3. Eden
EDEN
The casseroles slide across the passenger seat when I take the turn onto the dirt road, and I throw out an arm to keep them from tipping. Three of them, foil-capped, warm against my hand. The same seat I had a half-dead stranger bleeding all over last night.
I told my mother the food was for a sick friend. That part isn’t even a lie, depending on how generous you’re being with the term friend.
The gate is shut. A guy about my age steps out of the guard shack, and I roll my window down.
“Can I help you?” he asks. Then recognition hits him. “Hey. You’re the girl from last night.”
“Eden,” I tell him.
“Trapper,” he replies, introducing himself. He’s already hauling the gate open, gravel grinding under it. “Does Viper know you’re coming?”
“Nope.”
That gets a grin out of him, big and delighted. “Oh, he’s gonna love that.”
The lot is nearly empty. A few bikes are there, and a truck. Nothing like last night.
Stripped of the crowd and the dark, the place is much less intimidating. It’s two stories constructed from cinder block and weathered wood. It’s an old hotel that quit being a hotel a long time ago.
I get out of the car, go around to the passenger side, and grab the casseroles and my first-aid kit. I balance it all as I make my way up the porch steps.
The screen door is propped open, so I let myself in.
Inside, it’s dim and cool. A long table runs down the middle, couches thrown around it, a pool table off to one side with the balls scattered. The bar takes up a whole wall, and there’s a kitchen at the far end.
A man with dirty blond hair standing behind the bar looks up.
“You lost?” he asks, his eyes dragging up and down my body.
“I’m looking for Viper.” I’ve heard two men say his name now, so I’m pretty sure I have it right.
The grin spreads wide. “Viper’s a lucky guy.” Then he calls out, over his shoulder, toward the hall behind him, “Viper. You’ve got company.”
And Viper fills the doorway when he comes through it.
I’d half talked myself into believing I built him bigger in my memory than he was. I didn’t.
He’s cleaned up since the road. The blood and grime are gone. He’s wearing a fresh black T-shirt stretched over a muscular chest and biceps. He’s holding his left side carefully, where I stitched him up.
The tattoos I caught glimpses of on the road show clearer in the daylight.
His hair is dark and falls just above his shoulders. Gosh, he’s hot.
Brown eyes, dark as wet earth, land on me and don’t leave. “No,” he says. “You can’t be here.”
“Hi to you, too.” I smile.
He doesn’t return my smile, but I’m not discouraged.
“I told you not to come back.”
“You did.” I set the dishes and the kit on the bar before my arms give out. “But I wanted to make sure you were okay. I thought you could use some food. I cooked enough for your friends, too. Hopefully, you all love cheesy chicken with broccoli.”
Behind the bar, the blond says, “I love cheesy chicken with broccoli.”
Viper doesn’t look at him. He looks at me. “Girls like you shouldn’t be here.”
“Girl like me.” I let it sit between us. “You don’t know the first thing about a girl like me.”
He blinks, but his expression doesn’t change. And he doesn’t say anything.
That’s fine, though. He doesn’t need to. I can do the talking.
“Your stitches need checking. I’m here. Let me look, and then I’ll go. I’ll leave the food, and if you really don’t want me to come back, I won’t.”
He thinks it over, and I hold his stare and wait him out.
“This way,” he says, and turns without checking that I follow him up the stairs.
I grab my first-aid kit.
His room sits at the end of the hall. The bed is made. A dresser. A window with the blind down against the sun. No photos. No mess. Nothing on the walls.
“Sit,” I tell him.
The corner of his mouth quirks up. It’s involuntary, and it’s gone a second later.
He sits on the edge of the bed. “You’re bossy.”
“I can be.” I set my kit on the dresser and snap it open. “Take off your shirt.”
He pulls it over his head one-armed, careful of the side, and for a second, I forget what I came here to do.
I’ve cleaned and dressed plenty of wounds. I’ve never once had to remind myself to keep breathing while I did it.
He’s a wall of muscle, and almost every inch of his chest, torso, and arms is inked.
Under all of it, scars. Old ones.
The bandage I taped last night is gone, replaced by a new one already, but has gone gray at the edges. I peel it slowly.
“It’s healing clean. No heat coming off it.
You didn’t pop a single stitch.” I flush the line with saline, my thumb braced on his ribs to hold the skin taut.
His attention stays on my hands, not the cut.
I don’t look up because looking up means his mouth and his eyes are right there, and I’m not ready for what my face might do.
“You’re a nurse,” he says without question.
“Almost. Two semesters out.” I lay a fresh pad over the cut and reach for the tape.
“You shouldn’t trust men like me.”
“I was raised not to.” I measure out the tape and cut it. “My dad is a preacher. So you can probably guess how he’d feel about me being here.”
“So why are you here?”
It comes out flat, but it’s a real question, so I give him a real answer.
“Because I’m twenty-two years old and I have never once done a thing he didn’t sign off on first.” I smooth the tape down.
“He approves my clothes. My friends. The school I was allowed to attend for nursing. And someday, he’s probably going to try to pick my husband.
But I chose this. I chose to help you, and I want to see it through. ”
“You don’t know what you’re choosing by being here.” His eyes stay level on mine.
“Then tell me.”
“You chose to help someone that no good girl should be involved with.” He doesn’t look away.
My fingers stop on the tape along his ribs. “What if I don’t want to be a good girl?”
He doesn’t move. His eyes drop to my mouth and hold there, and his breathing goes uneven. I’m near enough that only one of us has to lean to close the distance between us.
He drags his attention up to my eyes, and when he speaks, his voice is harder, more direct. “You chose to save a man who was attacked by three men. I would have died without you. One of the attackers got a knife in me before I shot him.”
Oh, I didn’t expect that.
“That’s fucked up, right?” he asks, but he doesn’t expect an answer. “I’m not a good man. And that’s who you chose to save.”
“Did he die?” I’m afraid of the answer.
He shrugs. “Don’t know.”
“But you shot him defending yourself,” I say, explaining to him why his actions were justified.
“Stop,” he says. “Whatever you’re looking for, I’m not it.”
His hand comes up and closes over mine, the one resting on his ribs. Not hard. Just there.
I don’t pull away.
We stay like that, my hand trapped under his.
“You should go,” he says. He doesn’t let go of me.
“I should.” I don’t move right away.
And when I finally make myself, I drag it out—packing the saline, the tape, the torn wrappers, every excuse to stay near him one more second.
He stands when I do. For one breath, we’re close enough that I have to look up to hold his stare, and he looks down at me like he’s holding himself back from kissing me.
But he’s not going to kiss me.
I shouldn’t want him to kiss me.
Then I step around him, and I walk out.
Downstairs, a couple of guys are already eating the casseroles.
The blond guy says, “You can bring food around here anytime, sweetheart. This is fucking delicious.”
Viper scowls at him before following me out to the porch.
“You can’t come back,” he says.
I’ve got my keys in my hand. I stop on the bottom step and turn.
“Is that what you really want?”
He doesn’t look away from me, and I don’t look away from him, and the answer takes its time.
“No,” he says.
“Neither do I.”
He nods, but neither of us talks about what comes next.
I get in my car and drive toward home. Toward my father’s house, his rules, and the good, quiet girl I have to become again before I walk through his door.
I smile the whole way there.