19. Chapter 19
BLUE
For the first time since our romance began, Aaron took me to his home.
It was a huge brick building at one end of Main Street where the commercial buildings collapsed into residential houses closer to the ocean. It used to be a post office, and the bronze plaque still remained beside one of the black-painted front doors at the top of a series of short steps flanked by wrought-iron railings.
It wasn’t exactly the kind of home I’d have imagined for him if I thought about it.
Especially when he ushered me inside, flicking the lights on to reveal a tastefully restored, open-concept living space. The walls were exposed brick, the kitchen cabinets and appliances a sleek black, the countertops butcher block and gleaming with care under the copper hanging lights above the stove. The furniture was masculine but good looking, soft black couches and chairs, dark wood table and chairs, bookshelves against two walls forming one of two closed rooms on the main floor. Based on the neon sign that read “studio” on the door, I suspected it was where he made his art. Of course that art lit the walls, funny quotes mostly, and a huge, intricate replica of the Hephaestus Auto logo hung above the TV.
It was cool and cozy, somehow perfect for a man who was both a biker and a sweetheart, a funny man and an intensely complicated soul.
I lingered over a collection of framed photos on a long table behind the couch, touching one of Boner and Curtains with their arms wrapped around King at what looked like a wedding in the forest.
Even in his house, Aaron wanted to be surrounded by memories of his found family.
My chest ached as he left me to explore while he went into the kitchen, grabbing water and pain pills from a cabinet.
“I love it here,” I told him softly, keeping my head turned away as he approached so he wouldn’t be able to see the scar across my face.
Dr. Arora had stitched it closed properly with a delicate hand, promising that the scaring wouldn’t be so bad if I took care of it with her detailed instructions. She’d also fitted me with a real brace for my hand, declaring that even without an x-ray, it was clear my pinky, ring, and middle fingers were broken.
Aaron had bracketed my back on the couch the entire time she saw to me, and I’d been grateful he couldn’t see the extent of the damage on my face. Even in the car he’d borrowed from the club to take me home, he’d been focused on the road, and it was dark enough to obscure the ugly mark.
But now, in the warm light of his home, there was no avoiding it.
As if sensing my distress, Aaron only placed the glass and pills on the table before kissing my temple and moving back into the kitchen.
I swallowed the lump in my throat, loving him so much it was hard to breathe beyond the swell of it blooming at my centre.
“Gonna make you somethin’ to eat,” he muttered as he started banging around in the kitchen. “You shouldn’t take those meds on an empty stomach. Why don’t you take a shower while I fix it?”
He was careful to keep his eyes focused on the pan he was putting on the stove when I turned to look at him, and I felt gratitude warm my chest. “That would be great.”
“Up the stairs. Use the one in my en suite at the end’a the hall. Towels on the rack. Call if ya need anythin’, yeah?”
“Thank you,” I told him as I moved toward the stairs, trying to convey how much it meant that he was giving me space to sort through the complicated feelings rioting through me as adrenaline drained through my pores, leaving me exhausted and bewildered.
Photos lined the stairwell, and everyone in the club was represented in the frames. At the top, I noticed a large canvas depicting Aaron as a little boy. No tattoos or silver jewellery or that distinctive haircut, just a skinny boy with the same eye-crinkling, wide grin and mischief in his eyes. He had his arm slung around a little girl with pale hair and the same dark, wide-set eyes as him.
His sister.
The one who’d been abducted by the Chinese triad because of her skills as a hacker.
He hadn’t gone into details yet about the story, but I didn’t press. If I knew anything, it was how hard it could be to speak about the pain of loss and wounds that would never heal, no matter how much time passed.
“She would love you.”
His voice startled me into springing away from the photo.
I untucked the hair from my ear so it swung over my face as I looked down the stairs at him.
“Yeah?”
“Oh yeah.” He leaned against the banister with a soft smile. “You two’d get up to know good, I’m sure. Curtains and I’d be fucked.”
