Marked

twelve-2

She smiled and tightened her arms around his neck. “There are thirty people in the club,” she murmured on his mouth. “And in a few minutes, they’ll be coming up to take the furniture from here too.”

“I never asked for nothing,” he said, rubbing his palms up and down her a*s cheeks. “Just making up for lost time… You don’t want to know why I’ve got Taggert there?”

She did want to know, but worried that if she asked too many questions, he might think she was doubting him again. “You can tell me whatever I need to know.”

“Now she trusts the flow of information,” he said to himself. “I thought we were going back to the way things were. You never used to cut me any slack about sharing with you.”

“You always found a way to tell me what I needed to know,” she said. “But you kept a lot to yourself.”

“I did it to protect you. I can’t lie to you. I told you before, since we got together, I’ve never been able to do it.”

“Then tell me why Tag is on your floor,” she said. “And if he’s there, what are you doing here?”

“I’m here because you hustled your fine a*s out of my place so fast, I put my fist through the wall.” Picking up his hand, she stroked a thumb over his rough knuckles. She was used to their scars and bumps, and it didn’t appear that he’d hurt himself too bad. “Just like that time you walked out of Taggert’s with those big eyes all wet… It’s the disappointment,” he said, gritting his teeth. “I’ve figured out that’s what it is. I don’t care when you’re pissed at me. I don’t even really care when you’re sniveling about something. I mean, I care, but I care in a ‘I’m gonna go out and beat something until she smiles again’ kinda way. But when you wanna rip out my guts through my balls, baby, you look at me all disappointed and I can’t f*****g fix that. I can’t make you proud of me.”

“I’m proud,” she said.

“You weren’t this morning. You weren’t that time in Tag’s before Bogota. All I want is to make you smile.”

When she got excited, he got aroused. If he did something positive that made her happy, his male ego got stoked. Nya loved how his usually guarded emotions were so affected by her mood. She didn’t mean to manipulate his mood with hers; he’d given her into trouble for reacting on emotion and not being able to hide how she felt, so Archer was aware of what motivated her and it wasn’t any kind of malice.

But when she got excited to the point that she laughed and rubbed herself all over him, somehow it made him feel like more of a man. And for a guy like Archer who exuded nothing but masculinity, that was an achievement she wished she could bottle.

“How do you think I felt when you left my bed and told me we were through? What do you think it was like having your door closed in my face? And then in your apartment…”

She almost couldn’t draw breath. Her guts got light and she experienced that hollowness again.

“In my apartment, when?” he asked, concern creasing his brows.

Coiling shivers vibrated against her diaphragm in sporadic little bursts. It was anxiety or terror, mixed with primal hormones. “When you kissed me…. After I told you I stabbed Jamie’s killer and you kissed me, Arch.”

“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “I didn’t mean to f**k with your head.”

“I liked kissing you, I always like it. You didn’t f**k with my head; you can kiss me any time you damn well please.”

“Then why are you getting that wet look again, Squirm?” he asked.

Holding her head in both hands around her ears, he brushed his thumbs over her cheeks as if in anticipation of tears he’d want to wipe away.

“You said it meant nothing.” When the words came out of her, ice clenched around her heart. Her lungs swelled and her throat closed. “I don’t ever want to hear that I mean nothing to you, Fella.”

“You’re the only thing that means anything,” he said, without breaking eye contact. “I love you.” His voice was clear and deep, conveying his certainty. He wanted the words to resonate through her to wipe away any sorrow. “I thought I was protecting you. You were so cute when you were pissed about Ella, ‘cause I knew it wasn’t true. But I saw that I’d hurt you before you walked out. I couldn’t let you hate me for kissing you or be so cruel as to let you think I’d moved on, and not with just anyone, but someone you’d have to see every day. I mean, think about it, Ny, if I’d been screwing her, you’d be watching me come in and out of her apartment all the time.”

Her shoulders quaked at that disgusting thought, but he smiled. “Don’t,” she croaked.

“You got that same look of sickness outside my apartment that day.”

“When you started asking about my meds,” she said. “I was thinking about you with another woman.”

“And that made you feel sick?”

“Hey, buddy, you told another guy if he thought about seeing me n***d you were going to stab him in the gut, I mean, really? Couldn’t you be more subtle than that?”

“When it comes to warning guys away from my p***y, I don’t want to be subtle.”

“Can we just promise it’ll never happen again?”

He’d already told her that he wouldn’t be dumping her. But Nya wasn’t quite secure enough to forget what losing him was like, not yet. “You’re the one who walked out on me this morning.”

“Because you had my best friend attached to your floor. Is he really still there?”

Archer nodded. “And he will be for the next few days.”

“Why? Are you going to tell me that you’re protecting him from himself? You said that Gio was brave to be walking these streets, but that means Tag is too.”

