'The Limit' - Chapter Forty-Nine
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
It was killing him, slowly and painfully. Seeing Haley in his clothes, an old t-shirt that she is near to swimming in and a pair of his boxers, sets off something primitively possessive in him. He wants to drag her up the stairs to his bedroom, throw her down on his bed, and do things to her that would have her eyes rolling back in her head.
Oh, but that wasn’t happening. No, instead they were perched on opposite ends of the ratty couch he and Pete had acquired at a garage sale on their way back here after Thackeray let them out of school. They were watching some damn Will Ferrell movie he’d probably seen a hundred times and was paying absolutely no attention to now. Of course, why would he pay attention to a movie he could see at any given time when Haley - his Haley - was sitting a mere two feet away from him, miraculously and distractingly braless. Really, there wasn’t a chance in Hell that he’d focus on anything else right now. No way, no how.
To make things even more complicated, they hadn’t started the talk that Haley had requested. So to go along with the distraction of Haley in his clothes - braless, mind you - he had that hanging over his head, too. Inwardly groaning, he leans back into the couch trying to ignore the temptation to reach out and grab Haley and pull her to him. That one is proving to be easier said than done.
“Nathan,” she sighs in exasperation, rolling her eyes toward him. “You are staring at me. Is my hair frizzing out or something?”
Caught, he grins unabashedly in response. “What can I say? I like to look at you, Hay. I could do it day and night if you would let me.” Taking the opportunity, he reaches out snagging her around the waist. He maneuvers until he is turned sideways on the sofa, leaning back against the arm, with her sitting flush against him between his legs. “That’s better.”
She laughs, but holds herself stiffly as she tries to maintain minimal contact. “Ah, but this means that the staring comes to an unfortunate end now,” she points out teasingly.
“No way,” he corrects with a laugh, leaning over her shoulder to look pointedly down at her chest. The view is actually pretty damn great from up here, too.”
In spite of herself, she laughs at that. “I don’t know if you have heard, but leering is not the same thing as staring. It is also not the same as looking, peeking, or watching.”
Dropping a hand down to fiddle with the edge of the t-shirt, he asks, “Well, is it the same as peering?” She laughs again, and he is so gratified by that simple thing that his arms circle around her. “I love it when you laugh,” he admits, feeling more than a little ridiculous saying such a thing.
“Good thing that you can be funny once in awhile then,” she teases him, still not fully relaxed in his arms, although she isn’t bothering to try and hold herself away from him now. He’d be happiest if she’d just melt into him right this second, but he’s learned enough to hope that good things really do come to those who can wait.
“You wanted to talk?” he asks, biting the bullet to get this discussion out of the way and over with. Maybe then they can truly and finally move on and put all of this horridness behind them. Okay, maybe that was asking for too much.
She sits up, twisting around to look at him. “Well, yea, I think that we should. It just seems like there is a lot that we should get out into the open.”
With a sigh, she moves to sit Indian style facing him, still between his stretched out legs and within his reach, so he doesn’t protest. “Where are we supposed to start?” he asks nervously.
“I don’t know, Nathan,” she sighs, beginning to feel guilty for forcing him into this discussion, especially now that she isn’t so sure what she even expects to get from it. “I - a part of me wants to know, in your words, what happened. The whys, hows, and whens, you know? Then other parts of me chime in to point out that maybe I’m better off not knowing, but the partial stories I got from Brooke and Tim leave a lot to be desired and I figure I’d be better off knowing the whole stories.”
He nods, dragging a hand down his face. He had figured this was coming, and he knows that she deserves to have her questions answered. He just hopes that, since she already knows the worst of it, that they can spend more time on the better parts of things.
“It happened so fast,” he says when she doesn’t add anything else. “One day all I cared about was getting Luke off the team - to get Dan off my back, but I’m not going to lie - it was for me, too. I resented Luke, and I didn’t want him there, so I was going to do what Dan wanted and drive him off the team. I swear, that’s what was happening one minute, and then what seemed like the very next minute I was crazy for you and I didn’t know how to reconcile the two. They were sort of mutually exclusive.”
“When?” she asked quietly. “When did you decide you loved me? Because you said it at one point, but how do I know you meant it then? I just - how do I know that you meant it at all?”
“I never lied about loving you,” he insists quietly, taking her hands in his. “Hay, I know that I have not given you many reasons to trust me, but I….you know that I love you. I haven’t said that to anyone other than you since I was a little boy. I wouldn’t have said it to you if I didn’t mean it, I swear.”
Wrenching her gaze off their joined hands, she unflinchingly stares into his eyes. “I guess I know that,” she admits with a heavy sigh. “Sometimes it is just hard to remember. Sometimes it hurts so damn bad that I feel like I shouldn’t remember that part.”
Swallowing thickly around the hard lump that forms in his throat, he nods. “I hate that I made - make - you feel like that. It was all so stupid, that damn plan of mine.”
She sighs, squeezing her eyes shut tightly. “Maybe I was wrong, maybe we don’t need to talk about these things. I mean, we’ve been through it all before, so there really couldn’t be all that much to say, right?”
“No, I want to talk about it if it helps.” Earnestly, he goes on, “You know how important this is to me. Plus, I want to prove that I can be honest with you, even when the conversation is tough on both of us.”
“Oh, Nathan,” she smiles, her right hand coming down to rest on his left knee. “I know that. I do. Really, I don’t even know why I have this need to talk about it. I don’t even know what I expect to get from this.” Her fingers, tracing little teasing circles just above his knee, are about to drive him to distraction. “Maybe I am just grasping at straws for something to hold onto.”
Practically choking on the lump in his throat, he shakes his head even though he has an idea of where this is going. It just isn’t a direction that he cares for much. “What do you mean?” he asks dully, not really wanting to hear her answer.
She smiles at him again, and that proves to settle his nerves better than anything else could. “I don’t want to hurt you….but sometimes I think that I’d be crazy to let you back in, to let my guard down again. So, maybe on some level, I want or expect to hear something that I could grasp at to protect myself with. Like I could find a reason to stop this dead in its tracks.”
He takes a minute to let that digest, only giving her a vague nod of acknowledgement. She waits patiently, letting her words sink in. “I’m sorry, Ha - “ he begins, cutting himself off when she places her fingertips on his lips.
“Don’t apologize,” she chides him gently before slowly drawing her fingers away. “You’re sorry, I get it. There’s no reason to keep apologizing when we both know that you’re sorry. I know how sorry you are, Nathan.”
“I can’t help apologizing,” he groans, managing a rueful smile. “Besides, I am and I want to make sure that everyone knows that, but mostly that you know it.”
She nods, regarding him thoughtfully. “I don’t think that what happened, what is happening, or even what will happen is anyone’s business but ours. This is just hard for me, trying to get to a place where I can trust not only you, but myself to make good judgments and decisions. I guess that I don’t understand why - well, I don’t always think that I know what I’m doing, so yeah.”
“What don’t you understand?” he asks with atypical patience. “I want to explain the things that can be explained, and at least talk about the ones that can’t.”
“You don’t have to indulge me like this,” she insists, giving him a grateful smile. “I know that you don’t really want to talk about these things, and well, maybe I don’t either. Maybe there are better ways for me to get past all this stuff.”
With a self-deprecating smirk, he sighs. “No, I think I do. I do, and I want to talk about this if it helps you. Hey, who knows, maybe it’ll help me, too.”
She reaches out, surprising him by entwining their fingers together. “This is about both of us, you know. It isn’t just me.”
“Yeah, okay,” he agrees quietly, even though for him, it all comes down to her. It’s all about her. That should probably scare him, but somehow, it doesn’t.
“Nathan, how come, after you realized that you loved me, you didn’t just tell me what had happened to bring us together?” she asks, getting her nerve up to ask the question the one thing that possibly bothers her the most in all this. “There’s no doubt that I would’ve been mad as hell at first, but that would have been so much easier to get past. If you’d just come to me and told me the truth, things might have been so different.”
Closing his eyes and remembering his vow to answer everything truthfully, he takes a deep breath before opening his eyes and staring into hers. “Hay, I - even after I realized that I was so crazy for you and that you were the best thing that would ever happen to me, I was - I still planned on going through with it.”
Her eyes widen, and something uncomfortable and tense fills her chest and belly as she looks back at him. “Oh. I mean, I had just figured that you thought you could get away with it, that you dropped it after that. I hadn’t realized…well, okay. Thanks for telling me that, I guess it wasn’t easy.”
“I didn’t - it wasn’t because I didn’t love you enough, Hay. Ah, hell, pretty girl, I don’t know what was wrong with me, but I was just resigned to the fact that I would lose you when it was all over,” he tries to explain, feeling like he is bungling the whole thing in his own special way. “That was my punishment, you know? I deserved to be the one who ended up with nothing, so that was going to be the least of what I deserved.”
“You were prepared to sacrifice our relationship just to get one up on Lucas? I don’t - that’s just not even comprehensible to me, Nathan. I don’t even know how I’m supposed to deal with that,” she murmurs, pulling one of her hands free to rub at her temple.
Beginning to feel a little desperate, he shakes his head. “At first, I didn’t even care that you were going to get hurt. I didn’t know you, so you didn’t matter to me. It’s just, it wasn’t long after meeting you that I realized that you’d become the only thing I cared about. Nothing else really mattered to me anymore.” Giving her a pleading look, he leans forward until their foreheads are touching. “I kept dragging it out, you know? First in torturing myself by not taking things further in our relationship, and then it was just this ‘one more day’ mantra of denial and delay of the inevitable.”
Haley’s brown eyes stare into his, leaving him feeling slightly exposed. “Then Jake found out, and took that away,” she continues for him when he has trouble going on. “Why didn’t you just tell me then?”
Taking a deep breath, he lets his eyes fall closed as he answers. “Because I couldn’t. I wanted to postpone the inevitable as long as possible, even if that was just a few more days. I know it was selfish, but isn’t that just about the best word for me anyway?” She starts to respond, but he goes on. “For a few days, after I realized that Luke was smart enough to stick it out with the team, I told myself that I could get away with it. I let myself think that maybe you would never find out, and that everything would be okay. You would never hurt because of me, and I wouldn’t lose you.”