“I hope that happens someday,” I admitted softly, tentatively, because now that I was here with Aaron in his home, Grouch safe, half our enemy vanquished, our future actually seemed possible in a way that terrified me.
Because I wanted that ever-after shit with Aaron more than I wanted anything else.
There was no remorse in me for the lives of the White Raiders that were no doubt ash in the remnants of the farmhouse. They had shown no kindness in life, and they deserved none in death.
Instead, I was filled with hope like a new dawn after a violent storm had passed.
“Me too,” he said with a little nod, gaze lost to thoughts playing out in his head. “Go wash up, and the food’ll be ready when you are.”
I turned back around without saying anything, ghosting down the hall to his bedroom.
It felt a little strange to enter it for the first time without him, but it also gave me time to appreciate it.
The first thing I noticed was that the walls were painted cobalt blue.
I didn’t have to wonder if they’d always been that colour because there was still tape against the baseboards and an empty can of paint beside the open door.
He’d painted the room he dreamed in the same colour as my eyes and hair.
My heart pounded, tears burning the backs of my eyes as I wandered closer to the bed. On the nightstand, tucked into a framed photo of Zeus, Curtains, King, and Aaron were two printed-out photos of me. One was the selfie I’d taken in Eugene’s Bar bathroom, and the other was a photo he’d taken of us outside Lin’s Beauty Emporium. His nails were blue on the hand holding my face, and the shape of his smile was pressed against my cheek as I made a silly face into the camera.
God, we looked happy.
I’d never seen myself look like that.
Not once in my twenty-five years.
I thought of Aunt Rita saying she loved the shape of my smile and hoped to God Aaron would feel the same when he saw half my face stitched together.
The shower was huge and tiled in glossy black so it felt like a spa as I cranked the water to scalding and carefully washed without getting my cheek or braced arm wet. Washing my hair took way too long, and my sling ended up damper than I would have liked, but I got it done.
When I stepped into the bedroom in a towel, Aaron had laid out an old Hephaestus Auto tee and a pair of boxers for me. They smelled like fresh laundry and his cologne, comforting and warm as I pulled them over my pinked skin.
I thought about keeping my wet hair down to shield my face but decided at the last minute to twist it into a bun at the top of my head.
There was no hiding from Aaron, and I didn’t want to.
I believed that the kind of love we shared––bone deep, lifelong––would make me palatable to him no matter what. It was just my own insecurities projecting onto him, and he didn’t deserve that. He’d shown me to treat both of us better.
Still, I held my breath as I descended the stairs on bare feet and found Aaron sitting at the round kitchen table doodling in a large sketchbook with coloured pens. He had changed into fresh clothes, his muscle shirt revealing gauze wrapped around a wound he’d taken to his deltoid. He didn’t look up immediately, letting me come close enough to peer over his shoulder.
It was the specs for another neon sign. This one said “asking for trouble” in cobalt blue.
When I looked up from the page into his eyes, they were black velvet and a soft place to land. I went easily when he tugged me gently onto his lap, wrapping an arm around my waist so I was pinned facing him, cut cheek on display.
“You gotta know, Blue,” he said, so serious every word resonated like a struck church bell, like a holy toll, turning his home into a sacred space and me into a reverent relic. “If I gotta go to hell and back, fight the fuckin’ devil himself, sacrifice everyone’a my sins or my life itself, I’ll do it. You think you’re more trouble than you’re worth, but you gotta understand I’ve always been the kinda man who’s not afraid to ask for trouble if it’s worth the effort and there’s no doubt in my mind keepin’ you safe and loved is worth it all.”
“Aaron,” I breathed as he reached up to cup my face carefully beneath the stitched skin.
“All my life, I’ve fought to find beauty in the chaos, to be happy even and especially in the hard times ’cause if I waited for the good, I’d be sad most’a the time. I didn’t even realize how lonely I still was ’til I saw your colour blue and knew I needed it brightenin’ my life.”
