I didn’t like that.
I knocked his knee with mine gently. “Are you okay?”
Carefully not meeting my eyes, he glanced at my face before his gaze fixed on my eyebrow. “Let me help you.”
I nodded easily. “Okay.”
He rose to his knees and brought a waft of coconut and cherries with him. And now that I could focus, I could smell beer there too. But mostly it was justCody. Sunscreen and lip balm. Vulnerable and reticent. Loyal and exacting. Intense.
Keen, but somehow utterly unaware.
He reached out and, with so much care, moved my hair behind my shoulder. I kept watching him like a moth surveilled a grumpy flame. His defined cheekbones, his furrowed brow, his darkening irises—I searched anywhere I could look for clues to what was happening in his mind as he smoothed not one butterfly bandage over the cut, but three. He sat back, one stair higher than me this time, and balled his fist tightly, making the plastic crackle. His face remained fixed in a perfect brood and seemed content to stay that way.
That wouldn’t do, but before I could lodge anything against it, he made a demand.
“Show me your hands, Liem.”
I cocked my head to the side and tried to catch his gaze, but he was lasered in on my thighs, where I’d unconsciously been resting my hands in a position that wasn’t entirely natural. I flexed my fingers experimentally before I stilled at the pain. Lifting them slowly between us, the black flowers danced with spears of shadows as I reached toward him.
He took in the partially dried blood and did the impossible by brooding even harder. His voice was strained and nearly an octave lower, his register a deep bass as he instructed, “The other side.”
I rotated my hands and lifted my palms in offering.
Of what, I wasn’t sure.
But it didn’t matter.
He could have it.
13
Cody
Liem’spalms were scraped to hell, and I’d never seen anything worse in my life.
Which, unfortunately, wasn’t true. But it damn well felt like it.
I opened the alcohol swab and gently washed away the blood from the top of his hand. Then I opened another and ran it over the scrapes until they were relatively clean.
The longer I stared at them, the louder one particular thought circling my mind became until I had to voice it. “You’re an artist.”
The world needed what he created with them.Ineeded them.
Careful not to touch the angry slashes, I slid my hands under his and pulled his open palms closer, angling them toward the floodlight that streamed above the door to Bay Hall to check my work. The scrapes weren’t so bad up close, but they covered almost the entire palm of his left hand and a good bit of his right too. He must have tried to catch himself with his dominant hand, giving it the brunt of the fall.
Without thinking, I blew a soft, steady stream of air onto his left hand. His fingers twitched as he shifted uncomfortably.
“Sorry,” I murmured, frowning at the cuts. It had to sting. “You said you were fixed up, but these weren’t cleaned. Why?”
Liem cleared his throat before answering, “I didn’t show him.”
I grunted. “Might’ve been for the best. That dude was a bit twitchy. He also tried to shake my hand with a glove on.”
Liem’s light laughter sliced away the surface level of tension in my body, and I finally regained some small degree of clarity. Enough for the important questions, but not enough to let his hands go, apparently. “What happened?”
His eyes gleamed even in the dim light. “I flew.”
Leveling him with an unimpressed look, I tapped my finger on his wrist and then lightly strummed the hair tie that was still there. He watched the motion for a moment before speaking again. “I’m really not sure. I was headed to the BTB booth, and the next thing I knew, I was in the air. And then I wasn’t.”
