Say it Louder (6 page)

I shove down an appreciative chuckle. She’s more than a gutsy girl—she’s a woman with a razor-sharp point of view. In a world of groupie Barbie dolls and calculating alpha bitches, Willa doesn’t give a shit who likes her politics. She’s going to shove it in their faces anyway.

I follow her down the alley and then another shadowed sidewalk, and as we pass a bar that’s emptying of its last few patrons, Willa’s skittish. She twines her fingers through mine.

Like we’re just a regular couple.

Out for a stroll at two a.m.

I hold her hand, enjoying its strong, even pressure. I don’t remember the last time I held hands with Kristina. Years ago? Probably. We held hands when we were young and fresh in love or lust, when we were exploring each other.

We travel a dozen blocks in silence, Willa’s pace faster than commuters at rush hour. It’s like her feet don’t touch the ground; she moves with the kind of purpose and agility I see in Olympic athletes.

We go under an elevated rail bridge and pass a handful of homeless camps: tents, cardboard, and some with their sleeping bags right on the sidewalk. Willa waves at a fiftyish man in a knitted beanie who’s sitting cross-legged and smoking.

“Hey, Hal.”

He nods back. “Good night?”

“Always.” She pats the bag on her hip. “Doing a little decorating.”

“Good night for it,” Hal agrees and blows out a long smoke trail. Willa approaches him and for a moment I think they shake, but I see a folded bill pass from her hand to his.

Is she doing a drug deal?
The question makes me rethink everything I know—or don’t know—about Willa. I don’t want to get caught up in this.

But then Hal squeezes her shoulder and wheezes a thank you, and I realize Willa was just slipping him a little cash. The fact that she was trying to do it unnoticed intrigues me more.

She takes a sharp turn and ascends a flight of concrete steps—steep and narrow, we climb up a slope until we’re level with the rail bridge. She glances back at me, then ducks through a break in the chain link and steps out on a metal span, maybe a foot wide. She walks the beam to the middle of the bridge, maybe forty feet above the traffic zooming below.

And then she sits. Just sits down and gets comfortable, like it’s her couch and not a deadly fall into traffic.

Willa turns to me, still at the edge of safety, and the lights below her illuminate her expression. A challenge. Warehouses line most of this block and cars race below, filling the air with a constant drone of tires on pavement, but we’re above it all.

I pick my way across the beam, heart in my throat, until I get close enough to sit. Squatting down next to her is nearly my undoing, but I manage to get my butt on the bridge rail without plunging to my death.

“That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“I don’t even want to think about getting up.” My sweat-slicked palms grip the grimy, cold metal edge.

“You get used to it. Mind over matter.”

“I take it heights don’t bother you?”

“Heights are what keep me from being bothered. Nobody’s going to mess with us here.”
 

I think of the men walking down the street and scoot just a little bit closer to Willa, my arm brushing hers as we sit side by side, feet dangling.

“Also, when you’re up high, you’re close to invisible.”
 

I raise my brow in a question.

Willa continues, “You ever see someone just walking down the sidewalk, looking up?”

I shake my head.

“Plenty of people look down, but hardly anyone looks up. Plus, cops’ hats have that brim, so stuff up high is hidden from their peripheral vision.” She shrugs. “Learn something new every day, don’t you, Dave?”

I nod, a smile on my lips. For the last hour, I’ve forgotten what could be waiting for me at home, forgotten about the filth that Kristina could shovel to the media about my band, forgotten my tickets on the pity train, the Poor-Me Express.

Willa let me live in her world for an hour. And it was magical.

CHAPTER NINE

I don’t date. There’s work, there’s art, and there’s sleep.

That doesn’t leave time to swoon over boys. But the time I spent on that rail bridge with Dave is the most date-like thing that’s ever happened to me.

Ask me to replay tonight and I can’t tell you much of what we talked about. It was just … stuff. Stuff we like. Funny shit that happened to us. Embarrassing stuff.

I talked about Nancy, how she and Ivy planned a trip to Paris after Ivy’s diagnosis. Ivy died before they could make the trip, so Nancy gave me a ticket. It was the first amazing thing anyone’s done for me since Thomas hired me, I told Dave.

Dave didn’t volunteer much about himself. When I asked about how he grew up, he shut it down.

“My parents are gone,” he said simply.

“Gone where?” Then I got his meaning and I mentally kicked myself. “Oh. I’m sorry.”

“Heart attack for my dad. While I was in college. Mom passed a couple of years before that, my senior year in high school. Lung cancer.” Dave said it like he was reading a report, blank and emotionless.

“You miss them?” I knew I was on shaky ground, but curiosity was winning.

“Yeah. But the band and Tyler’s mom took me in like family. And if I’m being really honest, they’re a lot more like family than my parents were. Growing up, it always felt like we were just trying to get by.”

“I know that feeling.”

We were quiet for a long while, just watching the traffic zoom below us, but my heart squeezed with a strange feeling.

The small pieces Dave revealed started shaping a bigger picture that I could almost see come together. It was like staring at a half-done canvas and being struck by a sense of where the next brush strokes needed to be, but not sure if I could trust myself to make them right.
 

I’m starting to
get
him, and that understanding comes with a whole boatload of feelings that make my stomach squirm.

Dave’s got this cloud hanging over him, the fear of what’s next, but there’s something inside him that’s seeking light.