I cupped his hand to my cheek and dipped my forehead to press against his so all I could see were those warm, dark eyes. “I didn’t know what happiness was until I met you.”
“Then please,” he started, pulling away to bring the bowl of soup waiting beside his sketchbook to the edge of the table before me. He’d made me Alpha-getti. A laughing sob escaped my mouth because I’d told him once how nostalgic I was for them after raising Red and me on the sweet red soup. “I know it’s dangerous to stay here when your piece’a shit for a father and Hazard are still around, but I promised to keep you safe, and I fuckin’ meant it. Don’t want to live without you, though, so you wanna run, I’m comin’ with you.” He ignored my gasp of shock and barreled on. “You want that, I’m in, Blue. I swear it. But please, consider stayin’. Consider trustin’ me and my brothers to keep you safe. ’Cause you’ve been searchin’ for home and family your whole life just like me, and I want the chance to make you part’a the one I was lucky enough to find here in Entrance.”
Before I could respond, he pushed the bowl a little closer, drawing my attention to the letters carefully arranged in the spoon in the middle of the soup.
Be my Old Lady .
“I belong exactly where you are, wherever that is,” I promised him as tears slid past the rims of my lids and wet my cheeks. It was funny that I’d cried more in the last couple of months knowing Aaron than I had the entire time I’d been stuck with Rooster then Hazard growing up. Hope and happiness seemed to have that effect on me. “And I’d never take you from your family.”
“So you’ll stay,” he confirmed, a huge grin splitting his handsome face and shining on me like unfiltered sunlight. “You’ll be mine.”
“I already was,” I admitted.
He laughed then, bright, bubbling laughter that spoke of relief and hope and joy. It was contagious, and soon I was laughing too, the sound mixing between our mouths as he drew me closer to seal our lips together. He tasted like sweet red sauce, and the familiar burn of his scruff on my chin felt like coming home.
“You should eat,” he murmured against my cheek before brushing a tender kiss below my wound.
“Later.”
He chuckled again but moved his hand to my hair to gently pull me away, face creased with happiness. “No, Blue. Be a good girl so the meds don’t make you sick.”
I pouted but lifted the spoon to eat his message off the metal.
He grinned.
I rolled my eyes, but giddiness pushed like a drug through my sluggish bloodstream, reinvigorating me. Combined with the strong pain pills, I barely felt the injury on my cheek, and my left hand was down to a dull throb.
“I’mma drive you to and from work from now on, and you’ll live here with me, yeah?” he said, laying out the plan for our life like a kid giving out Christmas presents. “Curtains lives next door, and we share the loft. You okay with that?”
I nodded, hoping that the time together would endear Aaron’s best friend to me a little more. Truthfully, I liked the redhead. He was handsome in an approachable kind of way with a crooked grin and bright, clever eyes. I wanted to hear about his history as a red hat hacker and listen to stories about what this terrible twosome had gotten up to over the years.
Plus, he was Aaron’s brother in all the ways that mattered. I’d never separate them.
“Good,” he continued happily, stroking a hand down my back soothingly as I ate. “I got no doubt Hazard and Rooster’ll regroup, but that gives us time to shore our defences against them. They won’t catch us off guard.”
I believed it.
The operation at the Furry Creek farm that night had been a well-oiled machine like something military. I didn’t doubt The Fallen’s ability to care for its own and defend its territory. I was just grateful they’d come for me, that they considered me part of that fold.
“You wanna change up the house, just tell me. It’s your home now as much as mine, okay?”
I dropped my spoon into the half-empty bowl, too wired to eat any more. I put my hands on Aaron’s face, thumbs moving over the sharp, short stubble of his beard.
“There’s only one thing I want to add,” I confessed. “I want you to teach me to make one of your neon signs so we can have one together. Maybe even hang it in the bedroom.”
