I was exhausted. My jaw hurt, my tongue was sore, my muscles ached. I was ready for a nap.
“Do you have to leave?” she whispered from her curled position beneath her sheets. “You can stay for a little bit if you want.”
I snapped my belt into place and reached for my t-shirt. I tugged it on without looking at her because I knew that if I looked at her, I was going to crawl back into that bed with her and never leave.
“We have rules,” I mumbled, yanking my top on over my head. “We don’t stay the night.”
I didn’t see her face, but I heard her quiet, “Oh. I’ll walk you out.”
I hated it.
Hated myself.
How many times had I slipped out after a good time? How many times had I yanked up my pants and skipped home? This was no damn exception. I just had to get my shit together and remember this couldn’t last.
It couldn’t.
Chapter Six — Nero
The door slamming signaled Davien’s foul mood before the man even stalked into the cramped little foyer of our two-bedroom apartment. His shoes hit the wall next the door with a violence that had my eyebrows lifting. But neither of us said a word while he disappeared into the minute kitchen on the right of the door. I watched him yank open the fridge and haul out a beer that was cracked open before he kicked the fridge door shut with his socked foot.
He smelled of Mia. Her scent clung to him like fabric softener. It blossomed into the room, thickening until it was winding through every crack, sinking into every scrap of fabric. I knew it would be days before it would fully vanish. I knew because it had taken a day and a half after our night on the train. Despite our showers and change of clothes, she had lingered in the furniture, in the air … in my bed. I’d woken up the next morning and almost reached for her because that was how strong her presence was to me. It hadn’t even clued in that I had never spent a full night in bed with anyone, only that I smelled her and wanted to bury myself in it.
Smelling her on Dav as he guzzled down his drink made me ache for her, made me wish I could have been there, too, but Eduardo had needed me on a job. I couldn’t say no.
The gashes across my knuckles panged as if in reminder. The bag of ice I’d dumped over the broken skin was doing nothing, as far as I could tell, to soothe the injuries. Granted, it no longer felt like I’d punched a wall when I opened my fingers, but it still throbbed. The guy whose face I’d had to rearrange had one of the hardest skulls I’d beat into in a while. At least, I hadn’t ruined my clothes this time.
Blood was a pain to wash out.
Across the square of space, literally a single box containing a living room, a sliver of a kitchen and a block of a foyer, Dav belched as the last of his drink was sucked back. The can was crushed between his hands and pitched violently into the recycling bin.
“Rough day?” I ventured at last.
Brown eyes lifted and speared me. “No.”
My eyebrow lifted. “And yet...”
Dav exhaled. “It’s nothing. I just left Mia.”
I hummed quietly. “How is she?”
His answer was to dig into the front pocket of his jeans and unearth a bit of folded paper. It was dumped on the coffee table by my knee before he dropped into the armrest on my right.
“Her number,” he answered to my unasked question. “She gave it to me when I found her at work. She has ours, too.”
I studied the slip now lying alone and abandoned on a bare slab of wood, trying not to inhale too deeply. It was torture being that close to something as basic as someone’s scent and not physically have them there. I had a momentary lapse in judgment when my brain fantasized having her on the couch with me, long legs coiled around my waist as I drove into her. Dav could be there, or not. He could join in, or watch. It made no difference. It just mattered that her smell wasn’t there for no other reason than to drive me insane.
“How’d the job go?” Dav cut into my daydreaming.
I blinked and focused on the TV I’d muted when I’d heard him shove his key into the lock. It was some government conspiracy flick with guys I knew by face, but not by name. I had no idea what was actually going on.
“Fine,” I mumbled. “It got done.”
“Didn’t cooperate?” He nodded his chin in the direction of my hand.
I hazard lifting the bag and peering at my busted knuckles. Nothing was broken. I’d had enough broken knuckles to know for sure, but I definitely sprained or dislocated something. There was too much pain in my middle finger. Plus, the skin around the digit was a plum purple, unlike the jagged bits of skin that ran across the other three bumps.
I sighed and returned the bag. “Do they ever?”
“Do I need to take you to the hospital? That finger doesn’t look too good.”
I waved and grunted the offer aside. Hospitals asked too many questions, wanted too much information. We had people in our world who mended people like me in a pinch, doctors who took money on the side from the criminal sector of the city. I’d visited a few in the past, but I avoided them unless it was necessary. This wasn’t. I would be fine in a couple of days.
“How’s Mia?” I repeated, noting he hadn’t answered my question.
The chair creaked with the weight of his body falling back against the cushion. He dropped his arms on the rests and glowered at the screen.
“She’s fine,” he mumbled. “She’s home.”
“Something happen?” I pressed.
He started to shake his head but couldn’t seem to finish. His gaze remained fixed on the moving pictures as if they were responsible for all the pain in the world.
“Just a long day,” he grumbled at last.
I raised an eyebrow. “We lying to each other now?”
Dav closed his eyes and lowered his chin to his chest. “I’m not...” He trailed off with a sharp explosion of air. “Nothing’s wrong and nothing happened.” His fingers drummed on the armrests. “I was with her.” His chin lifted and he was locking gazes with me. “We didn’t fuck, but we messed around. It was fine. It was great, actually,” he corrected with another sigh, this one followed by the furious shoveling of his fingers back through his hair. “It was fucking unbelievable, okay? She’s … she’s fucking unreal.”
“Okay?” I pressed when he went silent, eyes glazed in whatever memory he’d found himself trapped in.
He swallowed audibly. “I got up to leave, like we do, and she asked me to stay.”
I waited for him to continue, but he’d gone silent again. His gaze stayed locked with mine with an insistence for me to understand what he was saying.
I didn’t.
I knew one of our rules was never to spend the night. It was a safety precaution to keep from getting attached, especially if we were sharing a girl because it complicated things when we had to walk away, which we always had to. Staying, cuddling, intimacy was dangerous, and we avoided them.
“She’s not the first girl to ask,” I pointed out. “You left.”
Dav hesitated. His attention went back to the TV while he rubbed absently at his jaw like it ached.
“I didn’t want to,” he murmured at last. Brown orbs rolled to the corners and fixed on me once more as if to gauge my reaction. “I didn’t want to leave.”