Love and the Laws of Motion Page 21

  And with that cryptic postscript, she turned and left the butcher shop. She was sorry? What for? What had happened eight years ago to send Nick out into the world totally alone? And how the hell was she going to convince Nick to forgive his mother and give his family another chance?

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Since Thanksgiving was the next day and Gemma was up to her neck with meal prep, Livie offered to cover her at the bar, as she had in previous years. Ordinarily a Wednesday night would be slow, but the night before Thanksgiving always defied that rule of thumb. Most people were looking at a four-day weekend, which meant Thanksgiving Wednesdays were always fairly crowded and celebratory.

  Tonight, all the regulars were there, plus a few old-timers who showed up less frequently. Teresa was there, too, chatting with Livie’s father whenever he had a minute to breathe. He smiled with Teresa—more than Livie had seen him smile in years. There was a...well, a lightness about him that hadn’t been there before. Her own feelings about Teresa were still pretty mixed, but she couldn’t deny Teresa made her father happy.

  A bunch of pressed-shirt college guys wandered in and took up residence at one of the tables. Romano’s didn’t see many of their type in the bar, and Livie got the impression that maybe they’d come in to slum it at someplace so obviously uncool. But they weren’t being assholes. They were watching the game on the flat-screen, and occasionally got a little loud, but not enough to drive everyone else away. Her dad was grateful for them, since they were drinking solidly and leaving hefty tips for every refill.

  The college boys made things busy enough that Livie texted Jess to see if she could come pitch in, which she did, along with Alex. And when Nick found out Alex was going to be there, he walked over, too. Now the two of them held down one end of the bar, watching the game.

  Laura DeSantis’s phone number was burning a hole in her pocket. Every time she thought about it, a knot of anxiety formed in her stomach. She hadn’t been alone with Nick since she’d gotten back from the butcher shop, so there’d been no chance to tell him about the encounter. The truth was, she hadn’t looked very hard for a chance, since she had no idea how to broach the subject. He was going to be angry, she was sure of that. And he’d probably flat-out refuse to contact Laura. What could she possibly say to convince him? Nothing had come to her yet.

  She finished refilling the college boys’ pitcher and set it on a tray just as Nick reached for her arm across the bar.

  “Hey, gorgeous, two more for me and Alex when you get a chance?”

  “As soon as I drop this at their table,” she promised him.

  “Thanks, Liv.” As he sat back, he dragged his fingers down the length of her forearm, sending a pleasurable little shiver down her spine.

  She was still smiling distractedly as she set the pitcher of beer down in the middle of the rowdy college boys.

  At that moment, the front door of the bar opened and Laura DeSantis stepped inside. Livie stopped cold, staring at Laura, who was looking around the bar with painful hopefulness.

  “I couldn’t wait,” she said with a shrug. “I wanted to see if he was here—”

  Nick’s voice cut through the chatter of the bar. “Mom?”

  As he strode across the bar, his eyes were dark with anger. Laura’s face lit up with a tremulous smile. “Nicky,” she breathed.

  Nick stopped a few feet short of her. “What are you doing here, Mom?”

  Laura flicked a glance at Livie. “Livie said you were staying in the neighborhood.”

  Nick crossed his arms over his chest, turning that angry glare on her. “Oh, she did, did she?”

  “I ran into your mother at the butcher shop,” Livie explained lamely. More like ran her down and tackled her. “I was going to tell you later.”

  “You were going to tell me.” His voice was flat and emotionless, and the look in his eyes scared her.

  Everything seemed to slow down around her. Alex had swiveled around to watch as soon as Nick left his stool. Her father and Jess had stopped what they were doing to see what was happening. Dennis and Frank had interrupted their conversation for the drama. Even the table full of college boys seemed to be paying more attention to the standoff than to the game on TV.

  “Yes, I—I was going to tell you,” Livie stammered. “But now she’s here, so...”

  His gaze swung back to his mother. “Yes, she is. I don’t know why you came here, Mom.”

  “I wanted to see you, Nick.” She was twisting her hands together anxiously. “Can we go somewhere and talk?”

  A muscle twitched in Nick’s jaw as he stared her down. Livie held her breath, praying he’d give her a chance, and dreading the scene that would erupt if he didn’t.

  After a pause that felt like it lasted a year, he exhaled heavily and dragged a hand through his hair. “Outside,” he muttered.

  He brushed past Livie without a word as he followed his mother outside. Livie stared at the door after it closed behind him. It felt like the right thing to do at the time, reaching out to Laura DeSantis about her son. At least he had a mother, one who was alive and well and obviously desperate to heal the breach with her son. Yes, she didn’t know what had caused it, but whatever it was, surely some small attempt to repair their relationship wasn’t too out of line?

  She hoped Nick eventually felt that way, too, or he might never forgive her for what she’d done.

  * * *

  Outside on the sidewalk, Nick stopped and faced his mother for the first time in eight years. What the fuck was he supposed to say to her? What could she possibly have to say to him?