Aaron’s whole face softened to an expression of love that took my breath straight from my lungs. His hand was tender as he cupped my abused cheek and gently ran his thumb along my jaw.
“Why don’t we do that right now? You got the energy?”
A little trill of excitement shivered down my spine.
I was utterly exhausted, and I knew Aaron must’ve been too, but it felt right to make something with him on this first night of our ever-after together so I nodded, already getting to my feet and collecting his sketchbook.
“Nah,” he said, drawing it from my grip and leaving it on the table. “I already got one started in the studio. We can work on that.”
He took my hand in his to tug me through the living space to the room he’d created in the corner behind the bookcases. It was dark back there, the windows blocked out. He took a remote from a wooden table strewn with paraphernalia and turned off the lights in the rest of the house so only the ones in this room remained.
“Come here,” he said, already pulling me in front of him at the work table.
A large piece of grid paper was laid out in front of us, a design carefully sketched and measured out in precise lines. It took me a moment to look beyond the specs and read the backward letters to discern their meaning.
A heart filled with the words “electric hearts.”
“The kinda love I got for you is electric. It lights up my soul and vibrates my bones. I can’t fucking live without it. Without you,” Aaron whispered in my ear before kissing my neck. “Never wanna know what it’s like to go back to a life without your light.”
“Same,” I whispered, turning my head to kiss him. “I love this. I love you so much it terrifies me.”
“Don’t be scared, Blue baby.”
“Not of you. Never of you. Just of losing you.” Fear flickered at the edges of my full heart. Knowing Hazard and Rooster still existed in this world, knowing they’d come for us both with an unceasing determination to end both our lives, wasn’t something that could fade until they were both dead and gone.
But Aaron’s love was enough to keep the panic at bay.
My faith in him and his was enough to make me feel safe enough to take a risk on our future together.
“Tell me how it works,” I asked, wanting to return to the present moment instead of worrying always about the next.
Aaron reached for a set of protective eyeglasses and fixed them carefully to my face.
“How do you even manage to look cute in nerdy glasses?” he asked incredulously.
A true smile tipped the right side of my mouth, and I knew in my bones that however the wound on my cheek healed, Aaron would find me just as beautiful as he always did.
“So the design is done backwards so the letters will lay flat at the front,” he explained, pulling glass tubing in front of us and flicking on a burner that produced a small, powerful flame. “You take every section of glass separately to control the bends.”
I watched as he pulled on his own pair of glasses and then lifted the glass over the fire until it glowed. Working quickly, he placed it over the stencil and used an iron tool to lift the soft glass into shape. It was almost hypnotic, listening to him explain the process as he laid out the tricky shape of the heart onto the paper. Fire to paper, sinuous movement against the glass to shape it to his will, and then back to the fire with the next section.
When he finished the heart, he pressed a kiss to my damp neck, sweaty because it was hot near the flame, and asked, “You wanna try?”
I nodded eagerly, accepting the gloves he passed me even though he didn’t wear any. The tubing was so delicate in my hands that it was hard to believe it wouldn’t shatter under the heat. Aaron carefully guided my hand above the flame, showing me how to properly expose the section to the heat.
When it was soft, I laid it down on the stencil and accepted the metal rod to shape the letter E backward into the glass. Aaron marked off where I should make each bend with a pencil mark, and when the glass threatened to collapse, he taught me how to breathe through a blow hose to bring back its shape. I stuck my tongue between my teeth as I bent over the table, so close to the material, I could smell the heat of it perfume the air.
“Perfect,” he murmured as I finished the one letter. “You wanna keep going?”
I did.
He talked me through it, helping me with the end section of the word before I started on “hearts,” and then showing me how to press that word over the existing heart shape to get them to fuse. It was way more difficult than I’d imagined even though I was used to working with my hands. Aaron had to file the glass into sections for me and press blocks of wood to the hot material to cool it rapidly enough to handle. There were no visual cues to tell when the glass was molten enough, so I had to rely on feel and Aaron’s other hand helping me to balance the tube above the flame, but eventually, I got the hang of it. He only had to correct me a handful of times, which I deemed an accomplishment, mostly because he lavished me with praise the entire time.
