Chapter 15 #2
"I don't know what you're talking about."
Her eyes narrow. The look holds for five full seconds. This one carries a specific message: she will find out everything I've ever moved in her shop, and the response will be disproportionate.
Ruby glances over from her station. The glance is brief. Her eyes skim past me and land on Frankie, then go back to her work. I might as well be furniture.
My hands curl at my sides.
The rest of the afternoon stretches. Ruby works her session, talks to her client, laughs at something the woman says about her teenage daughter's first tattoo. The laugh is real. Warm. For her client. Not for me. The sound of it hollows something behind my ribs.
She stretches between sets, rolls her neck, and pushes her hair off her shoulder. The movement exposes the line of her throat, and my jaw locks. A week ago I had my mouth on that throat. My teeth on her pulse point. Her head tipped back against the wall because my hand had put it there.
Now she rolls her neck and doesn't even check if I'm watching.
I am watching. Every second. Every movement. The way she leans over the client's arm. How her fingers adjust the needle. The way her lower lip catches between her teeth when she's concentrating. She knows I'm watching. She's choosing not to care. The choice is a blade between my ribs.
I want to cross the room. Put my hand on the back of her neck the way I did in the hallway.
Tilt her face up. Make her look at me. Say her name in the voice that used to make her breath catch.
Ruby. One word. The word that used to stop her mid-joke, mid-bit, mid-performance. The word that made her go still.
I want to make her go still.
But I pulled back first. I kissed her, then I spent three days treating her like a detail instead of the woman who said yes sir with nothing behind it but truth. She's doing what I taught her to do. She's matching my distance. I don't get to close the gap I opened.
My hand flexes against my thigh. I stay at the wall.
At five, her session ends. Ruby cleans her station. Only her station. She hangs her apron, grabs her jacket, and walks past me through the door. Close enough that I catch vanilla. Far enough that nothing touches.
I start the engine. She climbs on behind me, her arms loose around my waist, her hands held away from my stomach.
Last week her palms pressed flat against my abs and her thumb traced circles that dropped straight through my ribs.
Tonight her fingers barely grip the fabric of my shirt.
The cold where her warmth used to be follows me the whole ride home.
I walk her up the stairs. She unlocks the door. We go inside. I check the windows. The back door. The camera feed. She kicks off her shoes and heads for her room to change.
The silence lasts about four seconds.
"What the FUCK?"
I lean against the kitchen counter and wait.
She comes out holding a pair of jeans in one hand and a T-shirt in the other. Both two sizes too large.
"Nash." Her voice is dangerously calm. "Why is everything in my closet two sizes too big?"
"East."
"East was in my apartment?"
"Rider used his key."
"Rider used his—" She drops the jeans on the counter, turns, and walks back to her room. I hear hangers sliding. Drawers opening. A strangled sound that might be a scream filtered through clenched teeth.
She comes back with an armful. Dumps it on the kitchen table. Jeans, T-shirts, a flannel shirt, a tank top, a pair of shorts. All the right brands. The right colors. All two sizes too large.
"He matched the tags, Nash." She holds up a tank top between two fingers.
It could double as a tent. "He went shopping.
He found every brand I own, in every color I own, and he bought them all two sizes bigger.
That takes research. Takes commitment. That takes a man with a vendetta, a credit card, and way too much time on his hands. "
She pulls the flannel on over her T-shirt. The sleeves hang past her fingertips. She holds her arms out.
"I look like a child wearing her father's clothes. This is a war crime. The Geneva Convention has opinions about this."
She opens the jeans. Steps into them. They pool around her feet. She holds the waistband with one hand and shuffles to the middle of the kitchen. The denim drags on the floor behind her.
"Security detail keys are for security, Nash.
Not fashion terrorism." She grabs the waistband with both hands to keep them up.
"Tell East his retaliation is noted and will be answered.
At scale. I'm talking biblical scale. Plagues.
Locusts. I will dismantle that man's wardrobe thread by thread.
Every pair of boots he owns filled with something he won't expect and can't identify.
Every T-shirt replaced with a crop top. I will bedazzle his motorcycle helmet.
I will monogram his underwear. I will not rest until that man understands what it feels like to open his closet and find NOTHING THAT FITS. "
She takes a step toward me for emphasis.
The jeans slide off her hips. She grabs them, yanks them up, and the waistband goes past her bellybutton.
