“Are you here to tell me you don’t trust me?” Tinker asked.
That snapped Abby out of her fugue. “What? No.”
He took a step closer. “Are you here to tell me to fuck off?”
She shook her head. “No.”
Tinker nodded shortly and closed the distance between them. One hand slid behind her head and the other around her waist, jerking her to him. His mouth closed over hers and every single thought flew from her mind.
He was the one with the presence of mind to end the kiss. He pressed his forehead to hers, breathing heavily.
Reality intruded. “We do need to talk.”
He nodded, not lifting his head from hers. “I honestly didn’t expect to see you again.”
“Why?”
Tinker raised his head. “Because very few people ask why—they just take off.” He dropped his hands and stepped back. “I get it. It’s a huge fucking red flag.”
What would she have done if she’d found out on their first date? “I can’t say what I would have done if you had told me right from the start. But here? Now? I don’t want to go anywhere. But?—”
He tensed and crossed his arms.
“I want to hear what happened from you. I know what the arrest report said happened, but I would like you to tell me.”
“Yeah.” Tinker nodded and took a couple of steps away. Maybe putting distance between them would make the telling easier. All he knew was he wouldn’t be able to get through it if she was close to him.
“I told you pieces of this, so you know our parents died when I was seventeen.” He glanced sideways at her, catching her nod.
“Dani’s MMA nickname is ‘The Dancer.’ She got it because from the age of five until she was sixteen years old, she was a ballroom dancer. She was a ranked junior world champion and had more titles than I can even remember. We had moved to Charleston the year before so Dani could train with this dance coach, Dimitrii Popov, who had coached five or six international world champions. This guy was good, and he offered Dani a spot.”
Fuck, this was hard. He rubbed the ridge of his orbital bone with the heel of his hand.
“How did you feel about moving to Charleston?” Abby asked softly.
“Me?” He tried to remember how he felt back then. “I didn’t mind it. It sucked changing schools and leaving all my friends, but Dani and I have always been close. I was really proud of her, and I knew it was a great opportunity. We went to every single one of her competitions.”
He chuckled as a memory surfaced. “We’d been here a few months, and some dumb ass tried giving me shit one time because my picture ended up in the local news from one of Dani’s competitions. My mom used to make us wear matching Team Knight T-shirts. They were black and the letters were in bright pink sequins. He thought it’d be cool to call me a fag and try to make fun of me for wearing it. The next day I wore a neon pink T-shirt that had ‘real men wear sparkles’ written on it in iron-on glitter letters. Shoved him into the lockers so hard it left a dent. Then I made out with his girlfriend.”
“Of course you did.”
He shot her a grin and shrugged. “I was sixteen.”
“Mm-hmm. Continue, maybe without the commentary on your teenage escapades.”
“Just saying, I rocked those shirts.” Still grinning, he grabbed a wrench from the workbench next to him. Having it in his hands gave him something to focus on. “We were good.
“And then…we weren’t. It was late August and one of those big storms we get rolled in. My parents were on their way home from date night. Visibility was bad. Some drunk fuck who thought he didn’t have to obey the laws of physics hydroplaned through a stoplight and plowed into my parents. They died at the scene.”
He turned the wrench over in his hands. The sharp pain of that night had long since eased to a dull ache, but it still hurt. “I had just started my senior year. Dani was in ninth. And it was just us.”
“There was no one else? No other family?”
Tinker shook his head. “My mom’s parents died when we were still kids, and my dad was no contact with his family. I never got the full story, but I’d overheard enough over the years to know they weren’t an option. Neither of them had brothers or sisters. We were it.”
“What did you do?” Abby asked.
Tinker inhaled deeply and let it out slowly. “We had some money from my parents’ life insurance and the insurance payout from the accident, and we ended up being eligible for their social security benefits, so it wasn’t like I had to drop out of school to find a job to support us. But I needed a way to support us both long term and prove to the courts I could continue to support Dani.
