Page 39 of For You I'd Mend
“That door to the sunroom isn’t soundproof,” she said as I buckled my seatbelt.
Well, wasn’t that great? The only thing worse than being turned down was having an audience while it happened.
Lauren started the car but faced me as the engine groaned to life. “Believe what he told you, Poppy. Either accept what he’s willing to give you or move on. He’s a huge part of Cal’s life, so he’ll be part of Rowan’s, but he doesn’t have to have a place in yours. If it hurts too much to be his friend, let him go.”
And now I understood the hug. Lauren believed in karma more than anyone I knew. In her mind, her little lovefest in the kitchen offset the pain she might cause Theo by suggesting I drop him from my life. No doubt, she’d keep hugging him like that forever if I took her advice.
I stared out the window, and we drove around the corner in silence. Lauren pulled up to the curb in front of my house and blew out a breath. “I get it, Poppy. More than you know. But sometimes loving someone isn’t enough to save them. At some point, you have to protect yourself.”
I raised my eyebrows and waited. Lauren never talked about her life before she came to live with her grandpa in middle school. From her silence, Rowan and I assumed Lauren’s early childhood was bad, but after years of trying to learn more, we knew not to ask questions.
“Better go,” she said, “so you have time to get a good cry in before your family comes home.”
And that’s exactly what I did.
Chapter twelve
Theo
When I arrived atMarked on Aaron’s first day, Max was already at his station with one of his regulars, George. “You settled in?” Max asked, pausing his needle above an outline of a sloth.
George already had representations of five of the seven deadly sins inked on his left arm: a mirror, a pile of money, an overflowing shopping cart, boxing gloves, and an outstretched hand in green ink. After today, he’d just need lust.
“Sure,” I said, despite the fact I’d spent the night before sleeping on an air mattress and drank water straight from the faucet this morning since I didn’t own a glass. I should have bought a bed and some basics, but I’d held on to the hope something would delay Aaron, and I could wait to move until the house sale went through. Instead, I was renting from Mrs. Jenkins for the next two weeks until the closing and sleeping on the floor. Not that I could call it rent. She’d charged me five dollars and a painting class at her retirement home. I was basically up half a month’s rent on the exchange, and Aiden andI were still battling it out for a fair rental price. Fair for him, that is. He’d emailed me a lease with some bullshit amount that included a construction inconvenience credit.
“I picked up Aries yesterday and got him settled,” Max said, pressing the needle down.
“Who’s that?”
“Me,” a guy said, stepping out of the supply closet. “You must be Theo.”
He held out his hand, and I shook it while we assessed each other. You could learn a lot about a person from their tattoos. He had some decent ink, including a Japanese-style dragon in bold blue that wound around his left arm, but most of the rest were basic prison tats: barbed wire on his wrist, a spiderweb on his arm, both black and freestyled.
“Thought your name was Aaron,” I said, dropping his hand.
He pointed to a large tattoo on his neck. “Changed it.”
“To the Zodiac or the god?”
“Ain’t they the same?” he said, laughing.
“How do you spell it?”
“A-r-i-e-s.”
“That’s the Zodiac.”
“Theo’s Greek,” Max said, as if that explained why I was being a dick.
“Ah, got it man,” Aries said, scratching his chest. “Didn’t mean no disrespect. You speak English good.” He laughed softly. “Probably better than me. I stopped going to school when I was thirteen.”
Max shot me a look that made my balls shrivel. Growing up, I’d butted heads with my old man all the time and never felt an ounce of guilt, but the few occasions Max and I had gotten into it had left me feeling like a complete piece of shit. That look was an order to be the man he’d helped me become.
So instead of telling the dumbass who displaced me that I was born and raised in Peace Falls, I pointed to the partial sleeve on his right arm. “You do any of those yourself?”
“Yeah, this one,” he said, pointing to the spiderweb.
“It’s good,” I said, because considering he’d probably done it with pen ink and a staple, it didn’t look half bad. “Guess you’re a leftie?”
