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Chapter Forty Three
*****
Katie
It had been a few days since Nate barreled back into our lives. It was probably selfish to disappear for a day, but I wanted to be alone with Nate, even if it was just a few hours. He was more than happy to indulge my request to not know where we were going. As I pulled into the parking lot of my building, he smirked.
“You plan on taking advantage of me, don’t you?”
I looked over at him as I put the truck into park. He had wanted to drive, and it was killing him seeing me behind the wheel of his truck. However, he said if it made me happy, he would bite his tongue and let me drive just this once.
“You don’t even know where we are.”
Smirking at me, he responded quickly.
“Yes, I do. It’s your apartment. I’m going to guess Ryder and Paul are still back home.”
Taking the keys from the ignition, I looked over at him. I couldn’t remember telling him where the apartment was.
“How could you know that?”
“I may have been around for a few days before you knew I was here.”
“So, you’ve been spying on me?”
He let out a nervous laugh. His hand gravitating towards his hat, running down the back of his head and onto his neck.
“I wouldn’t call it spying. It was more like recon work to make sure I wasn’t going to completely ruin the happy new life you had settled into after I was gone. I didn’t want to screw up your life again if you were happy without me.”
I looked back at him, trying to figure out how he could ever think I would have been happier with him not in my life.
“Nate, are you serious right now?”
I didn’t want to move. The thought that he believed I wanted him gone was breaking my heart almost as much as it did while he was missing. He sat silently; his hand poised on the door handle. It was obvious when he swallowed that there was a lump in his throat he was trying to clear before he even attempted to answer me.
“Katie, I thought you hated me. Hell, I hated me for how I treated you. How I made you lie to your brother and your family. I was selfish and kept you and us all to myself so that no one else could say anything about it. The fear that when they found out about us and what would happen was constantly on my mind. I love you, Katie. I never want to lose you again.”
Clenching my jaw, I didn’t want to cry again. The past few days since he was back, I had been struggling so much with what I had gone through the last few months. It wasn’t easy to just accept that he was back. When he told me everything that had happened, I didn’t even care when he told me he kissed the girl that he had been staying with. I wasn’t jealous about it. He said he loved me. I loved him so much that it hurt sometimes. It was the scariest thing I felt in my entire life.
I had finally confessed aloud that I loved him. He held complete control over my heart and body, and there was nothing I could do about it. I worried every day that I was going to wake up from this dream. That none of this was real. That he was still missing and that I would wake up in a cold sweat again in my bed alone. Hearing him say that he loved me to didn’t ease my fears as much as I wanted it to.
“Let’s go inside.”
Leading him inside, butterflies swirled in my stomach. I had missed his touch on my skin. The way our bodies explored one another every single time we were together was as if it was the first time we had ever exposed them to the other. Something about this time was different. I couldn’t pinpoint if it was the time that had passed or the fact that we had both confessed something deeper to one another.
As I unlocked the door and walked in, my lip kept finding its way between my teeth. His breath on my neck sent a shiver up my body. I closed my eyes, trying to steady my breathing and not act like I was a virgin again. The feeling of his fingertips brushing the hair off my shoulder was almost more than I could take. My heart was beating so hard I could feel it in my throat. As his lips grazed the spot just below my ear, I froze where I was. I could feel my entire body trembling and hoped that he was oblivious to it.
“Is this okay?”
His voice was just above a whisper. There was no way he couldn’t tell I was nervous. Well, maybe nervous wasn’t the right word for it. I held onto the memories of his touch for so long that this didn’t even compare to it. I didn’t remember it creating such a jolt of electricity within me when his lips touched my skin. Nodding my head, his hand wrapped itself around my waist, holding me closer to him. Twirling my body to face him, his hand rested on the side of my face as I leaned into his touch.
“We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, Katie. You know that, right?”
Shaking my head yes, there was no missing how fast my chest was rising and falling. Backing off, he kissed my forehead.
“How about we watch a movie?”
Without warning, he deserted me in the middle of the room as he made his way over to the couch, grabbing the remote and flipped the television on. I wanted to do more than watch a movie. My body was begging me to rip his clothes off and let him touch every inch of me. My head, however, kept getting in the way like it always did.
