Page 33 of New Year

Zack’s eyebrows hit his hairline. “Your mother?”

“Yeah.” He snuffled hard and tried to chase those hot tears away. “We had a…complicated relationship, and she hasn’t been in my life for a long time. But sometimes, in the nightmare, it’s been other guys who’ve mistreated me.” Once he’d had the nightmare and it was nothing but flames beneath the mask, as if the exploding boiler was haunting him in his dreams. But that wasn’t important.

“Who was behind the mask tonight?” Zack asked, so softly Nat might not have heard him if he hadn’t been looking directly at him.

“The john from the alley that night. The night you rescued me.” Nat couldn’t stop staring at Zack’s lips. Lips that spoke so eloquently in the daytime but appeared so tantalizing in the night. In the dark, when they were simply two men with needs. Nat needed a gentle hand, a gentle spirit. He needed kindness.

He also needed stability and to get his life back on track, damn it. He couldn’t risk his place here to satisfy his inappropriate attraction to his roommate/landlord.

Zack leaned in, lips parted, his eyes so intensely focused Nat was drawn in, like a moth to a flame. Or a man intensely attracted to the man in front of him, and who wanted to claim him in the first, intimate way given to him.

Nat craved a kiss from Zack.

He feared it just as much. Nat broke eye contact and leaned back. “Thank you for rescuing me. Your friendship and kindness means the absolute world to me, Zack. I don’t wanna do anything to risk losing it.”

Zack reached out and briefly squeezed his knee. “I could make you all kinds of promises about never losing my friendship, or never kicking you out if we started something that went sour. But I can’t make you believe those promises. I value our friendship, too, Nat. I don’t want to endanger that friendship, either.” He scooted another twelve inches away. “Do you want to keep talking? Or are you okay to go back to sleep?”

The kindness in Zack’s expressive eyes kept the dismissal from feeling hurtful or abrupt. Zack was simply abiding by Nat’s wishes and backing off, when it would be so easy to launch across the bed and pin Nat down. He could overpower Nat easily, and as much as Nat wanted to trust Zack wouldn’t do that, trust Zack would stop if a kiss started going too far…

He didn’t. His trust over intimacy had been broken too many fucking times.

“I’m sorry,” Nat said.

“Don’t apologize. I didn’t bring you into my home just to bide my time until you agreed to have sex with me. That’s not who I am. If I want sex, I know how to go find a willing partner. But you’re still getting to know me. One day, I hope I can prove to you that you can trust me.”

“I do trust you about certain things.”

“But intimacy is your limit.”

“Yes.”

“And I accept that. We had a moment tonight, but that’s all it needs to be. A moment. Tomorrow, we’re exactly what we were an hour ago. Friends and roommates.”

Nat wasn’t entirely sure that was what he wanted. No, it definitely wasn’t what he wanted. But right now, it was what heneeded. “Friends and roommates.”

“Exactly. You also didn’t answer my question.”

“Um?” Nat rewound the conversation in his head, but it was the middle of the night, and he’d nearly leaned in to kiss the insanely hot, available man in his bed. Everything was upside-down right now.

Zack smiled. “If you want to keep talking more, or go back to sleep?”

“Oh.” Duh. He did enjoy talking to Zack, and certain things were easier to examine in the dark than in the light of day. “I’m honestly not that tired anymore. We can talk some.”

“All right.” Zack shifted around so he was sitting with his legs crossed, giving Nat his direct attention from a respectable distance. “You told me that your relationship with your mother was complicated, and you haven’t seen her in years. I imagine complicated is a massive understatement, if you preferred homelessness over reaching out to her for help.”

Angry wasps buzzed in Nat’s gut at the worst possible conversation topic. He’d have preferred talking about Austin over his mother. But Zack’s sharp observation impressed him. He picked at a piece of lint on his blanket, stalling as he considered his response. “I don’t have a relationship with my mother, and even if I did, I couldn’t have called her for help, because she’s in prison.”

Zack’s hands jerked, and his eyebrows shot up. “I can safely say I was not expecting that. Was she, ah, guilty?”

“Oh yeah, she was guilty. She pled guilty, so there wasn’t a trial. As soon as I turned eighteen, I changed my name and left Louisville. Came here to be anonymous and start over. It, uh…things haven’t been going completely to plan.”

“I’ve been in the business world long enough to know that plans, even those best laid, often go awry. Sometimes, we do our very best, and the results are still opposite what we’d hoped for. You did start over, though, Nat. Not everyone would have the stones to move to a brand-new city where you don’t know a single person. And I know we’re new friends, but I get the feeling that if you hadn’t met this person you don’t wish to find you? You’d be happy with the life you’d built.”

“He’s my ex. In case I haven’t been specific enough.”

“I kind of assumed that, but thank you for clarifying. When did you two meet?”

“When I was a sophomore in college. We met at a party thrown by a coworker of mine. He was five years older than me and everything a classic narcissist is: charming, attentive, complimentary. He knew all the right things to make me fall for him. And coming out of the situation with my mother…” Nat wasn’t ready to unpack that years-long trauma quite yet. “I didn’t have any real defense mechanisms. He made me believe that he knew what was best for me, convinced me I loved things I didn’t like doing. When things went too far, and I finally dumped him, I thought it was over.”

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