Chapter 35 Am I Not Good Enough?
Chloe shook her head, her breath hitching. "I don't understand."
"It’s basic psychology, Chloe," Nathan said, his voice terrifyingly calm, adopting the clinical, detached tone of a professor dissecting a case study. "You just woke up in an alien world. You have nothing. You know no one. I am the only familiar anchor you have left to rely on. You think I can provide you with a safe harbor, so your brain is confusing desperate dependency with romantic passion. It's a trauma bond."
"A trauma bond?" Chloe stared at him, utterly insulted. "Are you afraid I'll regret it? Are you so terrified of me changing my mind that you have to analyze my feelings into a medical symptom? Do you really trust me that little?"
Nathan swallowed hard, refusing to look at her lips. "I just want you to see the world first. I want you to meet people your own age. I want you to build a life, and then make your decision."
"Why the hell should I see more of the world? Why should I meet other people?" Chloe’s voice rose, vibrating with furious, broken heartbreak. "Isn't it enough that you are the absolute center of my world? Even if there were a thousand better men out there, I wouldn't look at a single one of them! Nathan, I love you! Whether you're twenty, forty, or eighty years old, I love you!"
Hearing the sheer, unadulterated devotion in her voice, Nathan smiled faintly, though his dark eyes glistened with a sudden, devastating moisture.
"Chloe," he murmured softly. "You love the boy I used to be."
"I love the man you are now!" she insisted stubbornly, stepping toward him.
Nathan took a deliberate step back, shaking his head. "In your mind, I am twenty, forty, and sixty simultaneously. I am still the untouchable, perfect fantasy you left behind."
"That isn't true."
"These twenty-three years might feel like a ten-hour nap to you, but to me, they were an endless, agonizing nightmare," Nathan said, his voice cracking under the weight of decades of grief. "I changed a long time ago. I am covered in scars. I am not the beautiful fantasy you fell in love with."
"You just refuse to believe me!" Chloe glared at him, tears of frustration spilling over her lashes.
"It's not that I don't believe you," Nathan whispered, staring at the peeling wallpaper. "It's just that the man I am now... isn't good enough for you anymore."
The profound, hollow sorrow etched into his sharp features was absolute. Chloe’s chest caved in. She couldn't bear to see the most brilliant man she had ever known looking at himself with such total defeat.
She closed her eyes briefly, surrendering. "Fine. I won't push you tonight. You want me to calm down? I'll calm down. You want me to go see the world? I'll see it."
She opened her eyes, locking onto his with an unwavering, ferocious resolve. "But hear me, Nathan Archer. Even if I see the entire world, and even if I experience everything this century has to offer, you will still be the only man I ever want."
Her gaze burned with an intensity that threatened to scorch him alive.
Nathan violently turned away, practically fleeing down the stairs. "Get some rest," he rasped over his shoulder. "Mason is waiting."
Chloe didn't try to stop him. She stood alone in the freezing hallway, watching his broad shoulders retreat into the dark until he completely vanished from sight.
Nathan practically threw himself into the driver’s seat of the Bentley and slammed the door shut, locking it like a vault.
Mason was sitting in the passenger seat, his arms crossed over his chest. "What took so long?" the teenager demanded, his tone thick with annoyance.
"We just had to clear some things up," Nathan said, gripping the steering wheel until his knuckles popped, desperately trying to force his heart rate to slow.
"Who is she?" Mason pressed ruthlessly. "Do you actually like her?"
"Yes." Nathan answered without a single second of hesitation.
Mason’s jaw clenched. "Well, even if you like her, she can't live here. This is Mom's house."
Seeing that his father was staring blankly out the windshield and completely ignoring him, Mason’s teenage indignation flared. "Besides, isn't she way too young to be my stepmom? It's embarrassing, Dad."
Nathan gave a short, impossibly bitter laugh. "She can't be your stepmom, Mason. She can only be your sister."
She won't be your wife, yet she expects you to pay for her to live in your old house? Mason thought, completely missing the literal truth of his father's words. His disgust deepened. He felt a fierce, protective anger that this manipulative young woman was taking advantage of his father's bleeding heart.
"She has no right to live there," Mason snapped.
"It was her house to begin with," Nathan whispered into the dark.
"What?"
"Nothing." Nathan reached over, ruffling his son's dark hair. "Drop it, Mason. It's not your concern."
"Of course it's my concern!" Mason retorted, swatting the hand away. "I'm not against you dating, but that girl is practically my age! She doesn't seem reliable at all. Does she even genuinely care about you, or did she just make you buy her things? Are you paying her rent?"
