Life Unaware (Entangled Teen) (14 page)

“What do you mean?”

I closed the pill case with a
snap
and slid it back inside my pocket. “I have an anxiety disorder.” After spending the last couple years working to keep my secret from everyone, spilling it to Nolan and his camera felt like inhaling after an eternity of holding my breath. I hadn’t realized how exhausting it was holding it in until the words left my mouth and ribbons of pressure unwound from my ribs. “When I was a freshman, I was up late one night studying for finals when my chest started to hurt really badly. My arms tingled and I couldn’t breathe. I almost passed out. I thought I was having a heart attack, so my dad drove me to the emergency room. Turns out it wasn’t a heart attack but a panic attack.”

I spoke faster, scared I might chicken out and swallow the words spilling off my tongue. In this moment, it didn’t matter if Nolan thought I was fucked up for needing drugs just to function. What I was doing, the on-camera purge of truth woven with regret, felt right in a way nothing in my life ever had before. Like maybe if I laid myself bare, I could rid myself of the secrets and regrets buried like botflies deep within my flesh.

“High school was a little more than I expected. Everyone thinks I have this perfect life. They don’t know that I’m barely holding it together—actually, I’m
not
holding it together. That’s the problem. And then there’s my mom—the congresswoman.” I tried to make out my shoes in the darkness so I didn’t have to look at the camera. “She’s mapped out my entire life, set this standard that’s impossible to live up to.”

Even though I couldn’t see Nolan, I could hear his steady breathing in the silence following my words. Finally he asked, “What kind of standard?”

“Perfection,” I whispered. A small voice inside my head, the old Regan, screamed at me to shut up, that I’d said too much.
You made yourself look weak,
the voice hissed. Maybe. But I’d opened myself too wide to pull back now, displayed all of my many scars. And who decides where to draw the line between vulnerability and strength? Because in this moment, I couldn’t decipher a difference. I’d come here tonight to apologize to the many people I’d wronged, but it took me until this moment to realize that maybe the biggest wrong I’d committed was to myself.

I fingered the tin of pills again and shrugged. “I have to be perfect. So
fucking
perfect all the time. Not just at home but at school, at church, at the fucking
grocery store
because everyone’s watching. Like the entire world is just waiting for me to screw up. And I’ve been holding my breath for years because I knew it was only a matter of time before the day came when I slipped up and everything fell apart.”

I stared into the camera lens. The darkness within seemed to grow larger, like a black mouth gaping wide to devour me whole. I felt my strength draining. I gripped the sides of my stool, trying to root myself to the chair when all I wanted to do was sink to the floor.
Just make it thirty more seconds
, I told myself.
Thirty more seconds and you can take a pill.

I wouldn’t die in the next thirty seconds, no matter how much the silence of the room made my skin itch and the sound of Nolan’s breathing made me squirm. I opened my mouth and spoke, just to fill the emptiness. “Some days I think the only thing holding me together are these pills.” I shook the tin and laughed a little. “It’s so pathetic. Even more pathetic than the pills, though, are the horrible things I said about other people—the awful things I did. I’m not trying to make excuses because there are none. I just wanted to say I’m sorry for everything—just
everything.
High school is hard enough without other people making it worse, and I’m really sorry I was one of those people.”

Exhaustion crept over me, and my shoulders sagged under its weight.
Almost done
. “I don’t expect to be forgiven for the things I’ve done. I just wanted everyone to know. I don’t want to be the person I was. I want to be me—whoever the hell that is.” I shrugged. “Guess I’ll find out.”

I paused and searched for Nolan’s dark outline beside the camera. “I don’t know what else to say.”

The camera’s red light blinked off. A second later the lights on either side of it went dark. It took my eyes several seconds to adjust to the darkness. When they finally focused, Nolan stood in front of me.

I nearly fell off the stool. “Jesus.”

He didn’t apologize for scaring me. In fact, he didn’t say anything at all. He just stared at me with a peculiar look on his face.

“Oh God.” I shrank against the stool. “Was I really that bad?”

“No.” Before I realized what was happening, he slid his hands along my cheeks. The tips of his fingers brushed past my ears and wound into my hair. “I had no idea you were going through all that. God, I’m such an asshole.”

Unsure what was happening, I couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe.

