too much time looking at his mouth—staring really—and I wondered if I was making Javi uncomfortable. God, I was making a complete fool of myself.
“I can’t help but worry about it,” I admitted. “We’re supposed to be working together, and I feel like I’ve done everything in my power and beyond to make it weird.”
Javi shrugged his slim but muscled shoulders. “It d-doesn’t have to be weird. We’re...we’re c-cool.”
He didn’t look like it would be cool, though. The air hummed between us, magnetic and alight. Javi brought his gaze up to meet mine, hazel eyes swimming with something I could almost believe was attraction. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something, but before he could, Giuliana let out a banshee scream.
It was tiny and fierce and grabbed both of our attention. She squirmed in my arms, little angry fists waving in the hair and gummy mouth open wide to voice her demands. It had been nearly three hours since she’d last had a bottle with Dana. I’d gotten so caught up in Mason’s lecture and Javi’s, well, everything, that I’d forgotten I needed to get her inside and feed her.
Feeling as if I’ve been drenched in ice water, I excused myself. “Sorry, Giuliana needs to be fed—I’ll see you later.”
It was blunt, and maybe I should have stayed and said more, but I was too busy kicking myself to care about niceties. Keeping your baby fed and dry was the most basic of parenting tasks, but as soon as I’d seen a pretty face, I’d gotten distracted. And hadn’t I just told myself a few hours ago that I needed to put more space between us?
If just talking to Javi got me so turned around that I practically forgot about Giuliana in my arms, how in the hell was I supposed to even think about dating him like Mason wanted me to do?
Easy. You don’t think about dating someone. You don’t have time for distractions.
Especially distractions like Javi, and all the messy things he made me feel.
8
Javi
I crumpled the paper in front of me in frustration and threw it in the trash. The backpiece I was trying to draft was giving me a headache. It wasn’t that the client was picky—he was trusting me with a massive piece, after all, and was giving me a lot of creative liberty. It was more that I knew what this back piece meant for the client, based on growing strong through hardship, and it was important that I get it right.
Absentmindedly, I began to rub the shield inked over my heart. It had hurt worse than all of my other tattoos combined. Not just because there wasn’t much meat on my sternum to shield my nerves from the needle, but also because of what it meant to me.
My parents, who were only parents by blood, had made my life utter hell when I still lived with them. The first “love” I’d ever experienced, the so-called love my parents should have had for me, had been twisted. It had hurt, over and over again, until the scar tissue around my heart was thick and near impenetrable. I’d had the shield done to remind myself that there were parts of me that needed to be shielded from everyone else.
And what was left of me, not good enough and broken, should be kept locked up where other people couldn’t see it.
Pulling out a fresh sheet of paper, I set in to sketch some more. This part, creating like this, was the part I lived for. I loved how it felt to capture a client’s vision and turn it into a piece of art, and I knew how important it was to feel good about the ink you got.
When working on sentimental pieces like this, I wasn’t always able to keep my thoughts and memories at bay, but as I sketched, I worked hard to tune out everything else in the shop. The music and voices faded. Black lines and color bloomed beneath my fingers.
“Javi, did you hear me?” Reagan’s voice cut through my creative fugue. I didn’t know how long he’d been trying to get my attention.
I put down my pen and pressed my palms into my eyes. “Sorry, no. What’s up, B-boss?”
“Can you take a few walk-ins tonight? Trinity called in sick.”
“You know I c-can,” I told him. It was true, too. When I wasn’t at work, I was either hooking up or at home. As of late, it had only