Nervously, I walked around and sat on the edge of his bed.
And that was yet another indicator that something was wrong. I didn’t sit beside him. And I didn’t know if it could be fixed.
Neither of us said anything for several long moments, and I had to appreciate them…these couple of seconds where nothing had yet been said, and so nothing could quite be called broken.
For a few seconds, I could pretend that everything was still the same.
But it wasn’t, and we had to be grownups and deal with our problems.
“You just left, and I was really worried for you all day,” Nathaniel said, pushing us into the dark unknown.
“I knew you would try to talk me out of how I needed to deal with things,” I said. “And I didn’t want to jump into a fight right then.”
“I think that shows us we have a problem,” Nathaniel said. And just barely in his voice, I heard grief working its way to the surface.
“Apparently we do,” I said.
We were both quiet for a few beats, and I knew, neither of us knew where to go from here. What did we start with? What was owed and what could we really fix?
“I’m sure you heard some rumors at school today,” I said.
Nathaniel nodded, but didn’t say anything else.
“I did get expelled from school,” I started, stating the easiest thing to explain. “Apparently there were several witnesses who saw Borden and I going in and out of the Society House and the school on Sunday. I don’t know who these witnesses are, so there won’t be any memory altering to fix it this time.”
And this time, we were guilty of what got us expelled.
From the look on his face, I knew Nathaniel was wrestling with the ethical implications of what I’d just said.
“It could have been a lot worse,” I said, my voice hoarse and tight. “I didn’t sleep the entire night, Saturday. I spent all night trying to come up with a plan, a way to bring them to justice. I came up with a few different plans. And this was the least of them all.”
“And did it work?”
I looked at Nathaniel when I heard the sharp tone in his voice. He looked off to the side of me, his jaw tight.
“Did you make them pay?” he asked. “Did you bring them to justice?”
And I realized then that he was right.
In the end, what kind of justice was it that we’d done? We’d pulled a prank on them, a practical joke. We showed the student body the truth about their grades, but what could they ever do about it? And in the end, Borden and I paid for it with our educations.
How juvenile I had been.
I should have gone with one of my other plans.
I should have made them pay in a real way.
“Don’t you patronize me, Nathaniel,” I said. My voice dipped low and dangerous.
“You’ve never walked down these roads before, Margot,” he said, his voice matching mine. “You’ve never had to deal with true confrontation in your life. I tried to warn you that—”
“Stop,” I said, my tone sharp and loud as I cut him off. “It won’t do us one bit of good to go down that road of I tried to warn you. Because I also tried to warn you that I couldn’t just do nothing.”
Nathaniel looked at me, breathing hard through his nose as he tried to reclaim his calm. “But Borden. Borden you could go and be yourself with?”
And that was when tears pooled in my eyes. That was when I started to crack, when my hold on this started to slip.
Because I saw it there in his eyes, the emotion in Nathaniel’s that said he was hurt, but that he was also sorry.
“It was just one day,” I said, the words hardly audible. “One day and one instance where he offered some emotional support and connection that I needed. The whole school is apparently making their own assumptions and spreading all kinds of gossip. But it was one instance.”
“I’m really sorry that it wasn’t me that could give you what you needed then,” Nathaniel said. His voice was unsteady with emotion. Because we were sliding further and further down this rocky hill.
I shook my head. “You’ve been exactly what I needed in every other instance.”
He shook his head. “Yet this keeps coming up. This keeps being a problem. And I don’t know how it goes away, Margot.”
I shook my head, too. “This shouldn’t be a definer. This shouldn’t be the decider of anything.”
A tear pushed its way out onto Nathaniel’s cheek, and I couldn’t stay away any longer. I got up and crossed the space to him. I knelt with my knees on either side of his hips, straddling his waist.
I reached up and brushed a thumb over his cheek, wiping away the tear.
“And yet resolving conflict is a part of a relationship,” Nathaniel said as he studied my face. His eyes lingered on mine, slid down my nose, focused on my lips, my ears. “And we keep failing at it.”
I pressed my lips together, trying to gain control over the emotions in me. But I lost. Two of my own tears pushed themselves out onto my cheeks. “Do you think that all of the other things were maybe just too easy? That maybe we just took the rest for granted?”
“I think that maybe we made too many assumptions too early,” Nathaniel said, his words barely audible at this point.
I leaned forward and I pressed my lips to his. Gently, softly, as if he were fragile and he might shatter or disappear into mist at any moment.
“You’re the love of my life, Nathaniel,” I said in a whisper. “It’s not supposed to be like this.”
He looked up into my eyes, and I saw it there, everything I was feeling, reflected in his eyes. “I think maybe we need to take a step back, Margot, and evaluate some very important things about ourselves.”
And as much as it killed me, I knew he was right.
We each had to decide. If we could change, if we could accept, or if there were core flaws that would put cracks in any foundation.
So, I nodded. I climbed off his lap, and with feet that weighed a thousand pounds each, I walked toward the door.
Nathaniel stood as I reached it and put a hand on the doorknob. I looked back over my shoulder.
“See you at nine tomorrow to work on the healing book?” I asked, trying to say something normal.
Nathaniel didn’t say anything, simply nodded with his lips tightly pressed together.
So, I walked out of the solarium. My legs felt like disconnected tree stumps as I walked faster and faster. My throat grew tight. Emotions flooded my eyes. I pushed myself faster.
I was halfway across the school grounds when I utterly broke down.
Sobs ratchetted their way up my throat. Tears broke free from my eyes. I had to wrap my arms around my middle to keep from crumpling to the ground.
While we had never said as much in words, I knew Nathaniel and I would never be what we were ever again.
We were too easy, had been too young and too naive. We had ignored critical differences in our personalities, and now the bill had come due.
I’d meant it when I said Nathaniel was the love of my life. I’d believed we were meant to be together with every fiber of my being.
But what if that wasn’t enough?
Chapter Twenty-One
For the first time since I was a five-year-old, I slept in on a Tuesday morning in March.