21
“Nathan!” I cry, hoping that came out more “pleasantly surprised” than “shocked and horrified.” Not that I would be shocked or horrified to see him under normal circumstances, that is, when I do not have a dead body AND a bag full of stolen things in my room. I slide out of the room and pull the door shut behind me, and only then do I breathe easier.
And there he is. My Nathan. “Hi.”
“Hi,” he says, smiling at me as though I’m the only person he wants to see in the entire world. He’s had this effect on people since our college days. He’d smile at the cashier at Safeway, and the kid would just melt. “I had some free time—okay, I don’t, actually, I made some free time—Meddy, I can’t stop thinking about you.”
“Me too.” Technically a lie—I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the corpse—but also not technically a lie, given that I’ve been obsessing over him for the past four years. I guess that’s what he wanted to hear, because next thing I know, his arms are around my waist, pulling me close. He pauses, his lips only a single, lonely inch from mine, and the yearning inside me takes over and I close the distance.
Every kiss we have steals my breath, stops the spinning of the world, and this one is no different. Time stops, air molecules freeze, and in this moment, there’s no me, or him, or everything else. Just us. I kiss him hungrily, and he kisses back with equal fervor. My lips part slightly, and he slides his tongue into my mouth. Molten lava fills my belly. I can’t have enough of him. The taste of him is intoxicating, the gentle caress of his tongue on mine sending me spinning into mindlessness. His hands hold me tight, possessively, and when one of them moves to cup my breast, I arch my back like a cat, filling his palm, feeling my skin burst into flames at the touch. God, I want him so badly.
“Can we go inside?” he murmurs, his lips tracing the words against my neck, making me whimper with need. I wrap my arms around him even tighter, words tumbling out of my mouth without much meaning.
Inside. Where we could rip off each other’s clothes, skin kissing skin, his warmth against mine, inside me—
Inside. Where Ah Guan’s corpse lies, cooling. My eyes fly open. I might as well have gotten an electric shock. All of my muscles tense, and I turn into a salt pillar. “Inside?” I squeak.
Nathan pulls back a little. He searches my eyes. “Yeah, I thought—” He blushes. “Sorry if I’m moving too fast—”
“No! No, you’re not. I really, really want to go inside with you. You won’t believe how much I’ve been fantasizing about that. It’s just—shit, actually, I just locked myself out.” I pat my pockets for my key card. I’m not even lying. In my panic to close the door when I found Nathan here, I forgot to grab the key card from the desk.
“Oh. That’s okay, I’ve got a master key.” He takes a card out of his pocket and smiles. “Look, I know this is moving really fast, but um—I’d actually love to just be able to sit down with you and talk, we have so much to catch up on and if I’m being totally honest, you know, I still don’t understand where we went wrong back in college. I drove myself crazy trying to figure out what I did, and I don’t want to make that same mistake now.”
“You didn’t. It was nothing you did.”
Confusion crosses his face.
“I was too scared to go east with you and I just freaked. I wanted to stay and help the family business, but I didn’t want to risk you giving up on your job offer, so. Yeah. Biggest mistake of my life. Believe me, I kick myself every day for letting you go.”
Nathan smiles, and god, it’s beautiful. It’s like years are shaved off his face. “So. I didn’t fuck it up?”
“God, no! You were the love of my life. I want to talk too, properly—”
He waves the key card at the door before I can say “but,” and the light above the knob turns from red to green. The lock slides with a click, and Nathan opens the door for me. My heart stops. My entire being has frozen.
But instead of walking in as I thought he would, Nathan remains outside.
He sees my startled, dazed gaze, and smiles ruefully. “It’s clear that you’re unsure about this, Meddy. And I’m not going to make you do anything you don’t want to. We’ve got all the time in the world after this weekend to talk about us.” He takes my hand, enveloping it with his warmth, and lifts it to his lips. My knees turn to water as he kisses my hand with exquisite reverence. “You’re worth the wait.” He tucks an errant strand of hair behind my ear and trails his fingers down the side of my cheek, to my neck, making me shiver with pleasure.
“After this weekend,” I promise, “I’ll be all yours, and I promise I’ll explain everything about my family and why I was such an idiot and broke things off with you.”
His smile lights up his face, same old Nathan, the boy I fell so wildly in love with all those years ago, and it’s like watching the sun rise. I kiss him again, wanting so badly to memorize every delicious curve of his mouth, the addictive taste of him. When we break off, we’re both breathless again. I slide back through the door, almost home free. His gaze flicks up somewhere behind my shoulder, and his smile freezes.
“Is that—?” A frown etches into his forehead as he cranes his neck to look through the gap at the door. When he speaks again, his voice has lost all of its warmth, and he’s looking down at me like I’m a stranger. “Is there a guy in your bed?”
A supernova goes off in my head. Oh god, he’s seen the body. HE’S SEEN THE BODY.
Instead of a look of horror, though, what settles on Nathan’s face is disappointment.
He laughs a little awkwardly. “I thought you weren’t seeing anyone, but—” He laughs again, an utterly humorless sound, and the look on his face is unbearable to see. Betrayal. My heart crumples at the sight of it. A small part of me insists this is worse, much worse than shock-horror. A small part of me wants to shout: “No! It’s not a boyfriend! Just some blind date I killed last night; he means nothing to me, I swear! I didn’t even know his real name before I killed the guy!”
But I stay there, blinking idiotically, letting the love of my life think I’m some cheating asshole who would go around making out with him while I’m still attached to some guy who’s apparently napping in my room.
“Anyway.” Nathan gives me a tight-lipped smile, the kind you give to the overly friendly cashier at Trader Joe’s to get them to stop talking. “I’ll see you around, Meddy.” And with that, he leaves. I melt back inside my room, close the door and lean against it, tears already pooling in my eyes. My chest hurts, like someone’s just reached in with an iron fist, shattering my ribs, grabbed my heart, and wrenched it out, but there’s nothing I can do to stop Nathan from leaving.