“But I still hurt because of you when Luke was so mad at me,” she notes quietly. “That was partially my fault, because I lied to everyone just as much as you did, but I didn’t know the real ‘why’ of it, did I? I know it is stupid to say these things now, but I wish you had told me the truth. I won’t pretend that I would have reacted well, but maybe. Maybe they would’ve been different, maybe it wouldn’t have hurt so bad because then I would’ve had you owning up to the truth to hang onto.” She stares at him with wide, sad eyes. “It was so easy to think that everything was a lie, you know? Because the knee-jerk reaction was that, well, he never loved me enough to set the grudge aside. He doesn’t love me enough to tell me the truth. That just kept circling through my head, like I wasn’t enough for you to love.
“And maybe that was stupid,” she continues with a bitter smile on her lips, “But I just couldn’t shake that feeling, and it hurt so bad.” Shuddering delicately, she glances away from him. “That day in the cafeteria, at school, oh, it was so awful. You didn’t say anything to me, Nathan! You just let me stand there like an idiot. Such an idiot.”
She’s angry with him. Though it probably shouldn’t, that catches him by surprise. He’d known how hurt she was by everything that he’d done, but somehow he’d just assumed that the anger part was gone, played out, probably because she kept such a tight rein on it all the time. Not that he thinks she doesn’t have the right to be angry, because he knows as well as anyone that she absolutely should be, but she’d just seemed to be more sad and hurt than anything else.
Reaching out to let his knuckles graze her cheek before gently turning her face back to his, he takes a deep breath, knowing that there was probably a lot riding on what he said in response to all that. “That was a huge fuck-up on my part, Hay,” he admits. “I don’t even know what happened. Maybe I froze, I guess, maybe… I don’t know, Haley. I just couldn’t move, couldn’t even open my mouth. I wanted to, I did, I wanted to do or say something to make things right, but I - I couldn’t. I didn’t.”
“That was a bad day,” she whispers, leaning into him, which just fills him with so much hope that he can hardly stand it. “All I could think when Luke was saying those things was that any second, you would say something to explain. Any second now, I just kept telling myself. Any second now, Nathan is going to say something because I know he wouldn’t just leave me here like this.”
“But I did,” he whispers back, heaps and heaps of guilt weighing him down. “I’m so sorry, I know that on the basis of that alone, you should hate me. I do know that, but I still can’t help but beg, hope, pray for you to be mine forever.”
Giggling a little at that, she pulls back, swiping at the tears in her eyes. “Forever is a very long time, Nathan,” she smiles, squeezing his hand. “I’m sorry for bringing all that up. I really hadn’t meant to go into all of that stuff.”
“No, don’t be sorry,” he sighs, giving her a wan smile. “We should definitely talk about these things, Hay. We need to clear the air, especially if they still bother you.”
She leans forward, kissing his cheek so close to his mouth that he’d only need to turn the slightest of degrees to meet her lips with his own. Not wanting to push her, he refrains. “I am sorry,” she insists, “Because I don’t want you to hurt anymore. I really hate hurting you, Nathan.”
“You haven’t hurt me,” he tells her honestly. “What I did hurt a lot of people, and in the end, that included myself. I hurt me, not you. Can - can I ask you something?”
“Yeah,” she agrees, although she looks a little startled by the request. “Of course, you can ask me anything, you know that.”
He nods, shifting to sit up just a little straighter. “Why are you here? Don’t get me wrong; I’m so thankful you are here that you wouldn’t believe it, but Haley, no one would blame you for wanting to get and stay as far away from me as possible. But here you are. I’m not complaining,” he promises, “But I am curious.”
Moving slowly, she turns sideways and scoots closer to him until her side is flush against his front. “What happened between us, well that hurt a lot. But more than that, more than the hurt and the anger, I love you. I’m - I am just happier having you in my life than I am without you, and I don’t want to lose you again.”
Burying his face in her neck, he has to bite down hard on his lip to keep from crying with relief. He’d known that maybe she was wavering, that she was still attracted to him and that she still had feelings for him, but to hear her say it was completely different from anything he might have thought. So stunned is he that she has to grab his hands and pull them around her before he responds with a tight grasp on her.
“I love you, too,” he breathes, pressing his lips to her neck. It has been months since he’s had this, since he’s had her in his arms like this, and it feels even better than he remembered and way better than he had dreamed. “I -oh, shit, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever hear you say that again,” he admits, a little choked up in spite of himself. He moves them down so that he is lying flat on his back, and she turns to be flat on top of him, her face hovering over his. “You’re so beautiful, baby. Do you have any idea how much I’ve missed you?”
“If it is half as much as I’ve missed you,” she returns, her lips grazing over his jaw and lower down to his neck, “Then we’re doing okay at something.” She won’t take her mouth away from his neck so he can kiss her, so he retaliates by roaming his hands down her back and bottom and over her hips, squeezing gently. “Nathan,” she moans, finally lifting her face to his. “I have missed you so much. So, so much.”
He slides his hands into her hair, lightly trapping her there. “I know, baby. You feel so good, you know that?” He pulls her down for a long, smoldering kiss, nudging her thighs apart with one of his own. “Jesus, Hay,” he mutters, “I have missed you so goddamn much, baby.”
She nods, moving feverishly against him. “I am sorry we didn’t talk sooner,” she gasps out against his mouth. “I’m sorry it took me so long to listen to you.”
“Don’t,” he countermands between kisses. “Please don’t apologize to me for anything, baby. I mean it, I don’t deserve any apologies from you, and it just makes me feel worse.”
“My eyes, God, my eyes!” Pete interrupts in a droll voice from the entryway. “Honestly, little fella, if you’re going to put on a show for me, you could at least get her shirt off so I have something great to look at.”
Nathan gives his friend, former perhaps, a hard glare as Haley scrambles off him. Of all the fantastic timing possibilities, this has to take the cake. “Damn it, Pete.”
Pete just shrugs, grinning shamelessly at the both of them. “It’s not that I’m against Christening the nasty garage sale couch, but I am against being excluded from the festivities. Especially when the festivities include our lovely Ms. James here,” he teases.
Haley shoots him her most sarcastic smile. “Nice of you to think of me,” she snits at Pete. Turning to Nathan with a much softer look, she says, “I should probably get going, Nathan.”
“No, no, no!” Pete exclaims, laughing. “You don’t have to go! I was just flipping you guys some shit, I figured anyone who could put up with Scott here could take a few jokes.” Nathan continues to glare at him in response to that, and Haley just stands there awkwardly looking back and forth between the two. “I’m just playing, for real. I bumped into your brother and that skinny girlfriend of his, and they invited me out to meet the rest of the ‘gang’,” he goes on conversationally. “Guess that’ll be something.”
“Oh,” Nathan blinks, everything else flying out of his head as he tries to process that. “I see.” He stands up, instinctively moving closer to Haley. “Have fun with that.”
Pete nods, grabbing a sweatshirt that is lying over the back of a chair. “Yeah, it’ll be nice to meet a few more people up here. I don’t really know anyone yet.” He glances up, smiling at both of them. “Well, except you two, but I’m guessing you’d rather me not be here, huh?”
Haley flushes a dull pink at that, raising an eyebrow at Nathan’s roommate. “Yeah, I guess I’ll be seeing you later, Pete.” He throws a jaunty salute her way, grinning as he turns and heads back out the door. Noticing Nathan’s discomfort, she loops an arm around his waist. “That was a little embarrassing, huh? I feel like a little girl caught stealing from the cookie jar or something,” she grins, faltering when he doesn’t respond. “Nathan, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” is his automatic answer. Before she can even protest that lame and obvious untruth, he gives her a rueful smile as he falls back onto the couch. “It’s crazy, it really is.”
“Tell me anyway,” she encourages, dropping to her knees in front of him. “You know I won’t think that you’re crazy, Nathan. I know better than that.”
Being able to reach out and touch her goes a long way towards settling him, and when she lets him pull her up onto his lap, he feels even better. “I’d been kind of looking forward to introducing him to Luke all summer. Now, I don’t know. It’s weird, and I don’t know. What if they like each other better than either of them like me?”
Sometimes he just breaks her heart for him, not over him. Big difference there. Recognizing his obvious worry over this, she wraps her arms around his neck and kisses his forehead. “I won’t tell you that you’re crazy or silly or whatever, but I will tell you that I don’t think you have much of a reason to worry, Nathan.”
“They’re both different from me,” he shrugs dejectedly. “I just thought that the three of us would hang out together. I didn’t realize it’d just be them sometimes.”
She nods, understanding how he’s feeling right now. Anyone with as many siblings as she has would understand it perfectly. “Well, we know that it isn’t just them there right now, Nathan. And I promise that I think both of them are way more interested in being your friend than they are in each other. I mean that; I believe that.”
He leans back, smiling to himself when she lays her head down on his chest. “I feel selfish again,” he notes, stifling a chuckle. “I just can’t get past that, can I? I don’t know, though. I just wanted something that was just mine. And Pete was kind of that, you know? He was my friend, and he wasn’t my friend just because he only knew me as some hotshot basketball player. He knows all the crap stuff, too, better than most people ever will. He - he saw me at my very worst, and he still wants to be my friend. Luke has only seen my worst, and he has no reason to think that there is anything more to me than that, so what? What happens?”
“What happens is that you get two friends instead of just one,” she points out reasonably, snuggling into his arms. “You’ll have two people who care about you, and that’s not a bad thing, Nathan. I know that sometimes we want things that are only ours, that no one else can touch…and maybe that’s us. Maybe what we have is what no one else gets to have, gets to touch, or even really gets to know about. Because it’s ours, and no one else’s.”
Despite everything else, despite all the crap, he can believe that. He can take that and hold onto it, and believe it for the good thing that it is.
Maybe things are looking brighter, and maybe everything’s going to be alright.
“Thanks, Hay,” he says seriously, smiling genuinely at her. “I knew there were a million reasons why I love you. This is probably number one.”
“I love you, too,” she returns breathlessly, her arms tightening around him. “Let’s go upstairs, Nathan.”
Well, who would argue with that?
~*~
What was he doing here? This was craziness, sheer, pure, and unadulterated craziness. Still, he wasn’t turning back either, so there must be something to it.
“You okay?” Haley asks him quietly, her hand tightening around his. “If you aren’t ready to do this, we can still get out of here. It’s not like we’ve even gotten to her floor yet.”
“No, I’m okay,” he assures her, managing an impressively bright smile, considering what a strain this is for him. “I think that this is something I need to do. Either fix a few things, or get that last bit of closure. Either way, it’ll be good.”
Grabbing and squeezing his hand in a measure of support, she reaches out and punches the ‘up’ button for the elevator. “You realize, right, that if she steps even one toe over the line, that I’m going to be on her like stupid on George W. Bush. I mean it, Nathan. So if I get arrested, you have to swear to get me out of there.”
