I didn’t stop him from washing my car. There was something rebellious about the way he’d reacted when I’d laughed at him. It hadn’t been a point-and-laugh scenario, but still my amusement had seemed to be offensive. So I’d swallowed my smile and let him carry on, doing what he wanted to do, fire burning behind his ice cold eyes.
There was something about Dax. It was like a perfectly made up house with everything neat and in its place. And there was this one drawer with something wild and crazy inside it, thrashing to get out.
He got into the car and started scrubbing. I noticed he took care with the stitching and the seams, the parts I’d been worrying about. Dax seemed to be a lot of things, but careless wasn’t one of them. He was the most attentive man I’d seen, actually, even though he had different ways of showing it. I knew what people must have seen when they looked at him – a good for nothing lowlife who was going nowhere with his life and couldn’t be making his money in any legal kind of way. That was what I’d thought when I saw him first, too.
Maybe that was the look he’d been going for. What I saw now was something different. That wild side of him that threatened to come lashing out. That depth to him that I was sure no one else took long enough to notice. And it hadn’t even taken me that long. Or maybe I was just looking at him the way I usually looked at people. I had a habit of seeing the nugget of worth that was buried deep inside, no matter how far down it was.
Even if it was completely unreachable. Maybe he was another of my delusions. Still, I didn’t care. I liked what I saw. I liked talking to him, even though he seemed to have very little to say most of the time.
“How did you end up right where Joker was when I got out of the car?” I asked him. He backed out of the car. His hands were wet and his skin was shiny with sweat in the outside light. He wiped his forehead with his arm, making his black hair stick up in the front.
“I’d been I town on business when I saw a black dog making its way across a road. Joker was missing for two months. I can’t even tell you how many black dogs I’ve followed just to be sure it wasn’t him. When you hit the dog…” he swallowed and corrected himself. “When you stopped and got out and I saw it was him? I nearly died.”
I nodded and sat down on a low wall that ran around a raised flower bed.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?”
“For what happened to him.”
He shook his head. “Don’t be. It wasn’t your fault. If anything, you helped me find him and make sure that he didn’t die. The people that did this to him…” He stopped his sentence like he didn’t want to verbalize the rest of it. And a part of me was glad. I didn’t have the feeling that he would just swear at them or flip them off. Dax looked like the kind of guy would use the word ‘torture’ without it being hyperbole.
“What do you usually drive?” I asked. He looked like he was heading off to a dark place, and while the guy was hot as hell, I wasn’t sure I was ready to go there with him. Maybe it was stereotyping to assume that he had it in him to hurt or worse, but men like him didn’t choose the deadly kind of look for shits and giggles.
“I’m usually on my bike.” He jutted a thumb past the garage. I leaned to the side and noticed a Harley Davidson motorcycle in a car port.
“Impressive,” I said. The whole house and yard were dilapidated but the bike was shiny and new, polished until it gleamed. It looked spectacular.
“It is. I was on foot because I’d just finished polishing it, and the sky looked like rain.”
I smiled and shook my head. Boys and their toys. “I thought it was something like a bike,” I said.
“Why?”
“Your jacket.”
He’d left it in the house when he’d gone to get the bucket and he was wearing a simple sleeveless shirt now. It made his arms look spectacular when he was scrubbing. I traced the tattoos that were arranged in a sleeve down his left arm; he had a matching set on the right.
He didn’t answer me. I didn’t mind the silence. I liked watching him work. The simple task of washing the leather seats – which he did with quite a bit of scrubbing, might I add – made his muscles bulge beautifully. He was really fantastic to look at. Yes, I was being blunt, staring the way I was, but Dax seemed like he had no shame; I figured I could do the same.
I could just be myself around him, which seemed strange because I hardly knew the man. And he was absolutely the opposite of the type of guys I usually went for. He was badass and hot in a dangerous kind of way. And I still found that I wanted to know him better.
“What do you do?” he asked. He straightened up and grabbed his shirt at the back of his neck, pulling it over head in one swift motion. His muscles rippled when he rolled his shoulders. Most of his body was covered in tattoos. A complicated tribal covered most of his back and there was a picture of Joker on his ribs. His front was full of symbols and words that went in a spiral around his peck, closing in on his nipple, making him look like a leather clad Magic Mike. That dangerous air and the promise that it would be a rough ride sent a shiver ran down my spine. I had to force my eyes back to his and focus on the question. His eyes were locked on mine, impossible to read. Hypnotizing.
