Page 44 of Handcuffed to the Gargoyle

No, wait, what?

Of course he wanted the cuffs off.

Well.

Maybe he wasn’t sure if he wanted them off yet. Maybe they should have this conversation he didn’t know how to have. Except Jeff was there.

Jeff nodded at them. “You guys good for now?”

“Yeah,” said Essence.

“I’m going to smoke,” said Jeff, and came out from behind the bar.

Now, they were alone.

It was quiet.

Okay, he thought, I need to just figure out how to say whatever it is I want to say. His gaze narrowed in on her neck. The marks weren’t as visible in the dim lights of the bar, which had to be the only reason no one else had commented on them after that Kevin guy had.

She realized where he was looking and her hands fluttered up over herself. “Is it really bad?”

He licked his lips, unsure of what to say. “It’s hard to see in the light here.”

“If I’d brought my real purse instead of the clutch purse, I’d have my compact mirror,” she muttered.

“Wait, you haven’t been wearing a purse.”

“It’s a clutch,” she said. “You clutch it.” She gestured.

“You haven’t been clutching anything either.”

“I put it in my coat pocket,” she said. “Let’s go to the bathroom so that we can look.” She started to get up.

He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to see it. It made him feel something like terror, but there was some darker element to it, something he didn’t even want to look at. She was already up and pulling him with her, though.

The women’s bathroom was smaller than the men’s room, possibly because it didn’t have to accommodate a urinal. He hunched over while she looked in the mirror, examining her skin, making faces.

“You can see every single one of your fingers,” she said, but her voice was sort of breathy, as if this was somehow exciting to her.

That made something surge in him, something confusingly good and bad at once, and he didn’t even know how to untangle the threads of it. He wanted to kiss her, which horrified him in some way. He clenched his hands in fists and stayed still.

“I wish I had a scarf or something,” she said in that same breathy voice. “You sure it’s not super visible in the bar?”

“It’s got to hurt,” he said.

She shook her head, maybe a little too fast.

“Hey, um, I shouldn’t have done that,” he whispered.

She looked over at him. “I know. I’m sorry I pushed you into it. I shouldn’t have started it. I only wish… if you were so uncomfortable with it, you would have said something before we got into it.”

He drew back, confused. “Wait, you don’t need to be sorry. It wasn’t like that. I mean, I wasn’t just doing it because you wanted me to do it.”

“No?” she said. “But you said you weren’t into it.”

“Well, I mean, I’m not.”

“What?”

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