Page 26 of Her Brother's Keeper

“I can leave the door open, come on this way…” He took me by the hand and led me out of the cavernous family room into the club and back out the door we’d entered it from. Once outside, I followed him across the grass to the asphalt track, around past the big garage and shop building to another outbuilding. He opened the door on one end of it and ushered me inside.

It was warm, and a long sterile hall with doors lining it to either side. Nox took my hand again and pointed at the first one, “That’s the bathroom if you need it, the one on the other end of the hall on the opposite side is one too.”

“Okay,” I murmured.

He led me about four doors down the hall and to the left opening the door, “This is my place,” he muttered, flipping on the light.

The room was fairly good sized and held a bed and a couple of dressers. A television was perched on the top of one of them, along with a small cable box, Blu-ray player, and a few remotes. Everything was neat and orderly, the air scented faintly with something herbal. The bed was big and heavy, made from the same light wood as the dresser and armoire. The furniture pieces rustic, speaking of the country or life on a ranch. It seemed out of place from the rest of Nox, of course, nothing about him had fit the stereotypes of what you would expect from all the tattoos and black leather.

He took my coat from me and hung it on a hook on the back of the door, hanging his jacket and vest beside it. He swung the door wide, and while I would have liked a little more privacy, I understood. It stung that he didn’t trust me, but what could be done about it? This was why we couldn’t have nice things… people, both men, and girls, behaving badly, ruining it for the rest of us.

“You okay?” he asked me, smoothing his hands up and down my shoulders. I nodded, and wrapped my arms around his waist, hugging myself close, in the shelter of his much taller body. He wrapped his arms around me and held me, and I could have stayed there forever.

“I was just thinking about how this is why we can’t have nice things, meaning people just wreck everything, you know?”

“I don’t think I follow,” he murmured.

“Like now, I want more than anything for you to trust me, and for you to close that door so we can just be, but I know you can’t…”

“I trust you, Maren.”

“You can’t, at least not really,” I said.

“Why do you think that?”

“Stop me if I’m wrong,” I said. “What’s to say you close that door, and we lay down, and I fall asleep and we just cuddle? Nothing inappropriate happens, you don’t touch anything you’re not supposed to, we don’t even kiss… What’s to say, a week, a month or even a year from now I don’t get upset with you and as vindictive recourse, I go out and cry rape or something equally awful? You know I would never do that, I know I would never do that, but so many other girls that have gone beforehavedone just that… which makes it unsafe for you or for me to close the door and have some privacy.”

“By and far it’s the same for you, isn’t it?” he asked, smoothing his hands up and down my back over my thin cardigan. “What’s to say I’m not some dirty old fucker? What’s to say I don’t pin you down and do things? Make you cry? Hurt you?”

“Because that’s not who you are.”

“Maybe not,” he said, with a hint of a satisfied smile tinging his voice. “The rest of the world might have a different opinion about it, though.”

“I wish we could just forget about what other people think.”

“Me too, Angel. If it’s the one thing I’ve definitely learned, it’s that people don’t know how, or just can’t mind their own fucking business.”

I sighed heavily and nodded wearily against his shoulder, “So what now?”

“I figure I leave the door open, we lay down, and talk about whatever you want. You fall asleep, I let you sleep, and I take you back in the morning.”

“And then?”

“And then we Cinderella for a few months.”

I laughed, “We what?”

He shrugged, “Dawn’s our midnight; it comes, we go back to being pumpkins and pretend this was just a good dream – at least until you’re eighteen and no one has a say about the shit that we do, or do not do.”

I let him lead me to the bed and sat down at his urging. He knelt and unzipped my knee high boots, sliding them off and setting them neatly at the foot of the bed.

“People will still talk, won’t they?”

“Yeah, people will always talk, but Maren, we don’t exactly have to listen.”

I smiled a bit wanly, “We don’t now, do we?”

“Unfortunately, when it comes to the law, I do,” he said and lifted my ankles, swinging them in towards the mattress. He laid my legs on his bed and I just naturally lay back to watch him. He came around to the other side, pulled off his boots and did the same as he did with mine, lined them up neatly at the foot of the bed on his side before he lay on his side to look at me. Our hands just sort of naturally met in the middle, on the mattress between us.

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