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“I can’t stop seeing it,” I admitted. “With Jorge…” I added.
“Yeah. That wasn’t supposed to happen. A wasn’t supposed to be there.
“He would have killed me,” I said.
“Yeah,” Junior agreed. “He wasn’t going to walk out of that building. But you weren’t supposed to see that. Are you hurt anywhere?” he asked.
“My face hurts,” I said, even though the ice pack was starting to numb that. “And I’m probably going to have bruises on my legs and under my arms. But I’m okay. They didn’t get a chance to hurt me. Are you okay?” I asked, my arm lifting to touch his head. “I saw you get hit.”
“Yeah, once the adrenaline is gone, I’m gonna have a killer fucking migraine. But I’m fine.”
“You’re bloody,” I said as my gaze moved down him, looking and finding more injuries that he was trying not to tell me about.
“Graze,” he said. “I’m fine. I promise. How about you lie back and hold this to your face?” he suggested. “I’m gonna go talk to A and the others. Then I’ll check in on you, okay?”
“Okay,” I agreed, kicking out of my shoes, then lying back to appease him.
He took a moment to pull the covers over me. Then, with infinite gentleness, he pressed a kiss to my temple before moving away.
A moment later, there was the sound of muffled male voices. Over time, though, there were fewer of them.
Feeling a little less numb, and more mentally focused, I climbed off the bed and made my way around the wall into the living room, finding Junior and his father in the kitchen.
Barry was sitting on the floor just inside the door unpacking boxes from the online shopping I’d done on the way up to the Christmas tree farm.
Suddenly, that felt like ages ago.
“You okay?” Junior asked, making my gaze move back to him. “Do you need something?”
“Coffee,” I said, nodding to the cups in his and his father’s hands. “I think that was a little, I don’t know, shock. I’m not feeling as weird anymore,” I admitted as I slipped the ice pack back into the freezer. “Is this going to be ugly?” I asked, waving at my face.
It wasn’t Junior, but his father, who moved toward me, snagging my chin with a gentleness that didn’t suit his size, and turning my head toward the light.
“It’s gonna darken. But you should be able to cover it with a little makeup. I’m Breaker,” he said as he released me.
“Shale,” I told him, giving him a smile. “I’m sorry we had to meet under these circumstances.”
He shrugged at that. “When this fuck finally got his head out of his ass and got a girl, I expected an uncomfortably awkward dinner conversation that all of us would hate every fucking minute of. I kind of preferred this,” he added with a devilish little smile that reminded me a lot of his son.
Suddenly, I could picture Junior giving me that exact smile twenty or so years down the road.
It also didn’t escape me what Breaker had just said.
That I was Junior’s girl.
Surely, if anyone would know that was the case, it was his father.
“Oh, good. A star!” Barry said, making me look back. “We always had an angel growing up. And I always wanted a star,” he said to our curious glances.
“What’s the deal with that?” Breaker asked, looking from Barry to Junior.
“He’s… a friend,” Junior said, seeming to get slightly more comfortable with that phrase the more he said it.
“Reminds me of a dog that follows you home,” Breaker said, making Junior chuckle, having described it similarly himself.“Your mother is gonna be jealous that I got to meet her first,” he said, jerking his head toward me.
“So, I should expect to have her at the door sometime tonight?” Junior asked.
“Eh, I’ll hold her off until tomorrow for you,” Breaker offered.