When we finished molding the lights, I was a sweaty mess, my right arm oddly tired from the strain, but I felt a blazing sense of accomplishment looking at the complex work of art we’d created together. The paper stencil and table beneath were scorched from our efforts, and I was glad for the glove on my hand because otherwise I’d probably have lost a finger.
There was no colour in it yet. He’d explained to me that the process was even trickier, using electricity to insert and burn off the colours inside the tube because neon gases wouldn’t work if exposed to any air. He let me pick out the colours to finish the design later, and he laughed when I didn’t choose blue just to be contrary.
It felt good to create something, but even better to be taught by someone who cared about me. I’d never had a loved one take the time and patience to coach me through learning a new skill, and it made me fall even more in love with Aaron, seeing his gentle leadership. It made sense that Zeus had entrusted the prospects to his care.
“Wow,” I breathed, looking at the electric heart we’d made, knowing it was the perfect emblem for us, Bones and Blue.
I decided to get it tattooed somewhere as soon as I could.
Aaron laughed. “You should see what Eugene does. He’s a proper glass-blower, and I’m just a tube bender. He can make shit so pretty it doesn’t look real.”
“I can’t believe this is real,” I admitted, touching the cool glass. “I have a whole new appreciation for just how much time it must have taken you to make me these so often.”
He shrugged a shoulder. “I can move a lot faster when it’s just me, and you were workin’ with only one hand. But yeah, I stayed up late workin’ on these ’cause I knew I wouldn’t sleep thinkin’ and worryin’ about you.”
I sank back into his chest, reaching up to grip his neck so I could bring him close for a kiss. When he pulled away, he gently pulled my protective glasses off and tossed them aside with his own.
“I’m sorry,” I offered. “I just couldn’t live with myself if something happened to Grouch when he was the only person before you to give me a haven and love.”
“Yeah,” he said gruffly. “How can I be mad when your big heart is one’a the reasons I love ya?”
I grinned against his mouth. “What’re some of the other reasons?”
His grin was devilish. “You sure you feel up to knowin’? I’m more a shower than a teller.”
“I’m sure,” I said, rocking to my toes to nip at his lower lip.
“Well, then.” He lifted me up, walking to the other end of the huge table to set me on the clean surface. “Lie back and close your eyes.”
“Um…”
“Just do it, baby,” he encouraged, leaning over to kiss me until I closed my eyes for him. “Good girl.”
I listened as he moved away and rattled around in some drawers, making a little noise of satisfaction before he came back to my side. Somewhere, music started playing, and “Free” by Ocie Elliot poured through the speakers.
“How’s it feel to be free?” he murmured against my stomach as he lifted my shirt slowly up my belly.
“Beautiful.” I tangled my hand in his hair as he smoothed his hands over my sides, kissing languidly from between my breasts down to my belly button, dipping his tongue inside, before continuing to the band of the boxers.
I jumped slightly when something cool and damp pressed to my skin and moved in smooth, short strokes.
“What’re you doing?” I whispered as I tried not to squirm.
The dual sensation of his warm, open-mouthed kisses and the cool tip of something pressed to my skin made me break into goose bumps.
“I told you, I like to show, not tell,” he explained opaquely. “So I’m showin’ ya.”
I realized as he moved to another section of my torso, the curve beneath my bare breasts, that he was writing on me with some kind of pen. I burned to know what he could be inking onto me, but I kept my eyes closed because I loved being his good girl.
He was mostly quiet as he worked, eventually relieving me of my shirt, carefully helping my arm through the sling and then the fabric. Next went my boxers so I was laid out like a naked canvas for his work. I shivered and moaned as he sucked each nipple long and leisurely, the pen constantly moving over my neck and torso. When he moved his mouth down to my mound, I moaned low and long at the first swipe of his tongue through my folds, shocked by how turned on I was by this experience.
