20. Harper
TWENTY
HARPER
I didn’t bother knocking when I left the living room. If Nash had a problem with me barging in, I guess he’d have to learn to lock his fucking door or something. Maybe hang a sock on the knob.
Since he was nowhere in sight, I settled on the edge of his bed, prepared to wait him out. The second I moved, though, I put a hand in a mess of semen and blood and shot up like I’d been stung.
"Fucking men." Some pretty creative swears left my lips as I stripped his bedding down, throwing it all in a heap in the corner to deal with later. A search of his closet and dresser produced no spare sheets, but there was no way he’d been living with one single set of sheets. How would he even do laundry?—
"Who let you in, bitch?"
Nash emerged from the only door I hadn’t checked, a towel slung low around his hips, another in his hands as he ruffled that shaggy mess of hair on his head. His eyes found the bed, void of any covering, and then spotted the red bag slung over my shoulder.
And then he sighed and turned around, hesitating in the doorway of what I realized now was a bathroom.
"Well, don’t just stand there. Bring it here."
The bedroom had been dark, but the bathroom was lit with an assortment of LED lights, giving it an almost ethereal glow. I didn’t mean to stop and gawk at the massive shower with a waterfall head or the amazing tilework that someone had painstakingly placed, probably by hand, along the backsplash of the long counter.
But there was no mistaking the assortment of skincare products on the counter for anyone’s but Angel’s.
"You share this bathroom with your brother?"
Nash peered into the mirror, picking at something on his face I couldn’t see from this angle. "Sorta, yeah. We drew straws, and I got stuck with that sanctimonious prick." His eyes met mine in the mirror, and I wished for the umpteenth time that I wasn’t so damn short so that I could see the rest of his face. "Let me guess—you wanna take your little first aid kit to my arm, right?"
I nodded, then realized he’d looked away. "Yeah, that was sorta the plan."
His hand patted the counter next to him and swept it sideways, throwing half of Angel’s bottles and jars on the floor. "Well, come on up, short shit. You can sit on the counter and poke at me until you’re content I’m not going to bleed to death."
When I moved to jump up on the counter, he grabbed my waist and hoisted me up, and I looked up into his eyes to thank him for the assistance?—
—and watched his face fall as my eyes widened in shock.
Nash withdrew on himself in the blink of an eye, his features turning to stone as I reached forward with my free hand and tried to make sense of what I was looking at.
Scars. Jagged, ugly, and violent scars ran from the edge of his lips on either side, almost to his fucking ears. It was like someone had decided he needed a permanent smile, like some sick recreation of the Joker. His head drew back as I stretched out to touch him, so I let my hand fall, afraid to push him too far.
"I forgot you haven’t seen me without my makeup on." His eyes cut to the mirror, hard and cold now. "It’s pretty gruesome, huh?" His hands balled into fists on the counter on either side of the sink. "Makes you fucking sick just looking at it."
My voice wavered as I fought back tears. I’d known they weren’t the same men as before, knew Nash was a little—well, off—but I hadn’t expected this.
"What happened?"
He refused to meet my eyes. His shoulders hunched, letting his damn ringlets of mahogany hair hang around his head like a curtain. It became his shield, something to hide behind, so he didn’t have to hide his weakness.
"Does it even matter?"
I put a hand atop his, slowly intruding on his space to show him compassion. There was no way to know it was the last thing he wanted from me.
"What do you even fucking care, Harper? Don’t act like it doesn’t turn your stomach to see this shit up close and personal." His fists lifted, throwing my hand off, and he slammed one into the mirror, shattering the glass into a thousand jagged wedges. His reflection was like a funhouse spectacle now, and a mocking grin split across his face, pulling at the scar tissue on his cheeks as I watched. "I’m a freak. A fucking monster. What person in their right mind would want to see this every day?"
I couldn’t deny the visual was jarring, but then again, I’d never cared about that stuff. Well, okay, I cared about it for awhile growing up. Image was everything to me before I was thrown off a bridge and had to rebuild my life without money. But Nash didn’t scare me. Far from it, actually.
