Chapter 12 #2
I turn back to my station. My eyes sting.
After I finish the aftercare instructions, I walk my client to the door and tell her to text me if she has questions.
She leaves. The bell jingles. I go back to my station, organize my ink bottles by color for the third time today, and pretend my hands aren't trembling.
Frankie walks past on her way to clean up. She squeezes my shoulder once without saying a word.
By seven, her last client is gone. I clean my station. Frankie cleans hers.
"I'll finish up," I tell her. "Go home."
"You sure?"
"Go. Enjoy your evening. Light a candle. Talk to your plants. Do whatever witchy things you do when I'm not here."
Frankie snorts. "Goodnight, Ruby." She grabs her bag and heads for the back stairwell.
I finish the stations. Lock up. Nash is on the Harley.
"I have to grab something from Frankie's. Left my other sketchpad upstairs last week. Two minutes."
Nash nods. I head around the side of the building to the stairwell entrance. Frankie's loft on the top floor, shop on the main floor, basement below that with its padlock.
I'm on the second step going up when I hear it.
Below me. Through the floor, through the stairwell, through the locked basement door. A scrape. Low, heavy. Furniture being dragged across concrete.
Then silence.
Then breathing.
I back up. One step. Two. My hand grips the stair railing. The breathing continues, steady, rhythmic. I climb to Frankie's loft, grab the sketchpad, and I'm back outside in ninety seconds.
Nash is leaning against the Harley, watching me.
"You're pale," he says.
"I'm always pale. I'm a redhead. We don't tan. We just accumulate freckles and anxiety."
He studies my face for a beat longer than usual. Whatever he sees, he doesn't push. He swings onto the bike. I climb on behind him. My arms go around his waist. My forehead finds its place between his shoulder blades.
His hand reaches back. Taps my knee twice. But this time his fingers linger. His thumb traces the curve of my kneecap once, slowly, before his hand returns to the handlebar.
My whole body goes still.
"Take me home," I say against his back. My voice is barely there.
He starts the engine. The ride to my apartment takes ten minutes in the dark. Neither of us speaks. He parks, walks me up the stairs, waits while I unlock the door, and follows me in.
The apartment settles around us the way it's started to over the past few days. Nash checks the windows, the back door, and the camera feed on his phone. I kick off my shoes, drop my bag, and head for the shower.
When I come out in sleep shorts and a T-shirt, hair damp, he's on the couch. TV on. Volume low. His boots are by the door, lined up with mine. His cut is draped over the kitchen chair.
I pour two glasses of water and bring one to him. He takes it. Our fingers brush. Neither of us pulls away.
"Nash."
"Yeah."
"Today was a good day."
He looks at me. The hardness in his face eases, just barely. The version of him I catch in these quiet moments when it's just us and the TV playing something neither of us is watching peeks through.
"Yeah," he says. "It was."
I take my water to bed. Pull the covers up. Through the wall, the couch creaks as he settles.
I close my eyes.
The compliment. The way he crossed the room without me hearing him.
Take it. The knee tap this morning, quick, light.
The knee tap tonight, his thumb tracing the curve of my kneecap.
His eyes on my hands all afternoon. On mine in the mirror, dark, hungry.
My body responded to him watching me with heat between my thighs and want that's been building all day, all week, all month.
Naya crosses my mind. The headband on his wrist. The nights he disappears to the fight circuit and comes back without saying where he's been. But every time I look for evidence, I come up empty. She's protective of him. He's protective of her. That's all the file holds.
The file isn't what's keeping me awake.
Nash is.
His mouth. Both corners lifted. The way he said take it like he'd wait all night. The way he looks at me when the jokes stop and there's nothing between us but air.
I lie in the dark for twenty minutes. My skin hums. My chest aches. Sleep isn't coming.
I push the covers off and stand.
The hallway is dark. I take two steps and stop.
Nash is in the hallway. Standing outside my bedroom door. His hand is at his side. He's been watching my door.
He's taken off his shirt. Just jeans, barefoot, the ink on his chest and arms on full display in the light from the living room.
I've never seen this much of him. The tattoos wrap his shoulders, trail down his ribs, disappear below his waistband.
The muscles underneath are defined, carved, the kind of body built by years of discipline and control.