“Tag doesn’t walk the streets,” Archer said. “He goes from his apartment to where he’s going and back again. The only people he sees these days are his coke dealers who come to his apartment, sometimes two or three times a day.”

Nya didn’t want to confront that, it was seedy. If he was allowing dealers to come to his door to do business, he had more of a problem than she’d realized. “Oh, God, Arch,” she murmured.

“Nothing I was gonna say was gonna stop him last night. It was take him back to my place and chain him down or put a knife in his throat. I picked the one I thought you’d prefer. ‘Cause even if he’d found Gio and tried to kill him, he’d never have done it. Your boy’s not a killer and I wasn’t joking about his state of mind. He was ranting and raving in the streets, waving his arms about, paranoid like a crazy motherfucker, making a scene. He didn’t even have a f*****g weapon and he’d have f****d up the crime scene. He has no experience with this s**t. He’d have got himself arrested and what does that mean for the rest of us? You might not give a f**k about going down, but I do and I know you don’t want your boy in a cell either. And then there’s the other thing…”

“What other thing?” she asked, kind of liking how she could look Archer straight in the eye because standing on this low couch elevated her almost to his eye level.

“You asked me to get him clean.”

Nya didn’t remember making that request of him. “I did?” She squinted. Archer had a way of interpreting things she said as requests, like when he’d paid her rent to her last landlord after a brief exchange at the bar downstairs. “When did I do that?”

“You asked how the f**k to get him off it, when we were in the office downstairs.”

It took her a few seconds to recall what he was talking about. “The night you were going to fight in the street? We weren’t even together then.”

“I still heard you.” And he still kept his eyes open for an opportunity to fix her friend for her. “Long as he stays on my floor, he’s clean. That s**t never goes away once you have a serious problem and he’s right on the verge of a serious f*****g problem, I don’t know if you’ve f*****g noticed. So you do it now, while it’s still a recreational habit, or you let it go for a couple of months and then getting him off the s**t’s not so easy.”

He was right and Nya recognized that she’d been lazy about taking action. It was typical that Archer should be the one to leap in and fix her problem before she had really even accepted that she had one.

But this was going to cause more animosity between the men. “He won’t think you’re doing him a favor. He’s a terrible houseguest. I saw what he was like when he was locked up in that other apartment, hiding from Hex. Sure, he knew he had to be there to protect himself. But he hates having people in his ear telling him what to do. Hates having them around all the time, watching him. It will only be worse now that he’s paranoid and anxious.”

Her love was pragmatic. “Ny, we’ve got three choices. One, we keep him where he is against his will, but we get him clean. Two, we pay for some high-end yuppie-boy program, an in-patient deal to have it done professionally with all the counseling shit.” Which wouldn’t work because Tag couldn’t confess half the s**t that was going on in his life. “Or three, we cut him loose and let him deal with his own crap.”

“Which will probably mean watching him die,” she said. “He has nothing to pull him out. It’s sad, Arch, if you think about it. He feels like he doesn’t have anything to fight for. Farrah’s left him. His business has gone to s**t. His best friend’s stolen money from him. And I’m with a guy who won’t give him the time of day.”

“Yeah, well the dude is in my f*****g apartment,” Archer said. “That’s a lot of f*****g time out of my day, Squirm.”

“You don’t usually leave people alone in your place. Why does Tag get a pass?”

“Derren’s there.”

That didn’t make Nya feel better. “Does he know not to hurt him?”

“Yeah, he’s just babysitting,” Archer said and if he trusted his mentor then so did she.

Nya had bonded with him during their drink here and she was pretty confident that Derren would leave Tag alone as long as he didn’t make too much noise.

“Is that wise? Having Derren there when Ester’s staying?” she asked. “And with that big bottle of chloroform you have stashed somewhere in your apartment…”

Her grin made her words come out as an almost-laugh.

But Archer remained deadpan. “You know it’s twisted that my mother talks about her fantasies in front of me, right?” Nya nodded. “Why do you encourage her?”

“I don’t,” she said, leaning forward, except Archer didn’t move so he just ended up supporting more of her weight. Though he didn’t seem to mind. He squeezed her a*s again. “It’s weird, she always does most of the talking and I like hearing her talk about stuff like that. It’s almost like watching a cartoon, you know? When things are so extreme that you almost can’t believe that they’re true, but it’s entertaining anyway.”

“Yeah? Well for me it’s more like a car wreck, when bodies are strewn across the street and everyone is slowing down, trying to catch a glimpse of the c*****e except all they’re doing is holding me up. I want to keep my head down and drive right through without seeing any of that s**t… What kind of sick, f*****g woman would want a guy to take advantage of her while she was out of it anyway?”