Chapter 34
RIGGS
Smith had stayed at the bar for two rounds, then he kissed my temple and told me and Toren he was calling it a night.
When I moved to leave with him, he gently shoved me back down into the booth, a move so opposite the way I knew him, and part of the reason I stayed was because of how much it had caught me off-guard.
I ended up staying at the bar with Toren until closing.
He’d had too much to drink to drive back to his hotel, and I didn’t want him dealing with a rideshare at two-thirty in the morning, so he walked back to the shop with me and I made him a bed on the couch.
I left the lights on for him, knowing he was going to inspect my home before making the decision to settle in for the night.
Knowing he would look for bits and pieces of his brother, confident he would recognize them all.
I found Smith in the bedroom, propped up against the headboard with one hand bent behind his head, the other holding his phone.
The room was dark, save for the light from Ev’s bedside lamp and the bright flash of Smith’s phone screen.
He glanced up at me when I closed the door quietly behind me, setting his phone down on his leg.
“Hey.”
“Hi.” I shrugged out of my jacket and shed the rest of my clothes, crawling into bed wearing nothing more than my briefs.
Smith moved his phone out of the way and opened his arms to me, and I didn’t need to be asked twice to rest my cheek against his chest. His heart beat up against my ear, and he folded me up in his arms like they were designed to hold me.
“Judging by the fact Toren is on the couch, I assume the rest of the night went well?” he asked.
“It went well.” I kissed his chest, slid back a little and kissed his armpit.
Before Smith, kissing had never done much for me.
Sex hadn’t really done much for me. It still didn’t, but there was something I was learning to appreciate about the intimacy of kissing, and intimacy did mean something to me.
Smith being happy and secure in a relationship with me also meant something, and if the kisses cost me nothing… what was the harm in it?
“I’m glad.”
Smith didn’t say anything more, and neither did I.
He drew long lines down the slope of my back and over the swell of my arms, and I tried to relax and breathe into the feel of him.
There was no intent in his touch other than to offer me comfort, which I realized I’d been missing since Ev died.
I’d been so isolated in my grief, that even though I’d been moving forward in life, I was also at a standstill.
It wasn’t until I walked us both into that bathroom stall at Rapture that I’d put myself into drive, and even then I didn’t realize how far behind I’d fallen until I started moving.
“Do you miss him?” Smith asked quietly, fingers still drawing shapes across my skin.
“Every day.”
He made a pleased sound. “I want you to meet Marshall.”
“Just him?”
“Apart from the rest of them,” Smith said. “I…I am the way I am because of him, and I didn’t like that for a while. I tried to run away from it.”
“Hence the tattoo.”
He laughed softly. “Hence the tattoo, but it’s come to my attention recently that I’ve maybe been too hard on him and maybe been a little unfair to him.”
I turned slightly onto my stomach and propped my chin just above Smith’s nipple. He moved his hand off my back and tucked some hair that had fallen out of my braid behind my ear. I knocked my head into his hand, and he pushed me back, a small smile flashing across his face.
“I don’t think you could be unfair to anybody.”
“I love that you think that.”
“You’re too hard on yourself,” I said.
Smith sighed and dropped his head against the headboard. Shifting off of him, I situated myself with my shoulder beside his. We both moved to lean against the other, our heads bumping together.
“I learned it from him,” Smith said. “I wouldn’t have any of the things I have if it wasn’t for Marshall.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Maybe some.”
“Agree to disagree,” I told him.
“How do you see me so differently than I see myself?”
I was grateful we were looking at the wall and not each other. This didn’t feel like a conversation we could have face to face, but still was something that needed to be put into the open.
“Because I don’t know you from before you knew me,” I said. “All I know of you is that you’re handsome and you’re talented and you’re successful and you’re very brave.”
“I don’t feel brave,” he muttered. “Not in the way you are.”
I snorted, unable to restrain the sound in my throat. “How am I brave?”
“Your husband died.” Smith crossed his legs at the ankle and quickly uncrossed them again, then he rubbed his feet against the sheet like a cricket. “And you didn’t quit.”
“I did quit,” I said. “For a while. I wouldn’t have started again if it wasn’t for Damon.”
“He’s a good friend.”
“The best.”
I needed to text Damon and let him know about Toren.
He’d get a kick out of knowing we’d gotten drinks, and he’d be mad I didn’t invite him along, jealous of Smith for getting to share a round.
The two of them had always gotten along well enough, and with the change of events, it felt like two versions of my life were colliding into each other.
The life from before Smith and the life after. The life with Ev and the one without.
“I just got very stagnant for what felt like a very long time. And when I decided to open the shop and do all of this, it was more a distraction than anything else. If I was busy, that was the same as healing, right?”
“No.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I didn’t realize my life had stalled until I met you, and that’s how I know you’ve not been unfair to Marshall, that you’re a good and strong person on your own, separate from him. You got me living again, and it takes someone very special to do that.”
“You’ll make me cry,” Smith grumbled, rubbing at his eyelashes.
“Not bad tears, though?”
“No,” he agreed. “Not bad.” Smith cleared his throat. “Do you really mean all of that, though?”
“Have I ever lied to you?”
His tongue made a sound in his mouth, a little suction against the top of his mouth like he wasn’t sure it could make words anymore. “No,” he finally said.
“When do you want me to meet your brother?” I asked.
Smith reached for his phone, swiping through a long string of text messages before saying to me, “Tomorrow.”
I took the phone out of his hand and set it back down on the nightstand.
