“Beer?” he asked, rather than saying more on the subject.
“Why not?”
He opened the fridge and stuck his head inside before he began pulling out sandwich fixings, setting them on the clean counter space, and then two beers. He opened one bottle and handed it to her while he took the other for himself. She watched him take a long swig, the muscles of his throat working to swallow the amber liquid.
“My dad, if you want to call him that, didn’t stick around. He loved my mother, but she didn’t want to leave the reservation, and he didn’t feel like he belonged there. Maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. They fought a lot, they loved a lot, but ultimately the fighting won. He left before I was even in school. My mother was devastated. My sisters weren’t really surprised.”
“How many sisters do you have?” Donna asked.
“Seven.”
“Oh, wow.” She couldn’t quite keep the shock out of her voice.
He spared her a grin. “Good women, every last one. Got me used to dealing with tears in general.” His broad hand tapped the spot on his chest where it was still a little damp.
She bet it would. She took her own drink and lingered near the small, two-person table tucked into the nearest corner. A copy of this morning’s paper was splayed over the surface. Her eyes lingered on the front page, which depicted a broken window and a headline talking about a local store being robbed overnight.
“I always wanted a huge family,” she said, her fingers trailing over the newsprint. “I thought having twenty sisters would make me feel better.”
“Better?” he asked, opening a package of lunch meat.
“I didn’t have many friends when I was a kid. Sure, there was Jerry, but he was a boy and it was really hard to talk to him about my ever-changing Backstreet Boy crushes.”
“I would have pegged you as an *NSYNC girl, myself.”
“God no,” she said, placing a flat palm over her heart. “I mean, the Boys were iconic through and through. *NSYNC just backed up Justin Timberlake.”
“Ouch, you really didn’t have a lot of female friends growing up, did you?”
“I didn’t have a lot of friends, period. There was Jerry, of course, and later there was… Rick.” Even saying his name made her feel cold. She crossed her arms and tried to ignore the memories it summoned.
He popped two pieces of bread into a toaster oven with some cheese. “Wow, I didn’t know you could turn a name into a curse word, but I am pretty sure you just managed it.”
“Well, there are some who deserve it.”
The toaster oven dinged, and he tugged the bread out. “Do you want to talk about it?”
The face of a sinfully attractive guy in a leather vest making promises as he backed her against a bike filled her memory. The feel of rich hands on her hips and the way her lipstick had looked on his mouth. More images of screaming in the middle of a cool winter night and him riding away on that very same bike.
“That’s a pretty firm no.”
“All right. Are you a mayo or Miracle Whip girl?”
“If it’s turkey I’ll have the Whip, otherwise mayo.” She meandered away from the table and back to the bookshelves. There wasn’t any dust on the book covers. That surprised her. She’d seen plenty of libraries. They usually belonged to the wealthy and the distinguished, filled with old books with older sentiments wrapped in gilded leather. Most of them were decorated with dust, proof that the owners wanted them just to have them, not to love them. It made her smile to see that he didn’t just have the books, he cared for them.
“Why did you leave?” she finally asked.
“Have you ever been on a reservation?”
“No,” she admitted, wondering why she felt guilty about that. “I can’t say that I have.”
“I won’t say it’s all bad. It’s not. There are some really great things about living there. You never really know the meaning of community until you see someone go through a tragedy on a reservation. When my dad left, we had the whole tribe coming around and offering any kind of help or comfort they could. If I was ever hungry, I could just wander over to a friend’s house and food would happen. If I needed some supplies for school and my mother couldn’t cover it, someone else just happened to have bought extra. That kind of thing. You feel like you are part of something.”
“But here you are.”
“Here I am, living alone and breaking the law.” He plopped the sandwiches together and brought a plate with a couple of single-serving bags of store-brand potato chips out to the living room.
She followed and settled herself on the couch next to him as he placed the plate between them. It was the second time that she’d be sharing sandwiches and chips with him, she realized. This felt more intimate than their time together at the Deli, bickering about whether or not he should have gone off with a model.
Cody took a bite of his sandwich before continuing. “Like I said, it was good to feel family, community, and being surrounded by people who looked like me. But there is some shit too, not the least of which is poverty.”
She thought back to the many years living in white-trash central. Her family rode the poverty line fairly hard. She could remember weeks at a time when dinner was hot dogs out of a forty-pack and the cheap quick-cook macaroni and cheese. “How bad?”
He didn’t quite meet her eyes when he said, “Bad enough. There aren’t a lot of what you might call career opportunities on the reservation. You pretty much have two choices: stay there and get drunk as often as possible, or get out.”
She picked up her sandwich but suddenly didn’t much feel like eating. “You got out?”
