by Lane Hart
Traffic isn’t bad on the highway now that the sun is starting to set, so it doesn’t take long to get home. I pull my car into the garage and then try to decide what frozen dinner I’ll be making tonight. They all suck, but I have to watch my weight or people will start asking me on Facebook if I’m pregnant.
God, sometimes I wonder if being in the spotlight is worth the trouble.
The first stop is my bedroom where I change into a pair of blue pajama pants and a white tank top, relieved to take off my bra. Then, I head back to the kitchen to pop my calorie-controlled meal into the microwave and then grab a bottle of wine from the pantry to celebrate my successful interview with myself.
When I turn around and come face to face with a bearded man sitting as still as a statue at my counter, I scream so loudly I temporarily go deaf.
And like an idiot, my fingers lose the grip on the bottle of wine. My one and only weapon at this moment falls to the floor and shatters on the tile.
“Hi, Sasha,” the man says calmly. Running his hand over his beard, he says, “You need to get better locks.”
Standing there frozen, all I can do is stare at him. Automatic bodily functions like breathing have ceased to exist. And I’m utterly speechless as to why this random man would be sitting in my house like he’s a welcome guest.
“Fuck!” he exclaims before he suddenly jumps up and starts around the counter toward me. He’s even bigger when he’s standing, well over six feet tall with thick, tattooed arms and a massive chest that makes me certain he could easily snap me in half. “You’re gonna cut your feet on the glass,” he says in his deep, grumbly voice as he reaches for me.
“S-stay the fuck away from me!” I warn him when my voice decides to work again as I start walking backward.
“Stop moving!” he shouts before softening his voice. “You’re standing on glass, sweetheart. I shouldn’t have snuck in, but I didn’t exactly think you would invite me in if I came to the front door.”
His voice is familiar, especially the term of endearment. And then there are his eyes that are a soft green like ferns, that aren’t looking at me maliciously but with affection.
“Chase?” I ask aloud.
“Oh, fuck. You just now recognized me? Wow. Okay. Sorry,” he says, running his hand over the beard again and stroking it several times like it’s a nervous habit. “Guess I do look a little different with the beard, huh?”
“What the fuck are you doing in my house? How did you get in here?” I demand as my chest heaves up and down in fear, shock, and anger at him standing here in my kitchen, talking to me so normally, like he never fucking destroyed me.
…
Chase
God, I had forgotten how gorgeous Sasha was in person. The camera lens doesn’t do her any justice. Although, I do miss the point of her chin and nose from before they were altered with surgery because of the accident. I really hate that my phone with all the pictures of her on it was crushed that night, leaving me with nothing but my memories of the old Sasha from my past.
And she doesn’t seem nearly as glad to see me as I am to see her.
“You need better locks,” I tell her again when she asks how I got in. “The back door was a piece of cake with a credit card. You need, like, deadbolts and chains and shit. Something to at least slow a burglar down while you grab a gun.”
“What?” she asks, her voice shaking. “You…you’re standing here, in my kitchen, talking about how easy it was to break into my house?” Her face begins to turn red with fury. “What I need is to not have some asshole barging in without my consent! And you…you of all people have some nerve coming here!”
“Slow down, sweetheart,” I tell her. “This visit isn’t about us or the past.”
“Oh really?” she asks, crossing her arms over her chest. My eyes are drawn to where her nipples are poking through her top clear as a bell, because she’s not wearing a bra.
Fuck me.
Focus, Chase!
“Can we go talk in the living room where we’re not stepping on glass?” I ask, gesturing down at her bare feet that are standing in puddles of red wine with shards of glass just inches away from cutting her up.
“No!” she exclaims. “We don’t need to talk! You need to get the fuck out of my house!” she yells before she turns toward the sink and grabs some paper towels.
“At least let me clean this mess up since it was my fault,” I tell her.
