Our Fault (Culpable Book 3)

I slept only fitfully, dreaming I was giving birth and the doctors were shouting that there were complications and the baby was in danger. I pushed and pushed. It was the only thing I knew how to do. Glancing around, I sought the one person who could make my worst fears disappear.

I can’t do it alone… Nick… I need him, please…

Mr. Leister said he couldn’t be here… He insisted that he didn’t want the baby. Or you…

I was crying, not just from the pain, but because I was alone. Mini-Me was about to come out, but when he did, I didn’t hear the loud cries of a newborn, just absolute silence. Some faceless presence approached me and handed me a bundle in a blanket.

I’m sorry… He was born dead.

It was a nightmare… I could feel the tears on my damp cheeks and my heart pounding at a thousand miles an hour. Then my eyes focused on the person in front of me. Nicholas had fallen asleep sitting on the sofa. I didn’t hesitate to throw off the sheets, get out of bed, and walk over to him. I sat on his lap and lifted one of his arms, wrapping it around me. He jerked a bit when his eyes opened.

“Noah…” he said. He was disoriented, but then he hugged me tightly, almost instinctively.

I buried my face in his neck. I was shaking like a leaf.

“What happened? Are you okay? Is the…?”

I shook my head, feeling a knot in my throat, unable to talk.

“Why are you crying?” he asked, frightened.

I closed my eyes and just felt him touch me. “I had a nightmare…”

He seemed to relax, but his arms swelled as he squeezed me tightly. “Do you want to talk about it? Sometimes that helps…”

The whole situation was so strange. For virtually the whole time we’d been dating, I had tried to hide from him how hard it was for me to sleep when he wasn’t there. Without even knowing it, he’d always protected me from my bad dreams. I’d always slept soundly at his side.

“I was having our child…” I said softly, “and you weren’t there. I was pushing and pushing…but Mini-Me was born dead. And I…I…”

Nick squeezed me again; his big arms swallowed me, but the image of my dead baby just wouldn’t vanish from my mind.

“That’s not going to happen, Noah,” he said, running his long fingers through my hair.

“How do you know?” I asked, leaning my head on his shoulders and opening my eyes.

He pushed me back so he could see me. “To start with, because there’s no one and nothing in the world that could keep me away from you when the time comes.”

“You promise?”

“I’ll be holding your hand from the first contraction until you’re through it. You have my word.”

I hadn’t expected him to say anything different, but still, an immense relief flowed through me. He reached down to touch my belly.

“Shouldn’t I be able to feel something by now?” he asked, as if frustrated.

“You will soon…” I said, holding my breath as I felt his hand under my shirt. “Sometimes I think our child is hiding, waiting to be sure you’re really here…”

“It’s still hard for me to believe, you know?”

It was overwhelming…Mini-Me, him, us… I still couldn’t grasp it all; there were just too many changes, and all of them were happening at once…

“I’m scared,” I told him, hoping time would stop, wanting to go back to the beginning, to when it was just him and me, and all the new problems we were facing hadn’t managed to hurt us.

“That’s normal… I’m terrified. But everything will be fine, you’ll see.”

“But what if it isn’t?” I whispered, scared to confess my fears aloud. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. I wasn’t supposed to be a mother, my body—”

“Your body’s perfect,” he said, leaving no room for doubt.

“Nick, the baby… I almost lost it,” I admitted, too scared to look him straight in the eyes.

“What are you talking about?”

I tried to get a hold of myself before talking any further. “Remember the night of the LRB celebration…when you had to take me home…?”

Of course he did. He got instantly tense. I was close enough to see the vein in his neck throbbing menacingly. He couldn’t have forgotten how drunk I was.

“I think that was the first time I could have miscarried… I thought my period had come…but it was something else.”

“Don’t feel guilty about what you couldn’t have predicted,” he said.

“I hurt our child…and I had to spend weeks in bed, and I don’t even know what the doctor’s going to tell me the day after tomorrow when I go to his office.”

“Is that why you had to rest…?”

