Bane

I grabbed the bun on top of my head and cut it, throwing it to the sink and turning on the water with the elastic band still on.

Looked back up. Didn’t flinch.

Proceeded with the rest of my task.

Looked up.

Flinched.

THERE’S AN EVOLUTION TO BIRTHDAYS. The older you got, the less eager you were to celebrate them. In my case, The Incident had aged me a dozen decades. For the past couple years, I’d tried to act like it didn’t exist. Like I didn’t exist. It was easier to pretend nothing was happening, because if life happened, I had to take control of it, and I didn’t have it in me to do it.

Not until now.

Three years ago, Pam had gotten me a bow bracelet from Tiffany’s for my seventeenth birthday and Darren had shelled out the big bucks for a weekend on a yacht for my friends and me. I invited fifty kids to the party, and some of their parents attended as chaperones, too. “For mingling and networking purposes, although making sure no one gets pregnant is also a priority”—Pam had giggled plastically, feeling blue-blooded like the people of Todos Santos for a hot minute. I was dating Emery back then, and I remember how triumphant she’d felt. She even went back to letting me calling her Mom.

It was the year when, for the first time, I skipped visiting my dad’s grave and placing the Kit Kat we used to share every morning on his tombstone.

It was the first and last year I truly felt normal, accepted, and popular.

Now, for my twentieth birthday, I decided to go back to the basics and celebrate by munching on a Kit Kat bar in my room, reading a book that Mrs. B had loaned me.

I opted for not leaving my room, since I didn’t have a shift at Café Diem today. Pam and Darren texted me their banal happy birthday wishes. Their messages remained unanswered.

Hannah slid her annual birthday card under my door, and Mayra called. I answered, but only because she monitored my moves so closely, I was afraid she was going to tell Darren and Pam I wasn’t making progress and they would insist on upping my sessions with her.

Bane hadn’t called, and I tried not to let it affect me. I tried, but I failed.

At 9:00 p.m., I was already in my bed, my face buried in Whitney, My Love by Judith McNaught. I thought I heard something—a soft thud. I looked up from the page. I’d been stuck on the same paragraph for half an hour, because my mind kept on drifting toward Roman. How I’d let him drag me back into the world too quickly, too recklessly, and he hadn’t even bothered to wish me a happy birthday. I listened closely to the silence. Nothing. My eyes dropped back to the page.

Click.

I glanced at the window. The usual oak tree stood there, staring back at me. I flipped a page, knowing I should pay more attention, and that the juicy part was unfolding in front of my eyes, when…

Click.

This time I stood up.

Click. Click.

I paced to the window, climbed on the window seat on my knees, and yanked my window up, slanting my gaze to the back of our garden, which was overlooking Mrs. Belfort’s maze. I saw a shadow of a man standing under the tree. His face was turned down, and he was wearing a ball cap. But the stance, height, and attire seemed familiar: Cargo pants and a faded black surfer shirt with holes in it.

“Roman?” My eyebrows collapsed into a frown.

“You asleep?”

His voice in my ears felt like a sweet promise, and that’s when I realized how much I’d missed him. How much I’d needed him to acknowledge my existence today, of all days, even though most time, I didn’t want to remember I was still alive.

“Reading.” I cleared my throat, trying to sound indifferent.

“On your birthday? Very rock ’n roll.”

My heart began to drum faster. He’d remembered.

I noticed he was swinging a bag in his hand, but didn’t want to be presumptuous.

“Why don’t you go back to bed? All this rebelling must be exhausting.” He was bouncing on the balls of his feet, looking less than his pissed-off, take-no-prisoners self. I wanted him to look up and drink me in with his green eyes no less than I wanted my next breath.

“What?” I snorted.

“Go back to what you were doing, Jesse, and pretend I’m not here. I just wanted to make sure you were in your room and that your window was not closed. Giving you a heart attack for your birthday is memorable, but kind of crappy, even by my very low standards.” His face was still down, and that damn ball cap denied me my current favorite view.

I knew I needed to keep my emotions in check with him, but it was easy to slip into infatuation with Bane. All the ingredients were there: funny, charming, confident, and hot as sin.

“You’re weird,” I grumbled, walking backward, my butt hitting my bed.

I heard him hop onto the metal barbecue grill outside, his boots producing a thump Pam and Darren would never hear, because their room was on the other side of the house. I bit back my smile and settled in bed, picking up my book despite knowing I’d never be able to concentrate.

