15 #2
“You always ignore it.”
“Maybe I like being consistent.”
“Maybe you like being a pain in my ass.”
Marv looked at me again, his eyes surprisingly clear for a man who smelled like cheap whiskey. “He gives lectures when he’s worried. You should hear him about socks in winter.”
“I’d rather jump into traffic.”
Easton shot me a flat, furious look. “Tempting.”
“Keep bleeding and I might push you.”
Marv laughed harder, coughing around it while Easton turned and started up the stairs without another word.
I followed, my boots ringing against rusted metal, my anger climbing with every step because even like this, furious and wounded and determined to cut me open, he still gave money to the drunk man at the bottom of the stairs.
I hated him for that too.
He reached the second-floor door and shoved it open with his shoulder, the metal groaning in protest. “Stop following me.”
“Stop bleeding.”
“It’s my blood.”
“Then stop leaving it where I have to look at it.”
He pushed into the hallway, and the noise of other people’s lives swallowed us.
A baby cried behind one door while a couple fought behind another, their voices slipping through walls too thin to keep anything private.
Cigarette smoke, fried grease, cheap cleaner, and heat trapped too long inside old pipes clung to the air.
I caught up with Easton halfway down the hall. “This building is depressing.”
“Yep. You can leave.”
“I’m trying to insult your life choices, and you’re ruining it by agreeing with me.”
“That must be hard for you.”
“You have no idea.”
His mouth tightened like he wanted to say something worse, something that would draw real blood.
A door cracked open, and an older woman in a purple robe looked out, her eyes sharp beneath a row of silver hair rollers. Her gaze went directly to Easton’s bandaged hand and the ice pack he now pressed against his ribs.
“Wade, you bleeding on the carpet?”
“No, Mrs. Alvarez.”
“You look like hell.”
“Working on my charm.”
She looked at me, her assessment quick and thorough. “You his girl?”
“No,” Easton said again, the word a flat, final stone.
This time, I answered at the same moment, my voice overlapping his. “Definitely not.”
Mrs. Alvarez looked between us, deeply unimpressed. “You both sound stupid.”
Easton sighed through his nose, long and weary. “Thank you.”
“You clean that hand.”
“That seems to be everyone’s favorite topic.”
“And check those ribs,” she added, pointing at him. “You’re breathing like a man pretending breathing doesn’t hurt.”
“I’m breathing fine.”
“You lie badly when your face is purple.”
“That’s bruising.”
“That’s stupidity showing color.” She turned one red-polished nail toward me. “You make him clean it.”
I lifted my chin. “That was already the plan.”
Easton muttered something too low to catch and kept walking.
Mrs. Alvarez shut her door with a definitive click, and I followed him to the end of the hall, where he unlocked an apartment with a newer deadbolt and a door painted so many times it no longer fit correctly inside the frame.
He got it open on the second try because his injured hand slipped on the first, and I watched him bite down hard against the pain, his jaw clenching.
He stepped inside and turned to block the doorway, his body filling the space.
“You got me upstairs.”
“I’m coming in.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am.”
His eyes dragged over me in one rough sweep, not soft or careful, but something hotter and angrier than either. “You always this pushy when you’re calling it helpful?”
I stepped into his space until the toes of my boots nearly touched his. “You always this dramatic when you need first aid?”
His jaw flexed. “You do not get to come in here and play nurse.”
“I’m not playing nurse. I’m playing the woman who had to drive you home because your friends were about to start drawing straws over who had to make sure you didn’t escape through a bathroom window and commit a sequel.”
“I didn’t ask you to drive me.”
“No, you agreed because apparently Ryan and Cade’s emotional-supervision package offended your masculinity.”
“It offended my will to live.”
“You’re bleeding in a stairwell and still dramatic.”
“I’m bleeding because Maddox had a fist too, Clarke.”
“You’re bleeding because you used your hands like consequences.”
His face went lethal, all the careful control snapping into something raw and dangerous.
Good.
I wanted the fight. I wanted the heat. I wanted him mean because mean was easier than the fact that he had stood in The Sin Bin with murder in his eyes because Maddox had said my name like filth.
“Move,” I said, my voice low.
“Make me.”
Nothing softened or healed, but the room changed the way it does when someone strikes a match and pretends fire isn’t the point.
His body filled the doorway, tall and tense, his chest rising shallowly beneath the dark cotton of his shirt, one hand bleeding and the other braced against the frame like he trusted wood more than either of us.