He laughs at her goofiness, beginning to relax a little bit despite the strain that comes along with seeing his mother for the first time since he was officially declared emancipated. Well, there was enough natural strain between him and Deb; the whole emancipation thing was just a bonus.
He had no delusions about how this meeting was going to go today. Deb had been a mess the last times he’d seen her, and he didn’t really anticipate that changing much. Haley had convinced him to come here today, to try and make peace or move on, but he wasn’t sure that it would do anyone any good. Still, she hadn’t led him wrong before, so if this is something she thought he could use, then he was going to be there.
Plus, a day alone with his girlfriend? Fine by him.
“I just hope she isn’t drunk,” he mutters, more to himself that Haley. She pinches him on the arm, frowning at him. “Well, she’s not a very good drunk. She’s sloppy and weepy, and it’s just not pleasant at all. You don’t need to meet her if she’s like that.”
“If you don’t want me to go in with you, all you have to do is say it,” she smiles, squeezing his hand tightly. “It won’t hurt my feelings to wait outside, and I know this is something that might be best done one on one.”
He squeezes her hand tightly. “No, I need you with me for this. Honestly, Hay. I don’t trust myself to not start screaming at her or something.”
She leans her head into the side of his arm, not quite reaching his shoulder. “If she gets you to the point where you are yelling at her, I’ll probably be right there with you,” she warns with a huge smile. “You know how on your side I am, right?”
“Thanks,” he nods, actually breathing a sigh of relief. Having her with him in this means the world to him, even if stands as a very sharp reminder of how close he’d come to losing her forever. Maybe he needs those reminders, just to always keep it there and with him. “I just - it means a lot to me, having you here. I hope you know that, baby.”
“I love you, Nathan,” she simply smiles, as though that says it all. It probably does, he has even begun to realize. At least he already knew how lucky he was to have that. He definitely reminded himself of that often enough. “If you need me with you for any reason at all, I’ll be there. Always, for anything, everything, and even nothing.”
They step into the elevator together, and as soon as the doors slide shut behind them, he is pulling her into his arms. “Do you know that I am the luckiest jerk on the planet? Don’t even think that I don’t realize just how lucky I am, okay? I know it, and I am grateful for it.”
She reciprocates his hug, wrapping her arms tightly around his middle. “We’re both lucky. Maybe we didn’t have the most conventional of starts, but that’s okay. I think we’ve both learned a lot of things and grown up a lot. We’re both lucky, is what I am trying to say.”
He startles when the door opens noisily. “That means so much to me, Hay. I feel like a broken record, saying that all the time.” He groans, giving her a pained smile as he glances around the lobby. “She’s worked her for over eight years, and I’ve never been here before. I’ve never seen this place.”
“Don’t give me more reasons to hate her,” Haley whispers back through clenched teeth. “I’m already not a fan for all the things she’s done to you - and that’s just what I know about.”
He grins at that, leaning down to kiss her cheek. “Maybe this won’t be as bad as we’re assuming,” he offers with a shrug, both of them laughing quietly when they share doubtful looks. “I guess stranger things have happened.”
“Not that strange,” she whispers back as they approach the reception desk. When Nathan falls silent, she answers the receptionist’s offer of help. “Hi, we are here to see Debra Scott.”
“Certainly,” the woman answers, her gaze lingering too long on an oblivious Nathan. “Who may I tell her is inquiring after her?”
“Her long-neglected son,” Nathan mutters, drawing a surprised look from the woman in front of them. The woman that Haley is getting dangerously close to snapping at - or ripping her hair off. Whichever. “I guess just ‘son’ would be fine.”
As they sit down on the chairs provided for visitors, Haley glares at the still-staring woman, reaching over to lace her fingers together with Nathan’s. “She has got the hots for you,” Haley sniffs, gratified when Nathan blinks in surprise before crinkling his nose up. “I was about to jump over her little desk there and show her where she can put her eyes.”
Now she has caught him off-guard. “Wait just a red-hot minute,” he grins, surprised and more than a little delighted to find that she gets jealous, too. Usually that shoe is on his foot! “You’re jealous? Just because some old lady is staring at me? Oh, hell, that’s hilarious, Hay. Really,” he grins, laughing when she pinches him on the thigh. “Oh, baby, do you know how much time I have spent being jealous of Jake? I knew I didn’t need to be, but I just couldn’t shake it all the way. It’s kind of a relief that you get the same way.”
Haley is about to respond to that when the shrill, nervous voice of Deb Scott rings out across the office. “Nathan! Oh, sweetheart!” she exclaims, rushing across the lobby to greet him. Not dropping Haley’s hand, Nathan reluctantly stands up. He does not, however, let his mother hug him when she approaches. Her face falls in disappointment. “No hug for your mother?” she asks sadly, her face going blank when she spots his hand joined to Haley’s. “And who is this?”
“This is Haley, Mom. She’s my girlfriend, and for this, she’s my moral support. So please don’t act offended that I’d bring someone with me. I need her here,” he explains, relaxing a little when Haley squeezes his hand.
“Oh,” Deb nods, peering at Haley who shifts uncomfortably. “I see. Well, Nathan, I don’t know that having an outsider here will be very conducive to our visit. Perhaps your little friend can wait outside, as this should just be you and me, don’t you think, honey?”
Haley wants to jump in and smooth things over, but this is Nathan’s thing, and she knows that he can handle it. “First of all,” he begins testily in his most closed off voice, “Haley is the last person in the world that I would ever consider an outsider in my life. You, however, are, and if you treat her with even the slightest amount of disrespect, we’ll be gone so fast that you won’t even be sure that we were ever really here.”
Deb’s eyes widen at that, but she just nods tersely. “Why don’t you - both of you, of course - come back to my office? It’s a better place for this type of meeting.” They both follow her, to her relief. Loath though she is to admit it, she hadn’t been sure that Nathan would go along with her.
“So this is where you’ve gone all these years to get away from home, huh?” he asks, his tone almost conversational enough to belie the accusation behind the words. “I’d ask why you never brought me here before, but what’s the point in having a place to escape to if the people you’re escaping from know about it?”
“Knock that tone off, young man,” Deb snaps, caught too off-guard by all that to censor herself. “This is my office, my place of business, and you will show a little respect while you are here.”
Before Nathan can gather up a retort, Haley steps in. “Mrs. Scott, I don’t think we were really properly introduced,” she says quietly as she extends her hand. “I’m Haley James. We spoke on the phone once, when Nathan needed medical care.”
Deb stares at her as though she was crazy, but reluctantly reaches out to grasp her hand. “I’m sorry if I seem terribly rude,” she responds, “But I had just figured that when I finally got to see my son again, it would be a family moment. I just don’t see why you would bring someone along for this, Nathan.”
He didn’t hear that last part. “Family? What family? You, me, and Dan? Either you are as high as Dan said you were, or you are in the worst kind of delusional denial that could ever exist!” Nathan grits out through clenched teeth. “If you have some crazy thoughts about that happening, then we’ll just have to leave right now.”
“Of course I don’t want you to leave, honey! Oh, I just don’t know what I’m supposed to say to you anymore. You’re just so different, and I am so afraid it isn’t for the better, Nathan,” she sighs fretfully, wringing her hands. “I don’t know what to do.”
Nathan gapes at her, exchanging a glance with Haley. “I’m in the AP classes at school now, Mom! I managed to get myself back on the basketball team at Tree Hill. I’d been kicked off! Expelled! And you question if I’ve changed for the better? How could you?” he asks, that last question betraying some of his hurt.
Deb blinks in surprise. “You’re back in Tree Hill?” she asks, ignoring Haley’s gasp of indignation. This woman doesn’t even know where her son is? “I cannot believe you didn’t tell me, Nathan! I’m your mother, I should know these things!”
“Do you even care?” he asks quietly. “Dan knows I’m back. He even expected it. You just don’t give me any credit, though, do you? God, you know I spend all this time thinking that nothing is as bad as Dan. Then there’s you, a whole different kind of awful. You, who spends the better part of my life working in a different area code, living in a different area code. I’d be hurt that you stopped caring after the emancipation went through, but you never really cared before, so why should that make a difference now?”
“That is not true!” Deb fires back, staring at her only son with a pained and pleading expression on her face. “I have always cared about you! I have always loved you, Nathan! How could you even think otherwise?”
His eyes widen with disbelief, and his mouth opens and closes soundlessly in agitation as he tries to formulate words. “You are such a piece of work, Mom!” he accuses her angrily, only calming down when Haley moves closer to him. “You have virtually ignored me for years! You didn’t live with us, you weren’t there when Dan was poisoning me against my own brother! Do you know how messed up I let myself get as a result of living alone with Dan? Because of all the crap he pulled that I began to believe was okay?”
Deb stares back at him with wide, tear-filled eyes. “Honey, I don’t even know what to tell you. I know that I’ve put a lot of focus on my work over the years, but I never meant to hurt you with that. I never meant it as a detriment to your development. Besides, once I realized how bad things were with your father, I tried to intervene. I came back to Tree Hill, and I - “
“Oh, stop patting yourself on the back!” Nathan explodes, knocking a nameplate off of Deb’s desk. “God, you are just as bad as he is! Worse, maybe. At least he doesn’t pretend like you do, he’s not living in a fantasy land. I know that he’s a self-serving bastard up front, but you - you fooled me. It took a lot longer to figure out that you’re just as selfish as he is!”
“Well, it was hard for me, Nathan!” she protests. “For so long, you were under Dan’s thumb, and you had no interest in me! So I threw myself into work, into things that I could actually make a difference in! Every time I came back to you, you two were closer. Every time I came back, you were more like him.”
“Oh, NO!” Haley interrupts as Nathan visibly recoils. “No, no, you do not get to put that on him! You do not get to compare him to your self-serving, narcissistic man-child of a husband! Nathan is nothing like him, and for you to suggest he is - no, to state that he is - is completely out of line! You do not have that right!”
Deb stares at Haley in open-mouthed shock. “Little girl, I don’t know who you think you are, talking to me like that, but you had better watch yourself. Don’t you dare tell me what I get to say or do to my son!”
Haley shakes her head, almost as if in amusement. “See, that’s the thing that neither you nor your abusive ass of a husband understand. Nathan is not a possession. He’s not a toy or a weapon. He’s not a way to relive your aborted youth. He’s a person, a good person, with thoughts and feelings and ideas and hopes and dreams, and you, mother or not, do not get to take any of those away from him. I’m sorry, but you just don’t.”
