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“Yeah, hey.” I wanted to tell him I was sorry so we could go back to normal and stop whatever the hell this was, but I couldn’t. Because I wasn’t sorry. I meant it. I had a goddamn thing for Nate, and now that it was out there, no part of me knew how to chomp at the air to get the words back inside my mouth enough to swallow them down.
“You gonna get up or just stay on the floor?” he asked once the window was closed.
Now that it was shut, this place was a hot box of stagnant air and awkwardness. We didn’t have windows on the other side of the apartment because the shop was there, and it was muggy, hot, and damp in the living room, with a nice undertone of mildew to make it oh-so homey.
Nate stepped back as I groaned my way to my feet. The tile floor was wet from the rain dripping off my body, so when I got myself into a semi-standing position, I balanced my good foot right on my slippery flip-flop. And went back down.
“Motherfucker!” Before my head hit the floor, Nate dropped to his knees, caught me, and my head hit his bare thighs instead of the tile.
What a fucking hero. My god.
“You’re a mess, Xavi.”
Yeah, I totally was. I looked up at him, seeing sadness through the anger he tried to hold on to. Nothing felt right at the moment, but being on the floor with him after a slip and a fall, in a room that housed my confessions and sparked our fight, I just wanted to wrap my arms around him and never let him go. The old me would have done it. The new me wondered if he’d think I was hitting on him or something.
Nate cleared his throat and stood up, pulling me up with him. I balanced with a hand on the back of a chair, and Nate kicked my flip-flop away.
“You suck in flip-flops.”
It was a known fact. Nate banned me from flip-flops three years ago when the toe thong broke mid-getaway and we’d had to spend a night in the drunk tank of the Garron cop shop simply because I blew a flip-flop and got bad raspberries on my knees. Slides ever since.
“How was your second date?” he asked.
“It wasn’t a date. Are we ever gonna talk about this thing I have for you?” I looked at the floor instead of his face. My toe throbbed like a son-of-a-bitch, and my clothes stuck to my skin like a dead wet blanket.
“Do you know what it means?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then no. You went to her instead of me.”
“I didn’t fucking go to her,” I snapped at him. “Wait, are you jealous?”
“Fuck off, Xavi.”
Yeah, that was why we were in this mess. Nate stepped away from me, unsure about staying but even more unsure about leaving.
“Nate, come on. This isn’t us.” When he turned to head down the hallway, I hobbled after him. “We don’t do this shit. Can we at least talk about it?”
He spun, and the narrow hallway wasn’t big enough to contain both our bodies and the moods we were in. “I tried to talk about it when I went to find you at the beach. Guess what I found instead?” He glared, his chest against mine, but both of our backs against opposite walls. “Found you on a fucking date.”
“It wasn’t a date! Jesus.”
“What was she doing there? You didn’t call her?”
“My phone was dead! I’d have called you if it wasn’t.” I shook my head, unsure if I was mad or glad to be talking finally. “She works at the pharmacy Madd dropped me off at, so she brought me back after I spent my last twenty bucks on a bottle of Advil.” I pointed to my busted toe and then hid it, knowing Nate hated feet. “The name brand kind. Sorry.”
He sighed, and when his breath hit me, it smelled like mint. That, out of everything that had happened today, offended me the most.
“Have you been chewing gum without me? Since when do you carry your own? That’s my job.”Fucking hell, had I been replaced?
Nate opened his mouth to answer and then shook his head. “We should end this,” he said. “The hookup thing. It’s over for good.”
Why was that what he wanted to talk about? “Because I have a thing for you?”
“Because it’s…”
“Really? That’s all you have to say?”
