by Cross,Lexi
“Did it ever feel normal to you?”
I thought about it for a moment, then shook my head. “No. There was always part of me screaming about how wrong it was. I loved him so much. You have no idea how much. But once he got deep in with the club, it never felt right.”
I didn’t tell her the whole story. I’d never told anybody the whole story. It was something I kept inside my heart, locked tight. It wouldn’t do anyone any good to admit the real reason I had to get far, far away from that club and everything related to it. It was the same reason I had to stay away from him after all the years of being apart…even though the only thing I wanted in the whole world was to feel his arms around me again.
Chapter Seven
Grayson
“How did she sit there in plain sight, without me ever finding her?” I looked up at Tony as he looked over my shoulder at the laptop screen. “I mean, shit, she lived less than ten miles from here. What a fucking joke.”
“It’s a big city, lots of people. What were you supposed to do, go on some mission to find her?”
“Something like that. That’s how it felt, anyway.” I sighed, remembering the first days after she left. My whole world crashed down around me. “I knew things were bad, but I didn’t know they were that bad.”
“Huh?” Tony looked at me, head tilted to the side. I didn’t know I spoke out loud until he did that.
“I said, I knew it was bad between us right before she left. I just didn’t know how bad it was. I mean, when I got home that day, and she was gone? It was like she hit me with a bus.”
“I hate to say it, brother, but you’re the only one who didn’t know she was gonna leave sooner or later.” He sat on the edge of the desk, looking down at me with a grim scowl. His bald head gleamed in the overhead light.
“You’re fucking kidding me,” I said.
“Nope.”
“Why didn’t you try saying something to me, maybe? You know, spare me a little pain?”
He chuckled bitterly. “Come on. You wouldn’t have listened. No offense, man, but you don’t wanna hear what you don’t wanna hear. You didn’t wanna hear how unhappy she was in our world. You figured, if she’s not complaining out loud, she’s fine. That’s how you are.”
“What, delusional?” I could practically feel my blood pressure shooting up.
“No. You’re a good leader. You see things how they are…unless you’re too close to them. Like, a club issue? You can see right through it in no time. It’s like nothing to you. When it’s something you really care about, though? Like something that’s a part of your life? It’s a different story.”
“You’re telling me I’m fucking delusional. That’s what you’re telling me.”
“You’re a stubborn fuck, too,” he added. “Don’t forget that part. You won’t listen to me. Even to me. Your best friend since birth. This is what I’m talking about. Maybe that’s why she left, man.” His voice was quiet. He was trying to be my friend, and I knew it, but that didn’t mean I had to like it. I pushed the urge to pound his face into the desk way down deep inside me, and told myself I had to prove him wrong by listening to him. I would listen and try to understand. That would show him who was a stubborn fuck.
“It’s too late for me to ask myself why she left. That was a long time ago. It’s in the past.” I glanced at the laptop again. “This is what matters.” I tapped the screen, which showed her brownstone. “Her place. They’re gonna come for her again, I know it.”
“Sure they will, if she owes that kind of money. I’m surprised they let her go this long—usually, if you’re a day late they’re after you.”
“I know. It’s weird. Maybe because she’s a woman, I don’t know. Some of these douchebags actually have a conscience. But they’re not gonna give up, not even after the beat down.”
“Especially not after it. They’ll wanna let you know you didn’t do shit to stop them.”
“Right.” I scrubbed my hands over my face. If I had gotten an hour of sleep the night before, I’d have been surprised to hear it. It felt like I hadn’t slept at all, tossing and turning, staring at the ceiling, watching the clock change from one minute to the next, then the next. Torture. And all I could do was think of her. Once I saw her on the street, once I kissed her at the apartment, it had opened the door. Everything came pouring out. Christmases, birthdays, vacations. Our wedding day. Our wedding night. The day we bought our house and christened every room. Over and over, I asked myself what went wrong. Just like I did when she first left.
“What do you wanna do about her?” Tony asked, breaking into my sleepy thoughts.
“I’d say let’s post a guard outside the house, but she’ll see that coming a mile away. She doesn’t even know all the new guys who came in since she left, but she’ll know who they are. She’s smart like that.”
“We could put ’em in a car,” Tony pointed out. “I know it would make me feel better.”
I grinned at him. “Still your little sis, huh?”
“Whatever. She was a good kid. She hurt you, and I hated her for that, but she was a good kid.” It was the closest Tony would ever get to saying he loved her, or even liked her a whole lot. We grew up together, the three of us. Tony was oldest, a year older than me and two years older than Jess. We’d lived in the same neighborhood, played together when we were kids. Went to school together—Tony got left back in grade school, so the two of us were in the same class. Jess was so smart she skipped a grade. It always amazed me that she would hang out with us in the first place.
