~ Nick
This time when I wake, I know exactly where I am, the smile forming even before I’ve opened my eyes. I roll onto my side, my hands reaching for her only to find the bed beside me is empty. My eyes shoot open just in time to see Emma walking in and closing the bedroom door behind her.
Like yesterday, she’s carrying two mugs of coffee, only this time she looks nervous as hell. Very different to yesterday when I woke up in her bed. Then again, a lot of things are different this time.
And as much as I’ve tried to tell myself I shouldn’t be doing this because it’s a mistake, I know it’s too late for that now. I’ve had a taste and the only thing I want now is more.
“Hey,” I say, smiling up at her.
She flicks her eyes at me before putting a cup down on the table beside me. “Hey.”
I lift my arm, my fingers slipping under her t-shirt and drifting across her stomach. Her hands shake a little and she immediately puts down the second cup of coffee, which is exactly what I was aiming for. Curling my hand around her hip I pull her onto the bed, her body falling onto mine. She lets out a huff of surprise before I pull her head down to mine and kiss her. She tastes like coffee and I wonder how long she’s been awake for.
“Nick,” she murmurs, her hands on my chest as she tries to push herself up.
I grin against her mouth, pulling her closer.
“Nick,” she tries again. “I have to get up.”
“Why?” I ask, rolling us over so she now lies beneath me.
“Because I have to,” she says.
I pull back a little and stare down at her. “You said you weren’t working today.”
Emma’s eyes flick nervously away, looking anywhere but at me. I’m not exactly sure what’s going on here, but something is definitely off. This is not the same woman that was moaning beneath me last night, whispering my name in a way that drove me fucking crazy.
“Em?” I ask, brushing a lock of hair from her face.
“Don’t you have things to do?” she finally asks, turning back to look at me.
“No,” I say. “Bar’s closed, remember?”
She lets out a sigh, her eyes moving to the ceiling. “Surely you have other stuff going on,” she says. “You don’t need to hang around here.”
She definitely won’t look at me now, but the penny finally drops as to what’s going on with her. She expects me to leave. To roll out of bed and go as though everything that happened here last night meant nothing. It pisses me off that she can think this; that she still thinks I’m that kind of guy. I thought we were past this shit.
“Whoa, okay,” I say, rolling off her. “What the hell’s going on here, Emma?” I’m staring at her, waiting for her to turn and look at me.
“What do you mean?” she asks angrily.
“You really just expect me to get up and leave?” I ask. “That we’ve had our fun and I got what I was after and now I’ll just go?”
Emma bites her bottom lip, shrugging a little as her cheeks start to colour. “Isn’t that what you want?” she asks quietly.
“Jesus, Emma. No,” I say, shoving a hand through my hair. “Did you actually listen to anything I said to you last night?”
Emma rolls away and sits up, sliding her legs off the side of the bed, her back to me. She curls forward and under the thin fabric of her t-shirt, I can see the bumps and contours of her spine. It feels like forever ago that I was sliding my fingers along those curves and finally giving in to what I was still afraid to admit I wanted.
She says nothing, just sits there.
“Is that what you want?” I eventually ask. “Just a one night hook-up?”
Emma shrugs and I’m starting to get pissed off with all of this. I push up off the bed, sliding over to sit beside her. She doesn’t look at me, but she doesn’t resist when I pull the hand that’s hidden beneath her leg and take it in mine.
“Emma,” I repeat, the word soft. She looks sideways at me, not quite meeting my eyes but at least it’s an improvement. “That’s not what I want, I thought you knew that. I thought I made that perfectly clear last night?” She nods, still not saying anything. I take a deep breath. “Is it what you want?” She shakes her head and I immediately feel my body relax, the tension I didn’t realise was building, slowly dissipating. “So why are you trying to push me away now?”
“I don’t know,” she whispers, her voice small.
“You don’t know?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
I thread my fingers though hers. “Tell me what’s bothering you?”
She exhales hard. “I, I don’t know how to make this work, how to…how to do this.” As she says the words, her other hand flicks between us.
I smile. “Em, nobody does.”
She looks up at me now and her face is a mixture of confusion and sadness and fear. “But I’m really bad at it,” she says.
