by Megan Crane
“I can’t help or change how I was raised,” Holly pointed out quietly, and there was definitely no pretending she wasn’t emotional. And maybe a little bit fierce besides. She could hear it in her own voice. She could taste it. “But you just bumped into me, deliberately, so you could shove me an inch or two. Out of pure malice, and don’t deny it, please. I saw your face. I find it hard to believe you’re so enraged about the specifics of my childhood all these years later that you feel you have no choice but to get physical.”
She noticed Bart was paying them a little too much attention and moved farther down the bar to scoop up a couple of empty beer bottles and a sad little afterthought of a tip.
I thought the point of working in a bar was the tips, she’d said to one of the other girls one night.
Lillian, with her hair dyed fire-engine red and her lips painted to match, had smiled with the sort of intense satisfaction Holly associated with very smug and pampered housecats.
It’s not that kind of bar, honey, she’d drawled. We’re the ones who do the tipping, if you know what I mean.
Holly knew what she meant. Even if she hadn’t done any tipping of that nature on her own. Unless last night counted? But she didn’t want to think about her time with Uptown that way, even if he did. Whatever else happened, whatever the truth was, she wanted to hold that long motorcycle ride and their time on the railway bridge close. Almost sacred. As if it was hers alone and nothing that came after could sully it.
She didn’t know why it felt necessary she do that. For her own survival, if nothing else. She only knew she had no other choice.
When she made it back to Katelyn’s side again, her friend looked a whole lot less mad than she had before. Out of the realm of thrown objects, anyway. Holly figured that was a start. Still, as she wiped down the long counter, every part of her body was on alert, waiting to see what would happen next.
It occurred to her that this was the first time she could remember standing up for herself in any real way—if she didn’t count this morning. Her usual approach was to apologize, no matter the situation, to make everybody calm down and feel better straight off the bat. No need to make things worse. No need to make it about her.
But maybe never making it about her led to a claustrophobic life in a pointless little place somewhere in Lafayette or Baton Rouge, waiting to settle for things she didn’t particularly want simply because it was easier than figuring out what she did want, then fighting for them.
“Everything is so easy for you,” Katelyn said softly. So softly that at first, Holly wasn’t sure she could possibly have heard her correctly. “Even this.”
“That’s not true,” she said when it was clear that Katelyn had not only said it, but meant it. She shook her head. “You know how things were, growing up. You know how drunk my mama always was and how hard it was to live up to all my daddy’s expectations. You were there, Katelyn. You saw it.”
“Sure, things weren’t always amazing,” Katelyn said in a rush, as if she’d been holding on to these things for years and this was her chance at last to get them out. “But it was never bad. Not seriously bad. There was all that money. There was never any worry it would run out. I get that you have problems, Holls. But like…what kind of problems? You just sailed through life here. Nothing touched you. You made it out and still, every time you came home, you were exactly the same. Like nothing ever stains you. Nothing ever leaves a mark.”
On some level it amazed Holly that of all the things that had been thrown at her today, that one hurt the most. She knew she wasn’t a whore. But she had the terrible suspicion that as much as her father had clearly been playing a part all this time, she had been, too. And that left her with the uneasy realization that she was more like her father than she wanted to admit.
Which meant she was as stained and hurt as anyone else. Maybe she just hid it better. Or maybe hiding it was a Chambless family trait.
“My mother, as far as I know, hasn’t gotten out of her bed without the aid of pharmaceuticals since before I was born,” she pointed out. Stiffly. “Maybe you think that counts as not that bad. And I suppose you’re right. She didn’t beat me. She didn’t even rave and carry on and make things particularly awkward. She just disappeared. It was like living with a ghost, but then, I guess that makes me lucky, too. All good southerners need a ghost and a drunk in the family. Isn’t it a law?”
Katelyn let out a little puff of sound, not quite a laugh. “Your mother can’t deal with what she had to do to earn her place in this town,” she replied, her tone dismissive. “But you’ve never had to earn shit. It was handed to you. There might as well have been silver platters. How is that fair?”