A line of dark hair runs from his navel into the waistband of his jeans.
I forget how to swallow.
"Nash."
"I heard you get up." His voice is low. Rough. The voice of a man who hasn't been sleeping either.
"You were watching my door."
He doesn't deny it.
I take a step toward him. Then another. The hallway is narrow. Two more steps and I'm close enough to feel the heat coming off his bare skin. Close enough to see the rise and fall of his chest, faster than it should be. Close enough to smell sandalwood and soap.
"Ruby." A warning. The same voice from the shop. The voice that tells me to stop.
I don't stop.
I put my hand flat on his chest. His skin is hot under my palm. Against my fingers, his heartbeat hammers hard and fast, nothing like the controlled stillness he shows the world. His stomach contracts when I touch him. The muscles pull tight under my palm.
"Tell me to go back to bed," I say.
His jaw flexes. His eyes drop to my mouth. "Go back to bed."
"Make me."
His hand comes up and wraps around the back of my neck.
The grip is firm. His fingers thread into my damp hair, his thumb pressing behind my ear, and he holds me there.
My breath stops. The grip tightens. Precise.
The pressure of a man who knows exactly how much force to use and is choosing this amount on purpose.
"You don't know what you're asking for," he says. Low. Against my mouth. His lips are an inch from mine. I can feel his breath on my skin.
"Then show me."
He kisses me.
His mouth covers mine, and everything I thought I knew about kissing dissolves.
The kiss is slow and controlled. Nash kisses the way he does everything, with total focus and absolute precision.
His mouth moves against mine with patience that makes my knees buckle.
He's tasting me. Learning me. His hand tightens in my hair, tilting my head to the angle he wants, and the fact that he's choosing the angle, that he's positioning me, sends a pulse of heat straight between my thighs.
His other hand finds my hip. Grips. Pulls me into him until my chest is flush against his bare skin.
I can feel every ridge of muscle, the heat of him burning through my T-shirt.
My nipples harden against his chest, and I know he feels it because his grip on my hip tightens, fingers pressing into the curve of my waist hard enough to leave marks.
I kiss him back. My hands slide up his chest, over his shoulders, into his hair. I pull. A low sound comes out of him from the back of his throat, a groan he didn't mean to let go of, and it's the best thing I've ever heard. I pull harder. The groan deepens.
"Careful," he says against my mouth.
"Or what?"
He walks me backward three steps. My shoulders hit the wall.
His body pins mine. Every inch of him pressed against every inch of me: chest, stomach, hips.
His thigh pushes between my legs, pressing up, and the pressure lands exactly where I need it.
My hips roll against him instinctively, chasing the friction, and the moan that leaves my mouth is embarrassingly loud.
"Nash." His name comes out broken.
His mouth moves from my lips to my jaw. To the spot below my ear. His teeth close on my earlobe and tug. My spine arches off the wall.
"Stay still," he says.
"I can't."
"You can." His hand slides from my hip to the front of my thigh, his fingers spreading wide, holding me against the wall. "Stay. Still."
I try. I last about three seconds before my hips roll again, pressing against his thigh, chasing the friction that's building between my legs. My clit throbs against the seam of my sleep shorts and I'm wet, soaked. He has to feel it because his thigh is right there.
His breath stutters. His fingers dig into my thigh.
"Ruby." A warning. Darker this time.
"I said I can't."
Nash's mouth is on my throat. Teeth grazing my pulse point. The hand in my hair tilts my head back further, exposing my neck, and the grip isn't gentle. It's possessive. Controlled. The kind of hold that says I have you and I'm not letting go.
He sucks on my pulse point. Hard enough to leave a mark. My hand flies to his shoulder, nails digging into the muscle, and the sound I make isn't a word. His free hand slides up my ribcage, his thumb grazing the underside of my breast through my T-shirt, and I arch into his palm.
"Please," I whisper.
"Please what?"
"Touch me."
His thumb traces the curve of my breast. Slow. Circling. He brushes across my nipple through the fabric, and I gasp. He does it again. Slower. My hips grind against his thigh, and the wet heat between my legs is impossible to hide.
"You're shaking," he says against my throat.
"I'm aware."