“We should go, Hay,” Nathan says quietly, staring at Deb, trying to gauge her thoughts. “This was a bad idea, I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Wait, no, Nathan, don’t go!” Deb exclaims, moving to stand between them and the door. “Please, don’t go. I’m sorry, I don’t know what got into me.”
Nathan rolls his eyes, tiredly shaking his head. “The same things that have always been in you, I guess.” Taking a deep breath, he looks her in the eye. “Look, Mom, I thought maybe we could talk, and that it wouldn’t be the same thing as it was before. Now, I don’t think we’re in that place yet. Maybe things are still too raw because of the emancipation, I don’t know.”
Taking a step closer to him, Deb shakes her head. “Honey, I want to try. I don’t know why I’m lashing out - I hear myself, and it’s like I don’t know who is saying those things. I - I want to figure things out between us. I’ve done a lot to be ashamed of; unquestionably, you have a lot of valid reasons to be angry with me. But I’d really like us to get past some of those and be a family again.”
“I already have a family,” Nathan counters, looking at Haley meaningfully, “And that’s what I came here for today. It didn’t really go the way I had imagined, you know?”
“We could try again,” Deb says, pleading. “Maybe sometime outside of my work. Maybe on a day when you shouldn’t be in school. We could do it sometime when both of us are prepared for it, and that would hopefully help it go a little more smoothly.” She sighs, brushing her bangs off her forehead. “I know that I have made a lot of mistakes, and obviously my biggest was not being home enough. At the very least, I should have paid more attention to what was going on with you and your father. I can never be sorry enough for that, can I?”
He shrugs. “It doesn’t matter anymore, Mom. Someone told me once that it felt better to get things out on the table, so maybe this will help with time.”
A small smile settles on her lips. “Well, I have to say, you’ve impressed me very much. And you’re right, Haley; Nathan is nothing like Dan. I’m proud of you, honey. You’ve obviously grown up a great deal. Are - are things okay, with you on your own? Do you need anything? Is there anything that I can do?”
“I didn’t come here for money or gifts, Mom,” Nathan sighs, frowning at the offer.
“I know, I know that. But if there was something you needed or wanted, you know that I am here for you,” she tells him, reaching out to brush her hand down the side of his arm. “Take care of yourself, honey. I’m here if you need me, and I’m here when you’re ready to talk again. Maybe the three of us can go out to lunch.”
“We’ll think about it,” Nathan answers as he moves to put his arms around Haley from behind. “We need to go now. I just can’t do this right now.”
To both their surprise, Deb nods and doesn’t hesitate to move out of the way. “Nathan?” she calls when they step out the doorway. “Thank you for coming today; thank you for trying. Now it’s my turn to try, and I’m going to do just that. I want you to know that.”
He shrugs as though indifferent, but Haley gives Deb a brisk nod. Even if Nathan doesn’t want to admit it now after that admittedly unsettling meeting, she knows that he would like to figure things out with Deb. It’ll be slow going, obviously, but if she can help facilitate that for him, then she will. So she won’t tell exactly what she thinks of her, but nor will she let her get away with anything where Nathan is concerned, either.
The ride down the elevator and the subsequent walk out to Nathan’s car is quiet, each lost in their own thoughts. As he’s pulling out of the parking lot, Haley looks over at him with a small smile on her face. “Well, that wasn’t so bad, right? I mean, from the way you said your dad talked, this place could’ve been a meth lab or something. I think we did okay.”
“I think you were amazing,” he tells her with a grin, his eyes burning into her. “That was actually hot, you standing up for me like that. It’s a little embarrassing, getting turned on by your girlfriend in front of your mother.”
“Nathan!” she laughs, poking him on the arm. “Don’t say things like that!”
“Why not? It’s totally true,” he smirks, winking at her. “I wouldn’t like a repeat of it, because it’s just unnatural to want your girlfriend when your mother is around making you feel like crap, but still. You’re just hot enough to supersede that, Hay. Good on you.”
She rolls her eyes, laughing at him. “You know, for all the big man on campus, stud of the world vibe you give off, you’re kind of a dork, Nathan Scott.”
He raises an eyebrow at that. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing? If it’s a good thing, then I’ll take it.” Turning serious, he looks at her as he slows for a red light. “Thanks for coming with me today. I don’t think I would’ve been able to handle it if you weren’t there. Thanks for standing up for me, too.”
“I’d do it again in a heartbeat,” she promises, leaning over the dividing console to kiss his cheek. “Come on, if you drive fast, we’ll have time to stop at your house before I need to be at the café for my shift.”
“Promise?” he asks a little breathlessly as her hand finds its way into his lap.
“Promise,” she agrees, her voice going breathless as well.
~*~
“Are you sure that you want to do this today?” Haley asks anxiously from the passenger seat of Nathan’s old car. If you aren’t ready, we can just keep this to ourselves for awhile. I wouldn’t really mind.”
Since this is about the fifth time that she has asked him that very question or brought it up in some other way, he really does get that she wouldn’t mind postponing it. In fact, she has mentioned it so many times that he is beginning to think she doesn’t want to do it which bothers him more than it ought. “Hay, I am completely and totally ready, willing, and able to face the people at school. I don’t care what any of them think, and the ones who do matter already know.” He watches her carefully as he asks the question that has been bothering him since she first brought up laying low with this. “Haley, do you not want people knowing that we’re back together? Are you embarrassed by it or something?”
Her eyes widen slightly and she blushes, lowering her head. “I’m not embarrassed or anything like that,” she is quick to assure him. “I just - I guess that I’m worried about how people will act when they find out. I had lived my whole life without experiencing the scrutiny and stares and whispers of the gossip system until last spring. It was frustrating and hard for me to go through that,” she tries to explain, gazing at him beseechingly. “I’m sorry that this is coming across poorly. God, the last thing I am is embarrassed - by you or us. I guess I’m just uncomfortable with the attention we’re going to get.”
Letting that sink in - and breathing a mental sigh of relief that she isn’t horrified and rethinking the whole thing - Nathan slowly nods. He can understand that, he supposes, even if it is something of a foreign concept to him. He’s always drawn a lot of attention, so it doesn’t really faze him. Even the negative attention he’s received from his peers lately has been easy for him to ignore. But Haley always held herself separate from everyone else, kept to a tighter group of friends that had no reason to gossip about each other or anyone else, so she had been somewhat sheltered from that. That was another thing he had blown for her.
“Okay,” he says slowly, trying to think of the right thing to say. “This is your call, Haley. I’ll tell you what I think and what I want, but ultimately this is up to you because I want you to be happy and comfortable with this, alright?”
“Alright,” she agrees with no hesitation.
He smiles at her, taking a second to organize his thoughts. “Okay, I want to walk in there today holding your hand, and I want everyone to know that we’ve worked things out and that you’ve forgiven my sorry ass. Frankly, I don’t give a crap what they think about me or you or us because I know what a good thing we have here. Purposefully hiding it, though, gives the impression that we’re ashamed of it or there is something wrong. There isn’t, and I don’t want people to get the idea that there is, okay?”
She gives him a wry smile, nodding her agreement. “You’re right, I know you are. I guess that the selfish part of me would rather avoid dealing with all that.”
“I know,” he agrees easily, smiling at her in a way that goes very far towards soothing her fears and anxieties. “We’ll be old news again soon, though. You know Brooke will probably show up with one of her dad’s business partners for Homecoming or something, and all the attention will refocus where it belongs, on her.”
She laughs at that, nodding her agreement. “You’re probably right about that, too,” she agrees, smiling at him. “Sorry for being so prissy about this. I don’t even care what they think,” she sighs, “But I just don’t need their judge-y looks and snotty remarks.”
As he eases the car into the school parking lot, he gives her a reassuring smile. Well, he hopes that it is reassuring; this is something of a fairly major role reversal for these two. “You weren’t nervous about telling Luke and Karen, or Keith, or your parents,” he points out, a little confused. “Why was it easier to tell them? It seems like that would’ve been worse.”
Shrugging, she shoots him another adorably wry smile. “They love me, and I knew that all of them would support me no matter what. There was nothing to worry about there.”
“That makes sense, I guess,” he shrugs. Aside from Haley and Pete and probably Lucas, though he was reluctant to admit it, he didn’t have anyone who was unequivocally on his side like that. Maybe someday he’d have a few more people he can count on like that, but for now, he is pretty happy with what he’s got.
“Well, I guess we’re here,” Haley notes needlessly as she stares out the window at the school. “Somehow it feels like the first day of freshman year all over again.”
He grins at that, rolling his head along the headrest of his seat to face her. “Were you nervous about all the big, bad high school students that you’d run into?” he teases her.
She rolls her eyes at that before grinning in return. “No, of course not. I was worried that people would know I was Taylor’s sister and assume I was as much of a slut-bag as she is,” she jokes. “Really, I think it was normal high school nerves. Maybe that’s all this is, too.”
“Yeah, could be,” he agrees, winking at her as she shifts restlessly in her seat. “Should we go in now?”
“Probably,” she agrees, not moving to get out of the car. He rolls his eyes at her immobility, wondering if he’s going to have to unfasten her seatbelt and carry her into the school himself. “What if we wait for Luke and Peyton to show up? We could all walk in together.” She laughs at her own suggestion. “That would really give everyone a few things to talk about, right? Probably you and me being together again would be the least of it!”
He grins in acknowledgement of that. “Yeah, it probably would. Us walking in with my half brother and ex-girlfriend? They’d be talking about us for years, probably.”
She nods, pushing her door open and jumping out suddenly. “Well, what are you waiting for, Scott? Let’s go, we’ve got classes to attend, splashes to make!”
Laughing out loud at her sudden bravado-inspired enthusiasm, he follows suit and climbs out of the car. She’s already trekking across the parking lot, smiling over her shoulder to let him know that he’s supposed to chase after her. Shaking his head, he hefts his backpack over his shoulder and takes off jogging after her. Once he catches up with her, she turns and throws herself into his arms, pressing her lips against his. “Hi.”
“Hi yourself,” he smiles back, reaching up to tuck a wayward lock of hair behind her ear. “People are beginning to stop and point at us, Hay.”
To his surprise, he can feel her shrug as she lifts her face far enough away from his to let him see her smile. “That’s okay, Nathan. They can watch.”
It takes a second for him to catch on, but then he laughs again, leaning back so that her feet are off the ground as he twirls her around in a circle. “Damn right they can.”