A boot slid against the glass of the kitchen window. I realized that he was climbing up to my room, and my heart was doing an insane dance in my chest, completely drunk, and I wanted to yell at it to stop before we were both going to be sorry.

“Oh, shit.” He chuckled breathlessly, and the exclamation was followed by the sound of scrabbling hands against the side of the house.

My smile crumbled. I set the book down. “Are you okay?”

Another puff and scrape. “Fine. My pants are slipping down, though, and my ass is making a grand appearance. Hopefully Mrs. Belfort is not in the mood for some maze-watching.”

I giggled. “Classy.”

“Hey, you haven’t seen my ass, lady. Don’t slam it before you try it.”

“Was trying your ass ever an option?” My heart somersaulted a thousand times a minute. Maybe I was having a heart attack after all. What was happening in my chest didn’t seem natural or familiar.

“Close your eyes,” he commanded, his voice booming all over my room, so I knew that he was close. I did as I was told. This year, I’d told Pam and Darren not to get me anything. They hadn’t. I couldn’t fault them for following my request. Besides, last year Darren had tried to give me something—a new flat screen TV for my room—and I’d respectfully declined. I’d called Hannah’s son and had him pick it up, since I knew she’d never accept the gift. But whatever Roman wanted to give me—I eagerly wanted to own it.

My eyes were squeezed shut when I heard his boots land on my carpeted floor. My pulse skyrocketed, thudding against every inch of my skin. There was a special thrill in knowing he could be doing anything to me. And that he wouldn’t. Because he was decent and fair. Because no matter what he thought about himself, he was good.

“Open.” His breath fanned across my face.

I blinked, adjusting to what I was seeing, and not entirely believing it was truth. The ball cap was gone.

So was his beard.

And his man-bun.

Bane. All of Bane. His entire, beautiful, silky, boyish face in front of me. Clean-shaven and mesmerizing, like Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo, the very first time you see him through the aquarium, and it feels like someone is pinching your heart from within, twisting it evilly on a taunting smirk.

I knew Roman was attractive, but this was different. It was more. His jaw was square and strong, but everything about him was utterly youthful. His bee-stung lips and Grecian nose. It was like he was invented to destroy me.

Then it dawned on me.

He’d shaved for me.

Last week, I was standing here, in my room, telling him to shave.

So he had. He’d stopped hiding. For me. Gifting me the most important thing in the world on my birthday—his acceptance of who he was and from whom he came.

Realizing it had been at least a full minute and I still hadn’t said anything, I opened my mouth. He stared at me expectantly, like I was holding the sky in my hands.

“Is that…a new shirt?”

He raised one eyebrow. “Now who’s being an asshole here?”

I fell into my bed, laughing. Roman pretended to punch my shoulder, mounting my body and pinning me to the mattress, while I desperately clung to the waistband of his pants, yanking them back up.

“You said your ass was showing. I didn’t think you meant the one that was on your neck.” I giggled breathlessly.

“Don’t do that.” He straddled me fully now, his erection grinding against my stomach, and not by accident. The air swelled between us, full of heavy breaths and hormones and need. I glanced at my door. Locked. Boy, I wanted to do a lot more things that involved gasping.

“Why?”

“Because I have an erection from hell and you almost sliced my balls into pastrami.”

I snorted, rolling my groin once, my navel hitting the crown of his cock through our clothes. He flinched and quickly moved away from me, standing up and walking over to the window, pushing it shut. He turned back to me, and we stared at each other.

We’d helped each other tear down the walls, and I hoped, with every fiber of my body, that what we’d find underneath them wasn’t rotten.

“I’ll ask again—what do you think?” He gestured to his face before grabbing the mysterious bag he’d come with from my window seat.

I scrunched my nose. “I liked you better with the beard and the man-bun.”

“Well, too bad, because you’re going to see this nasty-ass face for a very long time, every day.” He plopped down on my bed and handed me the bag. “Happy Birthday, Snowflake.”

“How do you know that it’s my birthday?” I held the bag, wondering if it felt so heavy because it held so many of my hopes and dreams.

“You told me.”

“Once. In passing. I didn’t mention the date.” My gaze clung to the bag like it was going to dissolve into thin air. It was a simple, purple, plastic bag. No name or brand on it. I knew Bane, and he wasn’t the type to buy a girl jewelry, even if he could afford it. I’d never really liked that Tiffany’s bracelet, anyway. Best thing I ever got was the Kit Kat my dad and I shared every morning on the bus on our way to my school.