Nolan dropped to his knees. His eyes practically glowed in the dim light of his computer screens. A stray lock of hair had fallen across his forehead, a reminder of how uncontained everything about Nolan was. He was so close I could feel his breath tickling my lips. Every breath I took felt like I was breathing in a piece of him. My eyes drifted closed and my body turned to mush, his scent overwhelming my senses.

“Regan, I have no idea what to do here.” His voice was lower than usual, husky even. “I only know what I want to do.”

He wasn’t making sense. “What’s that?”

“I’m going to kiss you.”

“What?” My eyes fluttered wide and I nearly choked on my heart, which felt like it’d leaped halfway up my throat. “Why?”

I cringed the second the question left my mouth. Asking a guy why he wanted to kiss you wasn’t exactly encouraging him to do it. And it wasn’t like I
didn’t
want him to kiss me, did I? I mean, obviously I’d developed some feelings for him over the last couple of days. I couldn’t deny the way my heart had trembled when he showed up at the barn that morning, or the way heat flooded my veins whenever he was near, or—

“Crazy, right?” Nolan laughed softly. For reasons I didn’t understand, the sound of it held notes of sadness. “I’m going to kiss you because you’re amazing, you’re beautiful, and because I
want
to.”

He leaned closer, and I got so dizzy, I knew I’d have fallen off the stool if not for his hands keeping me centered. He was less than an inch away when he paused and looked at me through heavy-lidded eyes. “Do you want me to kiss you?”

The heat from his palms seared into my skin. This was
Nolan
, the guy who’d annoyed me in the hallways for years. But he was also the guy who’d let me cling to him in the bathroom when I would have otherwise fallen to pieces. The guy who’d wrapped me up in his jacket because I couldn’t stop shaking. Nolan, who, in a weird way, stuck by me when everyone else abandoned me. Still, I’d never kissed someone before. What if I did it wrong? What if it changed things between us?

“Regan?”

The breathless way he said my name made my own breath catch inside my throat. “Yeah?”

“In this moment we have everything going against us. Can we maybe just hit pause on all the outside world bullshit and not overthink this?” His fingers twisted deeper into my hair. “For just tonight, let’s pretend that we have no past history—good or bad—and the only moment that’s existed between the two of us is this one. With that in mind, give me the first answer that pops into your head and I’ll be satisfied with the answer. Do you want to kiss me?”

Only one word came to my mind—the same word that had been there all along.

“Yes.”

Chapter Fifteen

Considering that everything about Nolan was lean and taut, the softness of his mouth caught me off guard. His lips brushed mine lightly before settling into a rhythm that made me feel like we were two puzzle pieces coming together. I leaned forward, and he pressed closer so my legs straddled his. His mouth explored every inch of mine, kissing both corners before tugging gently on my bottom lip.

His fingers curled into my hair, pulling ever so slightly. I gasped. The moment my mouth parted, Nolan deepened the kiss, and a warm wave of what could only be lust crashed through my body. The heat of it spread throughout my limbs, searing the tips of my fingers and toes. I reached up and grasped his shoulders to keep from melting away.

He pushed the kiss further, deeper, until I met him halfway, drinking in the taste of him. Sweet and soft like sugar melting on my tongue. With Nolan’s hands in my hair and his lips on mine, the world fell away until nothing else existed except him, me, and our kiss. I slid a hand down his neck to the hardness of his chest, just to confirm we were still separate people. Because with my eyes closed, with all the heat inside me and the fire burning through my veins, I was sure we’d somehow melted together. He groaned at the contact, skimming his hands along my sides until he reached the hem of my shirt. At the first touch of skin on skin, the last threads of anxiety in my system went up in flames.

I pulled away with a gasp. My cheeks felt like they’d been burned, but I wasn’t sure if it was from the lingering effects of Nolan’s kiss, panic that Nolan had gotten me mixed up with someone else, or fear that I’d done everything wrong. The mix of emotions twisted inside of me, rooting me to the stool and rendering me speechless.

Nolan pressed his forehead to mine. “That was… Wow. You okay?”

“I think so,” I managed, but it was hard to stay calm about the whole thing with him touching me. Making me want to kiss him all over again, mistakes and doing it wrong be damned.

He cupped my cheek and frowned. “This week has been complete hell for you, hasn’t it?”

“Pretty much.” I attempted a small smile. “But there were some good parts.”

“Yeah?”

He grinned, and my breath caught in my throat. I was sure he was going to kiss me again, and my entire body quivered in anticipation.