“I’m in video editing,” I said. My brain had managed by some miracle to spit out the right answer.
“Like movies?” he asked. The conversation was casual, talking about our careers. The look he was giving me, the feeling that settled itself in the pit of stomach, was a different conversation altogether. One was socially acceptable, the other was dark and dangerous. He looked at me like he was considering what I looked like naked. Where this sort of thing usually bothered me with other men, the way he did it made me want to give him what he was asking for.
I shook my head, trying to get rid of the thought. I was being ridiculous. He hadn’t actually asked for anything. I was being a complete perv.
“Yeah,” I said. “Movies. The company I work for is just not as well-known as some of the others. I’m working my way up.”
Dax looked me up and down like he was sizing me up.
“Yeah, I can see that about you,” he said.
“See what?”
“The kind of life you live. Precise, predictable. Safe.”
I wanted to get angry about the way he said it. But I couldn’t, because it was true. My life was perfectly safe. I knew exactly what was coming. I had a five-year plan that looked like it was going to rush itself off in three years, but that was fine with me. It would let me get an early start on my ten-year plan.
I nodded. “Yeah.” It wasn’t like I could argue about that. There was nothing exciting about me. “Nearly running over your dog and making my way to the vet, which is next door to where I am every day, was about the wildest thing I’ve done.”
He looked at me and his eyes were challenging me, telling me that I should try something wilder sometime. If he said it out loud, maybe I would have retorted that he should show me. Things could escalate from there.
But of course he never said it. And maybe he wasn’t thinking it at all, and I was reading things into how he was looking at me because I was desperate for a thrill and he mirrored my idea of what a thrill should be.
“It’s never too late to change,” Dax said before ducking back into the car. I nodded. That was true. The fact that I’d never really wanted to change wasn’t really the point. I wasn’t going to tell him that until I’d met him I was perfectly happy having only one track and following it slowly until I reached the only destination I’d planned out for myself. What was it he’d said: Precise. Predictable. Safe.
No one had ever summarized me that easily and that specifically.
I watched him clean for a while. I noticed how his muscled back moved when he threw his strength into the work to get the tough spots out. The cords rippled under his skin as he moved. His back was broad around the shoulders and down his spine. His back narrowed nicely to slim hips that disappeared into the faded jeans which hung precariously low.
His ass was perfect. He had muscle everywhere; he had to do more training than just washing cars and riding motorcycles. I wondered what his background was. I wasn’t going to ask. Imagine: hey, your ass is really fantastic. Do you Crossfit, or? Right. That wasn’t going to happen. I was making enough of a fool of myself as it was.
I wondered if the rest of him was covered in tattoos as well. I was willing to bet it was, but trying to imagine him naked made my cheeks heat up. Part of me wished I could. Another part scolded me for being disgusting.
Dax turned around and his gaze fell on mine. Had he caught me staring? His lips tugged up at the corners, a ghost of a smile fleeting over his face. God, he had. He’d seen me staring at his ass.
“Why don’t you tell me more about yourself?” he asked, steering away from the embarrassment I was wrestling. I took a deep breath and fiddled with my bun, wondering how obvious I’d be if I pulled out the pen and let it fall around my shoulders.
“I don’t know… there’s not really much to tell. I come from Arizona. I grew up in a small town, and I wanted to break away from everything that was always exactly the same as everything else. I have two sisters and a brother and we all made our own way. My parents are alone now, back home – I was the last to leave.”
I shrugged. I didn’t know what else to say. My life was painfully boring. I realized every time someone asked about it.
“So, you left the small town because you were bored of everything being the same, and you made yourself a life here where everything is the same? A new kind of sameness, I’m sure…”
I took a breath, wanted to say something, and realized there was nothing to say in response to that. He was absolutely right.
“Something like that.” I looked at my hands. “It just seemed like the thing to do.”
“That is the part of life I have no interest in.” He wrung out the rag he’d been using. “The part that seems like the thing to do.”
