my voice came out softer. “Elliott loved blue. I wanted to be just like him. I’m glad you were the one who found it. It always brought me luck.”
I took another step closer to him, stopping before I closed the gap. Looking up, I searched his eyes. What I found gave me the courage to be closer, to reach out and touch him. It wasn’t surrender but permission.
I ran my hand down his arm, the one with the ribbon tattoo. His skin was warm in comparison to the coolness of my fingers. His muscles tightened beneath my roving palm, and his eyes became even more intense on mine.
Placing the fabric at the beginning of the tattoo, I wound it all the way up to the end. Every fray, the very shape, had been etched to fit the art on his arm.
“You can have it. Now we’re even. We’ve traded. The leather jacket for the silk ribbon.”
“I wasn’t giving it back.”
“Right,” my voice came out even softer. “I’m aware. Yours. Still, I want to give you what it represents to me. My luck.” I used a fingertip to trace the tattoo, over and over, enjoying the fact that I could summon goosebumps to rise on his skin.
He lifted my chin, forcing me to meet his eyes. The fire had become a blaze, all-consuming and full of ache. “Stay away from that kid.”
That kid. He meant Ace.
“All right.” I dared myself to stare back, to meet fire with fire, and lifted the set of my chin. “If you’ll stay close to me.”
We stood that way for some time until he closed his eyes, leaned forward, and whispered against my forehead, “We’ll see,” before he placed a tender kiss there.
Chapter Eight
Scarlett
After dinner with Maggie Beautiful and her friends, and after Brando’s “birthday shindig,” he dropped me off at home. After I shut the front door behind him, I ran upstairs and stepped up to my bedroom window, using my pointer finger to push back the white lace curtains.
He must have sensed me there and turned. My body trembled from the sting of cold upon wet skin, and from watching him.
He stood in the glow of his truck lights, his flannel shirt rolled up at the sleeves, his dirty work boots washed by the rain, sending black ribbons swirling into the many puddles before dissipating. His arms were crossed, his feet the same way.
He pulled his beanie down, shielding his ears from the cold. He stared at me without apology, without shame, without turning away when I met his unwavering stare and our eyes connected.
Fine moments were not exactly my forte. Smoothness either. Or sultriness. Or anything along those same lines. I was eighteen. I had never been in love with anyone other than Brando—and had only been fifteen when I first fell for him. My brother had died in the wee hours of the next morning.
It was no secret that in some aspects of my life my mother had sheltered me to the point of smothering. She’d send me off to Russia in a heartbeat to dance, but to dance with a boy at prom? Forbidden.
Life had always moved me at a particular speed, a speed in which “talent” had dictated my every twist and turn. It’s all I knew, all I did, from the moment I could walk. Dancing with Maja Resnik’s shadow came with hefty responsibilities.
In one word, I was naïve. But not so immature that I didn’t understand my feelings, or which direction I was heading, and the speed with which I was getting there.
True love was the feeling—without the burden of guilt. Brando’s direction was where I was headed—which I had been for some time. And I was getting there at one hundred and fifty miles per hour—whereas I had only been going twenty before.
Though in this moment it was easier for me to stare back from the comfort of my bedroom window—easier and harder. I wanted to touch him, run my fingers up his arms, over his ribbon tattoo, over his lips and through his hair. I wanted to know what it felt like for his lips to touch mine, to taste his mouth, his tongue to twirl with mine in that way that lovers do, and for him to return my want with just as much passion.
In truth, it was much easier to imagine all of these things without the pressure to act on them.
Brando had feelings for me, I knew, but I didn’t know how deep