He was perfect.
“You want some music?” he asked, breaking the silence. I nodded, still too nervous to speak, and he put on the Black Keys, the volume low. He didn’t look in my eyes again, kept his averted. “Put your arm up, bent, like this,” he said. I did as I was told and he moved the sheet where he wanted it and bent to work without another word.
It hurt. I knew it would. I stared at the ceiling with tears leaking from the corners of my eyes, but I didn’t move.
“You want a break?” he asked after ten minutes.
“No,” I replied. “Keep going.” If we took breaks, if this took too long, McMurphy would think I’d fucked him. That was his default, that I fucked everybody. It didn’t matter what I did, how I argued, how I protested—he thought I fucked every man I met. He was getting violent about it. And it was getting worse.
“I’ve seen you before,” I said to Cavan after a while, lying with my arm above my head, staring at the ceiling. “You come to the club parties sometimes.”
“Sometimes,” he agreed, not raising his head. “I’ve seen you, too, from afar.”
From afar. I hadn’t heard a man use words like that in the seven months I’d been with McMurphy. They were also true, because until today McMurphy had never let me get within four feet of the club’s ink man, let alone introduce me to him, as if he thought I’d hump him like a bitch in heat the minute I got near. He wasn’t far wrong, and I didn’t care.
We kept going. After the first half hour he made me take a break, giving me a bottle of water. My skin was throbbing hard, but I didn’t mind. It meant I was being inked. It meant those birds would be on me forever, where I wanted them.
But time was spiraling away, and I was chickening out. It was just so nice, in that quiet room with him, smelling his nice smell, listening to the Black Keys and his breathing. No yelling. Not even any fucking. God knew he made my panties wet, and I was tempted to roll over and lick the collarbone that showed so deliciously above the neck of his t-shirt, but sex wasn’t what I wanted right now. It was just this. Just the quiet peace of his presence, and even with the eye-watering pain, I wanted it to go on forever. I wanted to forget the end would ever come.
But it was coming. McMurphy would be back, and my chance would be gone. So I screwed up my courage, put everything on the line, and said softly to him while he got to work again, “I want out.”
He didn’t even lift his head from where he was bent over my ink. Maybe he hadn’t heard me, or didn’t understand. But of course he did. “That so?” he said.
My heart soared. I felt like crying. That so? No shouting, no calling me an ungrateful bitch. Just That so? Listening. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had listened to me.
“I have to get out,” I said, staring at the ceiling. “He’ll kill me.”
“He might,” Cavan Wilder said. He took a cloth and dabbed at my weeping skin.
“I know he will,” I persisted. “He’s getting worse and worse, the paranoia. He’s using more than he used to. He’s losing control. He’s going to do it, and soon. You can help me.”
Still he worked, as if someone was watching us. But he sighed. “That’s not something I do.”
“You don’t help women who are about to get killed?”
That got me a glare, brief and beautiful. “You made your own choices,” he said. “Women make their choices the same way men do.”
I swallowed. I had. But I’d made the wrong choice, a stupid one, a mistake. The only thing you could do when you made a mistake was do your best to right it. In this case, right it before McMurphy decided one day that I really had fucked some guy, and either put me in the hospital or put an end to me altogether.
Or before he found out the one thing I was hiding from everyone.
“The thing is, you have to help me,” I said to Cavan. “You have no choice.”
Again he dabbed my skin, as if we were talking about the weather, except I could see his jaw was tight, his body tense. I wondered what it was like in bed, that body, what he did with it when he was with a woman. Whether it was good. “Tell me,” he said. “Why do I have no choice?”
“Because you’re Devon Wilder’s brother.”
Cavan went very still.
“You are,” I said. “Anyone who sees you both can tell. You don’t look exactly like him. Your hair is different, your eyes. But it’s the same face, the same name.” The words were coming out of me in a rush. The ink was almost finished, McMurphy would be back any minute, and this was my only chance. “You’re his brother. And if I can figure it out, then so can the club. And once they do, you’ll have to run, just like me.”
He looked at me. Emotion worked behind his eyes, anger and outrage and confusion and something else, something deeper I couldn’t name. “Dani,” he said, the first time he’d spoken my name. “When did you see my brother?”
So I was right, then. I’d been certain, but it still felt good to be vindicated. “In the news,” I answered him.
Now he looked shocked. “In the news?”
“You didn’t know?” He just stared at me, so I said, “Look it up, Cavan. Put your brother’s name in Google and see what you see. It didn’t make the national news, but it was big enough. Big enough for the club to find out, even here in Arizona.”