At a loss for words I just stared at her for a moment before Nash’s gurgling made me move. “Have you always been this awesome?”
She shut all the doors behind us and helped me haul Nash up the steps. I noticed she didn’t answer my question, but she did get Nash a huge glass of water and fished around in my bathroom until she found some pain killers. She left both on the bathroom sink in the hall that Nash used and gave me a pointed look. “Come find me when you’re done.”
I swore in a long litany under my breath as I helped Nash battle his thermal and jeans off. I was contemplating shoving his ass in a cold shower when the tequila started to take its revenge. The tattooed head disappeared inside the toilet and I spent the next hour making sure he didn’t pass out and alternately cramming liquids down his throat and jumping out of the way as they came back up. When I was finally sure he wasn’t going to get sick anymore I hauled him to his bed and made sure he was face down before I did a quick cleanup of the bathroom and myself and then went to find Shaw.
The door to my room was cracked open and she had my TV on. I wasn’t sure what I was going to find, the dirtier part of my imagination had all kinds of interesting scenarios laid out but wait awaited me wasn’t one of them. She had my California king stripped to the mattress pad and was making short work of changing all the bedding. Her crazy blue shoes were in the center of the floor looking totally out of place next to my discarded t-shirts and jeans and as I propped myself up in the doorway all I could do was watch her. She seemed to be having some kind of conversation with herself but she was muttering too low for me to hear what she was saying. I waited a full five minutes for her to look up at me or notice my watching her but she never did, so I asked, “What are you doing?” which made her jump about a foot in the air.
She put a hand on her chest and had the good grace to look a little bit guilty.
“Changing your sheets.”
“Why?”
“Uhh…Why?”
“Yes, Shaw why are you changing my sheets at nearly three o’clock in the morning?”
She was saved from answering when a Garth Brooks song rang from her pocket. I was starting to see she liked to pick songs for ring tones that fit the person calling. She had a brief conversation with who I assumed was Ayden and left the phone on the night stand next to the bed. She picked up the edge of my comforter and started to smooth it back over the big bed.
“Ayden got a ride home, I guess your friend in the band remembered her from the Goal Line and offered to take her.”
“That’s cool, though Jet isn’t exactly known for being a one girl kinda guy so I hope she isn’t reading anything into it.”
“Like I said she can take care of herself and honestly you aren’t really known for that either,” she waved a hand over the bed, “so I’ll be damned if I’m going to sleep let alone do anything else in a bed that has had more visitors than DIA without changing the sheets first.” Her bottom lip stuck out and she sounded slightly defiant.
“Shaw,” I moved out of the doorway, making sure to shut it and turn the lock on my way to her. “No one has been in that bed since you. I told you I knew on that Saturday that something was happening between us that was different.”
She shivered a little as I got close and I could see raw vulnerability in her eyes. It was scary to know how easily I could hurt this girl and how desperately I didn’t want that to happen.
“I don’t know how to do this with you, Rule. I drunkenly threw myself at you and was lucky you were willing to catch me, but sober it’s hard to look at that bed and not see every single other girl that was there before me, sometimes more than one at a time.”
She tried to make light of it but I could hear the genuine melancholy coloring her tone. I put both my hands on her face and tilted her head back so that we were eye to eye.
“I can’t change the past, Casper, not any of it. I can’t make any of those girls disappear or the fact you walked in on them on Sunday morning time and time again go away, I can’t bring Remy back or go back in time and not call him for a ride that night. There are probably a million and one regrets I have and if they are going to be between us here or in bed then let’s just stop it now because I’m not going to do combat over my past when my future is finally starting to be something I want to invest in.”
She lifted her hands up and grasped my wrists, at first I thought she was going to pull me away but she didn’t. She leaned forward and let her forehead hit the center of my chest. “Rule if this goes bad it’s gonna be so, so bad.” Her voice was just a husky whisper against my chest.
“True, but if it’s good it’s going be so very, very good.” I tunneled my fingers through her hair and she let her hands fall to my shoulders. We weren’t a perfect match, she was a lot shorter than me and I had to admit that I knew logically we made an odd pair physically but there was just something about her, something about the way she curved into me, the way she sighed my name like a prayer, the way she smelled like sunshine and sweetness and everything yummy all wrapped into one bite that made none of that matter and made her the only girl I could ever remember wanting to hold onto for more than a fleeting minute of time.
She started to pull my shirt over my head and I laughed a little when she got mad when it got stuck on my spiky hair. She made a face at me and tossed it over her shoulder onto the floor. She used a finger to poke the front tip of the spiked up hawk and lifted an eyebrow. “You look hot with a mohawk, Rule but I gotta say this hair is more trouble than it’s worth.” She trailed her hands over my ribs and stopped to look at the art work imprinted there. On one side was a grim reaper that ran from under my arm pit to the top of my thigh, on the other side was a beautiful angel and in-between them on my back was a massive gothic cross that went from shoulder blade to shoulder blade and ended at my tailbone, scrolling from shoulder to shoulder on an elegant banner was ‘Remy’ in bold script. I had more inked skin than not and where I normally didn’t think anything about it, being naked next to her in all her pale, perfect skinned glory it seemed slightly overwhelming. Her hands moved lower and before I had even kissed her she was messing with my belt buckle.
“Remy would have loved that piece you know? He always used to tell me he was so glad when you started getting tattooed. He said someone having the same face as him was always too weird, but then you started looking so different , he was glad it was you because there was no way he could tolerate sitting still long enough to get anything done.”