By the sensation of being utterly worshipped.
He held me still with one arm across my hips as he alternated between feasting on my pussy and bending to write more words on my thighs and calves, all the way down to my toes.
When he finished my front, he helped me turn over onto my knees, braced on my elbows so I didn’t hurt my left hand, and then he went to work covering me in his love again.
By the time he finished, I was shaking, on the edge of an orgasm that threatened to devour me whole.
“Please, Bones,” I begged, head hanging between my shoulders.
Every atom of pain and exhaustion had been swept away by the building tide of pleasure he’d coaxed out of me.
“Hold on a minute, baby,” he said as the sounds of photos being taken filled the space. “You look so fuckin’ beautiful. Can’t wait to see what you look like tomorrow, next year, in a decade. Know you’ll just be more and more beautiful to me as I fall deeper in love with ya.”
I’d always bear the scars of my past, physical, mental, and emotionally, but they seemed so much more bearable under the weight of Aaron’s love written on my skin, kissed into my most sensitive places, whispered into my ear.
“No one could ever love someone as much as I love you,” I admitted as he helped me turn over and I reached for him blindly, hauling him close when my fingers brushed his shoulders. “I’d take every hardship all over again if I knew I’d end up here with you.”
The shape of his smile pressed to my mouth before he whispered, “Open your eyes, love.”
I opened them, waiting for them to adjust in the darkness to the sight before me.
He’d propped a frameless mirror against the counter across from me so I could see the way the neon pen strokes glowed against my flesh in the dark. I gasped at the colours, pink and blues and purples, my shadowed flesh brought to life by bright hues the way Aaron told me I’d brought colours to his greyscale world.
The words were backward in the reflection, but I could still pick some of them.
Brave, bold, beautiful, selfless, kind , funny, silly, sweet.
And along my jaw under my wounded cheek: bone deep .
I laughed as happiness dissolved the last of my tension, feeling free and beautiful and so in love with the man before me I thought I might cry from the sheer enormity of it.
I fumbled for one of the discarded pens by my hip and pulled off the cap with my teeth so I could write one thing over Aaron’s heart.
My love for you is electric.
He grinned down at me as I wrote and then laughed at the design as if he couldn’t contain his happiness any more than I could. His hand worked between us for a moment, pulling down his grey sweats so his cock was freed, hard and ready for me. As if the act of loving me was the biggest aphrodisiac.
I clung to him with my right arm around his shoulders and shifted as he pressed his length against my wet pussy, sighing as he slid through my snug channel unerringly until he was fully seated. The stretch and burn of him took my breath away, but he held me close as I adjusted to the sensation, and when he started to move, making love to me in a way I’d never experienced before, I knew this was it.
The ever-after shit he was talking about.
“I love you,” I whispered against his mouth. “No matter what comes.”
“Love you, my blue-eyed, blue-haired girl,” he murmured. “And I’m never lettin’ you go again so long as you’ll have me.”
For all his joking and charm, Boner was serious about me . Faith Cavendish, the good-for-nothing daughter of Rooster Cavendish, the asshole set on burning down everything Boner knew. Yet he saw me only as Blue, the girl who loved beauty and fashion magazines, who was low-key addicted to curly fries and chocolate milkshakes, who searched for the fun and loveliness in life with zeal because it distracted from the constant ache of ugly terror I’d lived with at my heart.
He loved my curves and my hard edges. The scars and the soft places.
He loved me enough to burn down the world for me, and I loved him enough to trust he’d keep me safe even when the monsters came back to haunt us.
They would, I knew, but instead of fear, pressed tight to Aaron’s strong, sure form, filled with his cum as I called his name like a benediction when my own climax hit seconds later, I knew they could come for us again and again, and we’d survive every time.
We had more to fight for than they could ever know.