they were so confused I couldn’t see through the glass, convinced me that clouds were concrete and the air was sea.

I didn’t have eyes to see anymore.

I didn’t have ears to hear.

It would’ve taken nothing less than watching the whole thing unfold at a gas pump on public television in front of the whole world to open just a crack in the door for me to see.

I’ve always admired Nash.

Always cared for him.

But never in the past have I let the thought linger even that far.

Was it . . . love . . . all that time, hidden under covers?

But of course it was.

There are things the heart knows even when the mind won’t acknowledge them.

And as if the pianos couldn’t have escalated any louder, they do, and people begin to whoop and clap. A hundred crystals on the chandelier quake above the windowless tomb where I sit, deep underwater.

I feel the press of Nash’s hands over mine.

They’re warm.

Encapsulating.

Suffocating my hands, just as the crowds are stealing the air.

Nash frowns. “Pip, you’re sweating.”

“Yeah,” I say. “That’ll be the oncoming panic attack.”

“The—what?” He inches back, inspecting me closely for a blink, and then quickly moves to standing. “Come on.”

Swiftly he gathers me up and takes me by the hand as he snakes me around people, making a way with his broad chest where there was no way, the sound of the pianos dimming to a mere loud throb as we work to exit the restaurant.

When he breaks through the last of the crowd and jams his finger over the elevator door, the breathing comes a little more easily.

It isn’t until the elevator opens at the very top and I step into the humid sea-salt air of the observation deck that I take my first full breath.

I’ve sweated through my cardigan.

I’d be embarrassed, except that there are bigger things to deal with at the moment.

A flood of things.

Too many things.

“Let me get you a water.” Nash starts to walk off in the direction of one of the several water stations dotting the halls and then turns back as if remembering himself, grabs hold of my hand, and takes me with him. Even twenty feet is too much distance for him.

Gently he sets the cup in my hands. His hands linger on mine, the warmth of his palms set against the cool water in mine.

“Listen, Pip. Don’t . . . don’t answer me now. Everything is just . . . crazy right now and I know you have a hundred things you’re going through. I don’t even want to know your thoughts until everything settles down. Just . . . just do me a favor, will you?”