I nodded. He had the courage to close his eyes and jump. To break away from the norm and do whatever he wanted without caring what people thought of him. I wondered how many people he had that accepted him for who he was. Probably many. He seemed too confident to be a social reject.
“So, you have a lot of tattoos.” It seemed unfair that he could tell everything about me with the smallest little hint and I knew nothing about him.
“I do,” he said. Mr. Volunteer. He wasn’t going to give me anything unless I asked him outright. And even then he seemed to be really good at deflecting.
“Tell me about them.”
He stopped cleaning and looked at me. His eyes were so hard to read. He straightened out and turned to me, lifting his right arm so that I could see the tattoo of Joker.
“This one I’m sure you can tell. I paid more for this one than for most of these designs combined. I needed someone to get it just right and my regular artist doesn’t do photography.”
“It really is well done.” The ink looked like fur on his head and his mouth was open, tongue out, panting. He looked healthy, a picture of the dog he must have been before he’d been taken, long before I’d found him in the road.
“And the others?”
He held out the arm with the sleeve. There were skulls, roses, a compass, and a clock.
“The compass is direction. The clock is time. If you don’t have either of those you’re fucked… uh, screwed.” He swallowed hard, which drew my gaze to his throat. A rosary was tattooed around his neck, with dates designed as beads leading to a cross on his shoulder. He followed my eyes and touched the cross with his fingers. His face closed and I knew not to ask about it.
“What about the tribal designs on your back?” I asked. Safer to move away from the rosary.
He shrugged. “They all have so many meanings it’s almost like a biography just looking at them. Nothing interesting.”
“I’m interested.” I hadn’t meant to be that outright about it, but it was the truth. I was very interested in this man who seemed to be more and more three-dimensional the more I found out about him.
He shook his head. “Look, I know you’re trying to be nice making conversation and everything, but there are some things I’m just not going to tell you about. I don’t want to be rude, but the truth is that I don’t think you should hear about these parts of my life.”
I frowned at him. He was being very straight forward.
“It’s just that there are things that I don’t think you’d like to know about. There are things I don’t want you to know about.”
He turned away from me and kept scrubbing. The silence between us was so thick I could almost taste it. I hadn’t meant to offend him, but he seemed genuinely upset. I opened my mouth twice and inhaled to speak, but I couldn’t seem to find the right words. Where I’d felt open and honest before, able to say anything, I felt tongue tied now.
We stayed together like that for a while – me sitting on the low wall and him cleaning the inside of my car. The wall was cold and I was getting chilly. It seemed rude to ask for a different seat or to go into the house uninvited so that I could warm up, though, and going to sit in the car where he was busy scrubbing seemed inappropriate. It would be like I was waiting for a servant to finish their task. Besides, it felt like he needed some space.
I was struggling to place him. One moment, I felt like I’d known him for years and I could be more comfortable around him than I’d even been at home. And the next moment I felt like he was so closed off from me, a stranger like no one had been before. It wasn’t mood swings that I detected, either. It was something more than that. I didn’t know what, it was hard to wrap my head around, but I kept my seat and I watched him in silence with his back to me.
When he turned around, his face was serious, and his eyes were stormy. My gut clenched; I had no idea what had happened to upset him so much. He looked like a different man entirely.
Fear rippled through me for a moment. I was alone here, with a man I didn’t know, and no one in the city knew where I was. I’d been thinking all this time that he was capable of terrible things and I hadn’t once thought that maybe that meant I was in trouble somehow. Or that I couldn’t get away if I was. What could I do if he decided to come at me and do something drastic? He was twice my size
“Did I do something wrong?” I asked. My voice was thin, brittle. I hated that I sounded as scared as I felt. I didn’t know if he picked up on it, but if he did it only seemed to make him more upset.
“You don’t get it,” he said. His voice was a little hoarse, his words harsh.
“Get what?”
“The kind of person I am. The kind of life I lead.”
I shook my head. I had no idea what he was talking about. Maybe that was the point he was trying to make.
“I’m not the kind of man women like you want.” He sounded exasperated now. He was talking a lot compared to the minimal amount of words I’d gotten until now. “I know I’m not good enough for you. It’s painfully obvious.”
