Chapter 46 - Dove #2
“No! Where were you? What happened? Why did you leave me alone for that long?”
He stands abruptly, the chair scraping against the floor. He paces with his hands locked on top of his head, turning, pacing, and turning again. His shirt rides up with the movement, exposing a strip of his stomach—hard muscle, familiar grooves, and—
A barely-healed, scary-big wound under his rib cage.
My heart stumbles.
“What is that?” I grab his shirt before he can yank it down. “Jag! What is that?”
He reaches for my wrist, but not fast enough. I shove the shirt higher, revealing the full injury, pink and new, the width of a thumb. A wound that can only come from a blade sinking in deep.
“Someone stabbed you,” I whisper.
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.” My fingers hover near it, afraid to touch. “This is bad. This should’ve killed you.”
He doesn’t deny it. He doesn’t say anything at all. He just lets me hold his shirt in my trembling hands.
The silence between us is too loud, the distance too far. He’s hiding things from me.
The story about the man following me, the jobs he’s doing, the danger we’re in… That’s not all of it. Not even part of it.
“A couple of months ago, a soldier took me out for beers.” I watch his face carefully, the hard set of his jaw. “He was stabbed in a bar fight later that night.”
“Don’t know anything about that.”
“Yeah, you do.” I trail my fingers over the puckered skin. “Did he do this?”
“Fuck, no. He didn’t even get a hit in.”
“So you did kill him.”
“You’re fifteen-fucking-years old!” He bares his teeth, eyes wild. “And he was—”
“Twenty-two. A year younger than you.” I return my attention to his wound, examining the raw skin.
It’s only a few weeks old. Maybe a month. Too fresh to be related to the soldier.
A month…
This is why he vanished. Why he left me to fend for myself. Why the streets felt wrong and empty in a way they never have before.
“You were hurt.” I grip his scruffy face, holding it in my hands. “That’s where you’ve been. You weren’t working some job or hiding from the cops or whatever story you were going to feed me. You were dying somewhere.”
His eyes flick away. “Cracker patched me up.”
“Cracker?”
“The paranoid drug dealer who aimed the six-shooter out the door. This is his house.”
“You live in a drug dealer’s house.” I lower my hands.
“As if you didn’t notice.” He sighs. “I handle Cracker’s security, and he buys me all this.” He gestures at the room full of expensive tech.
“Are you using drugs?”
“No.” His head snaps up, eyes burning. “I’ve never touched that shit. Not once. Not even when Cracker tried to shove pills down my throat after I got stabbed.”
The image guts me. Jag bleeding out and some crackhead forcing opioids into his mouth. I should’ve been with him, taking care of him.
“You’ve been here all month? In this room? Recovering?”
“Yeah.”
“And you didn’t tell me? I would’ve helped you. Instead, you let me think you left.”
“I didn’t leave you, Dove. I watched you.” He gestures toward the monitors. “Every day. Every night. Always with you.”
Of course, he was. He doesn’t crawl through my windows anymore. He crawls through every camera I pass.
I miss the windows.
“What happened?” I point to his wound.
“I lived.” He sits on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, hands loosely hanging between them.
That’s it. No details. No who. No why. No explanation for the blade that almost killed him or the enemies that want us both dead.
I wait for more, but he won’t give it.
Not tonight.
Maybe not ever.
He exhales heavily, and the fight drains out of both of us at the same time.
The monitors dim to a blue glow, and the house outside this room sinks into muffled TV noise, clinking pipes, and someone laughing.
“Get some sleep.” Jag stands and pulls the blankets back.
“I’m not tired.”
“Hungry?”
“I ate at work.”
He pulls clean clothes from a crate in the corner, gives me something to wear, and gestures for me to turn around.
With our backs to each other, we change into our sleepwear. I pull on a shirt and flannel pants he grew out of, and I turn to find him wearing gray sweats and a white tank.
I climb into the bed, and the mattress dips as he joins me.
“Tell me about the shop.” He drags the blanket over us.
“You literally watch it through like six angles.”
“I want to hear it from you.”
So I talk. I tell him about the busted transmission I rebuilt after school, the oil spill I slipped on, the new guy who thinks he’s charming, but I would never date him because he likes country music.
Jag listens, really listens, even though he already saw and heard it all through his cameras.
“What about school?” he asks.
“Hate it.”
“You need it.”
“You needed it, too.”
“Still do. But I’d probably scare the teachers.”
That pulls a smile out of me. I roll onto my side, facing him.
His hair sticks up in every direction. He looks exhausted.
“And your foster place?” he murmurs.
“Awful.”