“No. I’ll clean up while you show yourself out,” Sasha huffs. Squatting down with the whole roll and giving me a clear view right down her top, she starts spreading the towels out to try and soak up the red wine. The fact that it looks like blood covering her feet and hands sends me right back to the night of the wreck.
Shaking my head to clear those thoughts, I tell her, “Look, I just came by to tell you that you need to keep your nose out of that shit that went down the other day.”
Pausing in her cleanup, she leaves the towels alone and stands up straight. “It was you, wasn’t it? You caused that wreck. You killed a man!”
I fucking hate how her blue eyes look wary of me, seeing me as the bad guy I am, rather than the man she once loved.
“You don’t need to worry about that. This is some dangerous shit, Sasha,” I warn her.
She crosses her arms over her chest again and says, “I can’t believe you and the Savage Kings are dealing the meth that’s killing people. You should be ashamed of yourself, Chase Fury!”
“What?” I say in surprise. “We’re not dealing shit. The Kings are trying to keep it out of our city.”
“Don’t lie to me, okay? You are dealing, and I have proof.”
“What proof? What do you know?” I ask. “Tell me everything you’ve found out, then I want you to leave this shit alone and go back to reporting about the sand castle competitions, or what the fuck ever fluff pieces.”
“Hector Cruz is the meth kingpin for the whole east coast, and I’m pretty sure that those guys you shot at…that guy you killed, worked for him. There’s also the photos I have of Torin meeting with Hector…"
“Bullshit,” I say since I don’t believe that for a second. The only drug the MC deals in is weed, and soon that shit will be legal. We have a hard and fast rule about not touching any of the hard stuff.
“Really, Chase? I tell you I have photos, and you still think I’m lying?”
“No, I didn’t say you were lying,” I clarify. Fuck, I love hearing her say my name again, more than I should. “You’re misinformed or got the wrong guy. You’ve never even met Torin.”
“You’re right. Maybe it was one of the other presidents of the Savage Kings. We all make mistakes. So, how about I get my phone and show you the photos to let you see for yourself?”
“Yes, let me see them so I can tell you that you’re wrong,” I tell her, having no doubts that she is mistaken on this.
“Even Jade admitted it was Torin. She said she was going to talk to him about it,” Sasha informs me.
Motherfucker. I guess Torin left that part out of our meeting.
“Go get the phone,” I snap at her, because I can’t fucking take her standing in all this glass any longer while throwing around accusations about my brother. My brother, the former Army corporal who lives and breathes being on the right side of the law whenever fucking possible. But if it was a Savage King meeting with Hector, the club needs to know who, so we can beat his ass into the ground for breaking one of our rules.
“Wow, you’ve really upped the asshole attitude over the years,” Sasha says with a shake of her blonde head before she tiptoes out of the kitchen and disappears down a hallway.
While she’s gone, I gather up all the red soaked towels and shards of glass and toss them in the trash can next to the counter. The mess is only halfway clean when Sasha comes back into the room with her phone.
“Wait over there,” I tell her when I see her in the doorway. She rolls her eyes but actually listens, waiting for me to come to her.
“Here,” she says when I’m right in front of her, the closest I’ve been able to get in a decade. When her cute button nose wrinkles in revulsion, I know she’s smelling the cigarette smoke on me and still disapproves of the habit, making me want to quit cold turkey. And how is it that she stills smells exactly the same, that sweet apple scent making my mouth water? You’d think by now I would’ve gotten over her, stopped wanting her, but it’s the exact opposite. I’d give anything to touch her. But, knowing she’s not a fan of the idea, I keep my hands to myself and look down to take the phone from her.
That’s when I see it…my name, written in small, black cursive letters that have started to fade.
“I, ah, I thought you had that removed,” I tell her, barely refraining from touching the ink.
“What?” she asks, then looks down at her outstretched hand. “Oh.” Seeing it, she slaps her other hand over the letters.
“L-laser removal surgery isn’t cheap,” she says, then clears her throat, which was always her tell for when she was lying.