I reached up and grabbed his ears like I used to do when we were younger, jerking his head around with a grunt at how strong he’d become. These boys really had grown up while I wasn’t looking. Now, they were men, all broken in their own ways, just like me.
I forced him nose to nose with me and waited until he met my gaze before I spoke. I needed him to see the truth in my eyes so he would believe it.
"Nashville fucking Blackwood, you stop that right now. Whatever happened here, these scars aren’t who you are. And anyone with half a lick of sense wouldn’t care about the outside. The real you is in here—" I shoved my finger pointedly into his chest, "—and these scars can’t change that."
He stopped fighting me, but I could see the conversation was over, so I released his ears and turned away first, reaching for the first aid kit instead. His eyes followed me, and he offered his arm wordlessly, back to looking anywhere but at me.
I could work with a broody and silent Nash. But what I refused to do was watch him treat himself like a monster to justify others’ reactions. I wouldn’t let him bury himself in self-hatred.
Nash had never been as vain as Angel about his looks, but he’d been a chick magnet nonetheless, with his pretty curls that danced around his head when he took off his football helmet, those eyes the color of warm earth, with the faint gold ring around the outside that reflected the sunlight when he tilted his head just right, and those long, nimble fingers he used to strum the strings of his guitar at bonfires. Back when he was a carefree, cocksure Nash, he’d never wanted for attention.
To see it all fall away after—well, after whatever happened to give him those scars—would wreck any man. Let alone one as high on life as Nashville Blackwood.
He didn’t wince when I washed his wound with alcohol. Didn’t flinch when I took out the sewing kit and put two stitches in the edges of his skin to seal the wound. He didn’t even roll his eyes when I covered it with gauze and patted it like a proud parent. But when I moved to slide off the counter, he stopped me, his hands caging me in on either side as he leaned in and forced me to look at him.
His gaze flickered from eye to eye, searching my gaze for something he couldn’t speak out loud. Whatever he found there must have satisfied him, and he shoved off the counter, offering his good arm as leverage as I hopped down and put solid ground beneath my feet again.
"You stripped my bed," he muttered as he cleaned up the broken glass on the counter, the towel sinking lower on his hips as he moved. "Why did you bother?"
I could hear a hint of the old Nash in there, slipping out around his hardened outer shell. It made me smile despite the amount of pain I felt at the way he saw himself, the way he hurt because of the ignorance and judgment of others. "Well, when a girl puts her hand in a pile of mingled bodily fluids, I’d say it’s time to do some laundry. I didn’t see a washer and dryer in the apartment, or whatever you guys call this place, so I assume there’s some facilities on site somewhere that you can use to clean it." I quirked a brow at him as his lips twitched in an involuntary smirk. "I assume you know how to use a washing machine by now. And I couldn’t find replacement sheets, so I couldn’t make the bed again."
"I don’t have any," he admitted, "but I’m sure Angel or Rowan do. You could ask them, if you want."
My grin widened despite myself. There he was, the Nash I remembered, trying to con me into doing his dirty work. "You can ask them yourself. I’m not your maid, Nashville Blackwood."
"Why do you call me that?" he asked, cocking his head with those brows of his scrunched up in the middle of his forehead. "Nobody else does."
"It’s your name, isn’t it?"
He shrugged. "More or less."
"Then I don’t see why I can’t call you that. Unless you don’t like it. Then I’ll only use it when you’re in trouble."
He rolled his eyes at me, sighing like it was a chore to put up with me. "Now you sound like my mother."
"She’s a smart woman. I could think of worse people to be like." I moved to walk away but stopped at the door to the bathroom, my hand on the doorframe as I tossed him a parting glance over one shoulder. "You know, you don’t have to hide who you are from me. I’ve seen a lot in the last seven years. I’m not the pampered little princess I used to be. People change."
His parting words cut me to the bone.
"Yeah, they do. But not always for the better."