“It’s a house full of women.”
“Exactly.”
“What’d they do?”
“Nothing. And everything. You know how it is.”
“I know.”
A hush settles over us. He lies back, opens an arm without asking, and I slide into the warm circle. My head finds the same spot on his chest it always has, just below his collarbone, near the rhythm of my favorite sound.
And just like that, we’re in our cardboard fort again. Our bed made out of trash. Our alley corner behind the bakery. Every place we hid in together, every night he kept watch while I slept.
“You scared me,” I whisper.
“You scare me every second of every day.” He presses his chin to the top of my head.
“How?”
“By existing outside of these.” He flexes the band of his arms around me.
“You’re not funny.”
“Didn’t say I was.”
I jab a finger in his ribs, nowhere near the wound, but he hisses like a kicked cat.
“Sorry.” I bite my lip.
“No, you’re not.”
I’m not. But he’s smiling now, the small, rare one that dimples the corner of his mouth.
The quiet stretches, warm and heavy, humming with the heartbeat under my cheek.
“I can’t remember them.” I trace a fingertip along the neckline of his tank. “Our parents.”
His body stiffens.
“I try.” I take a breath. “I really do. But it’s just… Blurry shapes. Maybe a smell. Maybe not even that. Tell me about them. Just something.”
“It’s late, Dove.”
“You never talk about them.”
He goes quiet again, and for a second, I think he’ll get up and escape into his computers.
Instead, he shifts onto his back, eyes on the ceiling. “Mom cooked, and Dad helped her sometimes. They liked to dance together in the kitchen. That’s all.”
“That’s not all.”
“It’s enough.”
“No, it’s not.” I lift my head. “I don’t remember what they sounded like or what they looked like or if they laughed or how they—”
“Let it go.”
“You remember more than I do.”
“It doesn’t matter what I remember.” He rubs a hand over his face, frustrated.
“It matters to me.”
“They’re gone, and we survived. That’s what matters.”
“But I want to know them.”
“You knew enough.” He flicks a strand of my hair off my forehead. “You knew they existed. Some kids don’t even get that.”
It’s not the answer I need. But I can tell by the roughness in his voice that talking about them hurts him.
He doesn’t talk about the past.
He barely talks about the present.
“Come here.” His hand settles on the back of my head, fingers threading through my hair as he guides my cheek back to his chest. “You’re okay now.”
“You’re the one who got stabbed.”
“And you’re the one who tackled a grown man with a knife.”
“So?”
“I’m proud of you.” His arm tightens around me, and his heartbeat evens out beneath my ear.
“I missed you so much.”
“Missed you more.” His chest rises slow and falls slower. Then, barely above a whisper, “I love you.”
“Promise?”
“I swear it.” Eyes half-closed, lashes heavy with exhaustion, he lifts his hand, pinky extended.
It’s automatic, this old little ritual fused in the joints of our finger bones. I hook my pinky around his and bring our twisted fingers to my lips. He’s so tired, lids drifting shut, but he still does it. He leans forward the inch it takes and kisses our intertwined pinkies, cementing the promise.
Then he settles into the pillow, breathing slow and deep, and dozes off.
Even in sleep, he never fully relaxes. The arm around my waist, rigid as steel, keeps me locked against him. The leg he shoved between my thighs would take an act of God to move, not that I’d try.
I crane my neck and watch him in the glow of the computer screens.
His face.
His mouth.
The faint scruff on his jaw.
God, he’s beautiful. Not pretty or delicate. Beautiful like a mythological warrior, built out of scars and near-death battles and muscles that aren’t earned in gyms but in fights no one else survived.
The guys I’ve been with are all noise and hands and rushed moments in dark corners. None of them touch me the way Jag does just by existing. None of them makes me ache the way Jag does when he’s asleep and defenseless beside me.
I shouldn’t be thinking about this. But I always do.
His body presses against mine, hot, solid, and unmistakably male. His heat seeps into me, sliding under my skin. I can’t help it. My fingers lift, hover, and settle on the hard flesh of his abdomen where his shirt rides up.
He’s hard everywhere, made for running, climbing, fighting, and surviving. I trace lightly, brushing over the contour of muscle and the dips between them.
He makes a sound in his sleep, a rumble dragged from deep in his chest. His arm tightens around my waist, anchoring me to him, but he doesn’t wake.
Encouraged, I let my fingers wander higher, sneaking under his shirt. Each tiny movement draws another unconscious reaction from him, subtle but responsive. A twitch. A groan. A stirring between his legs.
My mouth hovers near his throat, and he leans into it, shifting closer.