“Sorry— Thanks for helping with the thing.” I gestured to the dumpster when words failed, avoiding eye contact as I tucked my hair behind my ears.
“You’re bleeding.”
My eyes shot to him. “What?”
He nodded to my shoes, lowering his cigarette from his lips again, and I looked down.
There was a tiny cut on my ankle (no thanks to the milk crate) that was dribbling a thin line of blood onto the hem of my sock.
“Oh.” I waved my hand. “It’s nothing.”
Why did small cuts only start to burn when they were noticed?
“You sure?”
“I’ll be fine.” I forced a smile while the cut began to sting some more.
Can I get tetanus from plastic?
He studied my ankle and then dragged his eyes to my face as he drew back on his cigarette. "At least you didn't run the dumpster into me again." He flicked ash to the ground.
I grimaced. "You remember that?"
"Parts of it.” Smoke slipped through his lips on every word when his eyes gave me a subtle once-over. "You're stronger than you look."
“It was just adrenaline.” I motioned to his clothes — and the overall sweatiness of him. "How was the fight?"
Antonio was kind enough to give me the night off from sewing up sweaty men. I figured it was because someone had mentioned the drink spiking to him too.
Dean looked down at his knuckles and flexed his fingers. "Same as every other one… How are you after the other night?"
"Much better.”
He pressed his lips together, nodding in understanding before he drew back on the cigarette. “I guess we’re even then.”
"I guess so… I should probably get back inside. Before I trip over anything else, anyway.” I gestured to my ankle, smiling mostly out of embarrassment. The blood had dried and clotted already.
Dean’s lips twitched. “Bye, Lily.”
I made to leave with a small, awkward wave. Knowing Dean’s intentions over what happened on Tuesday night were just to return the favor for what I had done on Sunday, I felt less worried about the whole plaything assumption Roxy had created. She was a confident, beautiful, and extremely self-aware young woman who knew exactly what she was doing when it came to men. I was a bumbling, naive girl who flushed red whenever a boy so much as looked my way. Roxy had nothing to worry about. Just the idea of her — and possibly anyone else at work — thinking something might have happened between Dean and me was ridiculous. It would never happen. Ever. We were opposites.
And now I sounded like my mother.
I wanted to put the silly accusation to rest. And seeing as no one seemed to take my word for it…
“Dean?”
He was still by the dumpster, finishing his cigarette, when he looked up at me, raising his scarred eyebrow in curiosity as I approached him again. I wrung my hands slightly as I thought about how I would word this.
“The other night, when you brought me home, Roxy saw, as you know, and she thinks, well, assumes that something may have happened between us that night—” I cleared my suddenly dry throat as he cocked his head to one side. “Nothing happened, obviously, but I don’t think she believes me, and I was kind of hoping that maybe you could say something to her too?”
"I can't guarantee she'll believe me either." He tossed the cigarette butt to the ground, snuffed it out with the heel of his sneaker, and buried his hands inside the pockets of his hoodie before moving toward the door.
I took a small step aside as he passed, wondering if asking was a waste of time. He didn’t seem interested whatsoever as he pulled the door open. Maybe he wasn’t. The favors, at least in his mind, had been returned, so what was the point in him helping me out with this one?
Just when I was about to tell him to forget about it, he turned side-on and looked at the space beside him with a confused crease between his dark eyebrows. When he glanced up, finding me still standing in the middle of the alleyway, I realized he had expected me to follow.
“You comin’?” he said.
