Chapter 32
RIGGS
Saturdays at the shop had always been busy, and that hadn’t changed after hiring Merrick and Holden.
More people in the shop meant more noise, but it also meant more money, and I couldn’t be mad at that.
But it was the bustle of bodies and conversation surrounding me that threw me off the bells on the door jingling, announcing someone’s arrival.
It was just after dinner time, and I was in the middle of a decent-sized piece on someone’s thigh.
The other guys were both buried too, so it wasn’t an appointment.
I’d been expecting—or hoping—Smith would come by, but last I heard, he ‘was holed up with one of his brothers.
“Hey, man,” I greeted, without really looking up. “No time for walk-ins today, but if you want to leave your info, we’ll give you a call.”
“Will you?”
The voice was almost familiar, but more like a memory than anything else.
My spine straightened, and I set my machine down without looking away from the tattoo. I sprayed a towel, wiped the ink away, then snapped off my gloves and tossed the towel into the trash.
“Gimme a minute,” I said to Greg, my client.
“Sure thing.”
He was on his phone, anyway, not paying attention. Even if he had been, he wouldn’t have known that when I reached the counter of the shop, I was about to come face to face with a ghost.
“Hey, Toren,” I said, still not brave enough to look up.
“Come on, Riggs.”
Clearing my throat, I raised my chin and met the eyes of my dead husband’s twin brother.
Fraternal, thankfully, but sometimes I felt like that had been a fluke.
The two of them had always been extremely similar in not just appearance but also personality.
Seeing Evander and Toren Ember together was like seeing both sides of a mirror right in front of you come to life.
Surprisingly, Toren didn’t look the same as I remembered him, and I frowned, wondering if it was because I’d started to misremember how Ev looked or if it was because he’d changed after Ev died.
“Don’t look so miserable to see me,” he said.
“It’s just been awhile.”
Toren stared at me.
“By design,” I admitted.
He made an amused sound and shoved his dark hair back from his face. “Yeah, my parents can’t look at me anymore either.” He cleared his throat. “Our parents.”
“It’s not that.”
“Of course it is.” Toren followed the bitter answer up with a cruel laugh. “But it’s just something I have to live with now.”
I scratched the back of my neck, studying Toren Ember for the first time in years.
There were still pieces of Ev in his face, but he had put on some muscle and lost some baby fat.
I wondered, for the first time in a very long time, what Ev would look like now.
If he were still alive. If you knew, then there’d be no Smith, my brain helpfully supplied, and there was no fighting the grimace that flashed across my face.
“Exactly,” Toren agreed, even though he didn’t know what he was agreeing to.
“What brings you up this way?” I asked, letting my arm fall limp at my side.
“Was just in the area,” he said, looking past me to the shop. His inquisitive stare traced over every person, every piece of furniture, every piece of art on the wall. “Figured stopping by was the brotherly thing to do.”
“Toren.” I sighed, and the door to the shop opened, the bells breaking my thought in two. “I should have come around more. After.”
It would have been the brotherly thing, and he hadn’t been wrong with what he’d said about their parents.
Looking at Toren after Ev died was like looking at Ev.
It was too much for me to handle on most days, and I had no idea how their parents could look at one and not see the other.
It was the threat of loss that drove me away from ever wanting to have children of my own.
The risk was too great, and I wasn’t that brave.
Movement flashed in the corner of my vision, and I registered it half a second too late.
Smith slipped under the counter, already comfortable at the shop, which I loved.
He had my hoodie on still, which I also loved.
But when Smith saw me with Toren, he assumed I was speaking with a client and not a ghost from my past. He dragged his fingers across the small of my back as he passed me and whispered, “I’ll see you when you have time. ”
I reached behind me and grabbed him before he could go, not sure I wanted to introduce him to Toren, but also not confident I was able to finish the conversation on my own. I wanted Smith with me always, but especially then, when I needed support.
Shit.
I really had fallen in love with him.
“Well,” Toren said, sucking his tongue across the front of his teeth. His stare dipped and lingered on the hoodie that was almost too small for me and far too big for Smith. “I see.”
“Toren,” I said calmly, “this is Smith. Smith, this is Toren.”
Smith readily picked up on my discomfort, standing close enough to me I could feel the tension coming off of him. But he’d been raised well, and even though I could tell he didn’t want to, he extended his hand—and a greeting.
“Nice to meet you,” he said.
When Toren didn’t return his handshake, Smith tucked his hand into the pocket of the hoodie and feigned a polite smile.
“It seems like you two have some catching up to do,” he murmured.
Smith’s tone wasn’t quite icy, but it was guarded, and I didn’t blame him.
So was I.
“Is this your new boyfriend?” Toren asked.
“Yeah. Yes.”
It was an unfair question because Smith wasn’t new. Well, he was. But the question made it sound like he was the current in a long line of men who’d come after Ev, where in reality he was the first and most likely the last.
“Must be a weak replacement if you’ve got to dress him in Evander’s clothes,” Toren said.
“Shut the fuck up,” I warned, using my shoulder to tuck Smith behind me. It wasn’t like the conversation was going to get physical, but if I could use my body to protect him from Toren’s unfair and misdirected vitriol, I would.
“What?” Smith said, and then realization dawned. “Oh.”
He pressed his fingers against my back, his forehead against my spine, and then he literally held me up for the rest of the conversation with my dead husband’s brother.
“I can’t believe you’ve moved on already.”
“It’s been years, Toren,” I reminded him. “Almost four.”