It was killing him, slowly and painfully. Seeing Haley in his clothes, an old t-shirt that she is near to swimming in and a pair of his boxers, sets off something primitively possessive in him. He wants to drag her up the stairs to his bedroom, throw her down on his bed, and do things to her that would have her eyes rolling back in her head.
Oh, but that wasn’t happening. No, instead they were perched on opposite ends of the ratty couch he and Pete had acquired at a garage sale on their way back here after Thackeray let them out of school. They were watching some damn Will Ferrell movie he’d probably seen a hundred times and was paying absolutely no attention to now. Of course, why would he pay attention to a movie he could see at any given time when Haley - his Haley - was sitting a mere two feet away from him, miraculously and distractingly braless. Really, there wasn’t a chance in Hell that he’d focus on anything else right now. No way, no how.
To make things even more complicated, they hadn’t started the talk that Haley had requested. So to go along with the distraction of Haley in his clothes - braless, mind you - he had that hanging over his head, too. Inwardly groaning, he leans back into the couch trying to ignore the temptation to reach out and grab Haley and pull her to him. That one is proving to be easier said than done.
“Nathan,” she sighs in exasperation, rolling her eyes toward him. “You are staring at me. Is my hair frizzing out or something?”
Caught, he grins unabashedly in response. “What can I say? I like to look at you, Hay. I could do it day and night if you would let me.” Taking the opportunity, he reaches out snagging her around the waist. He maneuvers until he is turned sideways on the sofa, leaning back against the arm, with her sitting flush against him between his legs. “That’s better.”
She laughs, but holds herself stiffly as she tries to maintain minimal contact. “Ah, but this means that the staring comes to an unfortunate end now,” she points out teasingly.
“No way,” he corrects with a laugh, leaning over her shoulder to look pointedly down at her chest. The view is actually pretty damn great from up here, too.”
In spite of herself, she laughs at that. “I don’t know if you have heard, but leering is not the same thing as staring. It is also not the same as looking, peeking, or watching.”
Dropping a hand down to fiddle with the edge of the t-shirt, he asks, “Well, is it the same as peering?” She laughs again, and he is so gratified by that simple thing that his arms circle around her. “I love it when you laugh,” he admits, feeling more than a little ridiculous saying such a thing.
“Good thing that you can be funny once in awhile then,” she teases him, still not fully relaxed in his arms, although she isn’t bothering to try and hold herself away from him now. He’d be happiest if she’d just melt into him right this second, but he’s learned enough to hope that good things really do come to those who can wait.
“You wanted to talk?” he asks, biting the bullet to get this discussion out of the way and over with. Maybe then they can truly and finally move on and put all of this horridness behind them. Okay, maybe that was asking for too much.
She sits up, twisting around to look at him. “Well, yea, I think that we should. It just seems like there is a lot that we should get out into the open.”
With a sigh, she moves to sit Indian style facing him, still between his stretched out legs and within his reach, so he doesn’t protest. “Where are we supposed to start?” he asks nervously.
“I don’t know, Nathan,” she sighs, beginning to feel guilty for forcing him into this discussion, especially now that she isn’t so sure what she even expects to get from it. “I - a part of me wants to know, in your words, what happened. The whys, hows, and whens, you know? Then other parts of me chime in to point out that maybe I’m better off not knowing, but the partial stories I got from Brooke and Tim leave a lot to be desired and I figure I’d be better off knowing the whole stories.”
He nods, dragging a hand down his face. He had figured this was coming, and he knows that she deserves to have her questions answered. He just hopes that, since she already knows the worst of it, that they can spend more time on the better parts of things.
“It happened so fast,” he says when she doesn’t add anything else. “One day all I cared about was getting Luke off the team - to get Dan off my back, but I’m not going to lie - it was for me, too. I resented Luke, and I didn’t want him there, so I was going to do what Dan wanted and drive him off the team. I swear, that’s what was happening one minute, and then what seemed like the very next minute I was crazy for you and I didn’t know how to reconcile the two. They were sort of mutually exclusive.”
“When?” she asked quietly. “When did you decide you loved me? Because you said it at one point, but how do I know you meant it then? I just - how do I know that you meant it at all?”
“I never lied about loving you,” he insists quietly, taking her hands in his. “Hay, I know that I have not given you many reasons to trust me, but I….you know that I love you. I haven’t said that to anyone other than you since I was a little boy. I wouldn’t have said it to you if I didn’t mean it, I swear.”
Wrenching her gaze off their joined hands, she unflinchingly stares into his eyes. “I guess I know that,” she admits with a heavy sigh. “Sometimes it is just hard to remember. Sometimes it hurts so damn bad that I feel like I shouldn’t remember that part.”
Swallowing thickly around the hard lump that forms in his throat, he nods. “I hate that I made - make - you feel like that. It was all so stupid, that damn plan of mine.”
She sighs, squeezing her eyes shut tightly. “Maybe I was wrong, maybe we don’t need to talk about these things. I mean, we’ve been through it all before, so there really couldn’t be all that much to say, right?”
“No, I want to talk about it if it helps.” Earnestly, he goes on, “You know how important this is to me. Plus, I want to prove that I can be honest with you, even when the conversation is tough on both of us.”
“Oh, Nathan,” she smiles, her right hand coming down to rest on his left knee. “I know that. I do. Really, I don’t even know why I have this need to talk about it. I don’t even know what I expect to get from this.” Her fingers, tracing little teasing circles just above his knee, are about to drive him to distraction. “Maybe I am just grasping at straws for something to hold onto.”
Practically choking on the lump in his throat, he shakes his head even though he has an idea of where this is going. It just isn’t a direction that he cares for much. “What do you mean?” he asks dully, not really wanting to hear her answer.
She smiles at him again, and that proves to settle his nerves better than anything else could. “I don’t want to hurt you….but sometimes I think that I’d be crazy to let you back in, to let my guard down again. So, maybe on some level, I want or expect to hear something that I could grasp at to protect myself with. Like I could find a reason to stop this dead in its tracks.”
He takes a minute to let that digest, only giving her a vague nod of acknowledgement. She waits patiently, letting her words sink in. “I’m sorry, Ha - “ he begins, cutting himself off when she places her fingertips on his lips.
“Don’t apologize,” she chides him gently before slowly drawing her fingers away. “You’re sorry, I get it. There’s no reason to keep apologizing when we both know that you’re sorry. I know how sorry you are, Nathan.”
“I can’t help apologizing,” he groans, managing a rueful smile. “Besides, I am and I want to make sure that everyone knows that, but mostly that you know it.”
She nods, regarding him thoughtfully. “I don’t think that what happened, what is happening, or even what will happen is anyone’s business but ours. This is just hard for me, trying to get to a place where I can trust not only you, but myself to make good judgments and decisions. I guess that I don’t understand why - well, I don’t always think that I know what I’m doing, so yeah.”
“What don’t you understand?” he asks with atypical patience. “I want to explain the things that can be explained, and at least talk about the ones that can’t.”
“You don’t have to indulge me like this,” she insists, giving him a grateful smile. “I know that you don’t really want to talk about these things, and well, maybe I don’t either. Maybe there are better ways for me to get past all this stuff.”
With a self-deprecating smirk, he sighs. “No, I think I do. I do, and I want to talk about this if it helps you. Hey, who knows, maybe it’ll help me, too.”
She reaches out, surprising him by entwining their fingers together. “This is about both of us, you know. It isn’t just me.”
“Yeah, okay,” he agrees quietly, even though for him, it all comes down to her. It’s all about her. That should probably scare him, but somehow, it doesn’t.
“Nathan, how come, after you realized that you loved me, you didn’t just tell me what had happened to bring us together?” she asks, getting her nerve up to ask the question the one thing that possibly bothers her the most in all this. “There’s no doubt that I would’ve been mad as hell at first, but that would have been so much easier to get past. If you’d just come to me and told me the truth, things might have been so different.”
Closing his eyes and remembering his vow to answer everything truthfully, he takes a deep breath before opening his eyes and staring into hers. “Hay, I - even after I realized that I was so crazy for you and that you were the best thing that would ever happen to me, I was - I still planned on going through with it.”
Her eyes widen, and something uncomfortable and tense fills her chest and belly as she looks back at him. “Oh. I mean, I had just figured that you thought you could get away with it, that you dropped it after that. I hadn’t realized…well, okay. Thanks for telling me that, I guess it wasn’t easy.”
“I didn’t - it wasn’t because I didn’t love you enough, Hay. Ah, hell, pretty girl, I don’t know what was wrong with me, but I was just resigned to the fact that I would lose you when it was all over,” he tries to explain, feeling like he is bungling the whole thing in his own special way. “That was my punishment, you know? I deserved to be the one who ended up with nothing, so that was going to be the least of what I deserved.”
“You were prepared to sacrifice our relationship just to get one up on Lucas? I don’t - that’s just not even comprehensible to me, Nathan. I don’t even know how I’m supposed to deal with that,” she murmurs, pulling one of her hands free to rub at her temple.
Beginning to feel a little desperate, he shakes his head. “At first, I didn’t even care that you were going to get hurt. I didn’t know you, so you didn’t matter to me. It’s just, it wasn’t long after meeting you that I realized that you’d become the only thing I cared about. Nothing else really mattered to me anymore.” Giving her a pleading look, he leans forward until their foreheads are touching. “I kept dragging it out, you know? First in torturing myself by not taking things further in our relationship, and then it was just this ‘one more day’ mantra of denial and delay of the inevitable.”
Haley’s brown eyes stare into his, leaving him feeling slightly exposed. “Then Jake found out, and took that away,” she continues for him when he has trouble going on. “Why didn’t you just tell me then?”
Taking a deep breath, he lets his eyes fall closed as he answers. “Because I couldn’t. I wanted to postpone the inevitable as long as possible, even if that was just a few more days. I know it was selfish, but isn’t that just about the best word for me anyway?” She starts to respond, but he goes on. “For a few days, after I realized that Luke was smart enough to stick it out with the team, I told myself that I could get away with it. I let myself think that maybe you would never find out, and that everything would be okay. You would never hurt because of me, and I wouldn’t lose you.”
