One Last Time (Loveless Brothers 5)

“It’ll work,” I say, and he shrugs.

I lean back against the bathroom counter, hands against the edge, and he works in slow circles, taking the thick, sticky concealer off. It takes five wipes and several minutes, and if he thinks anything about the tattoo he’s revealing, he doesn’t say it.

The bathrobe opens as he works, and when the whole thing is revealed, so are the edges of both nipples.

For once, that’s not what he’s looking at. He’s looking at the tattoo, the heart with gears and levers, the heart that’s riveted together and indestructible.

Neither of us says a word. We both know when I got this and if he doesn’t know exactly why, he’s certainly smart enough to guess.

After a long moment, he reaches out and touches it. He doesn’t ask permission, but we both know he doesn’t need to: alone like this in hotel rooms, amidst our bad decisions, my yes is automatic and understood.

“I like it,” he finally says. “It fits.”

“Thanks,” I say, and his hand trails down my sternum, over the raven, falls away from me.

On a whim, I take his hand. I pull him a little closer, until our feet are nearly touching, and then I reach out and push his robe over his right shoulder.

It doesn’t take me a moment to find the scar he told me about, still slightly pink and raised, starting under his collarbone and slicing over his shoulder, ending just above his armpit.

“You volunteer to clean your mom’s gutters again?” I ask.

Once, when we were nineteen, he cut his forearm open on the edge of a rain gutter. He’s still got the scar if you know where to look.

Seth smiles, oddly sheepish, runs a hand through his hair.

“Not exactly,” he says. “Can you keep a secret?”

“I kept you one, didn’t I?”

“Dirt bike accident.”

It takes me by surprise, my fingers still tracing the scar.

“A what?”

He shrugs, that same smile still on his face.

“A buddy of mine races ‘em, so he let me take a spin around the track. I got too cocky on a turn, there was a rock…”

“And you didn’t get stitches?”

From the looks of it, he probably should have at least seen a doctor and had the cut taped together. It’s not a huge scar, but it could be smaller.

“That seemed like it might result in my mom knowing I’d gotten on a dirt bike,” he admits.

I just give him a look.

“I didn’t want her to worry?”

“You’re a grown man who doesn’t want his mother to chastise him,” I tease.

“Whereas you would never hide something like that,” he teases right back.

Point taken.

“At least see a professional next time you fuck yourself up,” I say, running my fingers over it one last time. “And keep it bandaged until it’s completely healed over. It’ll take longer but scar less.”

“Anything else, Dr. Radcliffe?”

“Be a smartass all you want, I know a lot about avoiding scars,” I say, pulling his robe back over his shoulder. “Hell, just call me next time. I’m not a doctor but I can do better than that.”

Without asking, I push down the other side of his robe, expose his left shoulder, pull it gently toward myself.

The tattoo is still there: black dots connected by black lines. If you know how to look at it, you’ll see a scorpion.

“You know you could get that removed,” I say.

“I could.”

“Or covered,” I go on. “This would be a cinch.”

“You really want it gone, huh?”

I don’t know what I want. I know that every time I see him, I look for it, and I know that when I find it, relief and guilt back me into a corner with a one-two punch. I don’t know whether to be glad that he doesn’t want it gone, or to be sad that he doesn’t think about it enough to do something about it.

“It’d be pretty easy to make it into another constellation,” I say, pretending I didn’t hear his last statement. “You could still match the others.”

All five of them have constellation tattoos, gotten right after the youngest turned eighteen. Their mom is an astronomer.

I’m a Scorpio.

“I could do a lot of things, Bird,” he says, and I take my hand off the tattoo, let him pull his robe back over his shoulder.

He pulls me off the bathroom counter, turns me around, drapes an arm over my shoulder, holding me against him. I rest my head where the scar is, turn my face away from the mirror.

“You shouldn’t call me that,” I say.

“Why?”

“Because it’s an old nickname.”

“So?”

I swallow, take a deep breath, feel the ever-familiar push and pull of wanting to believe that he means it and knowing that all the hurt and anger and resentment is still there, like lava just below the surface. I know because I can feel it there, bubbling, heating.

All those other women.