  “There’s a little coffee shop up the street,” she said tentatively, pointing over her shoulder. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

  Nick thought longingly of his beer back at the bar, back with Alex. A game to watch, Frank and Dennis talking his ear off about a whole lot of nothing. Simple and uncomplicated, the very opposite of what he was about to face. But he didn’t suppose there was any getting out of it at this point. He might as well let her have her say and get it over with.

  A few minutes later, they were seated at a tiny table for two in the front window of Brooklyn Coffee Roasters, a sleek, modern coffee joint that was packed, even at this hour, with twentysomethings on laptops.

  His mother turned her coffee cup in circles nervously. “You look good,” she said at last.

  Nick said nothing. The last time he’d seen her, he’d been eighteen. He sure as hell hoped he looked better.

  “Are you doing okay? Do you need money?”

  That startled a huff of laughter out of him. “No, I don’t need money. I’ve got plenty.”

  “You do?” she asked, surprised.

  Of course. Still shocked he could succeed at anything. “My computer work pays pretty well.”

  She dropped her eyes to the table, everything in her sagging slightly. Which made him—inexplicably—feel bad. He shouldn’t feel sorry for her. They were the ones who’d all but disowned him for something that wasn’t even his fault. At least, not entirely his fault. They didn’t deserve his pity.

  She looked older—surprisingly so. More than the eight years that had passed. And there was this air of nervousness around her that he didn’t remember, along with a kind of pervasive sadness. As much as he was trying to harden his heart against her, she was getting to him.

  “Livie said you were staying with her, so I thought...” His mother trailed off helplessly.

  “It’s temporary. I signed a lease on a new place a couple of weeks ago. I’m moving in as soon as the furniture gets sorted out.” Although right now, Greenpoint didn’t feel nearly far enough away. The moon wouldn’t be far enough to make him feel comfortable.

  “She’s nice.” When he looked up at her, she shrugged. “Livie. She seems very nice. Comes from a good family. The Romanos, everybody knows them.”

 
“Yep, the Romanos are great.” He was absolutely not discussing his relationship with Livie with his mother.

  “Chris is married now,” she said after a moment, to fill the silence.

  “Is he? Good for Chris.” Perfect Chris, keeping it on-brand.

  “Kate. She’s lovely. And they have a little boy. He’s about to turn two. Anthony.”

  That was like a fist to the chest. Chris had a kid? One he’d never even seen? Anthony was his middle name. Had to be a coincidence. Right? There was no way Chris would have named his kid after Nick.

  “He’s exactly like you were at that age. Afraid of nothing. You used to scare the life out of me with the things you’d get into. And no matter how many times I explained to you how dangerous something was, how you could get hurt, you just wouldn’t believe me. It was like you thought bad things could only happen to other people.”

  His gut twisted with guilt and anger. All right, enough with this bullshit chitchat over coffee, reminiscing and catching up on family news. That wasn’t why she’d come, not after all these years.

  “Why’d you come track me down, Mom? Didn’t you say it all eight years ago?”

  He’d expected her to get angry, like she had eight years ago, to shout back at him, and tell him it was all his fault, once again, reckless Nick bringing disaster everywhere he went. But to his shock, her eyes filled with tears and her face collapsed.

  “I can’t bear to think about what I said eight years ago.”

  She let out a ragged little sob, dabbing at her eyes with a wadded-up napkin. Nick said nothing, frozen, watching as she pulled herself back together. Finally, she took a deep shuddering breath and looked up at him—reluctantly, it seemed, because there was something like shame in her eyes.

  “You have to understand, as a parent, when your child is in danger, there’s nothing worse. I was out of my mind with panic. That’s no excuse for anything I said, I know, but you have to believe me, Nicky, I’ve regretted those words every day for eight years. Your father and I both have. I wanted so badly to talk to you, to make it better somehow, but you were just gone.” She lifted her hands and dropped them again. Tears slid down her cheeks unchecked. “The not knowing was the hardest. We’d heard you went to California, but then nothing. I worried that you were on drugs, or homeless. Every night, when I went to bed, the last thing I thought about was you. I wondered where you were, how you were doing. I prayed to St. Anthony to protect you and take care of you.”

  She didn’t finish, her words lost as she was consumed with weeping. His mother, always so tough and no-nonsense in his memories, had vanished, leaving this broken woman in her place. She collapsed in on herself, curled over, shoulders jerking with each soul-wrenching sob.

  It turned out his heart wasn’t as hardened as he thought, because he couldn’t handle watching her beat herself up anymore.

  He stood and reached for her, taking her by the shoulders, pulling her to her feet and into his chest. “Come on, Mom. It’s okay. Stop crying.”

  Her arms came around him, her hands twisting into his shirt, and she sobbed even harder against him. Murmuring a bunch of soothing nonsense, he patted her on the back as she cried, her whole body shaking with the force of it.

  He’d have to be a cold bastard to ignore her pain, to refuse to accept her apology, which she obviously meant with every fiber of her being. Had she’d been torturing herself like this all this time? Imagining him drug-addicted and homeless, for God’s sake? Guilt twisted in his gut again, but this time it wasn’t guilt about his actions eight years ago, it was guilt about what he’d done—or hadn’t done—all the years since.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  As the night stretched on, Livie found herself looking toward the door every five minutes, then every two minutes, torturing herself with thoughts about what might be happening between Nick and his mother, and what he was going to say to her when he came back. If he came back.

