“I think,” I said, feeling something turn over in my chest. “I think that’s perfect.”
His big, warm hand, veined and lined with callouses, gave mine a squeeze.
And I realized what had turned over in my chest.
My heart.
Because grief had shifted the prism of the lens I used to view Nova Booth through and turned it into something more than love for a brother or a friend.
It had amplified him, multiplied him like a kaleidoscope into so much more.
And that was it, the moment when I found the words for what that man was to me and what he would always mean to me.
I loved him.
Unintentionally, but irrevocably.
And when the tattoo was finished, raw and red, white petals tinged pink at the base and sides, Dane’s named scrawled in cursive beneath as a last-minute addition he’d added in my careful, somewhat shaky handwriting, I knew it for sure.
I was meant to be with him.
Despite the age difference, despite our foster family relationship, despite Dane being gone and all the other things stacked so high against us.
He was it for me.
So, when we went out back to work together on a huge depiction of a lotus blossom with Dane’s name beneath on the exterior wall of the shop, I added my own small design tucked away in the folds of the flower.
JB + LM surrounded in a barbed wire heart.
Barbed because it would protect us. Because I would protect us, our friendship, until it could bloom like the lotus into something so much more.
Until I was grown and beautiful like the women that lingered around Nova like bees to honey, and he would notice how much he loved me too.
It was the first lie I ever inked and the last one I would ever do myself.
Nova, it turned out, would do the rest.
LILA
By the time I was a teenager, I was an expert on unrequited love, but it wasn’t until I hit my mid-twenties that I truly understood how deeply the roots wrapped symbiotically around my heart could hurt me.
It would have been easy to turn brittle, for the pieces calcified by a lifetime of loving a man who would never love me back to crumble with age and crack off so I became less and less of the person I’d once been. That didn’t happen because I guarded my tenderness fiercely, like a knight set to defend the crown. I didn’t want to lose what made me me just because someone had chosen not love those things.
He was one man, one person amid a sea of others who had no qualms about showing me just how much they cared. They were mostly rough and gruff bikers, but the love they gave me was all the more miraculous and headier because of the atypical nature of their gifting it to me. I was not blood, and I was not an Old Lady. Normally, there was no place for a woman in a motorcycle club unless she was one of those two things. I was neither, and yet I had it all. Their love and respect, their championship if I needed it, and their support even when I didn’t. I had brothers and fathers and uncles in leather cuts even though I’d never really done anything to deserve it.
The first person to give me that was Nova. He didn’t have to, and I knew it took effort for him to weave me like that through them, so seamless no one thought to question why the young girl with no ties to the club was always hanging around. He did it because after he’d given me his own blood family, he’d found another more fitting one for himself, and he did as he had promised his best friend and my brother he would do when Dane first enlisted. He made me family in a way that would never quit.
So Nova gave me my families, even if he didn’t give me his romantic love in return. How could a girl really be bitter about that? He loved me, that gorgeous Casanova, in a way more precious than he’d loved anyone else, ever. I knew that, and even though it was a sheer, flimsy consolation, I wrapped it tightly around myself like a bandage whenever I felt that brittleness crack through my heart.
It was enough.
Or, I convinced myself it was enough for a very, very long time.
I knew the only remedy for unrequited love was to cut off the infected limb, amputate Nova from my life in a very real way for long enough to get over him.
But how long would that take?
I’d loved him since I was five years old, and now I was twenty-one. Would it take me all of the eighteen years I’d loved him for me to unlove him?
And what would my life consist of without him?