Page 53 of The Dom

“Why bother?” I snapped. “You clearly know the answer, or you’d have told Zed to fuck off.”

The more I said, the deeper I buried myself. Why was I arguing with her as if she’d accused me of something I hadn’t done? Granted, there was context to go around it, but the fact of my having slept with Joshua’s girlfriend was the truth.

She finally turned toward me, eyes flashing. “I don’t know the answer, Nate. That’s why I’m asking. I’m sorry that you don’t like me having to ask, but you’re not exactly an open book about anything that matters.”

“So, it matters if I had sex with my brother’s girlfriend?”

I tried to convince myself that the real reason the question came out angry had nothing to do with the fear that had kept me from telling her any of this in the first place. I was a shitty brother and not a much better man. I didn’t deserve someone like her, and this would be what made her finally see it.

“Should it?”

I had no answer for that, so I ignored it and continued on the offensive. “It’s not like you’ve always been the most honest person in the world when it comes to your past.”

Her mouth flattened into a line, and I knew I’d struck a nerve. “You’re right. I kept my reasons for being at Manhattan Records to myself. But when you had suspicions that I wasn’t being completely honest, you didn’t ask me a straightforward question. You went off on me. Should I have resorted to that tactic to get the truth out of you?”

“I apologized for that.”

“Yes, you did, but you don’t seem like you’ve learned very much from it,” she countered. “If you talked to me about things that mattered, maybe I wouldn’t have to hear rumors secondhand and then come to you for clarification because I’d looked like an idiot.”

“Maybe you should just trust me to know what’s best for you,” I shot back. “Or do you only trust me when it comes to fucking you?”

Color flooded her cheeks. “I trust you during sex because I know you’d never physically hurt me. You’re not that sort of man. But when it comes to my heart, I still don’t know how much I can trust you not to hurt me.”

She was right, no matter how much I hated to admit it.

“Maybe, once in a while, you could trust me,” she continued. “Trust that when I ask a question, it’s not an attack. Trust that I want to know the answer, and I want to talk it through with you if it’s an answer I don’t like.”

I wanted to believe what she was saying, but I couldn’t. She didn’t know what I’d done, so how could she know how she’d feel when she learned it? My own family had cut me out of their lives. People who were supposed to love me unconditionally.

Then again, I’d betrayed one of them first, so I supposed I deserved it.

Except they didn’t know the whole story. No one did. And I intended to keep it that way.

Besides, if they had really known me, they wouldn’t have believed the worst to begin with. Or, maybe, if I hadn’t always been such an ass, they would’ve had a reason to stop and listen.

Either way, it didn’t matter. My life was fucked up, and nothing was going to change it. Not Joshua moving back here. Not having dinner with my family without there being an argument. And not finding someone I cared about enough to want a real relationship with her.

Thirty-Four

Ashlee

I waited for his response, hoping he would acknowledge that he needed to work on trusting me. His first impulse when he felt threatened in any way was to fight back. He needed to start thinking first, determining if what was being said was even an actual attack.

I’d asked a question that I wanted to know an answer to because it connected with a conversation he’d agreed to have after we left the party. If he hadn’t made the connection, maybe I should’ve communicated it better, but it wasn’t always easy to maintain a cool head when he kept being deliberately pig-headed about things.

The worst part was, I was more sad than angry. I understood that the two of us needed time to share things with each other, but for me, it wasn’t a matter of not knowing him well enough to share everything. Not anymore.

Once we’d decided to try to make this work, I’d been all in. Anything he would’ve asked me, I would’ve answered honestly. We knew each other’s bodies so intimately that I couldn’t quite understand why we’d hide anything else.

If all he’d wanted was my body, he should have told me that, and I wouldn’t have let myself get so invested. I assumed that wanting a relationship had meant non-physical intimacy as well. I’d thought we’d been on the same page since Virginia Beach, even if we’d still had some miscommunications. If he didn’t want to answer a simple question, then I’d been mistaken.

Which only made me wonder what else I’d been mistaken about.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” he said finally. “I’m asking you to trust me to tell you what you need to know, and you’re insisting that if I trust you, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

“Do you hear yourself?” I asked. “You get to decide what I need to know, which means you also get to hide anything you don’t want me to know. How am I supposed to be close to someone who won’t let me in? How equal is a relationship when one person gets to make those decisions for both of us?”

“Are you saying that I need to bare my soul, tell you all of my deepest and darkest secrets? Are you forgetting that we’ve known each other for a month? And it wasn’t that long ago that you were expecting me to be understanding of why you hadn’t told me about Finley being your father.”

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