He glances over my shoulder, and then, with more trepidation than I’ve seen him have, he looks back at me.
I grin super wide in hopes it warms him up to my idea. “You don’t think Mach would mind if I slept up here, do you?”
He runs both hands down his face and mutters a few unintelligible things.
“Fine,” I say. “I’ll just go home with you.”
His eyes pop open. “The fuck you will.”
I got him. “So you propose, what? I sleep in my car? That sure sounds safe. Machlan’s gonna love you for suggesting that.”
“Now, I didn’t say that.”
“What did you say then, Peck? You won’t help me sleep here,” I say, motioning behind me. “And you won’t let me bunk with you.”
“Hadley. I. Don’t. Want. To. Die. Okay? I haven’t made it to the Wheel of Fortune yet. I haven’t made love to Molly. I haven’t even gotten my own dog yet, man,” he whines. “Don’t make me do this.”
“Stop being a baby.”
“But I am a baby.” He looks at me with the biggest set of puppy dog eyes I’ve ever seen. “Let me go home and forget this all ever happened.”
“Why?” I laugh. “Why are you acting like I’m asking you to rob a bank?”
“I’d rather rob a bank than help you break in to this apartment.” He gulps.
“You’re thinking of this in the wrong way. We aren’t breaking in. He’d totally let me if I asked—”
“So why don’t you ask?”
“Because then he’d come over here and just, bad things, Peck. Bad, bad things.”
I see the start of a grin, so I keep going.
“Let’s operate as if I did ask, knowing he’d approve, and he doesn’t even have to know. It’ll be our secret.”
“I promised Mach I was oblivious to your plans tonight, and that if I did find out anything, I’d tell him.”
“You don’t have to tell him anything,” I say.
“But bad, bad things will happen if I don’t.” He laughs. “Damn you.”
Propping both hands on my hips, I stare at him from my perch. I can see him break a little more with each second that passes. But after almost a minute, he still hasn’t given in, so I start toward the stairs.
“Fine. It’s your house then,” I say. “I like to sleep on my right side, and if I start to cuddle—”
“Fuck.” He storms toward the stairs, shaking his head the entire way. “This is going to hurt. You know that?”
“I don’t think so. The window looks fairly easy to pry open. I just need someone to boost me up there—”
“I meant for me. Machlan’s gonna milk my pain for all it’s worth.”
I swat him on the shoulder and lead him to the window. “Oh, he is not, you big baby. Just pretend this never happened.”
“I’m a terrible liar.”
Ignoring him, I direct my attention to the little window. On the other side is a sink that won’t have dishes in it because Machlan can’t stand dirty dishes. There will be a bottle of soap on the left side of the faucet and a strainer in the right sink basin.
“Did you hear me?” Peck asks.
“Nope. What?”
He dangles a set of keys in the air.
“Are those to the door?” I ask.
“Unfortunately.”
Snatching them out of his grip, I pop them in the lock, and the door swings open. “Peck,” I say, handing him the key ring. “You’re my favorite person tonight.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
We step inside and flip on the light. It’s exactly as I expect it.
A sink sits to our right, soap and strainer in place. A little table sits a few feet away with an aloe vera plant in the center that was a start from Machlan’s grandmother. A hideous orange and brown sofa is backed up against terrible brown paneling, and a television sits across from it. The long back wall has a futon, a dresser, and a little desk with a lamp.
“Smells a little musty in here,” Peck notes. “Maybe we should open the window a bit.”
“Yeah.”
I venture into the room as Peck wrestles with the window. My heart sits at the base of my throat, pulsing with every beat. I’ve sat on that sofa many nights, listening to the chaos of the bar below as I waited for Machlan to come up after Crave closed. I’ve woken up on the futon with my face on his chest with our legs wrapped around each other so crazily that I didn’t know where his started and mine ended. I’ve tasted his lips, felt his skin, loved his heart on those sheets, and my own heart tugs a little as I think about it.