I sighed. Tony heard me. “You okay?”
“No, man.” He was the only person in the world I would admit that to. “I hate this. I thought I was over it. Now it’s all coming back.”
“You were never over it. She’s your first love, brother. We always have that inside us.”
“You sound like a Hallmark card. Or a TV movie.”
“Fuck off. I’m just trying to help you.” He shoved me. I shoved him back. Neither of us really meant it, and it burned off a tiny bit of steam.
I looked around the office, with its wood paneling and fancy furniture. All the stuff Axel used to think was important. “I blamed him for a long time,” I muttered.
“Who?”
“Axel. Shit didn’t start going downhill until he went nuts.”
Tony nodded. “Yeah. There was definitely a before-and-after in those days. We were all pretty happy and safe until he decided it wasn’t good enough.”
“That’s exactly what I mean. It didn’t have to be that way. Look at this place. I mean, it’s great that he redid it—probably the best thing he ever did with all the money he earned and stole. It gave us a place to call home, whatever. But everything else. I could’ve done without that.” For months, there was never a night I didn’t get in a fight or pull my gun on somebody. There was never a night I didn’t expect to lose one of my brothers. I almost lost Tony in a gun fight—he knew how far Axel’s bullshit ran. He still had two scars on his side, where the bullet went in and out.
“You think it was all his fault, then?” Tony’s voice was quiet. We had never talked about Jess before, not that way. She was usually a bitch, cold and heartless. We didn’t understand how she could walk out like that without saying anything.
“What the fuck do you think? What are you, my shrink? I don’t like this.” I got up, looking out the window.
“I just wanted to know. You can blame it all on him if you want to. Shit, not a day went by back then that I didn’t blame a lotta shit on him. Losing our friends, man? Our brothers? It all started with him. I just don’t know if Jess leaving was totally one of those things. You weren’t easy to be around then—don’t act like you were.”
I didn’t say anything for a long time. Was he right? I was never the guy who talked about my feelings. I never told her what I was going through inside. I pushed her away. It was easier. When I got home at night—if I went home instead of staying at the clubhouse—I got into bed witho
ut touching her. She’d get up before me to go to school. Sometimes I wasn’t asleep, but I’d pretend to be if it meant I didn’t have to talk to her. I couldn’t talk to her. It would mean telling her what I did the night before.
I didn’t need to tell her. I saw it on her face all the time, every day. She knew. She judged me. She hated me, like I hated myself. I wanted to pull back from her before she pushed me away.
And she was too good for me. There was that, too.
I didn’t respond to anything Tony said. Instead, I changed the subject. “What about the loan shark?”
“What about him?”
“Do we know anything yet?”
“Man, it’s been, what, half a day since I talked to you last night? Everybody went to sleep, brother.”
“Lucky you.” I felt like the walking dead.
“We’ll find something. Don’t worry. I gave the guys her name—none of them know her. I picked guys who weren’t around when she was. They don’t know why they’re asking questions.”
I nodded. It was better than way. “Good enough.”
“What are you gonna do next? Are you gonna go see her?”
I thought about it. It was tempting. Showing up at her front door. Surprising her the way she’d surprised me when I got home that day and found her gone. I’d watch her face change when she opened the door, seeing me, knowing what it meant for me to be there. I would push her inside the apartment, take her in my arms, and…
“No,” I answered, willing away a hard-on. I wouldn’t do any of those things. I didn’t wanna get any closer to her.
He accepted my answer. “That’s fair. Okay. I’ll let you know when I hear something.” He turned to leave the office. “Oh, one more thing.”
“Yeah?”
“If you knew it was her when you first found her last night, would you have still beaten that guy up?”
I laughed. “Are you kidding? I would have killed the fucker.”
He nodded. “Yeah. I thought so.” I turned away, listening as the door clicked shut. When I knew I was alone I let out a sigh, leaning my head against the window. What was I gonna do?
I wanted to protect her. From the minute I saw her, I knew I had to keep her safe. There had been so much fear in her eyes, blank terror. It only got worse when she realized she was looking at me and not some random guy off the street. I had noticed, and it didn’t exactly make me feel good. Maybe at the time—all the hatred had come back, and the pain. I had wanted her to be afraid of me. Days later, I didn’t feel that way anymore. I wanted her to trust me enough to let me take care of her. She needed me, whether she believed it or not.
She wasn’t part of my world anymore, the outlaw underground world. She didn’t have the ways of fighting scumbags like that loan shark. I did. I was ready and willing to use them for her. I would do anything for her, didn’t she know that? I would do anything to stop anybody who thought they could hurt what was mine.
She’s not yours. The voice in my head made fun of me, the way it did back when she first left. She never loved you. She was fucking somebody else the whole time. She hates you. You were never good enough for her. On and on, every day, all day. It had gone away after a long time, and I hadn’t heard it in years. The voice was back because she was back.
