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“I get why you said what you said,” Gavin told him.
“But?”
“But that doesn’t mean you didn’t hurt her.”
Nick relaxed a bit. “I wish I hadn’t. I wish we’d stayed in the bar.”
“Why?” Mel asked. “Because then you’d have had an audience for your little pissing match?”
Nick looked at her coolly. “I didn’t want him there at all.”
“But since he was there, you wanted to make it crystal clear that you were better than him,” she said. “God, Nicky, you’re only fooling yourself.”
It had been years of this. Years of her thinking she knew better than him, and it was going to stop right now. “Should I have called you?” he said, voice rising. “Asked your advice?”
“You should have kept your mouth shut and trusted Hayley to take care of it.”
Nick pressed on the table so hard he half stood out of his chair. “She’s been in a shitty relationship with this guy for six years. A guy who thinks cerebral palsy is code for ‘can’t get laid.’”
“Because that’s what matters, isn’t it? How many women want to have sex with you?” Mel shook her head sadly. “What happened to you?”
“Mel.” Gavin was cautioning her, but it was too late.
Nick looked at both of them in disbelief. “I didn’t find my soulmate in the choir room, Mel. Life happened to me while youwere building your safe little family, and it turns out life sucks when you don’t get married at twenty-one. Especially when women have better options than a guy with shitty legs. So yeah, it’d be nice to know that either one of them took me seriously.”
“And if she took her clothes off, that would mean you were worth something.”
Nick stood up. “Tell you what. I’ll go out and find some other loser to take your advice, and maybe if he needs you desperately enough, he won’t be such a disappointment.”
Gavin moved to stop him. “Nick, don’t.”
“I’m done, man.” Nick headed for the door.
“You had her, Nicky.”
Nick turned around when Mel spoke.
“You had her,” she said, “and you lost her because you hate yourself.”
It didn’t hurt. He couldn’t feel a thing.
“You don’t care about what I had at all,” he said. “You want to sit here and take all the credit for Nicky Freeman’s fairy-tale ending because then you can pretend we never left high school.”
“I care,” she insisted. “I’ve always cared. I care because the Nicky I know would never hurt somebody for the sake of his ego.”
“The Nicky you know drops by to make you feel better about yourself.”
Mel stepped back. “To makemefeel better.”
“Sure,” he said. “You forget you gave up music, and I get to be there for a little girl who doesn’t look at me like I’m damaged.”
He’d seen Mel shocked and hurt. This was stunned.
“Rosie is three years old, Mel. She’ll be okay. But you can’t look away from her for a second because something might happen to her. You can’t stop trying to control my life because you don’t want to admit I’m not Nicky Freeman anymore. I can be Nicky for you, Mel. I’ll make jokes and talk about the old days and pretendI’m still the guy I was with Vicki. But then I have to go home. I have to be what everybody wants and try not to notice that nobody ever wantsme. So you’re not allowed to give me my part and then get mad about what I do when I’m not here playing it.”
Mel watched him, speechless. “Vicki wanted you,” she said.
“Vicki got tired of dating a cripple.”
