Dustin's expression flickered—something vulnerable passing through before he could hide it. Greg remembered the last time he'd asked about this topic. Dustin had moved on to distract him with the fries.
Greg couldn't let himself get distracted this time.
“Why does it matter?” Dustin asked.
“I'm trying to establish a timeline of significant events.”
“God, you really are going fulldetective, aren't you?” Dustin ran a hand through his damp hair. The motion lifted his shirt, exposing a strip of stomach. Greg looked at his clipboard very intensely.
“It's relevant to the investigation.”
“Fine.” Dustin blew out a breath. “I was sixteen. Tyler and I found this cliff behind our high school. We convinced ourselves we wanted to jump it. We spent weeks planning how we'd do it.”
“Without training?”
“Without anything. We were sixteen and stupid and convinced we were immortal.” Dustin's mouth twisted. “We had it all figured out. We were going to be legends. Well, until Mom overheard us planning.” Dustin laughed. “The look on her face.” He shook his head. “She sat us down and I thought, this is it. She's going to lock us in our rooms and throw away the keys.”
“She didn't?”
“Nope. She enrolled us in skydiving lessons.”
Greg blinked. “She... what?”
“She made sure we were as educated as we could be. Ground school, tandem jumps, solo certification. Everything.” Dustin shrugged, but his eyes were distant. “She said she knew she couldn't stop us. So she'd make sure we didn't kill ourselves doing it wrong.”
That was... not what Greg had expected. He wrote nothing on his clipboard. His pen hovered uselessly over the paper.
“That's an unusual parenting approach,” he managed.
“That's Mom.” Dustin's voice was strange—fond and frustrated at the same time. “At some point she gave up trying to stop us from doing dangerous shit and just made sure we knew what we were doing.”
“So that's how you got so good,” Greg heard himself say.
“Yeah.” Dustin's expression softened. “We got really good. But skydiving wasn't enough.” He paused. “I want to show you something.”
Before Greg could say anything, Dustin was pulling his shirt over his head and tossing it aside like it was nothing, showing off a truly unreasonable amount of bare skin.
Bare skin and tattoos.
That was distracting.
That wasverydistracting.
Focus,Greg told himself.You're here to investigate.
But Greg's eyes weren't cooperating with the investigation. They were too busy cataloging the planes of Dustin's chest. The definition of his shoulders. The scattered ink across his skin—so much ink, chaotic and beautiful, different styles and sizes, collected like souvenirs.
There was a swallow on his shoulder, wind and cloud lines wrapping around one forearm, a snake on his upper arm, a dagger with a rose…
“Greg.”
Greg's eyes snapped up. Dustin was watching him with undisguised amusement.
He pointed to a small tattoo that sat on his ribs, over his heart. “These are the coordinates of our first BASE jump.”
“Oh.” That was meaningful, wasn't it?
Greg wondered if the other tattoos had meaning too.