He lifts me. Both hands under my thighs, pulling me up the wall as if I weigh nothing.
I wrap my legs around his waist. The shift in position presses my center against the hard ridge of his cock through his jeans.
He's hard. Thick. The length of him is pressed against me through two layers of fabric, and the moan that rips out of me echoes down the hallway.
His breathing is ragged as he drops his forehead against mine. His hips roll against me once, and the friction of his cock against my pussy through my shorts sends a shock up my spine that makes my vision white out at the edges.
"Fuck," he breathes.
I grind against him. Rolling my hips, I press my clit against the hard line of him, finding the angle that makes the pressure build.
His hands grip my thighs hard enough to bruise.
He lets me. For three strokes he lets me ride the friction, his jaw clenched, the tendons in his neck standing out, his body coiled.
"Ruby." My name in his mouth. Rough. Wrecked. "Stop."
"I don't want to stop."
"I know." His voice is barely controlled. "Stop."
I roll my hips one more time. Pressing the full length of his cock against me, and the groan he makes is guttural, torn from somewhere deep.
His hand clamps down on my hip. Hard. Stilling me. Pinning me against the wall with a grip that says this is not a request.
"I said stop."
I stop.
My body screams at the loss of friction as my clit pulses.
My thighs tremble around his waist. But I stop because the voice he's using isn't playful.
It's the voice from the shop, from the fry, from every moment he's held the line while I pushed against it, except now I can feel what holding the line is costing him.
His cock is pressed against me, hard, straining against his jeans.
I feel his hands shake against my thighs.
His forehead is against mine and his breathing is shot.
"Not like this," he murmurs. The words cost him. "Not in a hallway. Not because you can't sleep."
"Then how?"
His eyes open. Dark. Burning. The look in them makes my stomach drop.
"When I take you to bed, Ruby, it won't be against a wall at one in the morning." His thumb traces a slow circle on my inner thigh. "It'll be because I've decided you're ready. And you'll know because I'll tell you."
My breath catches. The promise in his voice is a physical thing, pressing against my chest, settling between my legs where I'm still throbbing.
"And if I don't want to wait?"
"You'll wait." His grip on my thigh tightens. Releases. Tightens again. "Because I'm asking you to."
The shift is instant. He's asking. Not telling. A man who controls every room he enters is asking me to trust him. Part of me wants to push. Grind against him one more time, break his composure, make him lose the control he's holding by a thread.
But the part of me that goes quiet when Nash says my name, the part that said okay, taken in the shop today, that part answers.
"Okay," I whisper.
His grip loosens. He lowers me down the wall slowly, my body sliding against his until my feet touch the floor. Every inch of the descent drags my center across the hard length of him, and we both shudder. His hands find my waist. He holds me there, forehead against mine, breathing unevenly.
The hallway is dark. The apartment is quiet. His heartbeat pounds against my chest.
"Nash."
"Yeah."
"That was worth fourteen months."
His mouth twitches. Both corners. The full smile I've been chasing since the day I met him, right there, pressed against my forehead in a dark hallway at one in the morning.
I earned it.
He lets me go. Steps back. His hand drags down my arm as he pulls away, his fingers catching mine for a second before releasing. The loss of his body heat is immediate. Cold air rushes into the space where he was.
"Go to bed, Ruby."
"Yes, sir."
The words come out differently this time. Quiet. Stripped bare. The voice that makes his eyes darken and his jaw flex, the same voice he heard in the shop. Except now it's carrying the taste of his mouth and the memory of his cock pressed against me.
He watches me walk back to my room. I feel his gaze on my body the entire way. At the door, I turn around. He's standing in the hallway, shirtless, his jeans sitting low on his hips, his hands at his sides. The ink. The muscle. The restraint carved into every line of him.
"Nash."
"Yeah."
"Next time, I'm not stopping."
His jaw works. His eyes hold mine. The muscle in his forearm twitches.
"Go. To. Bed."
I close the door. Lean against it. Press my hand over my mouth.
Through the wall, the bathroom door closes. The faucet runs. He's in there for a long time.
Sliding down the door, I sit on the floor with my back against the wood, my sleep shorts damp, my pulse still hammering between my legs. I press my hand over my mouth and grin into my palm until my face hurts.
I can still taste him.