Holly stared at Katelyn as if she’d never seen her before while all around her, the bar seemed to fade into nothing.
“What are you talking about?” she asked, through lips that felt numb and her own terrible sense of foreboding. “What do you know about my mother?”
Katelyn sighed. “Oh, come on. I don’t believe anyone’s as naive as you pretend to be.”
“I don’t think I’m naive at all,” Holly said, and she didn’t even feel defensive about it. Because this was the day with no blinders. This was the day she finally saw things as they were, whether she liked it or not. Why stop now? “But I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“How do you think your daddy sealed all his deals with his rich little cronies?” Katelyn asked, sounding worldly and jaded in exactly the way Holly had always thought she wanted to—except it seemed a little less enticing suddenly, coming out of her friend’s mouth like that. It sounded worn-out and a little bit dark, if she was honest, in a way that made her stomach clench. She had the sense that she was crossing one of those lines in life that she could never step back over, and this was no kiss on a railway bridge. She opened her mouth to tell her friend that she didn’t want to hear any more, but Katelyn was already talking. “You must have wondered why so many of those country club douchebags from all over the parish were always so very delighted to see your mama on the rare occasions she went out. And if not, you must have noticed how fucked up she was every time she stumbled home.”
“Sure.” Holly shrugged, but her shoulders felt stiff, like they weren’t hers. “She has a few overindulgence issues that were always particularly bad at the country club, but I always thought that was a secret rebellion. She hated those people, which is reasonable. They’re pretty awful.”
“Your daddy whored her out, babe,” Katelyn said, flat and hard. Her gaze searched Holly’s and softened slightly at whatever she saw there. “I’m sorry. You really didn’t know?”
Holly’s lips were so dry they felt cracked and sore, though they couldn’t be. She’d reapplied her lip gloss all of ten minutes ago.
“How do you know this?” she heard herself ask, as if she needed Katelyn to present her with a flowchart or a set of detailed graphs to explain how she could believe such a thing. But deep down, she knew it was true, as little as she wanted to face it. She could see it in her friend’s expression—and worse, she could see what was behind it.
Pity.
“Holly…” Katelyn looked helpless, for what had to be the first time ever, and she shook her head as if she didn’t even know what to say. As if she was having a few second thoughts about this conversation, too. “Everyone knows.”
And Holly lost track of time then. Of herself. It all slipped away from her, as if she took a little vacation from her own body. Oh, she served a few drinks and she even chatted with a few of the roughnecks who bellied up to the bar ready for some Jack and a fight, but she did it on autopilot while her head spun around and around and around.
Katelyn’s revelations were like a key in a lock, a door finally opening and making sense of what lay within. What had always laid within, just waiting for her to see it. To let herself see what had been there all this time.
All those harsh whispers she’d only half understood—or worse, hadn’t wanted to und
erstand. Her mother’s low, distressed murmurs while her father bent his head close to hers, his teeth gritted. Men with red jowls and that sharp, smug look in their eyes when her mother had walked into a room, so frail and out there, like some kind of fragile flower surrounded by sharp-clawed jackals. All the jokes Holly had never understood, with undercurrents that had always made her uncomfortable. All the silences that gathered in the corners of that ostentatious house she’d lived in, so well-behaved it hurt, until they were indistinguishable from the shadows that seemed to claim all those rooms too early.
It broke her heart. It brought her childhood into sharp focus at last. All those lies and fictions swept away by the cold, crisp wind of an unacceptable, unpalatable, unavoidable truth.
She was coming out of the bathroom in the back hall, shaking the excess moisture off her hands, when she nearly ran straight into someone standing there, taking up most of the narrow corridor. Holly murmured something apologetic and tried to step around—but found herself stopped by a hand on her arm.
It took her a moment to understand what was happening. She looked at the hand on her arm, stupidly, and the tattoos she vaguely recognized. Then she finally thought to follow the heavily muscled arm up. And up.