“That’s nothing.”
“I know. I know, but also…” I trailed off, because it had been a lifetime and a blink of an eye at the same time.
Before Smith, it was easy to close my eyes and hear Ev laughing from another room, to feel the air move as he sat beside me on the couch to rest his head in my lap.
Now when I did the same things, it was a crapshoot on whether my brain would imagine Ev there or Smith.
What was easily decided was the one I wanted it to be, and moving on sometimes felt like a betrayal, but most of the time it felt necessary.
“How have you been, Toren?” I asked, scrubbing a hand down my face. “How have you really been? How are your parents?”
“They’re the same as you,” he answered bitterly. “Back to business as usual. It’s like…it’s like I’m the only one who’s lost something.”
“You know that’s not true.”
Toren was the one who’d stayed with me at the funeral home. He was the one who’d held me while I cried out every tear my body had ever and would ever make again. If anyone understood how much I’d lost when Ev died, it was the man standing in front of me looking like he was ready to go to war.
“Either way,” he muttered. “I can see I’m not welcome here.”
“Hey now.” I tapped my hand against the edge of the counter, and Toren stopped himself from turning away. “You’re always welcome here.”
I paused, then added, “As long as you can be fair.”
Smith exhaled a long breath against my spine, and he and Toren both understood my meaning.
“Right.”
“I’m going to go change,” Smith said quietly, flexing his fingers against my waist. “Okay?”
I nodded, turning my head as he moved so I could kiss him.
If Toren was going to start coming around again, if he truly wanted to be part of my life, he would have to get used to seeing me with Smith. He didn’t make a sound when I kissed my boyfriend. In fact, he didn’t even take his eyes off my fingers, still stretched across the counter.
Smith gave me a questioning look, and I smiled at him, brushing another kiss across the corner of his mouth.
“I’m good,” I promised him.
He offered Toren a quick nod, then headed for the stairs, leaving us alone again. The noise in the shop drifted back into my awareness, and I realized I’d all but forgotten Greg in the chair with his half-finished tattoo.
“I want to catch up,” I said, “but I need to finish up this tattoo.”
Toren glanced over my shoulder at Greg. “How long?”
“Shouldn’t be more than an hour.”
“I’ll go fuck off for an hour then?” he said, and it was almost a question, a tentative upturn at the end of the sentence like he didn’t quite believe it was the right thing to do.
“Yeah.”
Toren left without another word, and I let out a breath I’d been holding so long my lungs ached at the release of it.
Of all the people I’d imagined would walk into my shop at the end of the day on a Saturday, Toren Ember had not been one of them. I went back to my seat and put on a clean pair of gloves.
“You ready to finish this up?” I asked.
Greg looked down at the stained-glass arches and raised a dubious eyebrow. “Less than an hour?”
“Just color and then some white,” I said.
“Yeah. Let’s do it.”
I’d just laid in the yellow when Smith reappeared from the top of the stairs. He’d stripped out of my hoodie but hadn’t changed any other item of clothing and I wondered if he’d just been in the apartment wearing a trail in the floor the whole time.
“He left,” I said, and that was enough to send Smith down the final few stairs and into the shop. “He’s coming back, though.”
“I figured.” He pulled up a stool and sat a ways away from me and Greg, but close enough it was easy to hear him when he spoke. “Did you know he was coming?”
“Not a clue.”
“He must not have a good first impression of me,” Smith said with a frown.
I wiped the ink of Greg’s leg and figured out what parts of the stained glass design needed a burst of white highlight before rinsing the needles and picking up fresh ink.
“What about your first impression of him?”
Smith made a thoughtful noise, like the idea of having his own opinions hadn’t even crossed his mind. He was so much the youngest brother sometimes, and it made me want to take him upstairs at the end of the night and make him ask for everything he wanted, lest he get nothing.
“I’m sure it’s hard,” Smith said carefully. “Losing a brother.”
“A twin.”
“A twin?” His eyes went wide. “That would be like Hunter and Finn, and…I don’t think either of them would ever be the same if that happened.”
Smith scratched just below his sternum, mouth pulled down into a very unhappy frown.
“It’s obviously not cut and dried,” I said.
Greg winced as I laid in some white, whining, “Why is this the most painful color?”
“It’s not,” I assured him. “You’re just weak.”
He flipped me off with his eyes closed, covering them with his forearm for good measure. Smith sat quiet, lost in thought while I finished the tattoo. I got Greg bandaged and myself paid, then sent him on his way and returned to clean up my station.
“Toren should be back any minute,” I said.
That seemed to shake Smith out of his head. “Do you want me to go?”
“Not at all,” I answered quickly. “If he wants to be in my life again, he’s more than welcome, but I’m not going to hide things to make it easier for him. You can’t put yourself into a box for somebody else to carry. That’s not how life works.”
Smith hummed and pulled out his phone, typing out what looked like a quick email or text.
“Everything good?” I asked.
“Yeah, I just think that’s some advice Finn probably needed to hear.”
“Jesus, I’m the worst.” I took my hair out and redid the bun, doing what I could to get myself in order. “I didn’t even ask how your day was.”
Smith slid his phone back into his pocket and stood up, wrapping his arms around my waist and pressing a kiss against my chest.
“It was good. He’s got some stuff going on, but when doesn’t he?”
I laughed as the bells on the door jingled announcing Toren’s return.
“We’ll get through it,” Smith said next, and I didn’t know if he was talking about us or his brothers, but either way, I chose to believe him.