But just as quickly as it appeared, his smile melted. Nolan leaned in and brushed his cheek against mine. The simple gesture, the feel of his hair and his smooth skin, broke something inside me. His lips were so close to my ear that I could feel them graze against my earlobe when he spoke. “I’ve been horrible to you, Regan. The things I’ve done—”

“Can’t be any worse than what I’ve done to you,” I interrupted.

He sighed. “I wouldn’t be so sure of that.”

“I thought we weren’t bringing up the past tonight.”

“Yeah,” he responded, “but there are some things you need to know.”

“No.” I didn’t want to throw more ugly words in the space between us. This moment felt too fragile, like threads of spun sugar so delicate the slightest touch could shatter everything. And the way he looked at me just now—like he could see through all the bullshit and find the me that actually mattered, the vulnerable parts I’d kept hidden for so long—I wanted to hold on to that for as long as I could. “I don’t need to know anything. At least not tonight.”

He opened his mouth, but whatever words he wanted to say stayed lodged inside his throat. After several moments, he finally said, “Stay with me, Regan. Please.”

He sounded…vulnerable. Scared, even. The complete opposite of how I thought of him, but exactly how I felt unless he was around. I found myself nodding before I realized what I was doing.

His fingers trailed down my arms to my hands, where he grasped the end of my fingertips. One by one, his fingers slipped away as he walked to his bed and perched on the edge of his mattress. There was something dangerous about being alone on a bed with a boy. My pulse grew louder with each step toward him until it was a deafening roar inside my head. I managed to stand, shaky as my legs were, and cross the room, stopping in front of him. He glanced up at me and smiled, and it was unlike any smile I’d seen from him before.

How had I not noticed before now how gorgeous he was? The idea that someone like Nolan could have a secret smile just for me did strange things to my heart. I held out my hand, because in that moment, I desperately needed to close the distance between us. He pulled me beside him on the bed. After propping pillows against the headboard, he swung his legs onto the mattress, leaned back, and drew me against him so my head rested in the curve of his neck.

I was drowning in a sea of Nolan—his scent, his skin, his heat. My mind swam with the headiness of it all, every neuron pulsing with unfamiliar electricity. I placed my hand on his chest, and he shuddered beneath my touch.

“You’re not who I thought you were,” he whispered. A burst of pleasure washed over me, but it quickly fizzled out when he added, “I really like you,” with a distinct note of regret.

I frowned. “I’m sorry that’s such a problem for you.”

Nolan ran his hand down my cheek. “It’s not like that. It’s just…” He sighed. “There are things you don’t know about me—things you wouldn’t like. Before…” His voice trailed off. But I didn’t need him to go on to know what he was going to say.
Before
my messages had been posted on lockers,
before
we’d been paired up for the picture-book assignment,
before
he’d taken me in his arms in the bathroom stall, we’d both thought and said some pretty terrible things about each other.

“Don’t.” I laced my fingers with his. “I already told you we don’t have to talk about this tonight. Things were different before.”

“I know. I’m sorry for bringing it up again. It’s just—” He shook his head, the top of his jaw tickling the hair at the top of my head. “I was so stupid.”

“We were
both
stupid.”

He swallowed. “You don’t understand. What if I’d been too late? I was too late with Jordan.”

I traced the faded writing on the front of his shirt. “I thought she moved. How was that your fault?”

He didn’t answer right away. The more seconds that ticked by, the more I became convinced he wasn’t going to. But then he sighed, and it was like his chest deflated beneath my head. “She
did
move, but it was more than that. I let her down. I wasn’t there when she—
Fuck
.” He tipped his head back against the wooden headboard and stared at the ceiling.

“Nolan—”

“Things change,” he said. “There’s no way of knowing what the future will bring. I’ll tell you what happened between Jordan and me. I promise you I will. But for tonight, can we pretend I never said anything? That the world outside this room doesn’t exist?”

My protest melted on my tongue. How could I argue with that? “Okay. We won’t talk about it tonight.” Whatever his secrets were, they would still be there tomorrow.

His body gradually relaxed beneath me.

“Not tonight,” he repeated. He lifted a lock of my hair and twirled it around his finger. The moonlight streaming through his window created a soft glow over our bodies. His room was heavy and silent, and it was almost as if Nolan and I were the only two people in the world.

Almost.

I couldn’t get his words to stop running through my head.
What if I’d been too late?
The question pinged back and forth in my mind until my temples throbbed.

Too late for what?