“I did,” he admitted.
“Just grabbed a bike and left?”
He laughed and laid his head on the back of the couch, staring up at the ceiling like he was remembering something. “Well, that came later. First came four years at NSU.”
She blinked, wondering if she heard him right. “You went to college?”
He took another healthy bite of his sandwich and chewed thoughtfully. “I did. I studied education and history.”
“That sounds a lot like you wanted to be a teacher.” She looked at him now, really looked. Could she see him standing in front of a classroom full of kids talking about the world that history books showed? There was a distinct possibility. He had a good voice, a good sense of presence, and if big bad biker guys and police officers didn’t intimidate him, certainly a group of kids wouldn’t.
He took a long drink. The sunlight caught the bubbles that swam through the beer, making them look like tiny pearls caught in amber. “Some of the few good people I remember on the reservation were the teachers. They tried really hard to be good people. They were some of the few role models we had, and I guess it made an impression. It doesn’t matter, I didn’t make the cut anyway.”
It was his turn to take a daily phrase and make it sounds like a curse. She found herself reaching out to touch his shoulder. “What happened?”
He put his hand on top of hers, giving the fingers a light squeeze that she interpreted as gratitude. “Discrimination doesn’t really stop after high school. I made the mistake of adding in a little too much off-the-books history while trying to get my training hours together.”
“Off-the-books history?”
“Some of the things I was taught growing up.” He finished off the last of his sandwich and chased it with beer. He shook his head and let out a breath that could almost be called a sigh. “Weirdly enough, most parents don’t want their kids coming home crying about the other side of Thanksgiving and other aspects of colonization most prefer to be glossed over.”
She winced and rubbed her thumb across his shoulder. “I’m really sorry.”
He shrugged and sat forward just enough that her hand slid free from his shoulder. “It’s partly my fault. I was asked to apologize, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I didn’t want to. I didn’t think I should.”
“You got proud.” Sh
e didn’t mean for it to come out as an insult, but it did.
He eyed her. “You might know a thing or two about the difficulty of eating a share of crow.”
She laughed and began to eat a sandwich that went down a lot better than swallowing her pride. “Mmm. Good sandwich. Well done. Did we ever get around to talking about why you have a metric ton of books?”
“Nice segue, very smooth.”
“I try.” She fastidiously wiped a few crumbs from her fingers and set the plate aside.
He patted her leg and nodded. “I’ll let you have this one as you are clearly having a crappy day.”
“I appreciate it.”
He lifted an arm in an invitation for casual snuggles.
She eyed him dubiously. “I’m not really here to get cozy.”
“Maybe you aren’t,” he said, wrapping his arm around her and tugging her close. “But you haven’t finished the food I made you, and you pretty much broke down outside. So, I’m going to say that you need some coziness. I promise, I won’t get handsy with you… and I’ll tell you all about my amazing book collection.”
She raised an eyebrow. “It is a very good sandwich.”
“You keep complimenting my food and I’m going to think you like me or something.”
She slumped her body against his. He smelled nice, like spice and cinnamon and man. Donna wasn’t sure if she hated how easy it was to curl up with him on that old couch in the middle of nowhere, or if she was comforted by it. It was probably a little of both.
“Tell me about the books.”
“Like I said, we were poor. No television, and Wi-Fi wasn’t a big thing. But there was a little bookstore, new and used, just on the edge of the reservation. One day a month you could get four used books for two dollars. I could usually cobble that together. It started with those novels where the kids get to change into animals and just kinda went from there.”
“That’s pretty adorable.”
“I was an adorable kid. Do you read?”
“I’ve been known to flip through some pages. Not as many as you. But as I said before, I didn’t have a whole hell of a lot of friends.”
He squeezed her close, and it felt good. It was so easy to get lost in him—too easy. That had been half the problem this morning. He had been there, and she’d nearly fallen asleep with his body tucked up against hers. It was too much far too soon.
“So why the cooking?” she asked. He tensed, and she was close enough that she could feel it. “If you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine.”
“How about we go back and forth. You tell me something about you, and I’ll answer your question.”
“You wanna go all quid pro quo on this?” She lifted herself off his shoulder just enough to see his face. His eyes, so damnably blue against all the gold-brushed terra cotta of his skin, peered down at her. She felt a spike of lust run itself through her body with enough force that it nearly hurt.
“Yeah,” he said, unblinking and direct. “I do.”
She took a very long drink of beer before sitting up all the way, putting enough distance between her and Cody that she didn’t feel her skin humming. “All right, what do you want to know?”
“Tell me one hobby of yours.”
“Hobby? People have those still?”