“I’ve got a hematoma, and until it’s gone, I can barely do anything. The doctor told me it’s common with first pregnancies, but as time passes, it becomes more and more dangerous, not just for the baby but for me, too.”

“Explain to me again what the danger is for you.”

I saw so much fear in his pupils that I got scared myself. “Supposedly there could be complications if I lose it. But that won’t happen,” I said, determined to reassure us both.

Nick was speechless for a moment, as if suddenly the possibility of losing me and the baby terrified him. He stood, lifting me from the sofa, and laid me down on the bed. Then he paced through the room, his mind far away. When he came back over, he looked scared.

“I’m so sorry, Noah… This should never have happened. If I ever thought harm could come to you…”

I wanted to tell him that what mattered now was the baby, not me, that I was fine…but I couldn’t because he closed my mouth with a kiss, his mouth seeking consolation in mine. I needed a few seconds to relax; it almost scared me to feel the passion in this kiss, a passion that seemed to have eluded me forever. His tongue licked my lips, and I opened up. His breath was intoxicating and made me shiver. I touched his hair, pulled him in, but he wouldn’t kiss me any longer. Instead he looked me in the eye.

“Go back to sleep,” he said, panting. “You need to rest, and I…”

He was about to go, but my hand clasped his, holding him beside me.

“Stay with me until I fall asleep, please.”

A war seemed to be going on inside him. But he took off his shoes and lay down beside me. I let him pull me into his arms, and I rested my head on his chest. I didn’t want to think too much about what had just happened; I didn’t know where we were as a couple or how we would proceed. A kiss didn’t mean anything, did it? Maybe? I fell asleep with him stroking my hair and his heartbeat accompanying me like a lullaby.

When I opened my eyes the next morning, all I heard was the clicking of computer keys. In front of the bed was a sheer curtain dividing the bedroom from the rest of the suite, and when I sat up, I could see Nick’s blurry image on the sofa looking at his laptop screen, clearly displeased.

I remembered the moment we’d shared the night before. It had been a year and a half at least since I’d turned to Nicholas to feel better, a year and a half since I’d truly felt at ease in those arms… He had been good to me, but I had no idea what was coming next, and I was scared to ask.

Nick realized I was no longer asleep and looked up at me from his computer. I think we were both holding our breath—I know I was—until he finally closed the computer, laid it on the table, and walked over to the bed.

I didn’t say anything, I just waited to see how I should react. I felt a tingle as he stood next to me and looked down at me from above.

“How are you?” he asked, stroking my cheek and brushing a strand of hair behind my ear.

“Great,” I said almost automatically. My brain was too focused on his fingers touching me to pay attention to anything else.

He nodded and turned around.

“Are you leaving?” I couldn’t help but ask.

“I’ve got lots to do, including finding you the best ob-gyn in Los Angeles,” he said, taking out his phone. “Get dressed. I’ll have room service bring up breakfast.”

I threw on a sweatshirt but didn’t change out of my pajama bottoms. Ten minutes later, two huge trays appeared laden with enough food for an army. Nick was busy making calls, and by the time he hung up, I couldn’t eat anymore. He looked at my half-empty plate.

“Eat,” he said.

“I’m not in the mood for anything else,” I said, pushing my eggs around with a fork.

We hadn’t talked about us, and that was making me nervous. I couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d said to me the last time we were together and how certain he’d seemed when he’d told me he’d never forgive me.

“Stop playing with your food. You’ve barely had a bite.”

I frowned. “Is this the deal now?” I replied. “You’re going to order me around all the time? If that’s how it is, I’ll go back to Jenna’s.”

He didn’t like hearing that, but before he could say anything, someone knocked at the door. Steve came in looking preoccupied and holding a handful of magazines.

“It’s everywhere, Nicholas,” he said, not even seeming to notice me or the tray of eggs, fruit, cereal, and coffee.

“I know,” Nick said, turning and walking over to the desk. Steve followed him. I got up and did the same.

