But then the couch beside me depressed as he dropped down, making my cushion jump slightly and my heart fly up into my throat, still not used to having anyone around.
I looked over and watched as Ryan's somewhat tense expression softened until there was a small smile there. He reached out toward me, his thumb pressing into my cheek and rubbing. "Ink," he explained, pulling his finger away and showing me the blue.
When I was thinking, I had a habit of tapping a pen against my cheek impatiently.
"Thanks," I offered, closing the pad so that the notes from him and his housekeeper hid my words, always having been shy about mine until they were a finished project and I unleashed them to the masses.
"So I got a couple things from your place," he said, nodding his chin over toward the kitchen, making my gaze follow, shocking me when I realized the entire island was actually covered. So he wasn't just quiet, he was pretty much a ninja. "Found your laptop and charger since the computer was too much of a project, some bath stuff, some clothes, and a few of the books that seemed to be in an unread pile."
It totally was an unread pile with a stack of bookmarks on top, one for each book.
"Thank you," I said again, giving him another grateful smile. Good. He was too damn good.
"I ran into Bry," he said just as I stood up and started toward the pile, making me whirl back around, mouth parted, eyes bugging.
"What?" I hissed, my heart slamming again, but not in a surprised way, in a very anxious way.
Ryan and Bry?
No.
Bad, bad combination.
"Dusty, breathe," he suggested, tone almost annoyingly calm while I was running over the million or two reasons him talking to Bry was an absolutely terrible thing. "We just had some things to discuss and came to the same conclusions. Which," he went on when I moved to interrupt, "don't include letting you worry about a damn thing concerning it. You've been through enough. We have it handled. But anyway, he also dropped off your Christmas presents. It's in the box with the bath stuff," he added, casual as ever even though he had literally just told me that he was 'handling' a problem that involved a drug dealer and guys who beat and robbed me when he barely even knew me. "So, I hear you like baths when you're anxious," he went on, standing and stepping across the floor toward me. He reached for the box I held my bath bombs in and handed it to me. "I have literally never used that bath in there, but Anita cleans it every time she's here so it's clean and it's all yours. Take all the time you need."
All the time I'd need?
To come to terms with a guy I was maybe developing feelings for for the first time in years that barely knew me somehow 'handling' my problem with illegal prescription drug distribution?
Yeah, I was pretty sure there wasn't enough hot water in the building to last me until I came to grips with that kind of thing.
"While you do that, I will start getting things ready for later."
"Later?" I repeated, my mind going in too many directions to decipher what that meant.
His head ducked a bit, eyes warm, smile sweet. "New Years Eve, honey. We have a date."
A date.
I was pretty sure I actually freaking blushed at that word.
It had been so long since I had something as normal as a date with a man.
"Right," I agreed with a hesitant smile.
"I got confetti cannons," he added, looking almost a little sheepish at the idea.
Seeing that, I felt some of my tension melt away. If there were things that made him feel a little uncertain, and those things were freaking confetti cannons, then he seemed a bit more human to me.
"Sounds good," I said, genuinely meaning it.
Then I went ahead and took a bath of a respectable length. By my standards. So it was a two hour long bath by normal standards.
But, well, after the anxiety melted away some about Bry and all that, another idea crossed my mind. I was having a date. With a man I had already made out with and, sort of, dry-humped in my living room the week before. So, if things followed the way they would usually, those things and more could happen.
That meant, um, that some extra attention needed to be paid to some grooming.
So I did that and I slathered on lotion he had packed for me and slipped into the clothes he had picked out, feeling just the smallest bit of embarrassment at knowing he had gone through my underwear drawer seeing as he had matching bras and panties all stacked in the kitchen.
But, if things went the way I hoped, and was somewhat mildly terrified they might, the end game was for him to see my panties and bras anyway. Preferably as he pulled them off. Maybe with his teeth.
Okay.
I was getting ahead of myself.
When I walked back out, Ryan was in the kitchen chopping vegetables and put them on a platter that I would put good money on the fact that he hadn't bought it for himself. What man thought of things like having serving platters?
"Feel better?" he asked, having somehow heard me even with his back to me.
"Yes, thanks. Um, where did all my stuff go?" I asked, walking over to the island that had been stacked when I left but was suddenly only covered in snacky foods for our little New Years Eve date. Even the idea of that made my belly do a little butterfly flutter, something I wasn't sure I experienced since high school.
"Clothes are in the second drawer in the bedroom. You took your bath stuff. Your laptop and books are on the coffee table in the living room."
He was... moving me in?
I mean moving the books and laptop to the living room wasn't strange at all; he needed the counter space to put out the spread. But putting my clothes in his dresser? He was the kind of man who dressed well; he had to have used all his dresser drawers. So had he emptied one out for me?
"You didn't have to..."
"I figured you're not feeling too comfortable with your apartment now. You seem good here."
