“Drive-bys on a Sunday afternoon?”
“Oi. None of that. We’re doing it on a Saturday.”
“Which Saturday?”
Rubi made a note with his favourite pencil, his handwriting orderly as fuck when he knewhewas the one who’d have to decipher it next. “I mean, I’ll tell you, but I’m not expecting you to remember.”
“Rude.”
“Truth. And I love it. I love everything about you.”
“Really?”
Even now, after all these years, I couldn’t keep the scepticism out of my voice. I was abrasive. Chaotic. Unpleasant as hell when my temper got the better of me every damn day. It made no sense for anyone to love me, let alone a soul like Rubi.
Rubi dropped his pencil—hisdad’spencil. Sharpened at both ends, it had been in his life longer than I had. Probably. Or maybe there’d just been a lot of pencils that looked the fucking same.
“Riv.”
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.
Rubi made a grab for it—my hand, not my mouth, and the devil inside had me evading his touch. Evadinghim, when I knew whatever he was about to say and do would heal more than the cuts and scrapes on my abused fingers.
“Riv.”
“What?” The snap barrelled out of me, O’Brian to the bone and then some.
But Rubi wasn’t scared of me. Never had been. Only of how I made himfeel, and this day, and every fucking day, he regarded me with nothing but love and a whole lot of patience.
He waited for me to simmer down before he tried again to claim my hand, his palm warm and dry against the chilled skin I’d brought in from the road. “Riv, Riv, Riv.” He kissed my battered knuckles. “I don’t know how many times I can tell you I love that you’re noteasy. I fucking thrive on it, I thrive onyou, and you don’t need goddamn fixing to be worthy of it.”
“I’m a cunt to you.”
“No. You’re a cunt to yourself.”
I couldn’t look at him.
He didn’t make me. Just squeezed my hand, helped himself to the other one, and squeezed that battered bastard too. “Right now, you’re not hurtingme. You’re punishing yourself for whatever sin that demon in your brain has dreamed up while I’ve been gone, when all you need is to believe how much I fucking love you.”
I jerked my head to look at him. “I know you love me.”
“But today you woke up forgetting how I can, right?”
“Maybe.”
Rubi smiled, fondness I didn’t deserve shining in his kind eyes. “I’m not easy either, you know. How much of your life is spent apologising for my fat mouth? Actually, don’t answer that. Just hear me when I say I’ll never need you to be anyone other than who you are, okay? Justyou, cos your flaws fucking complete me and that’s never going to change.”
This was it. My moment to give in to Saint’s earnest advice.
Ask him. Ask him. Ask him.
But the trouble with the restless energy that plagued me whenever Rubi worked away on the rigs was that it abandoned me with the same abruptness it often arrived with.
I was so tired, and he saw it in me before I felt it in myself.
“Come on.” His deep voice softened to a low rumble. “Let’s go to bed.”
Ask him. Ask him. Ask him.