I tilted my head in challenge. “With that hand?”
His eyes dipped toward my mouth, and the look came so quickly I could have pretended I missed it if my body hadn’t reacted like a traitor, heat spreading beneath my skin. He noticed that too. His face stayed cold, but his gaze sharpened, honing in on the reaction.
“Careful, Clarke.”
I smiled, all teeth. “You keep saying that like you don’t want me to ignore it.”
His good hand shot out and caught the doorframe beside my head, not touching me, not trapping me enough to make it something I could accuse him of, but close enough that every nerve in my body went bright and electric.
“You think you know what I want?”
“I think you moved across town and still can’t get me gone.”
“I do fine without you.”
“Because only calling me Clarke—a clear boundary—makes it easier?”
“Because Aura is the woman who destroyed me for loving her.”
I shoved one finger hard into his chest. “And Easton is the man who turned hurt into a hobby and made every interaction feel like a public execution.”
He caught my wrist with his good hand, his fingers wrapping around it, warm and unyielding.
I looked down at his grip, then back at his face. “You going to let me in or bleed on your own floor out of principle?”
His grip tightened for half a second, one pulse of pressure, before he released me and stepped back, his movements stiff. “Touch whatever you want, right? You’re good at that.”
I walked past him into the apartment, my shoulder brushing his chest on the way in. “You’re trying so hard to be cruel it’s almost embarrassing.”
He shut the door hard enough to rattle the wall. “And you’re trying so hard to act unfazed that it’s getting pathetic.”
The apartment was small, cold, and aggressively bare.
One couch, worn at the arms. One lamp with a crooked shade.
A kitchen that looked clean only because there was almost nothing inside it: one mug in the sink, a half-empty bag of bread on the counter, and a stack of bills beneath a skate-sharpening receipt.
A gray blanket was folded over the arm of the couch with the kind of military precision that made me want to mess it up just to prove something in there could still happen by accident.
I dropped my purse onto the counter with a thud and started digging through it. “Sit down.”
“No.”
“Bleed standing up, then.”
“I will.”
“You’re exhausting.”
“You can leave at any point.”
“You got into a fight, your knuckles are split, your mouth is bleeding, your face is bruised, and your ribs clearly hurt. I am trying to help you.”
“You keep saying that like I missed it.”
I pulled out antiseptic wipes, gauze, medical tape, and a tiny bottle of saline. Easton stared at the pile, his expression unreadable.
His mouth twisted. “You carry a whole clinic in there?”
“I’m a woman with enough sense to stock my purse before we left the bar.”
“You’re a woman with control issues.”
“Both can be true.”
He hoisted himself onto the edge of the kitchen counter instead of sitting properly and held out his injured hand with an expression that made it clear he was not giving me a victory.
I stepped between his knees because the kitchen was too narrow to avoid it, and the second I moved close enough to smell cold air, sweat, blood, the clean trace of his soap, and the cologne I remembered too well, I wished I had made him sit on the couch across the room.
His gaze tracked every movement, heavy and intent.
I grabbed his wrist harder than necessary, my fingers digging into the skin above the stained gauze. “Hold still.”
“You always this rough with injured men?”
“Only the ones who deserve it.”
His mouth curved without humor, a cold, bitter slash. “That must be a long list.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. You’re not special.”
The second the words left my mouth, his eyes lifted toward mine.
There was the hit. Direct, ugly, and earned. A flicker of something raw and wounded in the gray depths before it disappeared beneath a fresh layer of ice.
His voice went flat and dead. “Yeah, I got that message.”
I tore open an antiseptic wipe with my teeth because my hands needed the violence, the sharp sound of foil ripping. “Do not sit in your sad little apartment and act like you’ve been innocent.”
“I never said I was innocent.”
“You’ve punished me all this time.”
“You humiliated me.”
“You made sure I paid for it.”
“You made sure I knew my place.”
I pressed the wipe against his split knuckles, the alcohol biting into raw flesh.
He hissed and jerked, a full-body flinch, and I tightened my hold, pinning his hand in place. “Don’t be a baby.”
“Don’t be a bitch.”
I looked up slowly, my gaze rising from his hand to his face. “Say that again.”
His eyes burned, two points of pale fire. “You heard me.”
The air between us flashed white-hot.
I should have stepped back. I should have shoved his hand away and let him clean his own wounds the way he kept pretending he wanted. Instead, I pressed the wipe harder, grinding it into the broken skin, and watched his jaw lock, one muscle ticking furiously.