Uptown.
He didn’t smile at her. His expression was uncompromising, his dark eyes unreadable.
And she remembered, as if across the span of decades, that she’d been so nervous about seeing him again that she’d almost left town altogether. She’d gotten one of the maids to drive her out here to pick up her car and after a long, restless sleep in her childhood bedroom with no locks on the door—something she’d accepted as normal her whole life that creeped her out the more she thought about it now—she’d tried to shower the previous night off her. She’d taken soap to the morning as if she could wash it clean. She’d scrubbed and she’d rinsed and when she’d climbed out, she was pink with all her efforts and all the hot water in St. Germain Parish and it didn’t help at all.
She thought she was very likely a new person, but not in a sense of rebirth or renewal. More in the sense of splitting into pieces and burning down into black ash, then hoping like hell something was planning to rise up out of that mess, wings stretched wide to take to the skies. Because if not, she was pretty much screwed.
And now Katelyn had taken that ash and blown it to hell and back, and here she was.
Uptown expected her to yell at him, clearly. He was expecting a fight, or harsh words, or maybe even tears. She could see it in the way he held his strong shoulders in a tense square as he faced her, and the kind of armored patience he wore as he just…waited.
But the only thing she could say she knew for a fact about Uptown was that sooner or later she’d get the unvarnished truth, no matter how painful. He wouldn’t spare her feelings. He wouldn’t lie. He wouldn’t lock her up in a rotting house and slap some pretty paint on it, then tell her the smells she sometimes found blowing in on the breeze were roses.
Not this man. Not ever.
She wasn’t sure that anyone in her life actually cared if they hurt her; when she stopped to consider it, none of them had ever had the courtesy to make that clear. Oh no. They all pretended they cared when they didn’t. Her father, for example. Had he ever cared about her? She’d turned it over and over in her head all day, and she’d come to the jarring, sickening conclusion that he couldn’t possibly have. Because he’d gotten to fucking whore too quickly.
That meant that everything really was a lie. Absolutely everything.
And therefore she might as well live the way she wanted to. She might as well do whatever she liked. Why not? She’d be blamed for it anyway.
She already had been.
Holly tipped her head back so she could lean a little closer to Uptown, and then she watched the way his eyes caught fire. She dared to reach out and put her hands on him, right there on his flat belly, where she could feel his heat and strength through the threadbare T-shirt he wore. She wanted to lift it up, explore beneath it. She wanted to see if she’d left marks when she’d dug her nails into him.
Oh, the terrible things she wanted.
“I don’t want to be a virgin anymore,” she told him, and she thought her voice seemed very loud in the space between them. The jukebox was playing something bluesy and there was the usual raucous laughter from the main area of the bar. She hadn’t yelled. And still, she thought her voice rang out like a gong, although she knew it couldn’t have, really.
Uptown’s hand on her upper arm seemed to get tighter. He reached out to grip her other arm in the same way, and he seemed to drink in the way she shivered, just the tiniest bit, in reaction. But then his dark eyes met hers again, and everything inside her seemed to slow down and turn into honey. Sweet and thick.
“What do you want?” he asked, his voice so low it seemed to wind its way into her blood.
She liked it. It terrified her. She wanted more.
And what was craziest of all was that she didn’t feel like she was rebelling here, or acting out, or careening off her set life path into madness. When she looked at Uptown, she didn’t feel that creeping desperation she’d felt throughout her senior year at Ole Miss. She didn’t feel panicky as she tried to come up with a story to tell other people, or even herself, about what was going to happen next. She didn’t feel that sense that time was bearing down on her, wishing her nothing but ill. She felt nothing but sure.
That this was right. That this was that life she’d been looking for, or he was, anyway. That this—he—was her choice. That tonight, this run-down dive bar on the edge of the bayou was exactly where she was meant to be.
“You,” she said. And when her voice cracked, his fingers pressed deeper into the bare flesh of her arms, and she felt that everywhere. Like a kiss. One of his kisses, intense and daring. “I want you.”
