Chapter Seven
THEY WEREN’Ta birthmark. Cal lay tangled in cotton sheets and rich boy and brushed his fingertips carefully over the red marks that dripped from Joe’s forehead down to his eyebrow. The skin was raised slightly and rough to the touch.
“What happened?” Cal asked.
Joe turned his head and gently—then not so gently—bit the heel of Cal’s hand. He stretched out on the narrowbed—Cal’s room only had a single—and tucked one arm behind his head.
“You want to get to know me now?” he asked.
Cal shrugged and dropped his head back against the pillows. He closed his eyes. That wasn’t the sort of thing you fucking admitted, even to yourself, even if it was true.
“My nanny splashed boiling water on me when I was a kid,” Joe said after a moment. “I had a lot of surgery apparently,to minimize the scars, and that’s all that’s left. He never fired her. She was with us until I was, like, eight and Dad sent me to boarding school.”
Cal winced. “Sorry.”
“I don’t remember it.” Joe shrugged. He nudged Cal’s thigh with his knee. “What about you? What happened to your ribs?”
“Nothing.”
Joe walked his fingers—finally warmed up—from Cal’s hip to his ribs. He poked his fingers rightinto a ticklish spot, and Cal swore as his nerves twitched an overreaction.
“Don’t,” he grumbled as he opened his eyes. “I know where it is.”
“So do I,” Joe said. “I showed you mine.”
Cal glanced sidelong at Joe, at the red flush of old scar tissue, and tried to decide if story for story was a fair trade. He begrudged that he had to admit it was. It wasn’t a secret, but he didn’t want to talkabout it.
“I got stabbed.”
Joe waited. So did Cal, as he watched ready sympathy bloom on Joe’s face and then quickly fade into wary suspicion.
“Edward said you had a record,” Joe said bluntly. That was for the best. Cal appreciated that he didn’t beat around the bush. “Is that why you got hurt?”
“Figured he would tell you,” Cal said. He scratched his ribs. There was an inch of skin on eitherside of the scar that he couldn’t feel. “And no. I stole cars. People didn’t even know they’d been robbed until the valet couldn’t find their Bugatti. Never even got a black eye on the job, never mind stabbed.”
“So what happened?” Joe asked as he moved his hand away.
“I’d only gotten out of jail, and I went on a bender with my brother,” Cal said. “We were both drunk, and some kid came to thebar to find his girlfriend and her friend. Or his friend. I don’t remember. She wasn’t there—smart girl—and since he’d walked all that way, he didn’t want to go home without stabbingsomeone.”
It sounded almost funny. At the time it hadn’t been. Cal didn’t even remember the kid until the moment he nearly staggered over him. He’d been skinny and strung out, visibly at the end of something. Calhad put his hand on the kid’s shoulder, easygoing with beer, and apologized for the near collision.
That still pissed him off. He’d said “sorry” to the man who was about to stab him in the side.
He hadn’t actually felt it at first, not really. The knuckles had thumped against his side, and then he’d felt what felt like a cold stitch between his ribs. It was only when he saw the blood soak throughhis shirt that he registered it really hurt and he couldn’t quite breathe.
“What did you do?”
Cal paused and glanced sidelong at Joe’s narrow, elegant face and dark, wary eyes.
“He stabbed me,” he said. “I bled a lot and yelled for help.”
It was the truth. It wasn’t 100 percent of the truth. It skipped the bit where Cal got twenty stitches and an orange juice, and the stabber spent two weeksin intensive care. Cal didn’t like violence, but he’d grown up too pretty not to be good at it, especially when he was drunk and full of anger about the year he’d pissed away.
“Sounds sensible,” Joe said. It was hard to tell if he was skeptical or impressed.
“It wasn’t serious,” Cal said. He untangled himself from Joe and the sheets as he sat up, the floor cold under his feet. “It hurt likehell, but I wasn’t going to die. It… made me realize some stuff, and I thought a reminder would be a good idea.”
If he’d died, there’d have been one person who gave a crap at his funeral, and even El would have been better off. Cal hadn’t wanted to go back to jail before that, but that was the first time he really wanted to clean up his act.