“You okay?” he asks.
I jump at Peck’s voice and turn around. “Yeah. Just thinking.”
“Just in case you were thinking about it—or not,” he adds. “Maybe you weren’t thinking of this at all, and now I’m bringing it up and—”
“What, Peck?”
He sighs. “Machlan doesn’t bring women up here. He comes in early and does some paperwork before the bar opens. He’ll nap up here if the bar is dead and he doesn’t need to be down there. He does all kinds of things, but never … that.”
My swallow is hard to pass. My tears are hard to blink back. I manage to do both.
“Thanks for telling me,” I say. The words scald my throat as I think of Machlan holding another woman or letting her hear his heartbeat in the dead of night.
My arms fold around my middle. Peck notices.
“If you want me to stay, I can stay,” he offers. “Or, despite my aversion to coffins, you can sleep at my place.”
“I’ll be fine. Thanks, buddy.” I give him a weak smile. “I won’t tell Mach you helped me.”
His brow furrows. “Nah, fuck it. Tell him.”
“That’s a quick change of heart.”
“Maybe it’ll be good to fire him up some. It’ll keep him off my ass for my tab.” He grins and closes the distance between us, pulling me into a hug. “I’m not asking for details because it’s safer not to know.” He chuckles as he lets me go. “But I feel like you have something going on, and I hope it works out for you.”
“Me too,” I whisper.
He heads for the door. “If you care, Mach is usually here by ten. Unless you want to deal with him, you might wanna be out of here by then.”
“Noted. And Peck?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks. I appreciate you.”
He winks. “Lock this behind me.” He waits on the other side until I slide the lock in place. It’s only then I hear his footsteps descend the stairs and his truck start and pull away.
The room seems to shrink with only me in it. I stand next to the table, a piece of furniture I know Machlan made in a high school woodworking class, and wait for a chill. An unsettled feeling. A gnawing sensation at the back of my mind.
Meandering through the small area, my lips part in a smile. It grows as I remember making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on the tiny counter space next to the microwave and gets wider when I remember the night Machlan broke up a fight in the bar. I spent a couple of hours up here tending to his bloodied knuckles and black eye.
My eyes grow heavy as they land on the futon. Yawning, I pull back the navy blue comforter and inspect the sheets. They’re crisp and clean. Slipping off my flip-flops, I flop on the mattress. The frame groans under the movement. I nestle in the pillows, yanking the blankets over my body. The entire bed smells like a mix of Machlan’s laundry soap and cologne, and I sigh as I float into a dream that I never want to wake from.
Seven
Machlan
You’d think I have a hangover.
My head hurts the way it does after the couple of times a year I kick back with my brothers and get a little heavy-handed with the Jim Beam. A sharp pain rips along the side of my head and shoots across my forehead, threatening to take my sanity right along with it.
What little there is left of it, anyway.
The bright, early morning light doesn’t help my cause. As I turn onto Beecher Street and
wave at Ruby as she heads to the library, I think my head might explode. The light almost blinds me as I grimace under my breath and pull onto the side street and then into the lot behind Crave.
I rub my temples in a futile attempt to lessen the ache between my eyes. Curiously, Beam headaches are generally less agonizing than this one. This is one I haven’t felt in a long time. This is a Hadley headache.
I have all the usual symptoms of this particular affliction. Piercing pain in my skull, extraordinarily high blood pressure, shortness of breath, a quickened pulse. Rock hard cock. Intense chest pains. Feeling of hopelessness and erratic behavior.
That’s what she does to me. She makes me a fucking lunatic.
Taking a deep breath, I try to focus on something other than her. The binder for my meeting with Spencer this afternoon lies on the passenger’s seat. I have no idea what I’m going to say to the guy to convince him to loan me the rest of the money for the building, and I should know that by now. I sat up with those damn papers all night, trying to come up with a plan. Instead, I just planned all the ways to interrogate Cross later about what Hadley might’ve said or done.
