Sadie’s smile thinned. “Enjoy him while you can. He’ll be onto the next soon enough.”
She left without another word, her heels clicking sharply against the floor as she disappeared into the restaurant.
The moment she was gone, I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.
Nathan turned to me, his eyes searching. “I’m sorry about that.”
“It’s fine.” I reached for my glass, swirling the wine before taking a slow sip. “I don’t care.”
His sharp gaze told me he didn’t believe me for a second. “No, it’s not okay. You think I don’t know what’s going through that pretty little head of yours?”
I arched my brow. “What exactly do you think is going through my head right now?”
He smirked, but there was no humor in it. “You’re thinking about all the ways Sadie and I have history. You’re wondering what she and I were, what we had, if any part of it still matters.”
The back of my neck burned because damn him, thatwaswhat I’d been thinking.
Nathan sighed, shaking his head. “Cupcake, I haven’t thought about any women, including Sadie, in any way that matters for a long time. And trust me, she hates that. That’s what this was about—rattling you, getting a reaction out of me.”
I let out a slow breath, tracing the rim of my wine glass with my finger. “Well, she definitely got a reaction.”
“Not from me,” he said easily, giving my thigh a reassuring squeeze. “I’ve got no interest in the past when the present looks like this.”
The tight feeling in my chest eased.
I turned my hand over, resting it atop his. “So she’s really just in the past?”
Nathan didn’t hesitate. “Buried.”
That, more than anything, was what I needed to hear.
A slow smile curled my lips. “Good.”
Nathan chuckled, pushing his chair back from the table. “Come on, Cupcake. Let’s get out of here.”
The car ride home was quiet at first, the city blurring past in streaks of gold and neon. Nathan drove with one hand on the wheel, the other resting lazily on my thigh.
I watched him for a moment before breaking the silence.“The restaurant was amazing by the way. How did you find it?”
“I used to go there with my mom,” he said, voice quieter now. “Back when it was just a small family-owned place. Back before Edge Records became what it is today and we didn’t have much money.”
My heart clenched at the mention of his mother. I knew she had died when he was a kid, but he never talked about how.
“She’d bring me there after school sometimes,” he continued. “We didn’t have a lot of money, but she’d save up so we could split a pasta dish and a slice of cheesecake.” A ghost of a smile touched his lips. “She had the worst sweet tooth.” Nathan exhaled a quiet laugh, but the warmth in his eyes didn’t last long. His fingers tapped restlessly against my thigh before he finally looked at me again. “It was a break-in,” he said, voice steady but hollow. “I was at a friend’s house for a sleepover. My dad was working late. Some guy broke into our house thinking no one was home. My mom was.”
My stomach twisted.
“I guess she startled him,” Nathan went on. “So he killed her. Just stabbed her without thinking about how many people's lives would change.”
I reached for the hand that was on my thigh and squeezed it gently.
“I remember coming home the next morning, all excited to tell her about the movie my friends and I watched. There was an ambulance and police cars outside, and I justknewI wasn’t going to like what they told me.” His throat bobbed. “She was already gone by the time my dad got there. By the time I got there.”
“Nathan…” I didn’t know what to say.
“I still have nightmares about it,” he admitted. “Not about how she died, but about what it must’ve been like in those last moments. If she was scared. If she called for me. If she thought—” He stopped abruptly, shaking his head again. “It’s stupid.”
“It’snotstupid.” My chest ached for the little boy he had been, for the pain that still lived in him all these years later.
