Inked in Lies (The Fallen Men 5)

But then he gave my small hand a firm squeeze and tipped his chin up so I could see the depthless brown of his shadowed eyes.

“I’ll stay ’til Dane gets back, yeah?” he whispered.

I nodded, scooting back on the bed so that he would have some room to lay beside me on the lumpy mattress. He hesitated for a second before swinging his shoes up on the covers as he settled on his back.

I closed my eyes and dragged a deep lungful of his familiar scent. His big body was effectively between me and the door, me and my fighting parents, me and the raw brutality of my life. Tucked away in the floral, humid air of my bedroom amid the pots and plants, rucked up against the wall with a boy I trusted almost as much as my brother, I finally let myself relax.

We were quiet for a long time, long enough for the fight to die down, the front door to slam as one of my parents left in a huff, and silence to descend.

I thought maybe Jonathon was asleep until he shifted his head on my purple pillow and looked at me with wide, alert eyes.

“Not sleepy, huh?” he asked softly, his voice barely audible above the rasp and texture of his head sliding over the pillow. When I shook my head, the left side of his full mouth curled up. “Yeah, me either. Whaddya do when you can’t sleep?”

I shrugged, feeling heat in my cheeks as I fiddled with the edge of my comforter.

He nudged me with an elbow then winked when I looked at him. “C’mon, you can tell me. You know I won’t make fun. Hell, maybe I can even steal some’a your tricks. I could use the sleep.”

“I make lists of flowers,” I admitted. “I was on Suntastic Yellow Sunflowers when you came in.”

His lips twitched, but true to his promise, he didn’t laugh.

“Suntastic, hey? Well, I’m pretty fuckin’ sure I can’t name varieties of sunflowers, but I could do other flowers good enough. You wanna do it with me?”

I stared so hard at him my eyes burned, and then when that didn’t work, I reached out to touch the warm skin over the hard curve of his tricep.

He quirked an eyebrow at me in question, but I surprised myself by admitting the truth of my action.

“Sometimes, Dane and I don’t think you’re real,” I confessed on a breath, horrified that tears started to well at the backs of my hot eyes. “You and Molly and Diogo and your brothers. We never met anyone like you.”

Something shifted in the planes of his face, like tectonic plates beneath the crust of the earth. Whatever emotion passed through him was too deep for me to decipher, I only knew it left his eyes so dark they looked black as he blinked at me.

“You know what, Li? You’re gonna grow up and meet tons more people who treat you well, and then my family and me won’t seem so weird to you.”

“Not weird,” I corrected harshly, nails digging into the arm I still held. “Beautiful.”

I watched his mouth soften, thinking it was too red for a man but that I liked it anyway.

“Okay, not weird. But I mean it, this…” he gestured to the cramped room, the lingering memories of the argument in the kitchen haunting the space like a silent spectre, “is only temporary. Dane’s almost eighteen, and he’s gonna take care of you. He’s gotta plan.”

I knew Dane had a plan. He’d been hatching plans to get us out and away from our parents since I could remember. He was smart, but it was hard to do well at school when you had a part time job as a drug dealer’s protégé combined with the stress of raising a little girl because your parents couldn’t be bothered to do it well themselves. He was noble and strong with a sense of heroism that we both shared. I knew he wanted to be a cop or a soldier or something important where he could fix broken lives like he swore he was going to fix ours. But that kind of job took education, and education took money that we didn’t have and time we couldn’t spare. So he figured he’d get into some sort of trade, and we’d get a little apartment, just us two.

But something about the plan made me sad and in the confessional silence we’d created in my bedroom, I was brave enough to admit that much.

“I wish he didn’t have to plan,” I murmured. “I wish he only ever had to dream.”

Jonathon made a sound at the back of his throat, an involuntary grunt like my words had socked him in the stomach.

“Do you have any dreams, Flower Child?” he asked me, trying to lighten the mood with one of his sideways smirks. “You wanna open a flower store or something?”