“Stop it.” I look at my reflection in the rearview mirror. “You’re a grown ass man who has business to take care of. Stop acting like a juvenile with a hard-on.”
My cheeks heat, partly from annoyance that this reminder needed to be said and partly because I’m embarrassed for the same reason. I tuck a phone number Lance gave me into the binder and look up.
My hand stills. I drop the binder.
The window to the apartment I use as a makeshift office slash crash pad is opened a sliver. I rack my brain, searching for the last time I opened it, and come up empty-handed. Peck helped me install a lock on the inside of the window, and it’s a bitch to undo.
My teeth grinding together, I step out of the car. Grabbing the bamboo rod I keep hidden against the dumpster, I make my way up the steps.
The clouds clear above me. The sun’s rays pelt my back, only adding to the sweat trickling down my spine as I anticipate what I’m about to find.
Nothing up there is worth a damn, but it’s the idea of being defiled, the inherent disrespect, that has me itching to teach someone a lesson. I almost feel sorry for the motherfucker who did this. He’ll be on the receiving end of a lot of pent-up aggression.
With my back against the wall, I make an effort not to give myself away with my heavy breathing as I lean to the side. Peering into the open slot at the bottom, I can only see a part of the kitchen area.
It looks like it always does.
Nothing’s out of place. No mess to indicate a break-in. Nothing but an open window.
My palm rests on the knob, and I attempt to rotate it, but it doesn’t budge. Locked tight.
“What the hell?” I whisper. Digging into my pockets, bamboo rod still in my right hand, I find the keys. They slip into the lock, and the door breaks free.
Sunlight trickles through the doorway, illuminating most of the apartment. Confusion replaces anger as I realize nothing’s been bothered.
I set the rod on the kitchen counter and walk slowly inside, leaving the door open. I walk around the table and next to the sofa. My eyes adjust to the differences in light as I peer toward the futon and desk. As they settle on the bump on the middle of the mattress, I stop.
Sucking in a breath, my chest burning, I think I must be seeing things. I can’t see the person’s face. All I can see is a little foot with a scar across the ankle and a wrist with a tiny tattoo of a wing on the inside. Although I haven’t seen the tattoo before and that bothers me, I know who is in my bed.
Every cell in my body lunges her way. The draw to her, the fight to not jump in bed and pull her up against me, knocks me off balance. I catch myself on the arm of the couch.
I glance around the room, back to the propped open window, and try to make sense of this. Before I can make heads or tails of this situation, she rustles against the sheets. I freeze. Don’t move a damn muscle. Just stand in place and stare at her like some kind of demented asshole.
The blankets are batted away. Her eyes struggle to open as I watch her.
“Oh, shit,” she whispers. Her voice is throaty and full of a sleepy grittiness. “What are you doing here?”
“Me?”
She sits up, grimacing. “You need a better mattress on this thing.”
I slow blink. Twice. “Am I missing something here?”
Her shoulders rise and fall as she fiddles with the hair knotted on the top of her head. It’s falling every which way from the thing she had it up in. Pieces are hanging all around her face and when she blows a lock dangling across her nose, I almost laugh.
“You apparently broke in my apartment, made yourself at home, and now you’re bitching about my mattress?”
“Accurate. You still didn’t tell me why you’re here.”
I throw my hands up and turn away from her. This attitude of hers is infuriating and not because I want to scream at her, but because I want to hold her down and kiss her until she stops talking.
“Peck said you didn’t … whoops,” she says. “Um …”
I whirl around. “Peck?” My brows lift to the ceiling. “Peck had something to do with this?”
“Yeahhh … Kind of?”
“That motherfucker said—”
“Just stop.” She tosses the blankets off her legs but doesn’t get off the bed. “You would’ve let me stay here if I needed a place to stay.”
“So?”
“So what’s it matter if Peck may or may not have helped me get in here last night?”