“What’s everywhere?” I asked and grabbed a copy of People from Steve before he could stop me. I saw the headline: Nicholas Leister Up to His Old Tricks. Underneath was a photo of him looking worse for the wear, with a cut on his face, emerging from a bar. I turned to the article page, but Nick snatched the magazine away and gave me an angry and menacing look.

“Go back to bed, Noah. Now.”

Crossing my arms, I said, “Not till you tell me what’s going on.”

“I’ll tell you whatever you want, but please, get back in bed.”

He wasn’t being bossy—he was worried for me; I could see that in the depths of those spectacular irises. I did as he said, feeling weird when I noticed Steve was watching my every move. Only once he saw me get under the sheets did Nick seem to breathe easier.

“Talk to Margot. She’ll handle this,” Nick said, throwing the magazine in the trash.

“You want to explain this?” Steve asked, looking over at me.

I’d never seen that expression, and it was obvious he was reprimanding Nick. This was the first time I’d ever seen a hint of anything threatening in Steve’s eyes.

“I will when I can. For now, just do as I ask; talk to Margot and try to make sure nothing else gets out from now on. The last thing I need the press to know is that Noah’s with me.”

That hurt—why lie about it? But more important to me then was knowing what could have caused a reporter to write a headline like that, making Steve act disapproving to the young man he’d protected and cared for since he was just a little boy.

Steve walked past his supposed boss until he was beside me. I saw worry in his face as he asked me if everything was all right.

Behind him, I could see Nick crossing his arms and giving him a piercing look. He didn’t like being ignored, and I was sure he didn’t like another man standing that close to the bed where I was lying half naked.

“Don’t worry about me, Steve,” I said, trying to summon a relaxing tone.

I didn’t think I convinced him, but at least he nodded, and without even looking at Nick, he walked out, not uttering another word.

“What was that about?” I asked.

Still staring at the place where Steve had been standing, Nicholas responded, “I guess his priorities have changed,” but something in his voice told me he wasn’t entirely upset about it.

“Are you going to tell me who you got in a fight with and why?”

He rubbed his thin growth of beard, which made him look like a bad boy, the very kind of boy I throbbed for.

“I ran into Michael at a bar close to campus,” he said with a kind of defiance. He was looking me in the eye, and I even had the sense he was paying close attention to how I reacted. I tried not to let the news shake me, but I couldn’t. Immediately I was tense, scared. “We got into a fight, they threw us both out, the press learned about it, and now they’re trying to use it to discredit me as CEO.”

Michael and Nick…fuck. Their last fight had turned out bad. But I hadn’t worried about anything happening again once Michael was out of the city and Nick was in New York and focused on his company. The last thing I’d imagined was that they could run into each other again, let alone that they could come to blows.

“You shouldn’t have gotten into it with him,” I said. Maybe he thought I was upbraiding him, but I was scared because I knew he needed to stay out of trouble. If Michael pressed charges, I wasn’t sure what would happen to Nick. But I knew we couldn’t have a reprise of the first night they’d met.

His muscles flexed in his clothing as he stood at the foot of the bed. “Have you seen him again?”

Had Michael told him something about our run-in a month before?

“I saw him on campus; we barely exchanged three words. Nicholas, I don’t want to see him any more than you do. I didn’t think he’d come back, but I guess he has other plans.”

“I don’t want you seeing him, Noah.” That sounded like a threat.

“I don’t plan to.”

He looked surprised. I supposed he hadn’t expected that answer. Nicholas had no notion of the way Michael had harassed me in the weeks after he’d gone to New York. And I wasn’t planning on telling him about it. I felt sure Michael’s intentions went no further than an immature desire to fuck with Nick, whom he’d always talked badly about.

I blinked as I realized how important my response was to Nick. As important as it was to me that Michael really would stay away from me. “I promise.”

“Good. Now I’ve got to go to the office.”

That saddened me, but I couldn’t just expect him to stay with me in that room while I was bedbound for what might be months on end.

“If you need anything, call me on my cell, and please, Noah, don’t get out of bed.”

I nodded, and he left. He promised he wouldn’t be late, and he left me alone in that unfamiliar room waiting for his return.