“Shep?”
“Yeah, yeah, I said hold on.”
He managed to get inside, get the door shut and locked, and get her laid out on the couch.
Then he got his first good look at her—more importantly, at what she was wearing.
“What the fuck?”
She twisted her upper body, and cracked her eyes open. “Hm?”
She had on a dress. Deep red andvelvet. Did peoplewearvelvet anymore? When her jacket fell open—cropped, leather,not warm enough for the February cold—he saw that its straps were narrow little spaghetti lines, and the hem flashed way too much leg. The shoes were a feat of footwear engineering, and clearly something she’d borrowed or stolen from her sister.
She was dressed like a model with a coke habit, and the fact had him clenching and unclenching his fists. Did Raven know she went out looking like this? Toly?
Or had the little brat gotten dressed in her dorm with no one the wiser and gone to the Upper West Side to meet some skeevy guy with a beanie who couldn’t even grow a mustache?
The latter seemed likelier.
Now that they were safe inside the apartment, the door locked against prying eyes and little shithead date-rapers, anger swept through him in a bristling hot tide. He closed his eyes, and then pressed his hand over them for good measure, afraid that if he kept looking at her, he’d start shouting and never stop.
He was just tired, he reasoned. Anyone would feel like shouting if they were awakened at three a.m. A pitiful excuse for the rage that boiled in his gut, but one that allowed him to talk himself back from the edge.
When he opened his eyes, Cass was still again, head cocked at an uncomfortable-looking angle, mouth open and hair trailing across her slack face. Even that was different: crunchy and stiff with product and worked into iron-created twists.
She’d gone out trying to impress someone. Probably the little douchebag he’d scared off the sidewalk and back into his six-million-dollar townhouse.
Had Raven known that was where she was going? Maybe. He sure hadn’t. When she first started school, she’d yammered on about all her friends, and her plans. She’d told him things she wouldn’t tell her sister.
But he hadn’t known about tonight, and that…well, it didn’tsting. He didn’tcare.
The truth of it was, she was growing up. Hell, she was grown. Her birthday was next month, and she would be twenty, and in the three years he’d known her, she’d gone from a lanky kid obsessed with K-Pop bands to a…the wordwomangot stuck somewhere between intuition and acknowledgement, so he cursed himself and went to the fridge for a banana bag.
~*~
A full bladder woke Cassandra. She rolled onto her side, smacked her lips, and found that her mouth was dry as the Sahara and tasted foul. When she kicked her legs, she felt unfamiliar sheets, and the light fell across her closed eyelids form an unfamiliar angle.
What happened at the party? She remembered the sidewalk, and spilling water. Had Sig gotten her inside? Was she inhisbed?
If asked a few days ago, she would have said she was glad to wake up in his bed, but now, in the moment, it was panic rather than joy that crackled to life inside her, waking her the rest of the way up.
When she opened her eyes, she saw bunk beds. Ugly, flat carpet, plain white walls. She turned her head and saw the underside of another bunk, which meant she was on the bottom. Did Sig havebunk beds?
Then the penny dropped. This was the bunk room at the Lean Dogs’ flat downtown. And then she remembered calling Shep. Maybe puking all over his shoes.
“Ugh,” she muttered when she sat up. The room didn’t spin, but her head felt split open, and her hands shook when she folded back the blankets and shifted laboriously to hang her legs off the side of the mattress.
A quick check revealed that her dress was gone and she was instead dressed in an oversized man’s t-shirt, which meantsomeone (Shep, it had been Shep, he was the only one staying at the flat just now) had changed her out of her dress. Her bra and panties were still on, so she hadn’t been naked, but the lingerie, she remembered with a wince, was burgundy lace and didn’t conceal much. A cotton ball was taped to the inside of her elbow, and the skin and joint were sore when she flexed her arm. An IV, then, which explained needing to pee.
Someone’s (Shep’s, of course it was Shep’s, it even smelled like his cologne) hoodie was hanging off the top bunk, and she pulled it on and made her way to the bathroom. Her reflection, when she washed her hands, proved pale and bedraggled, hair greasy at the roots from the styling paste. She’d done her makeup heavily last night, lots of smoky eyeshadow, but all of that was gone; Shep had wiped her face clean. She used her finger and a dollop of toothpaste to clean out her sour mouth, but gave up on trying to comb out her hair. She needed a shower—when she could manage one.
Her stomach still felt uneasy, but the scent of frying bacon drew her out into the main part of the flat.
Shep stood at the stove, his back to her, wearing a worn-thin white t-shirt that clung flatteringly to the muscles of his back, the broad, flat planes of his shoulder blades. He had a mermaid tattooed on the back of his left bicep, her colors muted from years of sun exposure, and it looked like she was swimming as he worked the spatula.
Tired and sore and a little nauseous, Cass was still an artist, and she took a moment to admire the little details she would include if she were painting him. The sharp horizontal line at his nape where the barber had used the clippers to square off his new haircut. The ropy veins that laced his forearm, visible when he reached up into the cabinet for the pepper. The little worn place at the waistband of his joggers where the elastic showed through. The nips and soft folds of the shirt where hiswaist tapered in sharply beneath his ribs. He ate like crap, but he worked out hard and it showed in every part of him.
She didn’t say anything, but he knew she was there without turning his head. “You gonna eat if I plate this up?”