Some of my crunchy clients talk about auras and chakras and energy fields, and while I don’t buy all of that, I get what they mean. When I’m inking someone, I have a sense of their light or darkness. My needle bites into their skin, I blot their blood as I work, and maybe it’s the smell of them or the feeling that ghosts across my skin when I meet their eyes as they lay back in my chair.

Blood and needles, ink and paint. Take all of humanity and you can boil down our motivations, our light and dark, into these essential elements. Murder, drugs, stories, art. They all come from blood and needles, ink and paint.

I come from this place.

Dave comes from another world. A world of rhythm—he taps out a beat without realizing it, his fingertips patting his jeans as I was painting tonight. He doesn’t know blood and needles the way I do. And yet, the way he’s hinted around the edges of a problem, I know there’s a darkness haunting him.

As I led us back to my apartment, Dave’s silence was strung taut with what he left unsaid on the bridge. It’s like he
wants
to say it, but admitting it would make it more real.

***

I scrub my face, brush my teeth, and before I leave the bathroom I toe one of the loose floor tiles back into place around my stained tub. Like everything else in this crumbling warren of apartments, it’s beyond repair.

“Bathroom’s free if you need it.”

Dave’s pacing by my couch and he looks at me uncertainly. “Thanks.” He passes me and a current of air licks at my sleeve, as if he reached out to touch me. Goose bumps prickle my forearms.
 

My bed “room” is just a mattress on pallets, with clothes stacked on shelves built from crates. I hear the bathroom door close and I whip off my leggings, then trade my long-sleeve shirt for an extra-large T-shirt that hangs off one shoulder.

I catch myself wondering what Dave will think, and then I crumple up that thought and squish it back to the edge of my brain. I don’t have the pajama sets or pretty lingerie I suspect most girls do, but this is what I sleep in. I’m not changing that just because I have company.

I have no clue why Dave
really
needs a place to crash, but I’ve been there before. I can barely fathom his privileged life, let alone a secret so terrible that he has to abandon it.

I fill a plastic Subway cup with water in the kitchen, drain it, and look up to see Dave emerge from the bathroom, wearing only boxer briefs.

Holy hell.

My eyes instantly go to his chest, hard planes of muscle and a compact stomach with hair curling all the way down to … oh, no.

I turn around to force myself to stop staring. Ever since he kissed me—check that, ever since I
made
him kiss me—my body’s been on high alert. And now he’s practically naked and standing in my apartment.

This is either the best or worst thing that ever happened to me.

Dave steps toward me and his hand reaches past my shoulder. I look up, and his face is inches from mine. Is this another kiss coming? A real, voluntary kiss?

My breasts betray me, tightening as my nipples poke at the T-shirt. Shit.

Dave pulls back, though, and I realize he’s only reached for a cup on the shelf behind me. This one’s from McDonald’s and I cringe a bit, wondering what he must think of me, recycling cheap plastic fast-food cups instead of buying actual glasses.

Wait. What the hell am I saying? I don’t give a shit what people think of me. My pink hair and sleeves of tattoos are proof of that.

Dave fills his cup with water and takes a long drink—long enough for me to covertly check out his tattoos. The words
love
and
fear
are spelled out across his knuckles.

The tattoos on his arms intrigue me: abstract and absent of color, they’re intricate, good edges, nice balance through the stroke that gets the ink even through each line.

“How many do you have?” I ask, trying to sound like it’s just professional curiosity. No, I totally don’t want a closer look at this man’s smooth, olive skin. The way it’s taught against his muscles, the way it hollows to a V at his waist, the way it dips to a crescent at his navel.

“Seven.”

My brows lift. I only see three.

“How many do
you
have?” His eyes crawl across my shoulder, where the top of my bee sleeve is exposed.

“Depends on how you count. I’ve sat for twenty-six sessions, but a lot of the work blends together when you’re doing a full sleeve.” I rotate my arm to show him an ocean wave that flows from the inside of my elbow to the back of my arm, the foam carefully shaded with detail.

Dave catches my wrist, then slowly rotates my arm. He should be looking at the tattoos, but his eyes are locked on mine, and suddenly I’m feeling too exposed, too raw from his gaze that traps me in place.

I move to step away from him and go to bed but he doesn’t release my hand. His pressure is just enough to maintain our connection.

I could pull away, shake off his grasp, but his fingers warm the pulse point in my wrist, his voice is soft with a gentle request. “Show me more?”

CHAPTER TEN

Dave stills, waiting for an answer. I chill and wrap my free arm around my chest, shy knowing my full breasts are apparent through the thin T-shirt.

There’s warmth in his touch, in his voice, in his gaze. And I want more. I want him closer, the way our arms kept brushing as we sat on that rail beam, neither of us admitting that every single touch was intended.

Every one.

“I’ll show you a few.” I walk back to my bed and sit, nodding at him to follow before I lose my nerve. “But you have to show me yours, too.”

Dave chuckles. “I like the sound of that.”

I glare at him. “Don’t. I’m a professional, remember?”

I tip the cracked shade on the lamp near my bed so the bare bulb stares at us. I’m too exposed but Dave looks comfortable in his own skin, like he parades around in black boxer briefs all day.

Maybe he does. Rock stars are known for weird shit.

“I like this one.” Dave says as he sits on the mattress and turns toward me. One hand wraps around my wrist again, anchoring my arm in place. His other hand explores, tracing the lines of my honeybees and their flowers. He pushes my T-shirt sleeve up to the top of my shoulder, then trails his fingers down my arm.