I shook my head, and in that moment, I felt like grinning. It was so fucking foreign to me now it startled me. I noticed she was fighting back her own smile. It was cute. Ophelia Finlay may look like an angel, but her reputation wasn’t that spotless. She had a badass quality that made being near her easier. I knew my demons and although she didn’t ever need to know them, I felt like she was tough enough to venture close and not get burned. The first aid kit in her purse did not fit how I thought of her.
“My mom still stuffs our stockings at Christmas,” she said as she went back to work now cleaning my knuckles herself with the wipe. The alcohol burned like a son of a bitch, but I didn’t flinch. “She gave all the girls one of these this year.” Ophelia shrugged then opened a bandage. “I tossed it in my purse and so far this is the second time it’s come in handy.”
Not wanting her to stop talking I asked, “When was the other time?”
She finished with me then closed her little kit. “I cut my arm climbing over something.”
The way her cheeks turned slightly pink made me even more curious. “What?”
She tossed the container back into the small white purse then put her hands in her lap and sat with her back straight before meeting my gaze. “A fence.”
That one word made her cheeks even brighter. “Why were you climbing a fence?” I wasn’t letting her out of this. I needed the story. From the way she was fidgeting with her hands, I knew it would take my mind off the shit in my head.
“Does that really matter?” she asked and gave me an innocent smile that did not belong on a Finlay’s face. Not even this angelic looking one. But damn she looked good trying.
“Yeah, it does.” The challenging tone in my voice had her narrowing her eyes. I waited while she debated telling me or continuing to stall. Either way, I had her attention and I was good with it. She made the other stuff fade away and I needed that more than anything else.
She shifted on the ground, but that regal poise of hers didn’t relax. How she could make sitting there without a slight slouch in her shoulders look so damn natural was beyond me. It was a talent I’d never actually seen before. The long pale hair of hers, that I knew from seeing her mother’s hair wasn’t from a bottle, draped over her left shoulder. She cocked her head slightly to the left and I watched as it brushed the cleavage she was showing with the low-cut Guns and Roses vintage tee shirt she was wearing. It had been altered at some point by being cut in a V-shape at the neck and cropped to just hit her waist. Most people would assume it was bought this way and not an original. But her grandfather was a rock legend and I knew the shirt was, in fact, a legit Appetite for Destruction 1987 tour shirt. That kind of vintage you couldn’t manufacture.
“Fine,” she sighed dramatically. “I was climbing the fence of a guy’s house that I had been dating.” When she paused this time, a slow wicked grin touched her lips. It didn’t matter what she said as long as she kept smiling like that. Damn if it wasn’t a welcome distraction. “He had wanted us to be exclusive and I’d decided I didn’t want to see him anymore. It got ugly at least on his part so I left in a hurry. But when I got home, I went to take off my jewelry and remembered my grandmother’s bracelet was still on the table beside his hot tub. In my need to get the hell away from there, I’d forgotten the bracelet. My mother’s mother passed away before I was ever born. My grandfather had the bracelet and gave it to my mother the day I was born as a gift. The day I graduated high school my mother gave it to me. It’s a very special bracelet.” She focused on something over my shoulder and for a moment her thoughts had gone somewhere else. Why was I so interested in her, in what she was thinking, in every damn thing about her?
“I wasn’t sure if he’d give it back or just continue to be dramatic. I didn’t want to see him again and hoped to avoid him until he got over us. So, I just waited until the middle of the night when I knew he’d be asleep and went back to get it.”
There was the urge to smile tugging at me, but I couldn’t. Not even with the image of Ophelia climbing a fence. Allowing myself to smile felt like a betrayal that I couldn’t face right now. I used the humor to distract me enough to push back the darkness that followed these thoughts. Yet the image of Ophelia scaling a fence to go retrieve her bracelet just because she wanted to avoid a man had been enough to make me want to smile. She made me forget the bad. Nothing I’d tried, no female, no activity, nothing had been able to make me want to move on in life the way she did. The way Ophelia saw life, went after it, lived it, made me want to be close to her. As terrible of an idea as that was. Why did it have to be this woman that brought back the life in me I didn’t think existed?