For You (The 'Burg #1)(66)
Feb surprised Colt by grabbing the frames or looking at them on the wall and reminiscing, sometimes she’d do it with a smile, sometimes she’d laugh. She didn’t hold herself guarded. She acted like there was nothing to fear and nothing to hide.
It was her laugh that started him understanding what it was about her jewelry on his counter that made that feeling steal through his chest. It wasn’t Feb’s laughter from days gone by. It was coming more frequent now, it was different and Colt understood the change. It was a new kind of laughter because it was more experienced, worldly, husky, deeper, womanly. It wasn’t the laughter of a girl who took a life filled with laughter for granted. It was the laughter of a woman who knew any laughter at all was a gift.
But it was their conversation about Darryl that made him finally comprehend his feelings about the jewelry.
He’d commented she should let Darryl go, saying straight out the man was a liability.
Feb lined up a shot, her torso bent over the table, her fine ass on display in her jeans. “Can’t do that,” she said and pocketed the three.
“Feb, I see him f**k up all the time. Folks even talk about it. You and Morrie gotta see it more than me.”
She was roaming the table, eyes scanning for her next shot and she said, “Sure. Still, can’t do it.”
Colt saw her shot the minute she honed in on it and prepared to line it up.
“February,” he said before her full concentration needed to be at the table, “he’s an ex-con and a –”
She straightened, put the bottom of her cue to the floor, her fist wrapped around it. She tucked it to her front and looked him direct in the eye.
“Yeah, Colt, he’s an ex-con and sometimes idiot. Dad brought him in when no one else would take him.” Colt started to speak but Feb kept going. “He’s also an ex-con with a family he’s tryin’ to keep fed, a wife he’s tryin’ to keep from leavin’. He’s an ex-con wouldn’t find a job with anyone else, he didn’t have us. If he found it, they wouldn’t keep him. He’s an ex-con tryin’ to keep on the straight and narrow, somethin’ would be difficult for him to do if we let him go and his life fell apart. He forgets to take out the trash, forgets orders halfway through, misplaces delivery notices he’s signed for. But none of that’s as important as a man who loves his family and wants a decent life.”
Colt couldn’t argue with that and he didn’t. Feb knew the conversation was over, took her shot and didn’t miss.
When she circled the table looking for her next one was when it hit him and he knew.
The kiss on Sunday morning he gave her wasn’t about her rolling her eyes at him, reminding him how she used to be. The kiss that morning was the same. Colt climbing into bed with her last night and having pizza and beer with her now, the same.
He’d avoided the conversation they needed to have because he had no f**king clue why one day he’d known in a dark place in his soul there would be no February and Colt and he wasn’t going to go back there and the next day he was kissing her, flirting with her, giving her the family day she needed to keep her shit together.
Now he knew that feeling that stole around his chest at looking at her jewelry wasn’t about going back to the February and Colt there used to be.
It was about finding the February and Colt there could be.
It was about that jewelry being there when he got up in the morning because she laid it there when she got home at night. It was about the woman she was now, not the girl she used to be. It was about a woman who’d make him toast and pour coffee in a travel mug when he needed to get to work; a woman who’d listen to his day and take his mind off it with a hand on his neck, a bourbon on ice, a constitution that could take the shit he saw everyday and, after, challenging him to a game of pool; a woman who’d pay a man to work in her bar who f**ked up just because she knew his life wouldn’t be what he needed it to be if she didn’t; and a woman whose best day was a day with her family and friends around her doing nothing but talking, laughing and being together.
He knew it was also about their history, the fact that the girl he once knew was in there, buried, maybe never to come out again but that didn’t erase the history they shared and the fact that she was Feb.
But it was more about what was happening in the right here and now, who he was and who she’d become and the fact that he liked it.
And he knew, he played it right, he could take the advantage Jack said there was to be taken.
And he was going to take it.
After he beat her game four, she saw him stifle a yawn and her eyes got as soft as her voice when she asked, “How much sleep you get last night?”
He didn’t lie. “‘Bout three hours.”
She took her cue to the rack on the wall and stowed it, saying, “You need your rest.”
She wasn’t wrong but he wanted that rest to come with her in his bed, those two silver necklaces she didn’t take off jingling as she moved. The ones he suspected she never took off. They had delicate chains and from one dangled a chunky, oblong charm proclaiming her a “party doll”, the other one a disc, not chunky, with a heart made out of hammered copper on it, a flower etched around the edges of the heart, the word on it contradicting her other charm, announcing the complexity of the woman wearing them. It said “peace” at the top of the heart.