I laugh this time, shaking my head at her. “No,” I say. “You’re not.”
She nods. “I am, you’ll see. You’ll get frustrated because I’m always working. And even when I’m not, there will be times when I’m on call so it will feel like I’m working. I’ll get phone calls and interruptions at all hours. And work, it’s…” She pauses, collecting her breath. “I work such crazy hours, you’ll eventually start to hate me for it.”
I try and give her a smile, my fingers brushing over her knuckles. I don’t fully understand where all of this is coming from, but it’s clearly something that bothers her, something that’s been an issue for her in the past.
“Em, if anyone knows what working crazy hours is like, it’s me.”
She shakes her head again. “Not crazy like mine,” she says. “Sometimes it feels as though all I do is work and I know it will get to you. You’ll be pissed because I can’t be somewhere when you want me to be, or I’ll be late when you need me to be on time and I don’t want to do that to…to this…to us.”
“Emma,” I say, falling back on the bed as I pull her down with me. She curls into my side, her head on my shoulder and I can feel the softness of her breath on my neck. I wonder how it is that she can so easily say this won’t work when we haven’t even begun to try. But at the same time, I wonder how it is I’m so easily willing to at all when I swore I never would.
I pull her closer, ignoring that voice in my head as I wrap my arms around her. “Don’t worry so much about the future,” I tell her, trying to not to scare either of us with these words. “Just focus on the us in the now, the present?”
Emma’s fingers uncurl from their fists, one hand reaching out to brush the ink on my forearm; and now she’s free.
“Aren’t you afraid?” she asks quietly.
“No,” I say, even though there’s a huge part of me that is.
She lifts her head, moves so she’s looking at me. “I don’t want to hurt you, Nick,” she says sadly. “I’ve already done it once and I don’t want to do that to you again.”
I stare at her, try to read and decipher the emotions that are warring it out in her eyes. She looks terrified, confused, but most of all sad.
“You won’t hurt me,” I tell her, somehow convinced. “I know you’re not that kind of person.”
She shakes her head. “But I already have, remember?” she says, her fingers brushing across Amy’s tattoo.
“That wasn’t the same thing,” I tell her.
“You’ll end up hating me because of my work.”
I shake my head. “No, I won’t.”
She nods now, even as she says, “Everybody does…eventually.”
I watch her, remembering that night in my bar, the phone call with Sarah. I hadn’t heard it all, but I’d caught enough of it to know that this wasn’t the first time she’d gotten frustrated with Emma over how little they saw each other. It had evidently reached some sort of tipping point too, because they haven’t spoken since then, even though they’re supposed to be best friends.
But as hard as it might be, I also get it. I get the long hours, the nights spent working and not being with who you want to be with. I understand sleeping all day, only to surface for some food and to start all over again. And I’m realistic enough to know that sometimes it will be difficult, that I’ll want to see her but won’t be able to, or that we’ll spend nights and days crawling into bed just as the other one is leaving. But it still doesn’t convince me to walk away, even though I’m as terrified as she is about it all.
“Emma,” I eventually say, waiting until she looks at me. When she finally does, I smile at her, lean in and press a soft kiss to her lips. “I know it’s not always going to be easy, okay? I get that. But I’m not going to try and start predicting the future here. I know that never works. Believe me, I’ve tried.”
She glances at my chest again, at my sister’s name tattooed across it and it feels like she understands exactly what I’m saying. How much I tried to help Amy and that I never saw a future without her in it, but only of one where she got the help she needed, where she was still alive and still my best friend, helping me run the bar like we’d always dreamed. But that future didn’t happen and in the end she was taken away and I was left without her and no amount of wishing or hoping or trying to change things could undo that.
“Just be with me now,” I say to her. “Let’s try this. Now.”
“You really want to do that?” Her words are a whisper, so soft it’s as though she’s too scared to say them out loud.
I slide my fingers into her hair, pulling her down so her mouth is only an inch from mine. I stare into her eyes knowing I’m already hopelessly lost in the never-ending blackness of them. Knowing I can’t possibly stop this now, even if I wanted to.
“Yep,” I whisper, before letting myself get pulled all the way in.