“But I still hurt because of you when Luke was so mad at me,” she notes quietly. “That was partially my fault, because I lied to everyone just as much as you did, but I didn’t know the real ‘why’ of it, did I? I know it is stupid to say these things now, but I wish you had told me the truth. I won’t pretend that I would have reacted well, but maybe. Maybe they would’ve been different, maybe it wouldn’t have hurt so bad because then I would’ve had you owning up to the truth to hang onto.” She stares at him with wide, sad eyes. “It was so easy to think that everything was a lie, you know? Because the knee-jerk reaction was that, well, he never loved me enough to set the grudge aside. He doesn’t love me enough to tell me the truth. That just kept circling through my head, like I wasn’t enough for you to love.
“And maybe that was stupid,” she continues with a bitter smile on her lips, “But I just couldn’t shake that feeling, and it hurt so bad.” Shuddering delicately, she glances away from him. “That day in the cafeteria, at school, oh, it was so awful. You didn’t say anything to me, Nathan! You just let me stand there like an idiot. Such an idiot.”
She’s angry with him. Though it probably shouldn’t, that catches him by surprise. He’d known how hurt she was by everything that he’d done, but somehow he’d just assumed that the anger part was gone, played out, probably because she kept such a tight rein on it all the time. Not that he thinks she doesn’t have the right to be angry, because he knows as well as anyone that she absolutely should be, but she’d just seemed to be more sad and hurt than anything else.
Reaching out to let his knuckles graze her cheek before gently turning her face back to his, he takes a deep breath, knowing that there was probably a lot riding on what he said in response to all that. “That was a huge fuck-up on my part, Hay,” he admits. “I don’t even know what happened. Maybe I froze, I guess, maybe… I don’t know, Haley. I just couldn’t move, couldn’t even open my mouth. I wanted to, I did, I wanted to do or say something to make things right, but I - I couldn’t. I didn’t.”
“That was a bad day,” she whispers, leaning into him, which just fills him with so much hope that he can hardly stand it. “All I could think when Luke was saying those things was that any second, you would say something to explain. Any second now, I just kept telling myself. Any second now, Nathan is going to say something because I know he wouldn’t just leave me here like this.”
“But I did,” he whispers back, heaps and heaps of guilt weighing him down. “I’m so sorry, I know that on the basis of that alone, you should hate me. I do know that, but I still can’t help but beg, hope, pray for you to be mine forever.”
Giggling a little at that, she pulls back, swiping at the tears in her eyes. “Forever is a very long time, Nathan,” she smiles, squeezing his hand. “I’m sorry for bringing all that up. I really hadn’t meant to go into all of that stuff.”
“No, don’t be sorry,” he sighs, giving her a wan smile. “We should definitely talk about these things, Hay. We need to clear the air, especially if they still bother you.”
She leans forward, kissing his cheek so close to his mouth that he’d only need to turn the slightest of degrees to meet her lips with his own. Not wanting to push her, he refrains. “I am sorry,” she insists, “Because I don’t want you to hurt anymore. I really hate hurting you, Nathan.”
“You haven’t hurt me,” he tells her honestly. “What I did hurt a lot of people, and in the end, that included myself. I hurt me, not you. Can - can I ask you something?”
“Yeah,” she agrees, although she looks a little startled by the request. “Of course, you can ask me anything, you know that.”
He nods, shifting to sit up just a little straighter. “Why are you here? Don’t get me wrong; I’m so thankful you are here that you wouldn’t believe it, but Haley, no one would blame you for wanting to get and stay as far away from me as possible. But here you are. I’m not complaining,” he promises, “But I am curious.”
Moving slowly, she turns sideways and scoots closer to him until her side is flush against his front. “What happened between us, well that hurt a lot. But more than that, more than the hurt and the anger, I love you. I’m - I am just happier having you in my life than I am without you, and I don’t want to lose you again.”
Burying his face in her neck, he has to bite down hard on his lip to keep from crying with relief. He’d known that maybe she was wavering, that she was still attracted to him and that she still had feelings for him, but to hear her say it was completely different from anything he might have thought. So stunned is he that she has to grab his hands and pull them around her before he responds with a tight grasp on her.
“I love you, too,” he breathes, pressing his lips to her neck. It has been months since he’s had this, since he’s had her in his arms like this, and it feels even better than he remembered and way better than he had dreamed. “I -oh, shit, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever hear you say that again,” he admits, a little choked up in spite of himself. He moves them down so that he is lying flat on his back, and she turns to be flat on top of him, her face hovering over his. “You’re so beautiful, baby. Do you have any idea how much I’ve missed you?”
“If it is half as much as I’ve missed you,” she returns, her lips grazing over his jaw and lower down to his neck, “Then we’re doing okay at something.” She won’t take her mouth away from his neck so he can kiss her, so he retaliates by roaming his hands down her back and bottom and over her hips, squeezing gently. “Nathan,” she moans, finally lifting her face to his. “I have missed you so much. So, so much.”
He slides his hands into her hair, lightly trapping her there. “I know, baby. You feel so good, you know that?” He pulls her down for a long, smoldering kiss, nudging her thighs apart with one of his own. “Jesus, Hay,” he mutters, “I have missed you so goddamn much, baby.”
She nods, moving feverishly against him. “I am sorry we didn’t talk sooner,” she gasps out against his mouth. “I’m sorry it took me so long to listen to you.”
“Don’t,” he countermands between kisses. “Please don’t apologize to me for anything, baby. I mean it, I don’t deserve any apologies from you, and it just makes me feel worse.”
“My eyes, God, my eyes!” Pete interrupts in a droll voice from the entryway. “Honestly, little fella, if you’re going to put on a show for me, you could at least get her shirt off so I have something great to look at.”
Nathan gives his friend, former perhaps, a hard glare as Haley scrambles off him. Of all the fantastic timing possibilities, this has to take the cake. “Damn it, Pete.”
Pete just shrugs, grinning shamelessly at the both of them. “It’s not that I’m against Christening the nasty garage sale couch, but I am against being excluded from the festivities. Especially when the festivities include our lovely Ms. James here,” he teases.
Haley shoots him her most sarcastic smile. “Nice of you to think of me,” she snits at Pete. Turning to Nathan with a much softer look, she says, “I should probably get going, Nathan.”
“No, no, no!” Pete exclaims, laughing. “You don’t have to go! I was just flipping you guys some shit, I figured anyone who could put up with Scott here could take a few jokes.” Nathan continues to glare at him in response to that, and Haley just stands there awkwardly looking back and forth between the two. “I’m just playing, for real. I bumped into your brother and that skinny girlfriend of his, and they invited me out to meet the rest of the ‘gang’,” he goes on conversationally. “Guess that’ll be something.”
“Oh,” Nathan blinks, everything else flying out of his head as he tries to process that. “I see.” He stands up, instinctively moving closer to Haley. “Have fun with that.”
Pete nods, grabbing a sweatshirt that is lying over the back of a chair. “Yeah, it’ll be nice to meet a few more people up here. I don’t really know anyone yet.” He glances up, smiling at both of them. “Well, except you two, but I’m guessing you’d rather me not be here, huh?”
Haley flushes a dull pink at that, raising an eyebrow at Nathan’s roommate. “Yeah, I guess I’ll be seeing you later, Pete.” He throws a jaunty salute her way, grinning as he turns and heads back out the door. Noticing Nathan’s discomfort, she loops an arm around his waist. “That was a little embarrassing, huh? I feel like a little girl caught stealing from the cookie jar or something,” she grins, faltering when he doesn’t respond. “Nathan, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” is his automatic answer. Before she can even protest that lame and obvious untruth, he gives her a rueful smile as he falls back onto the couch. “It’s crazy, it really is.”
“Tell me anyway,” she encourages, dropping to her knees in front of him. “You know I won’t think that you’re crazy, Nathan. I know better than that.”
Being able to reach out and touch her goes a long way towards settling him, and when she lets him pull her up onto his lap, he feels even better. “I’d been kind of looking forward to introducing him to Luke all summer. Now, I don’t know. It’s weird, and I don’t know. What if they like each other better than either of them like me?”
Sometimes he just breaks her heart for him, not over him. Big difference there. Recognizing his obvious worry over this, she wraps her arms around his neck and kisses his forehead. “I won’t tell you that you’re crazy or silly or whatever, but I will tell you that I don’t think you have much of a reason to worry, Nathan.”
“They’re both different from me,” he shrugs dejectedly. “I just thought that the three of us would hang out together. I didn’t realize it’d just be them sometimes.”
She nods, understanding how he’s feeling right now. Anyone with as many siblings as she has would understand it perfectly. “Well, we know that it isn’t just them there right now, Nathan. And I promise that I think both of them are way more interested in being your friend than they are in each other. I mean that; I believe that.”
He leans back, smiling to himself when she lays her head down on his chest. “I feel selfish again,” he notes, stifling a chuckle. “I just can’t get past that, can I? I don’t know, though. I just wanted something that was just mine. And Pete was kind of that, you know? He was my friend, and he wasn’t my friend just because he only knew me as some hotshot basketball player. He knows all the crap stuff, too, better than most people ever will. He - he saw me at my very worst, and he still wants to be my friend. Luke has only seen my worst, and he has no reason to think that there is anything more to me than that, so what? What happens?”
“What happens is that you get two friends instead of just one,” she points out reasonably, snuggling into his arms. “You’ll have two people who care about you, and that’s not a bad thing, Nathan. I know that sometimes we want things that are only ours, that no one else can touch…and maybe that’s us. Maybe what we have is what no one else gets to have, gets to touch, or even really gets to know about. Because it’s ours, and no one else’s.”
Despite everything else, despite all the crap, he can believe that. He can take that and hold onto it, and believe it for the good thing that it is.
Maybe things are looking brighter, and maybe everything’s going to be alright.
“Thanks, Hay,” he says seriously, smiling genuinely at her. “I knew there were a million reasons why I love you. This is probably number one.”
“I love you, too,” she returns breathlessly, her arms tightening around him. “Let’s go upstairs, Nathan.”
Well, who would argue with that?
~*~
What was he doing here? This was craziness, sheer, pure, and unadulterated craziness. Still, he wasn’t turning back either, so there must be something to it.
“You okay?” Haley asks him quietly, her hand tightening around his. “If you aren’t ready to do this, we can still get out of here. It’s not like we’ve even gotten to her floor yet.”
“No, I’m okay,” he assures her, managing an impressively bright smile, considering what a strain this is for him. “I think that this is something I need to do. Either fix a few things, or get that last bit of closure. Either way, it’ll be good.”
Grabbing and squeezing his hand in a measure of support, she reaches out and punches the ‘up’ button for the elevator. “You realize, right, that if she steps even one toe over the line, that I’m going to be on her like stupid on George W. Bush. I mean it, Nathan. So if I get arrested, you have to swear to get me out of there.”
