I stare up at the ceiling, trying to remember. “Hmm. I think I bought it off the shop teacher at the high school. I’d saved my allowance for months.” She still looks confused and I laugh. “I had a tutor at the high school after classes ended at the middle school. I happened to walk by the shop one day and saw the engine and something just clicked as I watched the shop instructor, Mr. Boyd, puttering with it. He ended up being one of my best friends until I moved out here.”
Nell is peering at me as if seeing me for the first time. “You had a tutor?”
I wince, wishing she’d have missed that part. “Yeah. I wasn’t very good at the whole school thing.”
I turn away and throw the tarp over the table and lead her to the private stairway leading to my apartment. It’s my way of politely indicating I don’t want to talk about it, and she seems to get the message.
Saying I wasn’t very good at the school thing was a huge understatement, but she doesn’t need to know that. I’m hoping to avoid the subject as long as I can.
My apartment isn’t much. A galley kitchen I can barely fit in—like, I can’t have the stove and the cabinets opposite open at the same time, not that I ever use the stove, but still—a living room in which I can just about touch all four walls standing in the center, and a bedroom that contains my queen bed and nothing else. All my clothes are in the dresser, which is in the living room, and the dresser also doubles as the TV stand. Not that I ever really watch TV.
I throw my arm out to gesture at the apartment. “It’s even less than the shop, but it’s home. I’d say I would give you the ten cent tour, but I’d need to give you nine and a half cents back.”
She laughs, the Tinkerbell giggle, and my heart lifts. But even with all the normalcy, the questions, the interest, I can see her fighting for calm. She hides it well, hides it like a pro. It’s buried deep, thrust down under the surface.
I respect the hell out of her for how hard she’s working to be okay. I just wish she’d let me show her how to let go, how to let herself hurt. I want to take her pain.
She’s plopped down onto the couch, and I can see the exhaustion in her eyes, in her posture. I leave her sitting on the couch, head back, legs splayed out. Making sure my room isn’t a complete pigsty, I change the sheets and add an extra blanket, then go back out to tell her she can crash in my bed. She’s already passed out in the position she sat down in. I lift her easily. She’s light as a feather, like an actual, factual fairy, made of glass and magic and fragile porcelain and deceptive strength. I set her in the bed, tug off her shoes, then debate whether to take her pants off for her or not.
Selfishly enough, I decide to go for it. I mean, I know I hate sleeping in pants, so I can’t imagine she does either. I pop the button, slide the zipper down, grip the denim at her hips and pull. She wriggles, lifts her hips, and I pull them down to her knees. The sight of her thighs and her pale cream skin is almost too much for me to take, especially with her tiny yellow thong, barely disguising the tender V in which I want so desperately to bury my face, my body. I can’t help my fingers from tracing a featherlight line across her thigh, just a brief touch, but too much. And not nearly enough.
I jerk myself away and scrub my hands over my face, through my hair, fighting for control.
I turn back, close my eyes and peel her jeans off the rest of the way.
As I’m in the process of pulling them past her toes, she speaks, muzzy and sleepy and ridiculously goddamn cute. “You’ve already seen me in my panties. Why the shy guy now?”
I settle the blankets at her neck, and she presses them down with her elbows on the outside, staring up at me with long fluttering lashes and tangled strawberry blond hair wisping across her perfect features. I back away before I give in to the temptation to brush the hair away with my callused fingertips. I can’t read the expression on her face. She just looks so f**king vulnerable, as if all the hurt is coming up and boiling over and she’s barely keeping it in, now that sleep has nearly claimed her.
“That was an ass**le move,” I say. “I shouldn’t have done that. You were asleep, I didn’t want—”
“It was sweet,” she says, cutting in over me.
“I’m a lot of things, Tinkerbell. Sweet ain’t one of them.” I brush my hand through my hair, a nervous gesture. “I only closed my eyes so I wouldn’t feel you up in your sleep.”
Her eyes widen. “You wanted to feel me up?”
I don’t quite succeed in stifling my laugh of disbelief; she doesn’t understand how bad I want her. Good for her. She can’t know.
I take a step closer to her, next to the bed, and I just can’t summon the strength to resist. A strand of hair lays across her high, sculpted cheekbone. I brush it away, mentally cursing my weakness.
“You have no clue, Nell.” I back away before my mouth or my hands betray me further. “Sleep, and think of blue.”
She snorts. “Think of blue?”
“It’s a technique I learned to keep bad dreams away,” I tell her. “As I fall asleep, I think of blueness. Not things that are blue, just…an endless, all-encompassing sense of blue. Ocean blue, sky blue.”
“Blue like your eyes.” Her voice is unreadably soft.
I shake my head, smirking. “If that’s what brings you peace, then sure. The point is, think of a soothing color. Picture it floating through you, in you, around you, until you are that color.” I shrug. “It helped me.”
“What do you dream about?” Her eyes are awake, and piercing.
I turn away and flick the light off, speak facing away from her. “Nothing for you to worry about. Bad things. Old things.” I turn back to glance at her, and her eyes are heavy again. “Sleep, Nell.”
I close the door behind me, and retreat into the kitchen. It’s nearly five in the morning by this point, and I’m beyond exhausted. I was up at seven yesterday finishing a Hemi rebuild, and the guys are going to be here to start working on the ‘Stang around eight. I end up writing a note and leaving it taped to the frame, saying I won’t be in today. They know what to do. Perk of being the boss, I guess. I trudge back up the stairs and slump back on the couch, eyes heavy, but brain whirling.
I’ll never get to sleep at this rate. I curse under my breath, trying to banish images of Nell’s naked thighs, begging to be caressed. It’s not working.