“Far too sane,” he agrees, eyes alight with mischief. “Andhow else would I get to play real, live Operation?” He purses his lips as he looks me over.
“What do you think?” I spread my arms. “Will I live, doc?”
“I’m not sure.” He tilts his head. “My skills are a bit rusty. It’s been—” He squints at the fridge, where he has a whiteboard filled with his illegible scrawl. “One hundred and eighty-three days since you last injured yourself.” His eyes are wide when he looks back at me. “Bailey, it’s a new record.” His whisper is awed.
“No thanks to you.”
He grins. “Face it, my girl,youare a liability.”
“Takes one to know one,” I mutter.
“Ah, but for me it’s devilish. It adds to my charm. I’m a bad boy.”
“You arenota bad boy.” Tristan’s far more complicated than that.
He pouts briefly before he taps the counter. “Up you go.”
I hop up onto the cool marble. Tristan sets the bottle down next to me, then a bottle of antiseptic. “It’s shocking how low your pain tolerance is. I practically have to coddle you.” He mimes snapping on surgical gloves and I scowl.
“In a perfect world, I wouldn’t get injured,Tristan.”
He steps between my legs. We’re the same height like this. He braces his arms on the counter. “Let me kiss it and make it better,” he teases.
I’m used to his teasing, but this time, something twinges in my stomach.
“That’s unsanitary.”
He wets a paper towel with antiseptic. “You cried like a little baby last time.”
I shove at his shoulder. It’s like shoving a boulder. “So did you.”
Tristan and I have been bandaging each other up in this kitchen for years. Him, when he fell out of a tree during a prank and scraped his back up. I made that one hurt as payback. Me, when I was stung by a wasp and he plucked the stingers out of my shoulder. Most recently when I punched myself in the face while doing bagwork in the gym and split my lip. He laughed for days over that one.
“And yet, here we are again.” He holds up the paper towel. “You know how this will go.”
I squeeze my eyes shut and sigh. “Fine. This is how it always ends.”
He chuckles, then passes me the bottle of liquor. “Where’s your gun?”
I crack the top. “At home in the safe. I’m off duty.” I take a hearty sip, then roll the whiskey over my tongue. It’s sweeter and smokier than Prince bourbon.
Tristan snags the bottle, then tips the whiskey back, careful not to touch his upper lip. The motion of his Adam’s apple draws my eye. Tristan has a nice throat. Strong, bronzed, curving into a set of very nice shoulders.
He wipes at his bottom lip with his thumb, and my stomach twinges.
Tristan might be my best friend, but right now, as our fingers brush and his eyes gleam as he passes me back the bottle, he feels like a stranger. In the sunlit kitchen, his eyes are gem-bright and he looks half-feral, the way he did earlier.
When he came for me, protected me, held me. Even though I never ask anyone for help and I never expect anyone to come. Tristan came.
Normally, I wouldn’t have another drink, but something inside me wants to put my lips where his have been. I drink while I hold his gaze, the smoky liquid warming me fromthe inside out. He was different today.More.More protective than I’ve ever seen him. It makes me see him in a new light. More than just a friend, aman. One who’d go to war for the ones he loves.
His lids go heavy as he watches. “Bold today,” he murmurs.
“Feels like I cheated death,” I say lightly, but my heart is thudding as he watches me. When we’ve bandaged each other before, it’s been clinical, never intimate. The air has never been thick like this. His gaze has never felt physical like this. I want to roll my shoulders to ease the tension, but I hold myself still on the counter as his fingers dance over my stomach, grazing the edges of the scrapes.
“How’d you get these?”
I swallow the shiver that rises. “When I rolled onto my stomach on the platform. I was too short to hit it at the right height.”