“Are you trying to dance around my question?”
She sighed softly. “Okay, okay. Yes, I have hobbies. I don’t usually have much time to enjoy them, but from time to time I do have fun.”
“Beauty salon stops don’t count.”
“Fat lot you know,” she snipped. “There is something very soothing about having your hair and nails professionally done. But those were not the vices to which I was referring. I, as you know, enjoy vegging out with horror movies and playing cards with my little brother. I also enjoy a nice cozy mystery novel when I have a few hours to spare, and a good long drive.”
“A drive?”
She motioned in the general direction of her car. “What, did you think the car was just a prop? There is a reason I spent half my income one year on that beauty.”
“All right, so you like horror movies and fast cars, and you wanted a big family.”
She nodded, finishing off her sandwich and waving the now empty plate at him. “That’s me. So, what about you? Why the MasterChef routine?”
He reached up and ran his fingers through his hair. His muscles made a tantalizing play of the simple act. “My mother has… issues. The kind she needs medication for. She doesn’t like taking it, and when she doesn’t… well. Shit happens. She locks herself up in the bedroom or the bathroom for a couple of days and cries about everything. My sisters and I would split up all the chores when it happened. I ended up with kitchen duty.”
“I’m sorry about your mom.” She meant it. Having a dramatic mother who couldn’t handle anyone else getting attention was one thing. Donna could only assume that having a mom with a legitimate debilitation was something entirely different.
He nodded. “It happens. She lives with my sister Roberta and her husband now. Roberta is a nurse and makes sure she gets the care she needs.”
“That’s good.”
“It is.” He stood up suddenly. “So, tell me something, Ms. Mason… why are you here?”
“What?”
“This morning you made it pretty clear that you didn’t want me around, at least not personally. Yet there you were, not eight hours later, crying in my arms. So, what’s up?”
She perched her arm on the back on his couch and palmed her cheek. “God, I nearly forgot why I came here. It was Kyle.”
His brows drew together. “Kyle? What happened with him?”
Donna opened her mouth to tell him, but the words wouldn’t come to her mouth. This was the moment she had been waiting for. This was the very thing that had her driving over here at the speed of fury. So why didn’t she want to say it? Kyle’s blackmailing antics was something that he needed to know, deserved to know, but the words got caught somewhere between her brain and her mouth.
“He’s… fine,” she lied. She didn’t want to tell him and she wasn’t entirely sure why. Would he be angry about the pictures? Would he laugh about it? Would it put some kind of rift between Cody and Kyle? Didn’t she want there to be a rift? No, she decided, she didn’t. She didn’t like the idea of Cody being mad at Kyle. It didn’t matter. He had the right to know what was going on, didn’t he?
“At least he’s physically fine,” she finally went on. “I just think that we may need to be a little more involved. He wants to go to this concert and—”
Her phone rang, the loud blast of classical music wafting up from her pocket and signaling an unknown number. She frowned and fumbled for her phone. It was a local number. She knitted her brows and swept her finger to answer the call.
“Hello?”
“Is this Donna Mason?” The voice on the other end of the line was mature, professional, and feminine.
“Yes,” she answered, “who is this?”
“I’m sorry to bother you. My name is Penelope Ramirez. I’m the principal at Carson High School. According to our files, you are currently Kyle Mason’s custodian?”
Donna felt her heart racing in her chest. A million possibilities ran through her mind. Was Kyle hurt? Had something happened at school? “Yes. That’s me. I mean, I’m his sister, but I’m looking after him. Has something happened?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. Kyle never came in to school today.”
Donna barely took part in the rest of the conversation. Yes, she knew that part of the agreement for bail was that he attend school. Yes, she knew that she could be held accountable for this lapse in attendance. No, this would not be happening again. For a moment, everything she had been feeling before walking inside threatened to overwhelm her again.
She felt a warm hand on her shoulder. She glanced up and found Cody looking at her. She wasn’t sure what she expected to find in that look, but she found surprising support. His mouth w
as set in a confident line, and his fingers squeezed ever so lightly, as if to remind her that she wasn’t dealing with this alone. Donna found a small amount of tension ease out of her shoulders.
“Ma’am.” Donna tried her best to sound as calm and professional as the flurry of emotions currently running through her body would allow. “Recently Kyle has been talking about a girl named Becky. I am not sure if…”
“Rebecca Pierce,” the principal answered when Donna trailed off. “I am aware of their relationship.”
“You wouldn’t be able to tell me if she was in school today, would you?”
“Not without written permission of a parent or guardian, no. Otherwise I can only talk to you about Kyle.”
BARE SKIN: A Dark Bad Boy Romance Page 41