He Waited for Fifteen Years novel · Chapter 36 of 48
Chapter 36: Unscientific
Nicholas set his coffee down on the security desk.
He did it carefully, the way he did everything, so it wouldn't spill.
Then he looked at Bryant for a long moment.
"No," he said.
Bryant smiled.
"No, you won't ask her? Or no, you don't want to know?"
"No, I'm not going to talk about my wife's sleep in a lobby with you."
He nodded at the guard, who was already coming around the desk.
"Mr. Ferraro has a trial in September and about forty witnesses standing behind him," Nicholas said. "He's going to let you walk him to the door now."
Bryant glanced over his shoulder.
The lunch crowd had stopped by the elevators to watch. Two women from accounting had their phones out.
He laughed and held his hands up.
"Of course," he said. "I'm a reasonable man."
The guard walked him out through the revolving door.
Bryant waved to me through the glass.
Nicholas picked his coffee back up and handed me mine.
"Car," he said.
He didn't say anything else for twenty blocks.
The driver took us up Park in the afternoon traffic.
Nicholas sat with his right hand on his knee.
The scar across his knuckles had gone white, the way it did when he gripped something.
He wasn't gripping anything.
"Say it," I said.
"Say what?"
"Whatever you're not saying."
He looked out the window at the doormen and the dog walkers.
"I'm jealous," he said. "Of a man. For a life that didn't happen."
He said it.
"It's unscientific," he added. "I'm aware."
"Nicholas."
"He knows which side of the bed you took. He knows what you looked like at twenty-five, and twenty-six. He knows what you sound like when you're angry at two in the morning in a house you've lived in for years."
His jaw moved.
"I'm never going to know any of that. I got you at twenty, in a ballroom, already bleeding."
The car stopped at the townhouse.
He got out and held the door for me, and I went up the steps ahead of him and turned around on the top one.
"Do you want to know what I said in my sleep?"
"No."
"Yes, you do."
He came up two steps, so our eyes were level.
"Yes," he said. "I do. I hate it. Tell me."
"Sorry."
He went very still.
"I said sorry," I said. "In my sleep, for seven years. He used to tell it at dinner parties. She apologizes in her sleep. Everybody laughed. I laughed too."
The wind came down East 70th Street and lifted the hair off my neck.
"That's what he had," I said. "That's what he's bragging about."
Nicholas looked at me for a long time.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–16 of He Waited for Fifteen Years are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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