AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He snorted. “You aren’t working with those hands.”
I looked at my hands then shrugged. “I’ve dealt with way worse so many times I can’t even count that high.”
And I had.
I’d done a lot of stuff I hadn’t wanted to do when I was younger.
Though, thank freakin’ God, it hadn’t been anything sexual in nature like my sister had to deal with.
But I’d been beaten, berated, forced into child labor.
Hell, it took me two years to get my GED because my dad had zero desire whatsoever to give us a basic education.
Needless to say, I could deal with pain if I had to.
Though, once my family got a good look at my hands, they’d try to talk me out of it.
Luckily, tomorrow was my contortion act.
No flying through the air and grabbing anything until Saturday of this week.
That was why the huge rush on my costume this morning.
Tomorrow we were doing a dry run for the friends and family of the circus staff.
We would be performing a small show to work out kinks between ourselves and add in anything that we needed to do to make sure everything fit time wise.
A movement caught my eye, and I turned to see Winston reaching into his pants pocket.
He pulled out a lighter and a cigarette.
I grimaced.
“What, don’t tell me you have a problem with smokers,” he drawled.
I mean, I hadn’t thought I had.
But the idea of him smoking…
“I don’t do it all that often,” he said when he saw my disgust. “Only when shit’s a lot…you know?”
Well…yeah. I did know.
“When shit’s a lot for me, I eat until I’m in a food coma and drink cheap wine from the liquor store,” I said. “Smoking seems so…bad.”
He snorted. “There are a lot of things I could possibly die from before cancer takes me.”
I wanted to know what those things were.
But I could see just by the set of his face he wasn’t going to expound on his comment.
“Anyway, I should go,” I said. “Long day ahead of me.”
He looked like he wanted me to get out of the truck, sitting there puffing away on his cigarette.
When I closed the door I heard him curse loudly, then he got out and walked with a purpose around his truck.
“What are you…” I said as he walked to the passenger side of his truck and yanked it open. “Doing?”
“I’m going to clean those hands,” he said. “I have a first aid kit in here. At least this way you won’t have to put your aching wounds directly on the steering wheel. Plus, that car looks fairly new. I would hate for you to stain the leather.”
He did have a point.
Though, my leather was dark brown, so I was thinking it might not stain it all that bad.
But before I could tell him that, he had me pulled in close with the cigarette hanging out of the side of his mouth on the side farthest from me.
He moved methodically, as if he was doing this in a way that was a platonic kind of thing. Not a ‘I just had sex with this woman and I’m taking care of her’ kind of way.
“This is going to hurt like a mother when you wash your hands,” he said. “Do that as soon as you get home.”
They were covered in dirt and grime, dried blood and flaking off, damaged skin.
Yeah, tonight was going to be a nightmare.
The next few days, actually.
Skin tears like this didn’t heal so fast. And that meant I was in for a couple of days of pain.
But it was worth it.
Any amount of pain was worth it.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve had my fair share of rips and tears on my hands. Being in the circus like I am, doing what I do, it tends to be rough on the hands. And practicing five hours a day, seven days a week, will definitely kill your hands. But they’ve never been quite this bad.”
“Probably never destroyed a concrete angel before, either,” he pointed out.
No. Never even given it a thought, actually.
But again, totally worth it.
“No,” I said quietly. “No, I haven’t.”
He finished cleaning my hands, and I would cry about how much it hurt for him to do so when I was in the car alone. Because no way would I show him that weakness. He hadn’t been gentle with me, either. Almost as if he was being a bit rougher than normal just to prove that maybe he wasn’t a good person.
And, to be completely truthful, maybe he wasn’t.
But if he helped us, I didn’t care about what kind of person he was as long as he helped us fix my father’s sins.
“Thanks,” I said when he shoved the large utility bag containing quite a few medical supplies back behind his seat.
“No problem,” he grumbled as he pushed me backward, finally took the cigarette from his mouth—that I might add was perilously close to being burned all the way out—and jerked his chin.