“No shit?” I reply since I’ve never looked into it. The Kings make damn good money, so even if it cost six figures, I could afford it. Not that I would remove her name from my skin even if I could. “It never shows on camera,” I point out.
“You watch?” Sasha asks, her blue eyes widening in surprise.
“Every night.”
“Oh,” she says, looking away as her cheeks begin to redden again. “Well, WBRL is the most popular network in the area.”
Because you’re on it, I withhold.
“They have this special makeup for tattoos to cover them,” she explains.
“Now I know,” I reply with a grin as hope blooms in my cold, dead heart.
Sasha’s parents are loaded. Her father owns several car dealerships, not the shady used car kind but the hot off the factory line ones. Removing my name from her body after the accident would’ve been high on their to-do list. Hell, I assumed it was high on hers, but she kept it. She kept a piece of me with her. If I had known that when I first started watching her on camera six years ago, I would’ve been ecstatic and probably came to see her then. Stupid fucking makeup.
“Anyway,” Sasha says with a shake of her head. “Here.” When the screen of her phone goes black, she presses a few buttons to bring up the image again and then offers it to me. What were we talking about again? Oh, right. The man she thinks is Torin.
I take the device from her and bring it closer to my face.
“Son of a bitch!” I exclaim. Using my finger and thumb to zoom in on the photo, I get a real good look at my brother wearing his cut, leaning against a brick building next to the greasy bastard that I recognize as the meth king of the east coast, who I’m sure the Aces distribute for.
“Goddamn,” I mutter as I scrub my left hand down my face. Why didn’t I put it together before? That day I put a beatin’ on Johnny, the Aces bartender must have called Hector and told him Abe and I were at the bar about to leave. He sicced those assholes on us. And my brother…what part does he play in all of this?
“So it is Torin?” Sasha asks, her blue eyes sparkling with triumph.
“Yes,” I admit, since she already figured out as much.
“And you didn’t know about him meeting with Cruz?”
“Hell no,” I grumble. “The Kings don’t have shit to do with meth.”
“So just your brother does?” Sasha suggests.
“No! Fuck, no. Torin’s got an old lady and a kid on the way. He wouldn’t touch the stuff for himself or for profit. The MC makes plenty of money for him to support them. He probably has millions in the bank, so why…”
I realize I’m saying all this shit aloud as I think through it.
“You may be an asshole, but I’m sorry that you had to find out this way,” Sasha says.
My mind's reeling, my thoughts going in a million different directions. So what if there’s a photo with Torin and a drug kingpin? That doesn’t mean Torin is dealing or buying or selling for him. They could’ve just been hanging out. Although, that doesn’t make sense either…
“When was this taken?” I ask, as I forward the picture to myself to have a copy, and to save Sasha’s number.
“Yesterday,” she replies.
“Maybe Torin was there bitching Hector out for the three overdoses,” I suggest, thinking that’s the more likely scenario.
Sasha clears her throat to get my attention, which isn’t hard.
“What?” I ask.
“Keep scrolling,” she tells me. “There are more photos.”
I swipe left to pull up the next photo. “Mother. Fucker.”
Torin is handing Hector an armful of stacks of cash about five times larger than the fifteen thousand stack that I got from the Aces.
In the next photo, Torin’s looking around as if worried about someone seeing him while Hector and his men counts the money.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” I exclaim as I clench the phone in my fist. Before I break the damn thing, I forward the other pictures to myself. When I get to a selfie of Sasha and her dad I hand it back to her.
“You can’t go public with this,” I warn her.
Spine straightening and sticking her tits out, she shouts, “The hell I can’t! I’m a reporter; this is what I do!”
“If you don’t back off of this, you’re gonna get hurt!”
“Worse than you hurt me?” she replies, her eyes beginning to shimmer.
There’s no pain as brutal as having that particular truth thrown back at me. It feels like she took the knife from my belt and carved out my heart with it.