He laughs at her goofiness, beginning to relax a little bit despite the strain that comes along with seeing his mother for the first time since he was officially declared emancipated. Well, there was enough natural strain between him and Deb; the whole emancipation thing was just a bonus.
He had no delusions about how this meeting was going to go today. Deb had been a mess the last times he’d seen her, and he didn’t really anticipate that changing much. Haley had convinced him to come here today, to try and make peace or move on, but he wasn’t sure that it would do anyone any good. Still, she hadn’t led him wrong before, so if this is something she thought he could use, then he was going to be there.
Plus, a day alone with his girlfriend? Fine by him.
“I just hope she isn’t drunk,” he mutters, more to himself that Haley. She pinches him on the arm, frowning at him. “Well, she’s not a very good drunk. She’s sloppy and weepy, and it’s just not pleasant at all. You don’t need to meet her if she’s like that.”
“If you don’t want me to go in with you, all you have to do is say it,” she smiles, squeezing his hand tightly. “It won’t hurt my feelings to wait outside, and I know this is something that might be best done one on one.”
He squeezes her hand tightly. “No, I need you with me for this. Honestly, Hay. I don’t trust myself to not start screaming at her or something.”
She leans her head into the side of his arm, not quite reaching his shoulder. “If she gets you to the point where you are yelling at her, I’ll probably be right there with you,” she warns with a huge smile. “You know how on your side I am, right?”
“Thanks,” he nods, actually breathing a sigh of relief. Having her with him in this means the world to him, even if stands as a very sharp reminder of how close he’d come to losing her forever. Maybe he needs those reminders, just to always keep it there and with him. “I just - it means a lot to me, having you here. I hope you know that, baby.”
“I love you, Nathan,” she simply smiles, as though that says it all. It probably does, he has even begun to realize. At least he already knew how lucky he was to have that. He definitely reminded himself of that often enough. “If you need me with you for any reason at all, I’ll be there. Always, for anything, everything, and even nothing.”
They step into the elevator together, and as soon as the doors slide shut behind them, he is pulling her into his arms. “Do you know that I am the luckiest jerk on the planet? Don’t even think that I don’t realize just how lucky I am, okay? I know it, and I am grateful for it.”
She reciprocates his hug, wrapping her arms tightly around his middle. “We’re both lucky. Maybe we didn’t have the most conventional of starts, but that’s okay. I think we’ve both learned a lot of things and grown up a lot. We’re both lucky, is what I am trying to say.”
He startles when the door opens noisily. “That means so much to me, Hay. I feel like a broken record, saying that all the time.” He groans, giving her a pained smile as he glances around the lobby. “She’s worked her for over eight years, and I’ve never been here before. I’ve never seen this place.”
“Don’t give me more reasons to hate her,” Haley whispers back through clenched teeth. “I’m already not a fan for all the things she’s done to you - and that’s just what I know about.”
He grins at that, leaning down to kiss her cheek. “Maybe this won’t be as bad as we’re assuming,” he offers with a shrug, both of them laughing quietly when they share doubtful looks. “I guess stranger things have happened.”
“Not that strange,” she whispers back as they approach the reception desk. When Nathan falls silent, she answers the receptionist’s offer of help. “Hi, we are here to see Debra Scott.”
“Certainly,” the woman answers, her gaze lingering too long on an oblivious Nathan. “Who may I tell her is inquiring after her?”
“Her long-neglected son,” Nathan mutters, drawing a surprised look from the woman in front of them. The woman that Haley is getting dangerously close to snapping at - or ripping her hair off. Whichever. “I guess just ‘son’ would be fine.”
As they sit down on the chairs provided for visitors, Haley glares at the still-staring woman, reaching over to lace her fingers together with Nathan’s. “She has got the hots for you,” Haley sniffs, gratified when Nathan blinks in surprise before crinkling his nose up. “I was about to jump over her little desk there and show her where she can put her eyes.”
Now she has caught him off-guard. “Wait just a red-hot minute,” he grins, surprised and more than a little delighted to find that she gets jealous, too. Usually that shoe is on his foot! “You’re jealous? Just because some old lady is staring at me? Oh, hell, that’s hilarious, Hay. Really,” he grins, laughing when she pinches him on the thigh. “Oh, baby, do you know how much time I have spent being jealous of Jake? I knew I didn’t need to be, but I just couldn’t shake it all the way. It’s kind of a relief that you get the same way.”
Haley is about to respond to that when the shrill, nervous voice of Deb Scott rings out across the office. “Nathan! Oh, sweetheart!” she exclaims, rushing across the lobby to greet him. Not dropping Haley’s hand, Nathan reluctantly stands up. He does not, however, let his mother hug him when she approaches. Her face falls in disappointment. “No hug for your mother?” she asks sadly, her face going blank when she spots his hand joined to Haley’s. “And who is this?”
“This is Haley, Mom. She’s my girlfriend, and for this, she’s my moral support. So please don’t act offended that I’d bring someone with me. I need her here,” he explains, relaxing a little when Haley squeezes his hand.
“Oh,” Deb nods, peering at Haley who shifts uncomfortably. “I see. Well, Nathan, I don’t know that having an outsider here will be very conducive to our visit. Perhaps your little friend can wait outside, as this should just be you and me, don’t you think, honey?”
Haley wants to jump in and smooth things over, but this is Nathan’s thing, and she knows that he can handle it. “First of all,” he begins testily in his most closed off voice, “Haley is the last person in the world that I would ever consider an outsider in my life. You, however, are, and if you treat her with even the slightest amount of disrespect, we’ll be gone so fast that you won’t even be sure that we were ever really here.”
Deb’s eyes widen at that, but she just nods tersely. “Why don’t you - both of you, of course - come back to my office? It’s a better place for this type of meeting.” They both follow her, to her relief. Loath though she is to admit it, she hadn’t been sure that Nathan would go along with her.
“So this is where you’ve gone all these years to get away from home, huh?” he asks, his tone almost conversational enough to belie the accusation behind the words. “I’d ask why you never brought me here before, but what’s the point in having a place to escape to if the people you’re escaping from know about it?”
“Knock that tone off, young man,” Deb snaps, caught too off-guard by all that to censor herself. “This is my office, my place of business, and you will show a little respect while you are here.”
Before Nathan can gather up a retort, Haley steps in. “Mrs. Scott, I don’t think we were really properly introduced,” she says quietly as she extends her hand. “I’m Haley James. We spoke on the phone once, when Nathan needed medical care.”
Deb stares at her as though she was crazy, but reluctantly reaches out to grasp her hand. “I’m sorry if I seem terribly rude,” she responds, “But I had just figured that when I finally got to see my son again, it would be a family moment. I just don’t see why you would bring someone along for this, Nathan.”
He didn’t hear that last part. “Family? What family? You, me, and Dan? Either you are as high as Dan said you were, or you are in the worst kind of delusional denial that could ever exist!” Nathan grits out through clenched teeth. “If you have some crazy thoughts about that happening, then we’ll just have to leave right now.”
“Of course I don’t want you to leave, honey! Oh, I just don’t know what I’m supposed to say to you anymore. You’re just so different, and I am so afraid it isn’t for the better, Nathan,” she sighs fretfully, wringing her hands. “I don’t know what to do.”
Nathan gapes at her, exchanging a glance with Haley. “I’m in the AP classes at school now, Mom! I managed to get myself back on the basketball team at Tree Hill. I’d been kicked off! Expelled! And you question if I’ve changed for the better? How could you?” he asks, that last question betraying some of his hurt.
Deb blinks in surprise. “You’re back in Tree Hill?” she asks, ignoring Haley’s gasp of indignation. This woman doesn’t even know where her son is? “I cannot believe you didn’t tell me, Nathan! I’m your mother, I should know these things!”
“Do you even care?” he asks quietly. “Dan knows I’m back. He even expected it. You just don’t give me any credit, though, do you? God, you know I spend all this time thinking that nothing is as bad as Dan. Then there’s you, a whole different kind of awful. You, who spends the better part of my life working in a different area code, living in a different area code. I’d be hurt that you stopped caring after the emancipation went through, but you never really cared before, so why should that make a difference now?”
“That is not true!” Deb fires back, staring at her only son with a pained and pleading expression on her face. “I have always cared about you! I have always loved you, Nathan! How could you even think otherwise?”
His eyes widen with disbelief, and his mouth opens and closes soundlessly in agitation as he tries to formulate words. “You are such a piece of work, Mom!” he accuses her angrily, only calming down when Haley moves closer to him. “You have virtually ignored me for years! You didn’t live with us, you weren’t there when Dan was poisoning me against my own brother! Do you know how messed up I let myself get as a result of living alone with Dan? Because of all the crap he pulled that I began to believe was okay?”
Deb stares back at him with wide, tear-filled eyes. “Honey, I don’t even know what to tell you. I know that I’ve put a lot of focus on my work over the years, but I never meant to hurt you with that. I never meant it as a detriment to your development. Besides, once I realized how bad things were with your father, I tried to intervene. I came back to Tree Hill, and I - “
“Oh, stop patting yourself on the back!” Nathan explodes, knocking a nameplate off of Deb’s desk. “God, you are just as bad as he is! Worse, maybe. At least he doesn’t pretend like you do, he’s not living in a fantasy land. I know that he’s a self-serving bastard up front, but you - you fooled me. It took a lot longer to figure out that you’re just as selfish as he is!”
“Well, it was hard for me, Nathan!” she protests. “For so long, you were under Dan’s thumb, and you had no interest in me! So I threw myself into work, into things that I could actually make a difference in! Every time I came back to you, you two were closer. Every time I came back, you were more like him.”
“Oh, NO!” Haley interrupts as Nathan visibly recoils. “No, no, you do not get to put that on him! You do not get to compare him to your self-serving, narcissistic man-child of a husband! Nathan is nothing like him, and for you to suggest he is - no, to state that he is - is completely out of line! You do not have that right!”
Deb stares at Haley in open-mouthed shock. “Little girl, I don’t know who you think you are, talking to me like that, but you had better watch yourself. Don’t you dare tell me what I get to say or do to my son!”
Haley shakes her head, almost as if in amusement. “See, that’s the thing that neither you nor your abusive ass of a husband understand. Nathan is not a possession. He’s not a toy or a weapon. He’s not a way to relive your aborted youth. He’s a person, a good person, with thoughts and feelings and ideas and hopes and dreams, and you, mother or not, do not get to take any of those away from him. I’m sorry, but you just don’t.”
