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“I… started dating when I was fifteen.”
She doesn’t look at Nate when she speaks.
A slight frown on her face, Eva looks at the glass of gin and tonic in her hand instead, the ice cubes in it half-melted: it’s an easy thing to focus on, and the effects of it are already becoming clearer in the way she talks, far more freely than usual.
She doesn’t usually talk about this.
Not that there’s anything to hide, certainly not from Nate.
It’s just not a topic she finds herself coming to often. It’s tied to certain things she’d rather avoid.
And yet she keeps going, and Nate lets her. Lets her talk as much as she wants to. Needs to.
“Mostly as a way to be out of the house, you know? Rebecca wasn’t around except on weekends”—she pretends not to notice the way Nate winces at the mention—“and I was too old for nannies already. It was just me. So I just… found other things to do. Had school, joined a lot of clubs. And, well, dating. Fooling around a bit. Didn’t really know what I was doing.”
It hadn’t been so bad, though. She’d never dated anyone for long, but she’d never had bad experiences.
Bobby had been the worst, and that had been much later. Even that hadn’t really left much of a mark, except for the one on her career.
“I came out at sixteen,” she adds. “It wasn’t hard, not really. People here didn’t care too much. I thought they would—I thought it was the end of the world. But it was fine. Rebecca didn’t care, either. She was alright about that. But it still felt… weird. You know? Like you have something to prove to yourself.”
She shakes her head, lets it go.
But then a thought that has been nagging at her for a while makes its way up her throat before she can stop it.
It’s just, well, Nate.
Nate with his brown skin that seems to glow in the light of her open-plan apartment. Nate with his tumbler of expensive whiskey that he brought here himself (she wouldn’t have known what to buy, would probably not have had the budget for it); Nate with his arm around her shoulders, pulling her close to him, always.
Gorgeous, sweet, wonderful Nate—whom she’s very nearly in love with—whom she can’t get out of her mind and who is three hundred years old.
Three hundred.
She can’t wrap her head around it.
So, she asks.
“What was it like for you?”
She’s still talking to the glass. Still frowning.
“You’ve been alive so long, I can’t even imagine—back then, it must have been—”
It must have been so tough.
It’s one thing for her to be out in the twenty-first century and another very different thing for Nate to have been born in the sixteen hundreds. And she knows he’s had lovers before, knows he must have navigated it all somehow, and still—
But then rational thought catches up with her words, and she stops herself.
She shakes her head. “You don’t have to tell me,” she says immediately.
She means it.
She’s seen the way Nate looks whenever family comes up, even her own. Whenever his past comes up, and from the few things she’s pieced together—the carnival mirror, the few comments he’s made, him being in the Navy—she can’t blame him, wouldn’t even dream of pushing him to talk about it.
It must all be so raw. Her questions aren’t worth that.
“I’m just… curious about you,” she adds by way of explanation, echoing something he’d said to her once. “But if it’s too much, I really don’t need to know. I promise.”
She’s made that clear to him (at least, she hopes she’s made that clear). Whatever happened to him only needs to come out when he’s ready to talk about it. If he’s ready to talk about it.
Before she can lose herself in her thoughts, however, Nate tightens his arm around her.
“It’s okay. You can ask.” He smiles down at her and it’s strained, yes, but she can tell it’s sincere. (It’s there, in the way it reaches his eyes, warm and soft and sweet and she’s never had anyone look at her like that before). “I just… try not to think about it too much these days, about how it was. When you’ve lived this long…” He trails off.
“But it wasn’t easy at first, no. Not when I was in the Navy. I believe that’s when I first realized.” He gives a soft laugh, but there isn’t much humor in it. “It would have been difficult not to.”
“I tried to—” He shakes his head, as though thinking better of what he was about to say. She doesn’t press. “It didn’t matter so much after I joined the Agency, as long as I kept to interactions with other supernaturals.”
Something, something in the way he says that makes Eva think that’s not how it always was. She couldn’t imagine Nate forgoing human interaction entirely, Agency or not.
There’s a question on the tip of her tongue, but she knows it’s not the time to ask it.
Still, she wonders.
Why does he care so much? Why would anyone, after everything he’s been through? She hasn’t been through a fraction of that and she barely cares at all.
“Nate…”
“It’s just how it was. But I wasn’t always unhappy. I was lucky, for the most part; luckier than I could have been.”
There it is. She’s learned to read this, too—she wouldn’t call it deflection, and she knows he’s not lying, but it’s a very clear indicator that the topic is over.
It’s that tension in his smile.
But then the tension dissipates when he speaks again. “And now I’ve found you. That makes up for everything else.”