“Tomorrow,” I repeated.
“Is it too soon?”
“Not too soon. What did you have in mind?”
“Marshall suggested we could come over for lunch.”
I groaned, sliding down until my head hit the pillows.
It was already three in the morning, and lunch time wasn’t terribly far away.
The nature of my work as a tattooer meant I could make my own hours and those hours rarely had me up before ten in the morning, though that had changed the more often Smith spent the night since he had normal working hours.
“At one,” he added.
“Then we’ve got to get to sleep.”
Smith sat on the edge of the bed, then joined me under the sheets. He hooked a leg over my hip and pulled my back against his chest, kissing the nape of my neck.
“Is this okay?”
“It’s nice.” I swallowed hard, blinking back tears. “I love you.”
“I love you.” He tightened his arms around me. “I feel like you’ve given me my life back.”
“Funny,” I murmured, “I was just thinking the same thing.”
We fell asleep wrapped up like that and woke up the next morning, neither of us having moved an inch.
I turned in Smith’s arms, smiling at the sight of him blinking sleep out of his eyes and stretching out in my bed like a cat.
Gray morning light filtered in through the window, and there was something altogether tentative and new about the way Smith touched me beneath it.
Nothing between us had changed, but somehow everything felt different.
Stronger.
“Do you want coffee?” I asked, brushing my thumb across the tip of his nose.
“Very much.”
I untangled myself from Smith’s arms and climbed out of bed. I remembered to get a pair of pajamas from my dresser before heading into the living room. Toren sat on the edge of the couch, the blanket folded neatly beside him.
“Oh, good.” He slapped his thighs and stood. “You’re up.”
“Is it late?” I asked.
“After nine, but…I would have left. I’ve been up awhile, but I can’t lock the door after me and I didn’t want to leave your shop unlocked.”
“I hadn’t even thought about that.” I winced. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“Damon has been on me to do one of those electronic keypad things, but I’ve never gotten around to it. Let me get a shirt and I’ll walk you down.”
In the bedroom, I grabbed a plain white undershirt from the dresser and tugged it into place. Smith hadn’t moved from the bed except to get his phone.
“Okay?” he asked.
“Walking Toren out.” I grabbed Ev’s hoodie from the back of the chair, that must have been where Smith left it when he changed the night before, and suddenly the material felt like lead in my hands. “Do you…would you mind if I gave him this?”
Smith chewed his lip between his teeth and looked from the hoodie to my face and back to the hoodie again.
“I understand the hoodie has history to you,” he said carefully. “And you don’t owe that history to his brother unless it was something that should have been his from the start.”
There was truth in those words, for sure, but Toren’s reappearance had me unsettled, feeling like every memory I’d kept of Ev’s was somehow stolen.
I sank down on the edge of the bed and smoothed the well-worn garment over my lap.
Yeah, it had been Ev’s once, and then it had been mine, but now it felt like it belonged a little to Smith too.
And Toren had no part in that relationship.
“You’re right.” I set the hoodie on the bed between us. “I just…”
“You can find ways to share the memory,” he said. “If that’s even something the two of you want to dredge up.”
“You’re right.” I cleared my throat and stood up, pushing the hoodie a little closer to Smith. He took my meaning and pulled it onto his lap.
Slipping out of the bedroom, I found Toren by the front door, hands shoved into the back pockets of his jeans.
“Sorry about that,” I said.
He shrugged. “I know I’m interfering.”
“You’re not,” I said quickly, shaking my head. “You’re not, Tor. It was, it was really good to see you again. I’m sorry that I haven’t…that I didn’t.”
“It’s fine.” He moved quickly, flinging his arms around me and yanking me into a hug I’d spent almost four years missing.
I reminded myself it was him and not Ev, that this was the brother of my husband, not my husband himself.
The hug was over as quickly as it started, and Toren looked like he’d eaten ants when we broke apart.
He opened the door to my apartment and all but ran down the stairs. He’d definitely tried to make an escape earlier in the morning. I caught up with him, unlocking the door and leaning against the jamb with my arms crossed in front of my chest.
“Is your number still the same?” I asked.
“Always has been.”
“So is mine.”
Toren clenched his jaw and nodded, then pulled a set of keys out of his pocket. He didn’t say goodbye to me, and I didn’t say anything to him. After he left, I locked up the shop and went back upstairs.
“We’re alone,” I called out to Smith, kicking the door closed and heading into the kitchen to get some coffee brewing.
Smith shuffled out after me with his hair pointed in every direction except the right one.
He joined me in the kitchen, leaning against the counter with his arms folded in front of his chest, his now-healed tattoo on display.
I tapped my fingertip against the top of one of the buildings and cocked my head to the side.
“When do you want to get your second tattoo?”
He arched a brow. “I don’t even know what I would get.”
“Why did you want this?”
He looked down at the design I’d put into his skin and gave me a shrug that was far more casual than I knew the decision-making process for him had been.
“It was important to me.”
“The content or the act?”
Smith rolled his eyes and the coffee pot pinged an alarm to let me know it had finished.
It also gave Smith an out to sidestep me.
He skirted around me and grabbed two mugs from the cabinet, poured coffee for each of us, and passed one to me like this was a dance we’d been doing for years, not weeks.
“I think you know,” he said, mouth obscured by the rim of his coffee mug. “I think you know me better than I know myself at this point.”
“I doubt that.” I rested my ass against the counter opposite him, crossing my legs at the ankle. “But I’m happy to be the one to help you learn.”