He let that hang, waiting I thought, for some kind of agreement. "I am," I agreed, taking a look around. It was nothing like my apartment. Everything was dark and streamlined. While my apartment was always neat, I had knickknacks and personal items to make it feel homey. Ryan didn't have much in the way of that aside from maybe the framed pictures of his nieces. It shouldn't have been comfortable to me. It was the opposite of everything I thought I found relaxing. But somehow, it still was. Maybe because it was so much of him. Maybe my comfort wasn't in the place itself, but the person who owned it, who lived in it, who touched everything inside it.
"Good. And like I said, you're welcome for as long as you need. It made sense to put things away."
He said it so casually, shrugging it off like it was no big deal that I almost believed it. That was until I remembered the boyfriend I dated from eighteen to twenty-two wouldn't let me have a drawer at his place until I demanded it with an ultimatum.
It said something when a man willingly, without having been asked, made room for you.
And right about then was when the full weight of understanding came over me- I was going to be living with Ryan freaking Mallick.
It was also right about then that I caught my reflection in the microwave. The words blurted out before I could stop them. "Ryan, how long until my eye goes down?" I asked, meaning the swelling.
The knife he was cutting with settled down on the board and he turned slowly, giving me a sympathetic smile. "No way to tell. Everyone heals differently. Some people will see a difference in a couple days; others take weeks or months to be honest. You need to ice it though," he added, going to the freezer and pulling out a fresh icepack and wrapping it up. "Twenty on, thirty off," he told me, giving it to me.
"Thanks," I said, giving him a small smile and moving over to the couch, flicking on the TV and laying down to follow orders.
Somehow, maybe due to the lingering headache in my temples or the stress of the last day and a half, I drifted off.
There was a tickling sensation down the side of my face, making me grumble and swat at
it. "Leave me alone, Rochester," I mumbled, only to hear a low, deep chuckle that, yeah, even half-asleep I knew didn't belong to my cat.
My eyes shot open. Yes, plural. Apparently, the icing did help somewhat. It wasn't fully open, but I could see more than a slit. And what I did see was Ryan sitting at the edge of the couch, his hand still brushing my somehow-dry hair out of my face. If my hair was dry then... "How long have I been sleeping?" I asked, trying to bolt up, but he pushed me back down.
"Couple hours," he shrugged.
"How many hours?"
"Five," he admitted with a smile.
"Five hours! Why didn't you wake me up?"
"Figured you needed to catch up. I did replace your icepack a few times though. Did some good. Maybe you'll be one of the lucky ones who only have a week or so of swelling."
"How do you know so much about things like that?"
"Things like what?" he asked, but it was pure hedging. He knew exactly what I was talking about.
"Injuries and fighting and all that."
"That is a story for another day I think," he said, making me stiffen slightly. "I'll tell you," he reassured, having been watching closely enough to see the change. "But let's not go there tonight, okay?" he asked and because he seemed to need it, I decide to give it to him. I knew what it felt like to not be ready to talk about something, to want to work up to it.
"Okay. So what did you make while I was out?"
"A bunch of dips and shit," he offered, shrugging. "My sister-in-law informed me that New Years Eve was not the kind of night you made a huge meal for. So it's all snack and apps. I did make some mozz sticks and fries though. Don't know what your alcohol tolerance is and figured we should lay a good fat and grease layer for it to land on."
"Good thinking. I haven't had more than a couple glasses of wine in, well, years." In fact, I refused to keep much alcohol in my house because I knew how easy it might be to reach for a glass of something during a stressful time. And then that became a crutch.
"Well, champagne aside, I have everything," he said, waving a hand at his liquor cabinet. "Benefits of having a bar in the family."
"What bar?" I asked, moving to sit up.
"Chaz's."
"No way," I said with a big smile. "That was the first bar I ever went into when I was legal."
"Kind of the only game in town," he agreed. "Though I snuck in and drank illegally with my brothers more than a time or two."
"Really?" I asked, smiling at the idea of him being a troublemaker. He seemed so staid and responsible.
"I'd call it peer pressure, but I really just wanted to know what the fuss was about. Pops came in and found us all puking in the bathroom."
"Was he pissed?"
He laughed a little dryly at that. "My parents aren't your typical parents. Pops was the kind of man who fixed the 'problem' when Shane decided to take up smoking by making him smoke an entire pack one after another until he was so sick that he never touched one again."
"So I'm assuming that when you were done being sick..."
"He made us chug until we puked again," Ryan agreed, smiling at the memory. "Pops is a hardass, but it worked. For the most part. We didn't sneak into the bar anymore at least. And it was a good year or two before any of us touched alcohol again."
"What's your mother like?" I found myself asking, liking the picture he was creating for me.
"Even more of a hardass than my Pops if you can imagine. Pops had to work a lot while we were kids and she was stuck with five troublemakers, boundary-pushers, and general pains in the ass. She had to be a force to deal with all of us."
"Like how?" I pressed, noticing the way his smile went nostalgic talking about his family, his eyes a little far away in the memory.
"Shane has a missing curfew followed by near frostbite story he can tell you sometime," he said easily, just assuming that it would happen eventually, a certainty in his tone that almost made me believe it too. "There's a falling through the kitchen window story that, I think, Hunter has to tell. Mark has a garden hose wakeup story."