  It was after midnight when the door opened and this time, Nick was the one who stepped through it. Livie had been drying a rack of glasses, but froze, her towel-covered hand still stuffed down inside a pint glass.

  He stopped right inside the door, not making a move to come any closer, watching her from across the room. Her stomach erupted in butterflies.

  Her dad looked up from his conversation with Teresa at the end of the bar, his eyes cutting back and forth between them. When Teresa gave him a very unsubtle nudge, he cleared his throat and straightened, coming to take the half-dried glass out of her hands.

  “It’s slowing down. Why don’t you head home, Livie?”

  Jolted out of her frozen state, she looked up at her father. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah,” Jess chimed in behind her. “We got this. You go on home.”

  She wasn’t exactly looking forward to this conversation with Nick, but putting it off wasn’t going to make it any easier. Might as well get it over with.

  She ducked under the pass-through and walked over to Nick, tucking her hands in her back pockets to keep from fidgeting. He watched her approach without reaction, closed up like a vault, every thought and feeling locked inside.

  “I’m heading home,” she said as brightly as she could manage. She was so terrible at pretending. “Want to walk with me?”

  He gave her one tight nod and moved to the side to let her walk out ahead of him.

  Outside on the sidewalk, he fell into step beside her, hands stuffed into his jacket pockets, head down, eyes on the sidewalk.

  Livie had intended to let him do the talking, but when he made no attempt to break the silence for several endless minutes, she couldn’t take it any longer. “Nick, I’m so sorry. I didn’t plan it, I swear. I saw her at the butcher shop and I acted on impulse. I didn’t know she was going to come here tonight.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I have no idea what your relationship with them was like, and it wasn’t my place to insert myself or try to fix things. I’m so sorry you were ambushed that way. I had no right to put you in that position.”

  He blew out a long breath and tilted his head back to look at the dark sky overhead. “Liv, it’s fine.”

  She almost missed a step in her surprise. “Really? I mean, it is? You seemed really angry earlier.”

  “I was. But not at you. Not much anyway.” He trailed off, turning his head away. “It’s a long story.”

  “You can tell me. If you want.” She hesitated, then charged on. “I mean, I know we’re not...this is not... But I’m your friend.”

  Finally, he looked at her, turning his head enough to give her a slight smile, and to brush his elbow against hers. “Yeah, you are.”

  Taking a deep breath, she asked the question that had been eating at her since she met him. “Nick, what happened with your family? Was it about getting kicked out of DeWitt?”

  “No. I mean, not directly. But it started there.” He took a deep breath of his own. “After I got kicked out, I moved back home.” He shook his head ruefully. “Things were tense. Things had always been tense, but DeWitt made it all a thousand times worse.”

  “You didn’t get along with your parents?”

  “Without trying to sound like a whiny teenager, they never understood me. The computer thing started early. I got my first desktop when I was six. Built another one out of spare parts and instructions I found online when I was seven. By the time I was eight, I was writing code, building websites. And this was twenty years ago. There were plenty of grown adults who couldn’t even turn on a computer back then, including my parents. They didn’t understand it, so they didn’t trust it. They were sure everything I was doing was illegal, that I’d get into trouble for it.”

  “Was it illegal?” Considering adult Nick’s attitude toward legality, Livie wasn’t so sure his mother was wrong to question him.

  “Nobody’d even written the laws yet. T
he internet back then...” He stared up at the sky, smiling at the memory. “It was like the Wild West. Anything was possible. People were doing amazing new stuff every day. Things that would have seemed like science fiction just five years earlier were happening right in front of my eyes. I knew the people doing it. I was doing it. It felt like we were making the future happen, you know?”

  Hearing him talk about those days, it was easy to understand why he loved it. It was no different than what she did, really. The thirst for answers, the giddy high you got when you puzzled out something no one else had yet.

  “All the rules and laws about what you could and couldn’t do,” he continued. “All that came later. Some of us got caught, some of us didn’t.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Oh, there were one or two cease and desist letters.”

  “Nick!”

  “Relax. Nothing serious. Corporate blowhards protecting their turf. But yeah, my parents were pretty freaked out. I was nothing like Chris. Straight As, on track to graduate with honors, already had a job offer from a major brokerage waiting for him when he graduated. To my parents, that’s what success looked like. What I was doing? That was just goofing around on the internet and getting into trouble. They changed their tune a little when I got the full ride to DeWitt, but they never really trusted me, you know?”

  It must have sucked, to be constantly compared to his brother and found wanting. As different as she and her sisters were, never once had her father set one against the other.

  “Anyway, when my little run-in with the Department of Defense happened, and I got kicked out of DeWitt, they were furious. I mean, I get it. They didn’t even go to college. They had to scrimp and save to put Chris through City College. I landed a full ride to an Ivy at sixteen and then I blew it. I didn’t see it that way, but I can see how they did.”

  “How did you see it?” Livie couldn’t imagine screwing up so bad as to get kicked out of college and not seeing it as a life-altering disaster. It would have destroyed her, but Nick shrugged it off as some minor inconvenience.