So she wasn’t mine anymore. Maybe not by law. Inside, I knew different. Jess was mine, she was always mine, she would always be mine. I’d been with hundreds of women since she left, and all I saw when I was inside them was her. Her face, her eyes. I’d hear the noises they’d made, the sounds, the words, and I would imagine it all coming from her. It was the only way I could get through life. I never told that to anybody.
I couldn’t sit back while she was in danger. No way. It wasn’t how I was built.
I needed to sit and think out the ways I could go behind her back to make sure she was okay. One way or another, I would take care of what was mine.
Chapter Eight
Jess
I never knew what it meant to wait for the other shoe to drop until I lived with the knowledge that Joe Green’s men would be after me again.
As days passed, I realized he was toying with me. I’d been so sure somebody would be waiting when I got out of the cab. Then again when I walked David to school on Monday morning, after spending most of the weekend locked up in the apartment. I’d even inspected the delivery guy through the peephole in the door, wondering if he was legit or just some goon trying to intimidate me. I only opened the door because I recognized the man as an employee of the restaurant.
He was toying with me. I realized that by Monday afternoon. Joe was seeing how far he could go before I completely unraveled. The ball was fully in his court, and he knew it. The certainty that he would be coming back before long—if not him, one of his enforcers—made life a living hell.
“Mama? What’s wrong with you?” I walked David home from school, looking both ways the whole time. I must have looked like a woman on the run, somebody who had done something horrible and knew she’d get caught eventually. I had done something horrible, all right. I had made a deal with the devil.
“Nothing, honey. Really. I’m just not feeling very well today.”
“You’re squeezing my hand,” he groaned, trying to pull away from my grip.
“Don’t let go!” I realized I’d nearly screamed it, and people up and down the street stopped to look at me. There I was, the world’s worst mother. Screaming at her poor kid for no reason. I could feel their judgment seeping into my skin.
I looked down at my wide-eyed boy, feeling a mixture of regret and guilt. “I’m sorry, honey. You know I don’t mean to yell at you. I can’t have you letting go of my hand in the middle of the street, though. Right? You know that.”
“I know.” He didn’t sound convinced that I had it all together. Well, he was right. I didn’t have it together, not by a long shot. I was falling apart, piece by piece. Crumbling all around him.
I wondered if drug addicts felt the way I did. Not that I felt high, but I knew they would do anything for a hit. They would steal, borrow, beg. Make all kinds of promises if only they could get their hands on what they needed. I did sort of the same thing. They eventually paid for it, didn’t they? After living on edge, knowing their deeds were bound to catch up with them. I could relate to that feeling, all too well.
If only I could turn back time. I didn’t realize I had muttered it to myself until I heard David ask, “What did you say, Mama?”
“Hmm?” I looked over my shoulder. Was there a big man half a block behind us? Didn’t he look a little shady, unfamiliar in the neighborhood? I picked up the pace. David trotted alongside me.
“You said something about time. Turning back time?”
“Are you reading my thoughts now?”
“No, you said it out loud. Mama, we’re going too fast!” Again, a couple of people stared at me. I wanted to slap them, tell them to mind their own business. They had no idea the strain I was under.
“I’m sorry, honey.” I picked him up, determined to get us the last two blocks as quickly as possible. How the hell had they found me in the first place? I’d told them my name, hadn’t I? And that was their business. Finding people. Otherwise, how would they ever make a profit?
“Come on,” I said, laughing like it was a game. “Let’s see how out of shape Mama is. I’m gonna try to run with you in my arms.”
He giggled. “Oh, Mama. You’re so silly. I’m too heavy!”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see about that.” I cast another look over my shoulder. The man was gone. Probably hiding. The moment the light turned green, I bolted across the street, then kept up the pace until we reached the brownstone.
I put David down, gasping for air. I felt like my lungs were on fire. My running days were long behind me—especially considering the fact that I was carrying a seven-year-old with a massive backpack. Why they gave kids so much homework, I would never understand.
I looked behind us as he ran up the stair
s. No man. Had I imagined it? No, I’d definitely seen him. I probably imagined who he was, though. He might have been anybody taking a walk.
I couldn’t live that way forever. Running up and down the street with my kid in my arms. Afraid to leave the apartment unless I had to. I’d even considered keeping him out of school that morning, out of fear. This was starting to affect my boy. I couldn’t let it go on forever.
What could I do, though? I had no idea. Rob Peter to pay Paul by taking out a loan elsewhere? Going to the bank, begging on bended knee for a loan even though I had nearly no collateral? The only thing worth putting up was my car, which was a piece of junk I knew wasn’t worth anything. They would laugh me right out of the place.
