Page 22 of Cover Up

Dei pushed up on his elbow. “Bad?”

“Entitled,” Felix said with a small sigh. He laid out several small cups, adhered to the tray with globs of Vaseline. “You know that saying, don’t fuck with people who handle your food?’

Dei grinned a little wolfishly. “You know I do.”

Felix glanced over and grinned at him. “I feel like that should also apply to people who are using a high-speed machine full of needles to permanently ink your skin.”

Dei choked on a laugh. “Yeah, no shit. I thought that would be common sense.”

“Common sense is definitely misnamed,” Felix said with a huff as he walked over. He had fresh gloves on and a disposable razor in his hand, and he used his thumb to tip Dei’s chin up again. “People seem to think that because they’re paying me for my art, they can talk to me however they want. And it’s…” Felix went quiet as he spritzed something astringent on Dei’s skin, and then he felt the dry scrape of the blade. “Sometimes I get flustered, and I lose my words. And I can’t…I hate looking weak.”

Dei felt his gut twist, and he curled his fingers around Felix’s wrist without realizing he was doing it. He started to pull back, but he felt Felix press into him, and he froze. “People are dicks, and your reactions to shit like that doesn’t make you weak, sugar.”

Felix shrugged and glanced downward. “I guess. It’s just hard not to feel like it. This woman came in—she’s had two pieces done by me, and she walked in and just started talking and…uh. Well, I didn’t recognize her. And when she realized that, she started cursing at me like I was doing it on purpose. Zeke had to kick her out.”

“Good. Fuck her,” Dei said, his voice a little more heated than he meant it to be.

Felix huffed a soft laugh and shook his head. “I just wish it wasn’t like this for me.”

“I know what you mean,” Dei said. He twitched his stump. “But it is what it is. Nothing we can do will change it.”

Felix nodded, and after a beat, the moment passed. He stepped away to prep his stencil, and Dei lay back, lowering his eyelids and sinking into the dark as Felix’s hands eventually lay down on him.

And in spite of the pain, it was maybe the best Dei had felt in a very, very long time.

8

Dei fought the urge to pick at the plastic shield covering his neck as he finished the last of the dinner rush. His hip was aching something fierce, and sweat had dripped between his eyelid and prosthetic so many times that he just took the damn thing out and shoved it into his pocket halfway through service.

The heat only made his mood worse, and he kept dropping shit. He burned the cream for pasta, lost half his cheese when one of the line cooks bumped into him, and when four dishes came back from the same table, he was seconds away from cracking.

One of the customers started demanding that they talk to the chef, and Jeremiah walked out there to deal with them, saving the group from Dei’s temper.

Finally, when the handle on his herb knife broke, he nearly threw his apron onto the flaming grill and quit. Luckily, Marcus took over and sent him to take a breath outside, and he sat against the back of the building with his head resting on the bricks, his ears ringing from how loud the kitchen had gotten.

He loved his job, he really did. Even on nights like this when it felt like everything was going wrong. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to deal with his professional life competing with the chaos of his personal one. He checked his phone for the thousandth time to see if Sofia had bothered to message him, but she was still in the goddamn wind.

He hated himself a little for not making more of an effort to find her, but he couldn’t burn down his own life with the flame she lit on her way out the door. He just wished he hadn’t felt so damn lost. He didn’t know where to draw the line between enabling and helping her, and there wasn’t some sort of book out there for older brothers who had to take over because their mom got too sick to parent.

He felt entirely lost at sea, with no lighthouse to guide him back home.

Taking a breath, Dei used his cane to climb to his feet, freezing when he heard footsteps coming toward him. He turned his head to see the walkway better, and a second later, he saw the one man he’d prayed he wouldn’t see ever again.

“Just the fucker I was looking for,” Clark said, his voice thick and slurring.

Dei didn’t really have any qualms about beating the fuck out of a drunk guy as long as that drunk guy was this one. He set his cane against the wall and curled his hand into a fist. “If you know what’s good for you, you’re gonna get the fuck out of here.”

Clark laughed. “Fuck you, man. The fuck is your dickless ass gonna do with your one arm and one leg?”

“Beat the absolute shit out of you,” Dei said calmly.

Clark took another few steps and stumbled. “Where’s your sister?”

Dei felt a small pulse of relief when he realized Clark actually didn’t know. “That’s not your business. And I’m dead serious, man. You got no business here.”

“You got no business here,” Clark mocked in a faux-deep voice, then laughed again. He tumbled toward the building and caught himself on the bricks. “I’m gonna find that bitch and make you watch as I—”

He didn’t get the chance to finish his sentence. He swung without thinking, and he knew the second his fist connected with flesh, Clark wasn’t going to get back up. Not for a good, long while. Dei stared, his vision a little hazy as Clark’s mouth and nose let out a steady trickle of blood. His chest was moving, so there was a good chance the punch, combined with whatever drugs he’d taken, was what knocked him out.

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