"What about you and Eli?"
"Eli stayed more out of trouble than the rest of us as a rule, but he still can never seem to follow simple orders. A while back, Ma demanded we all bring dates to Sunday dinner. It was mandatory. If we didn't bring one, we didn't eat. Eli didn't eat. And she made him help her serve and everything," he added, laughing.
"And you?"
"Hmm," he said, thinking on it a second, his own stories not coming as easily to him as his siblings'. "I was in senior year and for fuck knows what reason, we all had to be in one sport each. I'd say it was because she wanted us to learn teamwork or some shit like that, but really, she probably just wanted a few hours to herself where we weren't driving her nuts after school. And me, idiot I was, didn't opt for baseball where I'd get to sit out a lot of the practice or wrestling like Shane so I could use the skills I'd learned grappling with my brothers my whole life. Or even cheerleading like Mark..."
"Oh no no no," I cut him off. "You can't just drop a bomb like your brother being a cheerleader and move on from it," I said, laughing.
"You'd have to meet Mark to understand fully. He's ah... there's not a nice way to say slut so I'll just go ahead and use that. He has and always did really fucking love women. All his friends outside of us and maybe Colt were female. He dated a different girl every week in high school. And when he was forced into a sport, well, why wouldn't he pick one where he got to pick up and throw around a bunch of hot girls all day?"
"Smart guy," I agreed, deciding that Mark was definitely a brother I wanted to meet. "What did you do?"
"Fucking track," he admitted with a snort. "I have no idea what I was thinking. I quit after I don't know... two weeks. That was more than e-fucking-nough for me. But then Ma found out. And my mother, aside from being a strict believer in manners, family obligation, respect for elders, and treating women right, well, she fucking hates quitters. If we signed up, we finished. No excuses."
His mother was everything my mother wasn't. I think I learned manners despite her, not because of her. "What did she do?"
"She came and picked me up every single day from school, made me change into gym clothes, and then drove beside me as I ran through the neighborhoods for however long practice would have been. Every goddamn day. Even on days when it poured and actual track was cancelled, there I was running in it with her driving beside me so I couldn't get away with not doing it."
"Your mom sounds awesome," I admitted.
"What was yours like?" he asked, making my smile fall.
My mother was never a good topic for me. One, because we currently had a bad relationship. Two, because of the way I had been raised. And three, because she saw nothing wrong with how she raised me.
I was an only child, obviously. The product of a short-term affair with a man many years her senior when she was all but eighteen. When I had asked about him, all she had told me was that he was tall and blond, his hair dreadlocked and with a beard he oiled with rosehips and lavender and he spent eight hours a day meditating and doing yoga and was as close to a living, breathing second-coming as you could get.
She never even gave me a name.
It wasn't until I was much, much older that I realized... maybe she didn't even have one herself.
There was no nice way to say your mother was, well, a bit slutty. But that was exactly what she was, by almost any standard of the word. One-night stands, weekend flings, short dalliances. I spent more time in men I didn't know's apartments than I did in ones where my stuff belonged. And she had no moral compass about it either. She dated young, old, married, engaged. She didn't care.
Monogamy is a religious concept, not a human normalcy.
And while that might have been correct, it didn't excuse dragging a little, impressionable girl around and putting her in the homes of people she didn't know she could trust. I was lucky to have never been abused in the situations she put herself and me in.
> She liked to call herself a hippie, big on free love and the more-than-occasional ingestion of acid for 'spiritual' purposes.
I didn't ever have a bedtime. I ate whatever the hell I wanted, even if that meant an entire box of sugar cereal for dinner. I didn't even know what a dentist was until I was ten and my uncle had brief care of me and did those normal things with me- doctor, dentist, eye exam, the works. I never learned anything about basic human civility when I was at her side.
And, well, the fact that she would breeze into Navesink Bank, drop me off and then leave without me only to show up weeks or months or years later said a hell of a lot about her.
"She was a piece of work," Ryan agreed when I finished telling him all of that. "You were lucky you had your uncle."
Truer words had never been spoken.
I didn't want to think about what I might have turned out like had he never been a part of my life.
A huge part of me thought that maybe I would have turned out just like my mother. And that, well, was the worst possible thing that could have happened. I'd happily take my agoraphobia over that any day.
"Can I ask you something," he started, but went on before I could say anything. "And it's alright if you're not ready to talk about it."
I felt my belly tense, my heart fluttering in a way that was hinting at panic, but not taking the leap yet. "Sure."
"How did your agoraphobia become so bad?"
Right.
See, the strange thing was, after a while of living life a certain way, it can be easy to forget how not normal it is. I didn't spend every moment of my day in my apartment thinking about what a freak I was, how crippled I was by my condition. I just adapted. I lived the best way I could. I cooked, I cleaned, I read, I wrote, I paid bills. It was a very small life, but it was a life.
So when it was brought up, when it was thrown in my face, my immediate instinct was to shut down. That was my coping mechanism. After so many years of upsetting and disappointing people, it was hard to even bring it up.
Ryan (The Mallick Brothers #2) Page 10