I take a step toward her but stop myself before I lose the fight with my body and end up on top of her before I realize it. “It matters because I explicitly told him to tell me if he knew …”
The look she gives me stops me from saying anything more.
“Well, I explicitly told him not to tell you,” she says.
It’s not the way her breasts fill out the tight little T-shirt she’s wearing or how the pants fit the curves of her hips that has me all worked up. It’s not even the way her lips form a little bud, still swollen from sleeping on her stomach like she always does.
It’s the fire in her eyes. The challenge she’s tossing my way. The fierce way she doesn’t give two shits about what I say or do. She’s going to do what she wants either way, and that pricks at something deep inside my soul that I’ve never been able to pinpoint. Or stop.
Damn her.
“You know what?” I say, narrowing my eyes. “It’s time we get something straight.”
“I agree.”
Much to my surprise, a reaction I try desperately to hide, she leaps off the bed. Tugging her shirt down over the top of her pants, she props a hand on her hip. Her eyes narrow, still puffy from sleep.
“You got something you want to say?” I ask.
“Oh. Are we going to pretend like you’re suddenly going to start listening to me?”
“I was going to, but you’re running out of time. Better talk quick.”
“You’re such an asshole, Machlan.”
I scratch my chin. “I know. That’s why I find it so interesting that you keep coming around.”
She rolls her eyes and goes back to trying to tame her gorgeous, wild hair again. “It’s a coincidence.”
I yank a chair away from the table and twirl it around. Sitting in it backward with arms draped over the back, I look at her. “There are no coincidences, sweetheart.”
The last word gets her. Her eyes light up. If I were closer, I’d guarantee you can see the jade flecks.
“Especially if you consider you walked into Crave knowing there was an excellent chance I’d be there since it’s my bar, then broke into my apartment.”
“You own the only bar in town, and I’ve stayed in this apartment more times than I can count—”
“What’s that have to do with anything?” I fire back.
Her chest rises and falls with the force
of her breathing. “The fact of the matter is that you weren’t supposed to be here.” Her arms cross over her chest, her nose tipped up in some hoity-toity gesture.
Fuck that.
I go out of my way to stay out of her life. I kill myself every morning and night when I walk by her robe that hangs on the hook on the back of my bathroom door. It’s the worst kind of torture to know I could drive to Vigo and see her and probably hold her if I tried hard enough.
But I don’t do that. I don’t do any of it. Even though I think about it every day, I let her live her life without me. That’s how it’s supposed to be. That’s the result of the choices we made, and I have to step aside. I might be an asshole, but I’m not evil.
My eyes narrow. “I don’t give a damn if I was supposed to be here or not. It’s my fucking apartment.”
“Fine. Get out of here and I’ll get my stuff together and go.”
“Oh no,” I say, standing. Grabbing the chair, I fling it behind me. “You always do this.”
“Do what?”
“You start running your mouth and distract me and make me forget what I was going to say. I have a point, and I haven’t made it yet.”
“Then you better make it.”
She grins a cocky, I-got-you kind of smile. If she only knew.
“I can’t with you,” I say, shaking my head.
Her grin fades. Her eyes drop too. “I think we’ve already established that.”
Our eyes lock together over the thirty-year-old carpet. The exchange says more than her lips ever could and, quite frankly, more than I could ever hear her say out loud.
The wind is knocked out of my lungs at the emotion in her eyes. “That’s not what I meant to say.”
“No. But I’m glad you did.” She shakes her head as if the motion will rid her of thoughts of me. “Anyway, back to the point at hand. Don’t even think about bringing this up to Peck.”
“I’ll do whatever the hell I want.” I grab a can of chew out of my back pocket and flip it between my fingers. The rhythm sets a mood I think we both find some comfort in.
“Peck was helping me last night,” she says over the sound of my thumb hitting the can. “Cross and Kallie were all kinds of loud, and I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I figured I’d be in and out before you even knew it.”
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