Mason huffed, looking out the window. "If you really need a wife, I think Aunt Anna is fine. At least we know her background, and she's been obsessed with you for years."
Nathan looked at his son, listening to the boy aggressively nag him, and couldn't help the small, genuine smile that touched his lips.
Mason suddenly hesitated. The anger drained from his face, replaced by a deep, terrifying anxiety. He looked at his father cautiously.
"Dad... about your health," Mason asked quietly. "Did you tell her?"
"No," Nathan whispered, his smile dying instantly. "And I don't want her to know. Ever."
"Oh." Mason exhaled a massive sigh of relief.
If a man as ruthlessly honorable as his father was hiding his medical condition, it meant Nathan had absolutely no intention of pursuing a real, long-term relationship with the gold digger.
When they finally arrived back at the mansion, Mason retreated to his room to tackle his calculus homework.
Nathan walked straight into his master bedroom, closed the heavy oak door, and locked it.
He didn't bother turning on the overhead lights. He stumbled toward the armchair beside the floor lamp and collapsed into it. He raised a trembling hand, pressing the heel of his palm violently against his throbbing temple. A sharp, agonizing hiss of pain escaped his gritted teeth.
Seconds later, his right hand began to shake.
It wasn't a slight tremor. It was a violent, uncontrollable spasm. He grabbed his right wrist with his left hand, squeezing the joint tight enough to bruise, desperately trying to physically force his nervous system to obey him.
The shaking didn't stop. It only violently worsened.
Gasping for air, Nathan forced himself out of the chair. He staggered toward his desk and yanked open the bottom drawer, pulling out an unmarked amber prescription bottle. His hands were shaking so severely he couldn't push and twist the childproof cap.
Clatter.
The bottle slipped from his grasp, tumbling to the hardwood floor and scattering white pills across the rug.
Nathan dropped to his knees. He blindly clawed two pills from the floor, shoved them past his lips, and swallowed them dry. He collapsed against the side of the desk, squeezing his eyes shut as the excruciating electrical storm in his brain raged on.
It took twenty agonizing minutes for the medication to finally kick in and the tremors to subside into a dull twitch.
But the blinding, splitting agony in his skull remained. He couldn't stop a low, ragged groan from tearing out of his throat.
In the dim light of the room, Chloe’s tear-streaked, desperately beautiful face flashed behind his eyelids.
‘Whether you're twenty, forty, or eighty years old, I love you!’
When she had screamed those words at him in the hallway, how could he not have wanted to throw her against the wall and devour her? How could he not have wanted to drag her to an altar and force her to vow that they would never be parted again?
Even now, sitting on the floor like a broken old man, he wanted to chain her to his side. He had waited twenty-three years. He had ripped his own life to shreds to find her. God, how could he not love her? His dead, decaying heart still beat exclusively for her.
But he couldn't let her have him.
The brilliant, flawless boy she had fallen in love with was dead. In his place was a forty-two-year-old shell with severe neurological damage from invasive brain surgery, plagued by epileptic tremors, staring down the barrel of a massive stroke that could leave him paralyzed at any moment.
He remembered how, back in college, Chloe had obsessively read romance novels. She used to lie on his chest, tracing his jawline, proudly bragging that her boyfriend was far more handsome and brilliant than any fictional billionaire. She used to joke about writing a novel about him.
Nathan let out a quiet, shattered laugh that tasted like blood.
What did she want with him now? To become his live-in nurse? To spend her twenties wiping drool from his chin when his brain finally gave out entirely?
If she wrote a romance novel with a pathetic, dying man like him as the male lead, no one would ever read it.
Nathan laughed until his lungs burned, and then, completely alone in the dark, he pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and violently wept.
He had survived her death. But her return was going to completely destroy him.
It didn't matter. He was far past the age of youthful selfishness. As long as she was alive, as long as she was breathing and safe, he would gladly rot in the dark. Wasn't this exactly what he had bargained with God for? He couldn't be greedy now.
Down the hall, Mason had spent twenty minutes staring at an impossible calculus equation.
Frustrated, the teenager picked up his workbook and walked down the carpeted hallway toward his father's master suite, intending to ask for help.
Mason raised his knuckle to the heavy oak door.
He stopped.
Through the thick wood, bleeding out into the silent, empty hallway, Mason heard a sound that made his blood run completely cold.
It was the ragged, broken, suffocating sound of a grown man completely tearing himself apart.