Not paying any attention to me, Dex pulled the drunk guy closer to his face.
I looked over to see that the bouncers were even closer. So I did what yia-yia used to do when Will was being a little shit. I pinched his side as hard as I could.
That got his attention.
He swung those bright blue eyes over to me, jaw clenched, mouth grim.
I pinched him again. "Don't get arrested, you friggin' behemoth. C'mon."
Dex blinked twice. He glared at me for a moment before whatever anger or frustration he was feeling melted away in the blink of an eye. He nodded stiffly once, dropping both hands to his sides. With a glance behind my head, he cocked his head in the direction of the exit. Dex gestured me over to him, eyeing the door as his sign that we should get going. Shane followed behind me until we got to Dex, who maneuvered me in front of him as we made our way outside. By some miracle, we caught a taxi in complete silence almost immediately.
Shane slid in first, and as I started to duck to sit in the middle because that was the way we had ridden over with Slim, Dex's hand on my arm stopped me. "Me first."
Okay.
I slid in after him, listening to Shane give the driver the name of our hotel.
Heat hit the side of my face almost immediately.
"Did you call me a behemoth?"
I tilted my head just a little to see that Dex's muscular body was angled toward me, his legs spread wider than necessary, his thigh pressing into mine as his mouth lingered way too close. "What?" I breathed out.
His lips twitched. "You called me a behemoth." I swear the corner of his mouth tilted up.
"Oh." I grinned because yeah, I had. "I did."
Shane's head peeked over Dex's shoulder. "Did you pinch him or was I imagining that?"
At the reminder, Dex started pulling up the side of his shirt where I'd gotten him. All I could see in the dark cab was the sleek outline of his lateral muscles rippling.
I think my mouth watered a little before I caught myself and snapped my eyes over to Shane. "He wasn't listening."
“Don’t think anybody’s ever pinched me in my life,” Dex claimed with a frown.
"You weren't listening!" I insisted.
“I’m gonna have a goddamn bruise. From you,” he pointed out the obvious.
"Bro," Shane hummed. "You know your ass can't be getting into trouble again."
I wanted to ask him if he was still under probation. I mean, he'd lost his mind over some guy accidentally spilling a drink on him. What wouldn't make him lose his mind?
Almost as if he was reading my mind, Dex made an irritated noise in his throat. "He spilled shit on me."
I snickered and mumbled under my breath, "Wearing a black shirt." Like that was noticeable.
I must have spoken too loudly because Dex's head snapped around to look me in the face.
With a one-shoulder shrug, I twisted my body to look out the window. "Just saying. Spray a little Resolve on it and it's fine. You didn't need to get your panties in a wad."
Shane snorted.
Dex grunted but I ignored him and settled my forehead against the window of the cab, listening to Shane strike up a conversation about having watched The Avengers recently. I’d overheard from Slim that Dex's first tattoo had been a Captain America shield somewhere on him. Where exactly it was located, I had no clue.
To be honest, I thought that was sort of cute.
Big, bad Dex with his inked up arms, black bike, the f-bomb dropping dick in a motorcycle club… liked superheroes? Unreal.
So all right, it was pretty friggin’ cute.
I pulled out a twenty dollar bill from my purse to pay for the trip when Dex pushed my hand away and nudged me out of the cab. I felt like a drunken prostitute on the way through the hotel lobby and up the elevator with the two friends. Shane said bye on his floor while we went up silently to the twelfth floor.
We were about halfway down the hall when I remembered something Dex had said at the bar about being too old. “How old are you?”
“Thirty-three,” he answered.
I stopped walking and stared at him. Thirty-three? I guess it made sense. He had his own business. A business that had been open for six years, so it wasn’t like he could have been too much younger despite the fact that his looks landed him somewhere in his mid twenties instead of early thirties.
“Huh,” I huffed, taking in the lean frame in a fitted shirt. “You don’t look like you’re thirty.”
Dex shot me a sidelong look that could have passed as a smile. “I feel like it most of the time."
Neither one of us said anything else as we made it into the room. I grabbed my pajamas and ducked into the bathroom to shower the smell of sweat from the bar off and get ready for bed. By the time I made it back out, Dex was sitting on the edge of the mattress in basketball shorts and a t-shirt with a bottle of lotion between his legs, one hand massaging his opposite arm.
“Are you putting lotion on?” I asked.
Those true blue eyes flickered up to mine. “Yeah. It preserves the colors. See?” He slid the sleeve of his t-shirt up to his shoulder, pointing at the solid shiny black ink of his right arm. “Gotta be careful with all this black. I don’t want it lookin’ gray in a few years.”
“Oh,” was my brilliant response. I blinked. “How many do you have?”
Dex smiled, that slow creeping smile that I recognized as a sign that he was amused. “Only five.” He watched me standing there for a minute longer. “Wanna see 'em?”
No.
Who was I kidding? I nodded anyway.
He slid forward on the edge of the bed, his hands dropping to his knees before he started yanking up the material on one side of his shorts. Heavy muscle filled in his thigh covered in black ink. A tattoo that looked like the outline of a sugar skull—the ones I'd studied in my Mexican Folk Art class in high school—stamped his leg. The letters 'WMC' and 1974 were tattooed in individual banners directly below the figure with loose, almost loopy lettering.
“This is my club piece,” he explained.
My eyes were glued to the huge skull that wrapped around the side of his thick thigh. “Why'd you do your thigh?" My Dad and Sonny had theirs on their arms. I'd caught the bottom of Trip's on his back.
Dex shrugged. “I had other plans.”
I coughed. "So... where are the rest of your tattoos?"
Oh boy.
His mouth slowly melted into a smile, that unblinking gaze absorbing everything in its path—me. After a minute, he sat up and held his arms out in front of him. “You’ve seen these.”
I had but not in great detail and not without checking them out on the sly.
“What are they though?” I asked him, genuinely curious.
Dex looked down at them. “Different ideas I came up with.” Flexing his right wrist, and his left, he looked up again and shrugged. "Sometimes I'll get ideas from random shit I see. Like this one,” he held out the arm with the configuration of fading triangles. “Went to the planetarium with my niece and I just couldn’t get it out of my head.”
He then held up his other arm, the one with the wing wrapped around it. “Other times I'll dream of stuff."
But it was more than that. He dreamed of things that looked angelic? I had dreams of zombies chasing me and breaking into houses, not things like his. Not landscapes of abstract colors. Then again, maybe an artist had thoughts like those and I definitely wasn't an artist.
He started tugging his shirt up and over his head, and I had to physically tell myself not to say anything stupid because I’d gone brain dead. All I could think of while watching Dex sitting there with his bright, beautiful tattoos and his equally beautiful but tired face, was that the world was unfair.