“Wootek?!”
I whip around so fast I barely get my jeans zipped up.
Anaise’s outline is visible with the alley light illuminating her from behind.
I squint my eyes until my pupils adjust, but before I get a chance to answer her, Carey is pushing past me, his shoulder colliding with mine like he’s already punishing me for my future behavior.
From behind, I see him swipe the back of his hand across his mouth, then glance back at me as he zips up his jacket.
“Why are you back here?” Anaise slurs out.
“He wanted his keys and I wasn’t willing to give them over,” he says like it’s nothing. And the cackle that explodes from within Anaise’s tiny body as she links arms with Carey, is the permission I needed to exhale.
We didn’t get caught.
No one saw us.
No one knows, and that's how it needs to stay.
Another day.
The same day.
It's been five days of this shit.
Two days of ignoring him completely, then three pretending like nothing happened right to his face.
He was right.
He’s always fucking right.
Carey Novak, the golden child, can do no wrong.
It may have been five nights since the alley, but I can still feel his hands on my body.
Every time I close my eyes I see him looking up at me with my cock poised at his lips.
I can’t take a single step anywhere without reliving the way he pulled away from me at the end. The look he gave me as he glanced back over his shoulder was fifty percent pride of conquest, and fifty percent grief for what he knew would never happen. And like an angel, he accepted it. No fight. Nodiscussion. He just showed up at work, and within thirty seconds he figured out where he stood, and just fell into line.
He hasn’t joked with me, or pushed one conversation past the bare minimum.
He smiles at every client, even the ones who rarely look up from their phones, and somehow, by the time they leave, they're smiling back at him. If only he’d put up a fight, or act even a little bit like that night mattered to him, then maybe I could find it in me to—
Fuck, I hate myself.
Nothing else can ever happen between us.
I need his brother to come back. With Eden here it’ll be different. They’ll probably bicker so much that Carey will quit, then I can get my life back. I need him out of sight to get him out of my mind, but I’m too weak. Just having him in the same room brings my body a level of peace I’ve not known for so long, but it's costing me my sanity. I've not been eating right for weeks, and last night a walk-in client kept me in the shop till well past midnight. Too drained to drive home, I passed out in my van, the exhaustion leaving no room for the guilt to seep in. At the time it was serendipity, but now I'm running on fumes and there's a tremor in my hand.
I wipe away the last of the excess black ink from my client’s thigh. “It looks great,” he says, and I force a smile.
“It’s ninety-nine percent of the way there.” I really should just finish. It doesn’t need the grey highlights, but I’m already squeezing the ink into the cup.
Considering how tiny of a portion I need, I spill a crazy amount of it.
The tremor is getting worse.
I look at Carey to see if he saw. He’s leaning on the desk with his elbows, not flirting, just talking with my next client—Liv, the girl from weeks ago who got the Ouroboros-tailed cats. Mid-sentence, his eyes meet mine and I almost jump out of my skin. He stares, expressionless, but I know what he's thinking;what a fucking child.
