I told him simply, “As long as you can do the job and the price is fair, I don’t care about what happened in the past. Our working relationship is all about what’s going on in the here and now.”
He seemed to take my words at face value and we all exchanged business cards. He left and Rule and I walked out to the front of the building so I could lock the door.
“What do you think?” Rule’s tone was curious.
“I think I want a cigarette.”
He cut me a dirty look and followed me to where the Charger and his truck were parked on the street.
“Seriously?”
“I think that I don’t know what I’m doing. I look at that space and can’t even imagine tattooing there or the kind of clients we might have. I think I have no idea how to run a business, or how to get Phil to tell me the truth, and I think I’m falling for a girl who can’t seem to trust me fully, and as a result won’t let me get nearly as close as I want to. Do you know how much that sucks? I never wanted to get this close to any girl, ever.”
“Whoa …”
He laughed at me a little and reached out and clamped a hand on my shoulder.
“Chill out, brother.”
I swore and propped a hip on the fender of the Charger and crossed my tattooed arms over my chest.
“Seriously, Rule. I feel like I’m losing control of everything. The ride can stop anytime and let me off. Being dizzy sucks.”
Both his eyebrows shot up and he took up a spot next to me, his pose almost identical to mine. “Listen, Nash, you need to breathe. You have a lot going on right now, and trying to deal with it all at one time is going to make you flip the f**k out. Phil won’t tell you what you want to know, so go talk to your mom. Seriously, that’s the easy solution, and if Ruby the Great won’t tell you what you need to hear wait until Cora’s dad gets here for the birth of the baby and ask him.”
It made sense. I just wished I could do it without the talking-to-my-mother part.
“As for the shop and being a business owner, you are not in this alone. I’m here, Cora is here, Rowdy has your back, and we still have Phil. The success or failure of this shop will not be solely on you, Nash. We all want it to succeed, we all want to make Phil proud whether we do it in time for him to see it or not.”
He was right … more than my future was at stake here and I needed to remember that.
“As for the girl …” He bumped me in the arm with his fist. “There is no falling. You fell. She’s got you and there is no getting loose from that. So she’s guarded, so she’s hard to figure out … did you stop and think maybe the reason you like her, that she matters, is because she isn’t easy like all the rest? Easy is very forgettable, my friend, complicated and difficult stays with you forever. Believe me, I married it.”
I looked at him and tried to think of something to say that could refute what he said. There wasn’t anything.
“We were all a bunch of pricks back then; it took finding the right person to make me not want to be that guy anymore. You, well, you were always the nice one, but even the nice guy can have a bad day. Eventually she’ll get over her hang-ups over the past, and if she doesn’t, you move on because that means she’s not into the guy you are now.”
I huffed out a breath and watched it turn into vapor in the cold in front of me.
“When did you turn into the relationship sensei?”
“All my friends and family are falling in love around me, I’m just trying to keep them from making the same mistakes I made with Shaw. I wouldn’t waste any of the time I did getting to her if I could do it all over again.”
I would’ve made fun of him for being sappy and sentimental, but I had been there for the journey he took to get to his girl. It wasn’t always pretty and they had both hurt more than they needed to along the way, so discounting his words of wisdom didn’t seem very smart.
“All right. I guess I’m gonna cruise up the mountain and try and see if I can have a conversation with my mom without strangling her or trying to choke myself out.”
“Good luck with that. Hey, you still bringing the nurse to the Bar this weekend?”
It had taken a week of persuasion with both words and sexual lures to get Saint to agree to come out and meet my friends. Ayden and Shaw were champing at the bit to get to actually meet her outside of the hospital setting.
“If she doesn’t back out on me. She’s really shy, timid around new people.”
“You better tell her if she plans on sticking around, she needs to get over that, or else Cora is going to put together an ambush and the girls will end up on her doorstep without you there as a buffer.”
That was exactly what would happen, so I made a mental reminder to push Saint a little harder the next time we hung out. I didn’t mind pushing her, usually the results ended up with us naked and wrapped around each other, but I was still leery of pushing too far because I just didn’t know where her breaking point was. And frankly, I didn’t know where mine was either. I liked her, really liked her, in bed and out of it, but there was always something unknown about her that kept me on the edge. She was a strong girl, had to be in order to do her job and be as good at it as she obviously was, but outside of her work and away from the hospital, there was a veil of vulnerability and unease that surrounded her. I could practically see the struggle she was having within herself when we were together. She wanted to be with me, wanted to spend time together, but the gears in her head would start turning and I could see her trying to figure out how much of herself she could give to me and still feel safe.
I was also doing my best to show her a good time. Ever since the incident in the backseat of my car, I kept it in the forefront of my mind that she essentially had missed out on all the teenage nonsense that went along with boys figuring out how to get into a girl’s pants. So I took her to the movies and tried to get my hands in her shirt. I took her out for pizza and made out with her on her doorstep when I dropped her off. I tried to get her to go on a double date with Rule and Shaw, but she had balked at the idea, not ready to be that fully ingrained in my life yet, which led to the question of what exactly we were doing together.
I had never spent more than one night or one weekend with the same girl, so to me we were doing something that looked like starting a relationship. To her, though, I just didn’t know. She texted me, called me when she had free time, but never stayed the night at my place when she came over and never asked me to stay when I was at hers. Granted, she never asked me to leave either, but there was just a lot of gray area happening, and I felt like I was navigating all of it blindly since I had never even been interested in starting something with anyone before. I knew she was special. I just didn’t know how to show her that beyond what I was already doing.