She looks down at herself. Looks up at me.
The oversized flannel hanging to her knees, the jeans bunched in both fists, her hair wild from pulling shirts over her head.
"I look like a scarecrow, Nash. A fashionable scarecrow whose entire identity has been stolen by a man who thinks revenge is a clothing size."
I laugh.
The sound surprises both of us. A real laugh, low, from my chest, the kind I haven't made in months. My shoulders shake once before I lock them down. My jaw clamps but it's too late.
Ruby freezes. Her eyes go wide. Her mouth drops open.
"Oh my god." She points at me with the hand that isn't holding up her jeans. "Oh my GOD. You laughed. That was a laugh. A real, actual, full laugh. With sound. From your body. Frankie would lose her mind. Candace would frame it. I need to call someone. Need documentation. I need a witness."
She's grinning. The full grin. The one that lights up her whole face and hits me somewhere I can't protect.
She steps toward me, one hand on her jeans, the other reaching for my arm, and for three seconds the distance between us disappears.
The Ruby I've been missing is standing in her kitchen in clothes that don't fit, pointing at me, grinning like she just won a war.
Then she stops.
Her hand drops. The grin folds in on itself. Her eyes shift away from mine, and she takes a step back, the oversized flannel swallowing her shoulders.
"Anyway." Her voice flattens. "I need to figure out what to sleep in."
She turns and walks back to her room. The jeans drag on the floor behind her. Her door clicks shut.
I stand in her kitchen. My hands grip the edge of the counter.
Her laugh is still in my chest, trapped behind my locked jaw.
The kitchen smells like vanilla. The air holds the shape of her grin.
She was right there. Reaching for my arm.
Three seconds of her reaching for me the way she used to, my whole body leaning into it before she pulled back.
I let go of the counter. My knuckles ache.
When she comes out, she's in sleep shorts and one of the oversized T-shirts because it's all she has.
The shirt hangs to her mid-thigh, the collar slipping off one shoulder, and she looks small in it.
Ruby doesn't look small. She fills rooms. Ruby takes up every inch of space she's given and steals the inches she isn't. But tonight she looks small, and it sits in my chest wrong.
She makes a cup of tea. Carries it to the couch. Sits on the far end.
I'm on the other end. TV on. Volume low. The middle cushion between us holds nothing.
Last week she sat there. In the middle. Her knee pressed against mine, her shoulder leaning into my arm, her body heat bleeding through my sleeve.
She laughed at something on the screen, tipped her head back, and her hair brushed my jaw.
I didn't move. I sat there with her hair against my skin and her laugh vibrating through my arm while I pretended to watch the TV.
Every nerve I had was focused on the warmth of the woman beside me.
Now her pencil scratches across the sketchpad. Her tea steams. The TV plays something neither of us is watching. Three feet of empty cushion between us and I can feel every inch of it.
"Ruby."
Her pencil pauses. "Yeah."
"You sure you're good?"
"I'm great, Nash." She doesn't look up. "Watch your show."
The pencil resumes. I watch the side of her face.
The set of her jaw. Her mouth bare, the red lipstick washed away in the shower.
Her lips are softer without it. Pink. The bottom one fuller than the top.
I've spent months watching that mouth perform, deflect, deliver jokes at full volume.
Tonight it's pressed flat, quiet, stripped down to what's underneath the color she paints on every morning.
The urge to reach across the empty cushion hits hard. Put my hand on her jaw the way I did in the hallway. Turn her face toward me. Make her look at me. Make her tell me what changed.
My hands stay where they are.
I click the remote. Screen goes dark. She gets up and takes her tea to her room.
"Goodnight, Ruby."
She pauses in the hallway. Doesn't turn.
"Night, Nash."
The door closes and the click echoes down the hallway.
The couch is hard in the dark. The spring digs into my left side. Through the wall, her breathing evens out. She's not asleep. Her rhythms are different when she sleeps, and this isn't it.
My fault. All of it. Every empty inch between us on that couch, every glance she cut short, every grin she killed before it could reach me.
My thumb finds the headband and presses until the weave bites bone.
The apartment is dark. Through the wall, her breathing never fully settles into sleep, and mine doesn't either.
We lie on opposite sides of the drywall, awake, and the distance between us fills the room until the first gray light bleeds through the window.