Instead of shock, Bea scowled. “Like you could keep your mouth shut,” she retorted. “That’s not what I meant.” It wasn’t like she purposely meant to make him uncomfortable or whatever, but beauty and aesthetic had been her thing before, so it was hard not to notice a nice set of features. Even if they did belong to her best friend, who obviously didn’t want to acknowledge them. Or didn’t care. She’d never bothered to ask, just knew she’d hit some nerve when he reacted like that.
“How the hell are you going to practice without a partner?” She might be one of the guys to a lot of them around here, but even she only seemed to find herself in these conversations with Ty. Oddly enough, she kind of missed it too. “Your hand isn’t going to do the fucking job, Mackenzie, and you know it.” Sex wasn’t on anyone’s top of the list, but it was a pretty great stress relief if you could get it; that’s what Bea had always thought.
Tapping the end of her nose in the universal ‘right on’ motion, she nodded. “Turns out I fucking intimidate.” It was how she operated, and it worked, so she didn’t change it. “Not enough to keep a rumor from starting, but enough to have someone even bother in the first place.” It was surreal sometimes to have the freedom to find shit like that. She’d never been comfortable enough at the safehouses to even bother, so before Sing Sing she’d had quite the dry spell going. “There was a guy, but I lost track of him a couple months ago.” She didn’t know protocol for reunions with best friends, so she didn’t really know if talking about sex and avoiding talking about her injuries was really the right way to go about things, but hell, it was just nice to have the opportunity to talk to Ty at all.
“And now I got you around, so you can watch my back and snap at people. Or whatever it as you did,” she smirked. She wasn’t dumb; she knew that Ty had shut down a lot of talk that went on behind her back.