Tempting(62)

“And we’re both sick to death hearing Mom worrying over your weight.”

“I’ve actually gained weight.”

“Probably your carbohydrate diet finally kicking in. Wouldn’t it be nice to spend your money on actual food instead of packaged crap?”

“I didn’t call for a lecture, Celeste.”

“Why did you call? Are you considering changing your major?”

Was I? Celeste had dangled the carrot in front of my face and everything it offered me was like a seductive whisper in my ear: no more long hours at the coffee shop, no more cold thermostat settings, time with Nathan that wasn’t stolen moments here and there. Changing my major would mean a lot of things, but it would mean I could be with Nathan more publicly. If having him as my professor wasn’t a complication to my academic credibility, I could see him without the cloak and dagger.

“Maybe.”

“I thought so.” The triumph soaked Celeste’s words so heavily I could practically feel their weight on my end of the line. “Let me know if you do. See you next week.”

“Fuck.” I put my phone in my pocket and began the walk to the subway, but the vibrating of my phone halted my movements.

Seeing my mom’s name, I knew instantly Celeste had called her.

“Hey, Mom.”

“Baby,” she said, her voice a hundred degrees warmer than the weather around me. “Are you okay?”

The million dollar question. The last few weeks of sneaking around with Nathan, working extra hours, and choosing between paying my electric bill or putting food in my fridge had really begun to wear on me and in that moment, all I could think to answer was, “No.” The word came from my lips before I’d realized I’d spoken it. I desperately wanted a wall to sink against.

“Oh, honey. Why don’t you come home?”

Pinching the skin between my eyebrows, I sighed. “Mom, I can’t. I have school and my job. I can’t just quit.”

“Okay. But perhaps you can change?”

And there it was. My hand fell and I inhaled through my nose. “I don’t know—”

“You know I worry about you,” she interrupted. “All alone in that big city. Leo told me you didn’t even have internet hooked up.”

I narrowed my eyes, now convinced that Leo’s true first name was ‘Fucking’ with the amount of times I referred to him as ‘Fucking Leo.’ Just like in that moment. “I was bumming off the neighbors, but I have my own now.”

“Adele, there’s another way. You’re just like your father—stubborn.”

Shit. The gravity of her words shifted the ground beneath me. Was I just like him? Stubborn, unwilling to be deterred. Doing what I wanted, no matter what anyone else thought. That was my father defined. And, it was me.

“You can still write, Adele. But this way, you can study something more lucrative, more secure.”

She was knocking me down, nick by nick. Defeat was beckoning my name. Suddenly, I didn’t want to fight anymore.

When we ended the phone call, I stood by the stairs to the subway, fully intending to go to Nathan’s house as planned. But instead, I turned back toward campus and entered the registration office with my heart in my throat.





Chapter Twenty-Eight





Truthfully, I don’t know how the hell this happened. All I’d wanted from the very first night was just a release. I wanted to feel someone next to me, even for a short amount of time. And some way, somehow, I found myself staring into my refrigerator, wondering what I could make Adele for dinner, since I knew she had to work late. She hated mushrooms, so I stopped keeping them in my fridge. And she, against all my warnings, loved eating whipped cream straight from the bottle. So that too, had found its way onto my shelves.

Her smiles became my currency. Like the goodness or badness of my day was dependent on whether I saw her, saw that snarky narrowing of her eyes and heard that cutting tongue, read the words that she put in front of me, held me against her when I fell asleep, marveled at the mess she was able to make with such a small number of items, studied the different shades of gold in her hair when the sun hit it, hurt when I saw how moved she was by simple affection, the same way I used to be when I first started dating.

I’d fucked my way into a relationship.

Who the hell had I become?

At the age of thirty-four, I was someone’s boyfriend. I looked forward, down to the minute, to that moment where she’d walk through the door and give me that secret little smile. The one that said, “These people? They don’t know you. I know you. I understand you.”

I’d become addicted to her skin, to feeling every part of her that had been previously neglected. The freckle on the inside of her right arm and the light birthmark on the bottom of her left thigh had been discovered in the last week. I wanted to make her feel so good and so beautiful and so wanted that she couldn’t fathom having any man touch her but me.