Now these two knew how to protect each other.
Justice hadn’t heard the crunch of tires outside or the
sound of an engine, so he could only assume that Nash had walked again, despite
the fact that Justice had told him repeatedly to call if he couldn’t get a
ride. Talk about stubborn, maybe Justice needed to sit outside the bar at
closing time and bring Nash home himself. The last thing he wanted was some
asshole Nash had tossed out of the place waylaying him on the way back out to
the scrapyard. There were other equally lethal reasons it wasn’t safe for him
to walk at night, like venomous snakes and feral pigs.
As soon as Nash shuffled into the light, Justice leapt to
his feet, fists clenched and furious about the glimpse of blood and bruises.
“What the hell happened?”
“Nothing I couldn’t handle,” Nash remarked as Justice
approached him to see not just the black eye and cut cheek, but a split lip.
Judging from the way he was moving those weren’t the only
injuries either. Justice’s blood boiled at the thought of someone striking Nash
when the other man seemed to have one of the evenest tempers of anyone Justice
had ever met. He reached into the freezer and yanked out a bag of frozen carrots,
passed them to Nash, and watched him wince when he placed them beneath his
t-shirt against his ribs.
“Who hit you?”
“Some drunken idiot who decided to blindside me while I
tossed out his friend. No worries, he looks worse than I do.”
“I didn’t ask you that. I asked who hit you,” Justice said
as he crowded into Nash’s space and gently placed a bag of frozen corn against
Nash’s bruised eye.
“I didn’t exactly have time to ask his name when he was
laying into me.”
“Didn’t I tell you that place was a fuckin’ hell hole?”
“Didn’t I tell you I could handle it?”
“Doesn’t necessarily mean I believe you,” Justice replied.
Nash groaned and shifted the cold vegetables on his ribs,
good eye focusing past Justice towards the table behind him. “It looks like
you’ve been busy.”
“Yeah,” Justice remarked, allowing him the subject change
for the moment.
“I wanted to see how close I was to making the goal. Unfortunately,
it’s not as close as I’d like to be.”
“How far off are you?” Nash asked.
“Far enough.”
“Now who’s being evasive about answering questions?”
“Fine, I’ve got forty-eight hours to come up with eight
hundred bucks, but no pressure, right?”
Nash dug a hand in his pocket, pulled out a wad of cash,
peeled off a few bills and shoved them back in his pocket before dropping the
remainder of the money on the table. “Now you only need a hundred.”
“What the everloving fuck, I can’t take that. It’s almost a
third of what you need for your bike.”
“And in two weeks I’ll get another third. I’m in no hurry; you
on the other hand do have a deadline and I refuse to take no for an answer.”
“Nash…”
“I mean it, Justice, you’re taking the money and if you
don't I’ll just give it to Jude so he can give it to the bank so you might as
well cut out the middleman and just accept it.”
“Son of a bitch,” Justice muttered, before leaning in and
impulsively brushing a kiss over Nash’s lips. It was one part thank you and one
part just because he’d been wanting to do that for days.
He still held the bag to Nash’s eye and felt the man push a
little closer, deepening the kiss. Justice groaned, locked his arm tight around
Nash’s waist, and held him close as their tongues slid against each other. They
kissed until Nash hissed and tensed, Justice realizing he was pressing too
tight against injured ribs and stepped back.
“You need to let me take a look at those,” Justice ordered,
a bit out of breath, not that Nash sounded any better.
“They’re fine, not even cracked, he got in a lucky shot or
two, that’s all. Won’t even hurt anymore in a couple of days.”
“You need to quit working there,” Justice announced.
“And do what?” Nash murmured. “I wasn’t trying to get hit in
the first place. I just wanted the two assholes who were trying to pick a fight
over the pool table to take it somewhere else. My mistake was missing the fact
that one of them had a friend.”
“Any more mistakes like that and you’re likely to get your
head knocked off,” Justice remarked. “In my opinion, it looks good exactly the
way it is.”
“Yeah, I’m kind of attached to it myself,” Nash remarked.
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