Page 77 of Waiting for You

"What's the date?"

"The day her mother signed her over to me." He watched the needle move across his skin. "My sister wasn't in a state to keep her, and everybody on God's earth had an opinion about whose fault that was and what I ought to do about it. I stopped asking them and filed the paperwork myself."

"That's a big thing to take on."

"Taking her was the easy part." He flexed the hand I wasn't working on. "People hated me for it, my sister most of all, for a long while. I was the man who took her kid." He was quiet a moment. "I'd sign it again tomorrow. The thing that stays with me is the year before it, when I knew something was wrong in that house and kept telling myself it wasn't my place to step in."

I kept the needle steady against his arm.

"That's the part that finds you at three in the morning," he said. "The hard thing you go and do, you learn to live with. The one you watched yourself skip just sits there and waits for you."

"You get this philosophical under the needle with everybody?" I asked, keeping my voice light, because the alternative was admitting how close to the bone that cut.

"It's the only place anybody makes me hold still long enough to think." His mouth edged toward a smile. "My wife says I should be paying you double. Half for the ink and half for the counseling."

I laughed, but my hands had gone careful, and my mind was across the city in a study with a mahogany desk, sitting across from a man who had spent thirty years deciding what was best for me and calling it love.

"I've got no use for what-ifs," he said, half to himself, watching the line come together. "A what-if is just a thing you were too much of a coward to go and find out."

I finished the shading without saying much after that.

When it was done, he studied the fresh work for a long time, the name resting between the two dates, the skin already flushing pink around it.

"Worth being the bad guy," he said. "Every single time."

I wiped him down, taped it, and told him to keep it out of the sun. At the door I stopped him, because I didn't want him to be just another arm I'd worked on and forgotten.

"Hey. What's your name again? I'm hopeless with them."

"Marcus."

"Marcus." I shook his hand. "Come back when it's healed and I'll touch up whatever needs it."

"I will." He lifted two fingers off his temple, half a salute, and was gone.

I sat alone in the empty studio with the buzz still ringing in my ears.

I'd been telling myself I'd deal with my father once I was ready. Once I was strong enough, settled enough, far enough out from under him to walk into that house and not shrink. I'd been telling myself that for eight years, and the readiness had never come.

I didn't do anything about it. I rinsed my tubes, wiped down the station, and filed his words away with everything else I wasn't ready to look at. But they wouldn't settle. They kept knocking.

My father wasn't the only hard thing I'd watched myself skip.

My mind kept replaying the Hawaii confrontation. I'd rehashed Xavier's words until they lost all meaning, but it was my own behavior that wouldn't let me go. Stripped of the lies I'd told myself, the truth was ugly. I'd called it moving on. It was nothing so clean.

It gutted me that he'd moved on, or that he'd looked like he had. What I felt wasn't rage, and it wasn't some debt I thought he owed me. It was pride, plain and wounded. I'd watched him across the room at Violet's wedding, whole and easy and over me, and I couldn't bear for him to see I was anything less.

So I'd brought Andrew and tried to look like a woman who'd landed on her feet. But the performance kept failing. I kept swapping seats to end up next to Xavier, kept stretching out every conversation, kept telling myself it was nothing. It wasn't nothing. I was pulling threads loose in a life I no longer had any right to touch.

Xavier read my actions as a pattern, and he was right. I'd dressed up that same behavior as innocent coincidence. I was lying.

The worst part was that he hadn't moved on. He carried the same burden I did. He'd been trying to look past the damage I'd caused, building a livable life, and I crashed back in and pulled it apart anyway, too consumed with proving I was fine to care what it cost him.

I'd hurt a man who was already bleeding. I'd been selfish and proud, and I refused to admit it until Hawaii burned away my excuses. I didn't deserve Xavier. I wasn't sure I deserved much of anything.

To be fair, he hadn't fought for me either. He took my packaged ring and vague note without a single question, and when I finally told him the truth in that corridor, that my father had sworn to burn his whole life down, he called it movie-villain fiction and turned to stone. We'd both walked away from the same fire and blamed the other for the burns.

But with Marcus's words still ringing in my ears, I was tired of keeping score. Keeping score was just another way of sitting in a dark studio waiting for a readiness that was never coming.