“What is it?” I asked, hearing the nerves in my voice.
He didn’t reply though. Rip just loomed there, on a hip and an elbow, looking and looking and looking for so long, I had to lick my lips. For so long I wondered if he thought there was something wrong with me. Until suddenly, he dipped his face down—and I held my breath—and he did the last thing I would have ever expected.
Rip brushed his dry, warm lips over mine. Over the corner of my mouth. Over the length of my lips. Just the quickest, lightest, most feather-like kiss of my life.
And just as quickly as it happened, it was over. He rolled back down to his back, leaving me….
Just like that.
Rip had kissed me.Me.
Was it… was it for comfort? Did friends do that? Kiss each other sometimes to make the other person feel better?
Yeah. Yeah, they did, I told myself as I heard him exhale. That’s what I was going to keep telling myself. He hadn’t slipped in any tongue, that wouldn’t have been friendly.And you wouldn’t have said no, my brain tried to whisper, but I ignored it, for now and forever, to cling onto the one and only thing hanging around in my head that made any sense. My one genuine worry in that moment that had nothing to do with this man maybe-yes-maybe-not kissing me. “You still want to be my friend though?” I asked him.
I’d swear on my life he just scooted closer to me, and I wasn’t going to overthink it. I definitely wasn’t going to think about what had just happened either. “Luna, if you knew the things I’ve done…”
“I would still want to be your friend,” I told him, breathing in through my nose that Irish Spring scent all over him. I licked my lips again and told myself I was only imagining that they tasted different. “Unless you like… hurt a kid or an animal or a woman.”
I could hear the breath he took, feel the tension of his bicep under my arm.
I was lying on Rip’s arm.I was lying on Rip’s arm.After his lips had met mine.
He was comforting me, I told myself. That’s all.
“No, I’ve never done any of that, but other men…” He trailed off, still speaking in that rough voice. “You don’t have a single idea the shit I’ve done, and I don’t wanna tell you.” I could feel the breath he took because it made the chest I knew from touch that was directly in front of my face expand and expand and expand.
There. There. He was telling me a little. Just a little. “It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me.”
“I don’t want to, but you should know, you should know who you wanna be friends with.”
“Tell me later,” I told him softly, taking in another big gulp of that clean male scent. But I thought. I thought about his words. I thought about all the different backstories I had come up with over the years.
“But can I ask you one thing? One thing that won’t change at all regardless of what you say? Because I swear it won’t matter, but I’ve thought about it a lot and I just… I just want to know. We don’t have to talk about it anymore afterward. And you can count it as my favor. We’ll put it in our box of secrets.”
I didn’t want to think that his “hmm” sounded worried, but I thought it did.
I squeezed his hand again, letting my fingers linger over the two fingers I knew had an M and a C on them. “Were you in a gang before?”
The arm beneath my head went hard again, and it took seconds for it to relax. Seconds that seemed like minutes as his body finally lost its defensiveness. And I couldn’t say I was totally surprised when he said, “Yeah, baby. You can say that.”
Well. I couldn’t say I was surprised. I wasn’t, not even a little bit, but his response tickled at that part of me that had a dozen different questions. I was only going to choose one. “Can I ask you one more thing?”
His “yeah” was a rumble.
“Why’d you do it?”
If the question surprised him, I would never know for sure. What I was aware of was the way he sighed and how I felt it before he answered, “I was mad after my mom died. Real fucking mad. I didn’t go out to join… it. I was raised here; I don’t think I ever told you that. Few months after Mom passed, I packed up my shit and left. Moved around a lot there for a while. I’d spend a couple days here and there, New Mexico, Colorado, California for about a year, then I headed back. I don’t got a whole lot of family, but back then I had an uncle in San Antonio—”
Some part of me startled at the mention of the city I’d grown up in, but I didn’t make a peep.
“He was into that life. My mom’s brother. I was mad as hell over life, and… they… took me in. It was kinda like having a new family, if your family was fucked up and everybody had lost their minds,” he kept explaining in a steady voice. “I spent eighteen years there.”
I curled my toes under the blankets, thinking about what he’d just said. “Were you happy?”
The sound that came out of Rip’s mouth was a twisted, sad, low laugh. “Nah, baby, you don’t really think about shit like that in that life, but sometimes you bury yourself so deep into something you don’t know how to get out until you wake up one day and know you can’t keep going a minute fucking longer.”
His words slipped beneath my ribs and right into my chest. I knew exactly what that was like. Knowing you couldn’t keep doing something anymore without losing too much. I rubbed my fingers against Rip’s and felt his move right back, not holding mine but just there. There and there and there. Warm and strong and present.
