Page 53 of Surrender
I actually couldn’t remember.
It’d been a hell of a long time since I’d been in the middle of this kind of family banter. Growing up, we’d had our fair share of family game nights that turned into declarations of war. In the end, though, James really had been the glue that held our family together. When he passed away, I didn’t just lose him, I lost my whole support system.
Nate was taken away in a cop car.
I attended summer school at Juilliard in New York and was offered a permanent position for the following school year. Not long after that, my parents sold our family home and followed.
Only, they moved to upstate New York, which was a full four hours from the city where I was a teenager on my own for the first time, trying to navigate life, grief, and one of the most intense performing arts institutes in the country. Without anyone but my chaotic best friend, a dream, and honestly, a little bit of spite.
“Darcy?” I jerked my head to the right and found a frowning Nate.
Not exactly unusual.
“Mmm?”
He laid a warm hand on my shoulder. “Come on, Bishop’s outback and he wanted to chat about those girls.”
“Oh, right.” I blinked a couple of times and gave my head a slight shake before following him out of the kitchen. He pressed his hand to the small of my back, nudging me to the right and down the hallway that practically split the center of the house, but before I reached for the screen door to the back porch, he tugged on my shirt.
“You feeling okay?” he asked, his penetrating gaze feeling like it was burning through to my soul. That was normal for him, though. He always studied me like he was trying to hear the things I wasn’t saying, over the things I was.
“Yeah, sorry.”
The past few days, I’d felt drowsy and tired, still coming down from it. The words tumbled out before I even realized I was speaking. “I was just thinking about how lucky you are to have all of this.”
The family dinners.
The club traditions.
The inside jokes.
It was everything you wanted your family to be, and this one was loud, messy, and a little scary at times, but somehow still really fucking beautiful.
“It hit me for a second, you know?” I added, offering a small shrug. “I never really thought about the things I was missing, but now I’m here within it, it’s filling a space I didn’t even know was empty.”
I let out a quiet breath. “It’s just kind of weird to be sad about what I missed out on,” I explained, glancing down at the hold he still had on my shirt. “But feel so full at the same time.”
Nate didn’t respond right away—though I couldn’t blame him, I’d just rattled on about every thought currently plaguing my brain. His thumb brushed slowly over the fabric of my shirt a couple of times before he finally let go.
Not to pull away.
But to brush a couple of stray hairs back from my face.
“It’s not weird,” he said finally, his fingers brushing just under my ear. “There was a time I felt the same way. Like you think you’re fine until someone flips a light on and you realize you’ve been standing in the dark.”
That hit me harder than I expected.
Because he was right.
I hadn’t felt unhappy before, but now I was laughing in kitchens with people who already felt like family and smiling until my cheeks ached. Now standing in a hallway with the boy I’d once loved, who’d grown into the kind of man I knew I could fall for all over again.
He brushed at a couple more rogue hairs that I could imagine were probably sticking up all over the place, given the fight I’d had with my hand and my ponytail holder this morning.
After a couple of days locked up in Nate’s bedroom, while trying to feel like a human again, at first it was hard. Everything felt slower. I wanted to sleep a lot. And my emotions were on a rollercoaster ride of their nightmares. But it was better. And this was the first time I’d been out of the house, so I was sure I still looked a little like I’d been hit by a train.
Or drugged by a psychotic ex.
I smiled and swatted at his hand.