Chapter 8
Uptown didn’t bring many people back to his place.
He’d grown up living in a series of ratty-ass trailers, each with a goddamned revolving door that had always let in the trash. People had trekked in and out at all hours, none of them up to any good. It hadn’t been at all unusual for him to come home from school to find the trailer locked up and empty, stripped of everything because his mother had decided to try to make some cash. It was equally possible he’d arrive home to find the ratty old thing packed full of unsavory assholes in the middle of a “party.” Sometimes he’d gone to sleep with his mother out on the couch, watching TV if they’d paid the bill that month and claiming she was in for the night, only to come out the next morning and find the place trashed, his mother either nowhere to be found, tweaked out while she did something insane like scratch at her own leg for hours, or slumped over in a heap, lost in a total blackout.
The first thing he’d promised himself was that when he had his own place, he’d have fucking locks on the doors and there would never be anyone inside his own walls he didn’t want. Ever.
After he’d patched in with the DKMC he’d lived for a while in a house in town, but that had been too much of a temptation for his mother and all of her scumbag friends. They’d crash out on his doorstep no matter how many times he told them they weren’t welcome. He’d find them huddled in the corners of his garage. No matter how many fights, how many shitty scenes, it always happened again—and Uptown didn’t know why it surprised him. Junkies weren’t exactly great at remembering their own promises. He knew that better than most.
It was all too much of a fucking hassle, so for a long time after that Uptown had lived in one of the rooms in the clubhouse. No one could reach him there unless he wanted them to, or they could somehow get through the entire club first. Sure, his mother had turned up from time to time to make a scene about how ungrateful he was, blah blah blah, but he had to deal with that only if he felt like it. If he didn’t, his brothers stepped in.
I fucking hate this shit, he’d gritted out at Roscoe and Greeley one night, a year or so into living at the clubhouse. His mama had
been barefoot and leathery and an embarrassment out in front of the old warehouse, screaming down a fall night. He’d been pretending to ignore her from inside while he nursed a bottle of bourbon, wishing he could be as much of a hard ass as someone like Chaser, who had a standing kill order out on his ex for the shit she’d pulled.
But he was soft where it counted, because he couldn’t do it. He remembered his mother. Even when he looked at the screaming, erratic zombie who’d taken her place, he still saw his mother.
This is why you have brothers, Roscoe had replied at once.
Greeley had slapped a hand onto Uptown’s shoulder. You don’t carry this weight on your own, brother. She’s our problem. Not yours.
And unlike family chats with his mother, always deeply wrenching and hideously emotional and lasting half the goddamned night, neither Greeley nor Roscoe had forgotten everything they’d said come dawn. They hadn’t claimed amnesia or smoked their promises away. They’d stood up from the bar where they’d all been sitting and then they’d gone out and handled the situation, because in the Devil’s Keepers, family wasn’t just a word and some hand-me-down DNA.
It was real blood. It was kept promises. It was life.
A couple of years ago Uptown had reclaimed this land out in the bayou from the enterprising asshole who’d happily taken his grandfather’s pride and joy out of his mother’s hands in exchange for a tiny fraction of what it was worth, barely a week after his grandfather had died.
Holly was the first woman and one of only a handful of people he’d ever brought out here, deep into the bayou, to what his grandfather had always called his shack. The asshole who’d had it since his grandfather had died had mainly come out here to fish, but had put in improvements, too. Redid the roof, screened in a part of the porch. Modernized the kitchen and shored up the docks. It was the only reason the dickhead was still alive.
The bayou was the one place Mama never went no matter how sick she was for a fix. She hated the looming cypress trees. She hated the mists and the water that always felt too alive. She muttered about the eyes on her, and that was when she was stone-cold sober. In the two years since he’d moved back out here, he hadn’t once come home to find her camped out on his doorstep, waiting to drop some sob story on his head so she could rob him blind while he slept.