“We should go, Hay,” Nathan says quietly, staring at Deb, trying to gauge her thoughts. “This was a bad idea, I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Wait, no, Nathan, don’t go!” Deb exclaims, moving to stand between them and the door. “Please, don’t go. I’m sorry, I don’t know what got into me.”
Nathan rolls his eyes, tiredly shaking his head. “The same things that have always been in you, I guess.” Taking a deep breath, he looks her in the eye. “Look, Mom, I thought maybe we could talk, and that it wouldn’t be the same thing as it was before. Now, I don’t think we’re in that place yet. Maybe things are still too raw because of the emancipation, I don’t know.”
Taking a step closer to him, Deb shakes her head. “Honey, I want to try. I don’t know why I’m lashing out - I hear myself, and it’s like I don’t know who is saying those things. I - I want to figure things out between us. I’ve done a lot to be ashamed of; unquestionably, you have a lot of valid reasons to be angry with me. But I’d really like us to get past some of those and be a family again.”
“I already have a family,” Nathan counters, looking at Haley meaningfully, “And that’s what I came here for today. It didn’t really go the way I had imagined, you know?”
“We could try again,” Deb says, pleading. “Maybe sometime outside of my work. Maybe on a day when you shouldn’t be in school. We could do it sometime when both of us are prepared for it, and that would hopefully help it go a little more smoothly.” She sighs, brushing her bangs off her forehead. “I know that I have made a lot of mistakes, and obviously my biggest was not being home enough. At the very least, I should have paid more attention to what was going on with you and your father. I can never be sorry enough for that, can I?”
He shrugs. “It doesn’t matter anymore, Mom. Someone told me once that it felt better to get things out on the table, so maybe this will help with time.”
A small smile settles on her lips. “Well, I have to say, you’ve impressed me very much. And you’re right, Haley; Nathan is nothing like Dan. I’m proud of you, honey. You’ve obviously grown up a great deal. Are - are things okay, with you on your own? Do you need anything? Is there anything that I can do?”
“I didn’t come here for money or gifts, Mom,” Nathan sighs, frowning at the offer.
“I know, I know that. But if there was something you needed or wanted, you know that I am here for you,” she tells him, reaching out to brush her hand down the side of his arm. “Take care of yourself, honey. I’m here if you need me, and I’m here when you’re ready to talk again. Maybe the three of us can go out to lunch.”
“We’ll think about it,” Nathan answers as he moves to put his arms around Haley from behind. “We need to go now. I just can’t do this right now.”
To both their surprise, Deb nods and doesn’t hesitate to move out of the way. “Nathan?” she calls when they step out the doorway. “Thank you for coming today; thank you for trying. Now it’s my turn to try, and I’m going to do just that. I want you to know that.”
He shrugs as though indifferent, but Haley gives Deb a brisk nod. Even if Nathan doesn’t want to admit it now after that admittedly unsettling meeting, she knows that he would like to figure things out with Deb. It’ll be slow going, obviously, but if she can help facilitate that for him, then she will. So she won’t tell exactly what she thinks of her, but nor will she let her get away with anything where Nathan is concerned, either.
The ride down the elevator and the subsequent walk out to Nathan’s car is quiet, each lost in their own thoughts. As he’s pulling out of the parking lot, Haley looks over at him with a small smile on her face. “Well, that wasn’t so bad, right? I mean, from the way you said your dad talked, this place could’ve been a meth lab or something. I think we did okay.”
“I think you were amazing,” he tells her with a grin, his eyes burning into her. “That was actually hot, you standing up for me like that. It’s a little embarrassing, getting turned on by your girlfriend in front of your mother.”
“Nathan!” she laughs, poking him on the arm. “Don’t say things like that!”
“Why not? It’s totally true,” he smirks, winking at her. “I wouldn’t like a repeat of it, because it’s just unnatural to want your girlfriend when your mother is around making you feel like crap, but still. You’re just hot enough to supersede that, Hay. Good on you.”
She rolls her eyes, laughing at him. “You know, for all the big man on campus, stud of the world vibe you give off, you’re kind of a dork, Nathan Scott.”
He raises an eyebrow at that. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing? If it’s a good thing, then I’ll take it.” Turning serious, he looks at her as he slows for a red light. “Thanks for coming with me today. I don’t think I would’ve been able to handle it if you weren’t there. Thanks for standing up for me, too.”
“I’d do it again in a heartbeat,” she promises, leaning over the dividing console to kiss his cheek. “Come on, if you drive fast, we’ll have time to stop at your house before I need to be at the café for my shift.”
“Promise?” he asks a little breathlessly as her hand finds its way into his lap.
“Promise,” she agrees, her voice going breathless as well.
~*~
“Are you sure that you want to do this today?” Haley asks anxiously from the passenger seat of Nathan’s old car. If you aren’t ready, we can just keep this to ourselves for awhile. I wouldn’t really mind.”
Since this is about the fifth time that she has asked him that very question or brought it up in some other way, he really does get that she wouldn’t mind postponing it. In fact, she has mentioned it so many times that he is beginning to think she doesn’t want to do it which bothers him more than it ought. “Hay, I am completely and totally ready, willing, and able to face the people at school. I don’t care what any of them think, and the ones who do matter already know.” He watches her carefully as he asks the question that has been bothering him since she first brought up laying low with this. “Haley, do you not want people knowing that we’re back together? Are you embarrassed by it or something?”
Her eyes widen slightly and she blushes, lowering her head. “I’m not embarrassed or anything like that,” she is quick to assure him. “I just - I guess that I’m worried about how people will act when they find out. I had lived my whole life without experiencing the scrutiny and stares and whispers of the gossip system until last spring. It was frustrating and hard for me to go through that,” she tries to explain, gazing at him beseechingly. “I’m sorry that this is coming across poorly. God, the last thing I am is embarrassed - by you or us. I guess I’m just uncomfortable with the attention we’re going to get.”
Letting that sink in - and breathing a mental sigh of relief that she isn’t horrified and rethinking the whole thing - Nathan slowly nods. He can understand that, he supposes, even if it is something of a foreign concept to him. He’s always drawn a lot of attention, so it doesn’t really faze him. Even the negative attention he’s received from his peers lately has been easy for him to ignore. But Haley always held herself separate from everyone else, kept to a tighter group of friends that had no reason to gossip about each other or anyone else, so she had been somewhat sheltered from that. That was another thing he had blown for her.
“Okay,” he says slowly, trying to think of the right thing to say. “This is your call, Haley. I’ll tell you what I think and what I want, but ultimately this is up to you because I want you to be happy and comfortable with this, alright?”
“Alright,” she agrees with no hesitation.
He smiles at her, taking a second to organize his thoughts. “Okay, I want to walk in there today holding your hand, and I want everyone to know that we’ve worked things out and that you’ve forgiven my sorry ass. Frankly, I don’t give a crap what they think about me or you or us because I know what a good thing we have here. Purposefully hiding it, though, gives the impression that we’re ashamed of it or there is something wrong. There isn’t, and I don’t want people to get the idea that there is, okay?”
She gives him a wry smile, nodding her agreement. “You’re right, I know you are. I guess that the selfish part of me would rather avoid dealing with all that.”
“I know,” he agrees easily, smiling at her in a way that goes very far towards soothing her fears and anxieties. “We’ll be old news again soon, though. You know Brooke will probably show up with one of her dad’s business partners for Homecoming or something, and all the attention will refocus where it belongs, on her.”
She laughs at that, nodding her agreement. “You’re probably right about that, too,” she agrees, smiling at him. “Sorry for being so prissy about this. I don’t even care what they think,” she sighs, “But I just don’t need their judge-y looks and snotty remarks.”
As he eases the car into the school parking lot, he gives her a reassuring smile. Well, he hopes that it is reassuring; this is something of a fairly major role reversal for these two. “You weren’t nervous about telling Luke and Karen, or Keith, or your parents,” he points out, a little confused. “Why was it easier to tell them? It seems like that would’ve been worse.”
Shrugging, she shoots him another adorably wry smile. “They love me, and I knew that all of them would support me no matter what. There was nothing to worry about there.”
“That makes sense, I guess,” he shrugs. Aside from Haley and Pete and probably Lucas, though he was reluctant to admit it, he didn’t have anyone who was unequivocally on his side like that. Maybe someday he’d have a few more people he can count on like that, but for now, he is pretty happy with what he’s got.
“Well, I guess we’re here,” Haley notes needlessly as she stares out the window at the school. “Somehow it feels like the first day of freshman year all over again.”
He grins at that, rolling his head along the headrest of his seat to face her. “Were you nervous about all the big, bad high school students that you’d run into?” he teases her.
She rolls her eyes at that before grinning in return. “No, of course not. I was worried that people would know I was Taylor’s sister and assume I was as much of a slut-bag as she is,” she jokes. “Really, I think it was normal high school nerves. Maybe that’s all this is, too.”
“Yeah, could be,” he agrees, winking at her as she shifts restlessly in her seat. “Should we go in now?”
“Probably,” she agrees, not moving to get out of the car. He rolls his eyes at her immobility, wondering if he’s going to have to unfasten her seatbelt and carry her into the school himself. “What if we wait for Luke and Peyton to show up? We could all walk in together.” She laughs at her own suggestion. “That would really give everyone a few things to talk about, right? Probably you and me being together again would be the least of it!”
He grins in acknowledgement of that. “Yeah, it probably would. Us walking in with my half brother and ex-girlfriend? They’d be talking about us for years, probably.”
She nods, pushing her door open and jumping out suddenly. “Well, what are you waiting for, Scott? Let’s go, we’ve got classes to attend, splashes to make!”
Laughing out loud at her sudden bravado-inspired enthusiasm, he follows suit and climbs out of the car. She’s already trekking across the parking lot, smiling over her shoulder to let him know that he’s supposed to chase after her. Shaking his head, he hefts his backpack over his shoulder and takes off jogging after her. Once he catches up with her, she turns and throws herself into his arms, pressing her lips against his. “Hi.”
“Hi yourself,” he smiles back, reaching up to tuck a wayward lock of hair behind her ear. “People are beginning to stop and point at us, Hay.”
To his surprise, he can feel her shrug as she lifts her face far enough away from his to let him see her smile. “That’s okay, Nathan. They can watch.”
It takes a second for him to catch on, but then he laughs again, leaning back so that her feet are off the ground as he twirls her around in a circle. “Damn right they can.”