The fear drained away and a mix of relief and confusion stayed behind. “What are you talking about?”
He rolled his eyes. “I’m pretty sure you’re smart enough to figure that one out.” His tone of voice was rude now, and it pissed me off.
“Really, you don’t need to be an asshole,” I snapped. He blinked at me, lips slightly parted as if he was surprised I’d spoken to him like that. Maybe people didn’t ever snap back; he certainly had the tough guy image down to a science. Most people were probably too scared to say boo. And I should have probably been scared too, and I had been, but then he pissed me off. Besides, his pity-me-because-I’m-so-difficult act was pretty annoying. If there was anything worthy about being a twenty-first century woman, it was being the only one who got to choose who was good enough for me, and who wasn’t. “Since you haven’t told me anything about you, I have no idea why you would say that. Besides, it’s up to me to decide who I want to spend time with, right? And I’m still here.” I shook my head. “And it’s not just because you’ve got my car in your possession right now.” It was a rush, admitting that. In my boring life, it was tantamount to doing a pole dance in his front yard while screaming ‘Do me.’ It felt completely amazing.
He looked like he was thinking about it. Finally, he nodded and dropped the rag into the bucket of water with a plop.
“Your car is done,” he said. I glanced at the bucket. The water was a nasty brown, the result of old blood and soap. I didn’t want to dwell on it. I pushed myself up and off the wall. My ass cheeks were numb and cold; it felt good to move. I walked to the car and looked in.
“Wow, this is amazing,” I said. “I was all calm before, but I was seriously worried about the stitching. Thank you!” There was absolutely no sign of the gory scene that had taken place back there. If I hadn’t known his dog had been bleeding all over my leather seats, I wouldn’t have been able to tell. “Thank you.”
He nodded. “You’re not the one that should be thanking me.”
He was calm again, now. His rant was over, or he’d come to some sort of conclusion that I wasn’t privy to. He stepped back and I closed the SUV’s back door.
I was suddenly aware how close he was. Only inches away, I could feel the heat radiating from his skin. When I looked at him, his eyes were electric. He was just a little bit taller than me, which put our eyes almost at the same height. There was something intimate about it, looking a man in the eye rather than having to look up.
The atmosphere around us changed. The tension bled out until there was a vacuum begging to be filled with something else. Lust and a mixture of sexual tension and the thrill of the unknown crept quietly in. Again, I was unsure if I was the only one feeling it. All the signs and cues had been wordless; it was entirely possible I was imagining them.
He slid his eyes down to my lips, and for the first time I got the feeling that he was on the same page as I was. That he felt as attracted to me as I felt to him.
There was nothing shy or ashamed about Dax. He was serious about what he wanted and I had that idea that he usually got it. Under any other circumstance it would have been the exact reason why I didn’t give it to him, but this time I wanted him to take whatever he wanted. He looked at me like I was something exotic, something he had never tasted before, and I wanted to be that special someone. I wanted to be the person that would make the others pale in comparison.
Because I was under no illusion that there weren’t others. A man like Dax – badass and mysterious – was sure to have women falling at his feet. And I didn’t care. Reckless? Maybe. I didn’t care about that either.
He closed the distance between us. His eyes stayed on my lips, and they flicked up to my eyes the moment before I closed them. His lips came down on mine and they were soft as velvet and electric all at the same time. Kissing him felt like I was plugged into a live wire and my whole body lit up. A buzz crawled through my body, heat rising and pooling between my legs, and I didn’t want it to stop there.
When he broke the kiss, his pupils were dilated so that his diamond eyes seemed darker. His lips were slightly parted, his breathing just hard enough for me to notice. I was aware of his body, his bulging muscle, his masculinity.
“Come inside with me,” he said.
I knew what he was asking for. This was where I was supposed to the good girl and decline. This was where I knew his intentions and turned them down because they weren’t my intentions. But I didn’t want to be a good girl, dammit. I wanted to go with him and let him show me what he could do with his mouth. I wanted my intentions to be the same as his. I was suffocating in a life that was too perfect and I needed him to turn everything upside down so that I could feel alive again.
I swallowed hard and nodded.
“Okay.”