AllFreeNovel
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“Make do?” I want to be wrong. So desperately want to be. Please.
“It isn’t Gatorade in here. Let that be enough for you.”
“Gross.”
“What did you expect me to do?”
“Not be gross. Why are you so gross?”
He shrugs. “Years of trauma, neglect, genuinely not giving a shit. Oh, and maybe being cuffed to the radiator in a psychopath’s apartment, without the opportunity to shower or even fucking wash myself in the sink, despite the fact that I fucking worked a shift at the fire department the other night and I saved that psychopath’s life.”
I roll my eyes at his dramatics. “First of all, I’m not a psychopath. I’m what you would call a survivalist with trust issues and a genuine need for revenge.”
He glares at me, and I can’t decide if I want to slap him or kiss the aggravation right off his face. After he showers. “Listen, can you just uncuff me so I can drink that coffee and clean myself up?”
“And if I do, then what? You going to play nice, Dixon Green?”
“Define ‘play nice,’” he says, his eyes scanning mine as if he’s looking for something more than just freedom from his metal constraints.
“Emptying your own pee bottle, taking a shower, and leaving your clothes outside the bathroom door so that I can throw them in the wash real quick. You smell like you need a long shower and I refuse to smell your body odor the whole damn day. I may have grown up around a motorcycle club, and I may be a bartender, but to deal with your stink, I’d have to be a garbageman.”
His lips twitch at that. It’s the barest hint of a smile, and it's like being sucker-punched, for the way it twists my stomach.
“Alright. I’ll play nice.”
I kneel to unlock the cuffs, my hand hovering over his wrist. For a moment, our eyes meet and the world tilts slightly. The weight of his gaze threatens to shatter the barrier I’ve built between us. But I reinforce it with thoughts of the why I’m here, the pain I’ve endured, and the fucking nightmare we buried in the desert.
Click.
The cuffs come loose and he rubs his wrists, the reddened skin proof of his bondage.
Standing up, I point toward the bathroom sternly. “Move it.”
He snatches the coffee from my hands and takes a long drink, then another, before handing the empty cup back to me. “Fuck, that was good. You’re a terrible host, but you make a damn fine cup of coffee. Time for that shower.”
He raises an eyebrow at me, prompting me.
“It’s the second door on your left down the hallway. Fresh towels are under the sink.”
Nodding, he turns and heads to the bathroom.
“Suppose you’ll need my clothes to wash them,” he says, still a teasing note in his voice. He’s enjoying his freedom too much. I never should’ve let him out of the handcuffs. Now that he has a shred of my trust and a purpose, it’s like he’s free to show just how much of an asshole he really is. “I’ll just leave them out here.”
That sentence is all the warning I get before he strips. All of it. His cut, his shirt — revealing a back marked with tattoos and with muscles that ripple and shift in hypnotic ways — and, just before I manage turn my eyes away, I see his firm, underwear-covered butt as he bends to pull off his jeans.
“You don’t have to fucking strip in my living room,” I say.
“Do you expect me to take a shower without stripping? Besides, this ain’t nothing you haven’t seen before, unless you’ve been living under a rock since you were born. Now, I’m going to leave my clothes here and take a shower so long that it will use up all the hot water in the building.”
I wait until I hear the door close before I take my eyes off the ceiling.
Then I grab his clothes and go to the closet where my washer and dryer are stacked. My hands linger on his jeans, gripping them, feeling the essence of him. I feel him on my fingertips, smell him, and something decidedly un-hateful swirls in my chest in a way that makes my breath short and my heart beat fast. I toss his clothes into the wash, then I pick up his cut. The patch, a black-and-white grim reaper, the road name — Smokey — and the road-worn texture of the leather. I take it all in. I imagine it on his shoulders as he tears down the highway astride his bike, as he bursts into combat, as he sits at a table with his brothers in the clubhouse, laughing, smiling… I like his twisted smile.
What the hell am I doing?
That thought strikes me like lightning and I let his cut drop. It hits the ground, and I turn the washer on and hurry to the kitchen, on the lookout for something, anything, to take my mind off Dixon Green.
I settle on making breakfast. For dinner. Because it’s damn late, I’m hungover, and there’s few things on earth as good for a hangover as breakfast food. Bacon, eggs, toast, even pancakes drenched in butter and syrup. I make it all. I’m a decent cook, not just because I grew up in a household with two hungry men and often had to help my mom in the kitchen — that is, until she passed away, then I took over entirely — but because, in my bar-tending journey, there have been nights where I’ve worked at bars where I was the entire back of the house staff, cook included.