Hell, I deserve it.
“You’re right, I did hurt you, and I’ve suffered the worst possible punishment for it, knowing that you’ll never fucking forgive me…”
“No, I won’t,” she agrees, wrapping her arms protectively around herself.
“And that even after all this time it’s impossible for me to stop loving you –”
The last word barely leaves my mouth before her palm connects with my face. The resounding WHAP echoes through the otherwise silent house.
“You don’t get to say those words to me,” Sasha seethes as her chest rises and falls in anger.
Reaching up, I run my fingertips over the unexpected but deserved sting on my cheek that her hand left behind. “Why not?” I ask. “They’re the truth.”
“Don’t!” she shouts, her blue eyes fierce and glowing. “Don’t you fucking dare…not after what you did to me. Get the fuck out of my house!”
She still cares about me. Hell, now I even think she still loves me. Nothing invokes that sort of physical response from such a sweet woman except for hate. Hate because she wishes she could erase me from her mind, her heart, her skin…but she can’t, even though she’s tried. It’s hard to hate someone unless you loved them, and they hurt you beyond repair.
I turn away from her to let her cool down, but I don’t leave. Instead, I go back over to the mess on the floor and finish cleaning it up so that Sasha won’t have to risk cutting herself.
After a minute or two, Sasha clears her throat, warning me that a lie is coming. “If you don’t leave, I’ll call the police.”
Since my back is to her, I smile, knowing she can’t see it. “What are you gonna tell them?” I ask without looking at her. “That some asshole broke into your house and started cleaning?”
She blows out a huffy breath behind me because she knows that I’m onto her, and I remember when she’s obviously bluffing.
“I’ll, um,” small throat clearing and stammering, letting me know a doozy is coming. “I’ll tell the police that you killed that guy in the SUV.”
Tossing a pile of wine-soaked towels into the trash, I look over at her and say, “Try again, sweetheart. You’re gonna have to be a little more convincing than that.”
I wet some paper towels in the sink and then squat down to wipe up the last of the stickiness on the floor.
“Sergeant Barnes of
the Highway Patrol is on my speed dial. Should I call him?” Sasha asks, making me freeze. She didn’t stammer or clear her throat. She’s telling the truth, and I…I fucking hate it.
“You should call him,” I lie through my clenched jaw when I stand up to toss the wet towels on the counter before facing her. “Because if you’re trying to make me jealous, it’d be much more effective if you knew his first fucking name.”
Her front teeth bite down into her bottom lip when she realizes her mistake. “I’m done, so I’ll show myself out. Be sure to lock up behind me,” I tell her with a wink before I stroll over and walk out the back door.
Once it shuts, I stand there a minute. Unable to leave her without another glance, I look over my shoulder to get a final glimpse of her. She didn’t follow me to lock the door. Instead, her back slides down the wall until her ass hits the floor. Then, she buries her face in her hands.
I know she’s crying, and I wish I could hold her and make it better, but that’s not what she wants from me or what I can give her.
Ten years ago, I hurt her beyond repair. There’s nothing I can do or say to make her forgive me.
Finally, I force my boots to take me to my bike that I stowed in a parking lot a few blocks over, comforting myself with the fact that this won’t be the last time I see her.
Sasha’s stubborn with a wild side that’s drawn to danger. She won’t give up on the Torin and Hector bullshit, which means I’m not gonna take my eyes off her.
Chapter Eight
Sasha
“It’s impossible for me to stop loving you.”
“Ughhh!” I scream as I slap my trembling hands over my ears, as if that will stop the words from repeating like a broken record in my head. One of my palms is still burning from hitting Chase. I shouldn’t have done that, but I couldn’t stand there and listen to him lie to my face.
How? How can he say those words to me? If he loved me, he wouldn’t have run. He would’ve been by my side when I woke up in the hospital, holding my hand, and telling me that everything was going to be fine.
