“Marshall suggested we could come over for lunch.”
I groaned, sliding down until my head hit the pillows. It was already three in the morning, and lunch time wasn’t terribly far away. The nature of my work as a tattooer meant I could make my own hours and those hours rarely had me up before ten in the morning, though that had changed the more often Smith spent the night since he had normal working hours.
“At one,” he added.
“Then we’ve got to get to sleep.”
Smith sat on the edge of the bed, then joined me under the sheets. He hooked a leg over my hip and pulled my back against his chest, kissing the nape of my neck.
“Is this okay?”
“It’s nice.” I swallowed hard, blinking back tears. “I love you.”
“I love you.” He tightened his arms around me. “I feel like you’ve given me my life back.”
“Funny,” I murmured, “I was just thinking the same thing.”
We fell asleep wrapped up like that and woke up the next morning, neither of us having moved an inch. I turned in Smith’s arms, smiling at the sight of him blinking sleep out of his eyes and stretching out in my bed like a cat. Gray morning light filtered in through the window, and there was somethingaltogether tentative and new about the way Smith touched me beneath it. Nothing between us had changed, but somehow everything felt different.
Stronger.
“Do you want coffee?” I asked, brushing my thumb across the tip of his nose.
“Very much.”
I untangled myself from Smith’s arms and climbed out of bed. I remembered to get a pair of pajamas from my dresser before heading into the living room. Toren sat on the edge of the couch, the blanket folded neatly beside him.
“Oh, good.” He slapped his thighs and stood. “You’re up.”
“Is it late?” I asked.
“After nine, but…I would have left. I’ve been up awhile, but I can’t lock the door after me and I didn’t want to leave your shop unlocked.”
“I hadn’t even thought about that.” I winced. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“Damon has been on me to do one of those electronic keypad things, but I’ve never gotten around to it. Let me get a shirt and I’ll walk you down.”
In the bedroom, I grabbed a plain white undershirt from the dresser and tugged it into place. Smith hadn’t moved from the bed except to get his phone.
“Okay?” he asked.
“Walking Toren out.” I grabbed Ev’s hoodie from the back of the chair, that must have been where Smith left it when he changed the night before, and suddenly the material felt like lead in my hands. “Do you…would you mind if I gave him this?”
Smith chewed his lip between his teeth and looked from the hoodie to my face and back to the hoodie again.
“I understand the hoodie has history to you,” he said carefully. “And you don’t owe that history to his brother unless it was something that should have been his from the start.”
There was truth in those words, for sure, but Toren’s reappearance had me unsettled, feeling like every memory I’d kept of Ev’s was somehow stolen. I sank down on the edge of the bed and smoothed the well-worn garment over my lap. Yeah, it had been Ev’s once, and then it had been mine, but now it felt like it belonged a little to Smith too. And Toren had no part in that relationship.
“You’re right.” I set the hoodie on the bed between us. “I just…”
“You can find ways to share the memory,” he said. “If that’s even something the two of you want to dredge up.”
“You’re right.” I cleared my throat and stood up, pushing the hoodie a little closer to Smith. He took my meaning and pulled it onto his lap.
Slipping out of the bedroom, I found Toren by the front door, hands shoved into the back pockets of his jeans.
