“Okay. I’ll go get us some space in the crowd,” I said.
Noah kissed me, biting my lip with gentle force. “I’m glad you’re here.” I got off the stool and he gave my ass a playful smack before he turned and headed for the back room.
I found a spot near the back wall with a decent view of the stage, well out of the range of the mosh pit. The dudes hanging out tonight were pretty huge, some of them Noah’s size, and I didn’t have any interest in throwing around with them. There was a constant flow of people into and out of the crowd as the band’s set continued; people hitting the facilities, getting beer, or going outside to smoke, the movement never ended. I tried my best to ignore it and enjoy the show when a tall body came to a stop next to me.
At first I didn’t think anything other than the general awareness of someone in my personal bubble, but that was just a consequence of being at a packed underground show, so I quickly brushed it off my mind. But then this creeping sensation moved along my skin and I turned to look.
The dude was tall, thin, and dark-haired. Judging by his eyes, he had been drinking for many hours before he even got to the show, but there was nothing fun about the drunkenness on his face. He leered down at me with something in his glassy eyes that looked almost like hatred.
Immediately I gave him a sour look. “The fuck is your problem?” I yelled at him over the music as I took a step to the side to add some distance between us.
“You got my fucking dick hard,” he slurred at me, stepping closer.
Oh, fuck. My heart started racing and I stumbled two steps back until I hit the wall hard. Before I could reach out and grab the hoodie of a dude standing in front of me, the drunk guy stumbled forward and pinned me against the wall with his body, leaching his fetid breath into my face.
“Get the fuck off me!” I screamed, but my voice was just one of many screams in the hardcore din, and in the dark corners of the club it was near impossible for anyone to tell that what was happening wasn’t right.
The drunk guy ground his body against mine. I made a desperate bend for the pocket knife I kept strapped inside my combat boots, but he countered faster than I expected and yanked me by my hair to keep me upright. His other hand ripped its way up my shirt and over my breast as he lowered his mouth over mine and forced his tongue past my lips. My body froze at the shock and speed of it.
Feeling bile rise in my throat, I did the only thing I could and bit down on his tongue. He yanked his head away and howled, but the grip he had on my breast and hair only tightened. When his nails dug into my sensitive skin, I screamed in pain.
In the dark strobing lights, suddenly the drunk was falling backwards with wide, surprised eyes. He released his death grip on my body and his hands flew out to the sides, trying desperately to find some balance, and failing. He hit the floor on his tailbone hard and instantly writhed like a worm on a sidewalk after a rainstorm.
Noah stood over him, his shoulders squared, his eyes blazing with hate and anger. Like a herd of sheep, the crowd instantly parted from the scene of the fight, as entranced by the display of power as I was. Noah circled the fallen man before he grabbed him by the shirt collar and pulled him up until he was hanging like a rag doll, his tip-toes just barely scraping the floor.
Noah didn’t even scream at him. He let him hang there for a few horrible seconds, terrified, staring into the face of pure hatred. Then he threw him hard into the bar, where his face connected with counter edge and let out a sickening thud. The drunk collapsed to the floor in an agonizing heap.
I was still pressed against the wall, too shocked to move. Kevin came around from behind the bar, carrying a beat-up baseball bat and looking ready to fight. When he saw Noah standing over the man, he dropped the bat and helped Noah pick him up. A few other men stepped up to give a hand and together they dragged the motherfucker out of the club.
The band kept playing, and most of the show-goers didn’t even notice.
Noah came back inside and immediately made his way over to me at the wall. A few people had already gathered gently around me, asking if I was okay. He patted each of them on the shoulder as he pushed by them to get to me. As soon as he was close enough, he gripped my head between his hands and forced me to look him in the eyes.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
I hadn’t even had time to consider the question. In a split second I went from feeling that disgusting man’s hands all over me to watching him get beat up by Noah Hardy. It was all too much, too fast.
Noah seemed to sense that. He rubbed his thumbs over my cheeks, his expression crumpled and worried, before kissing the top of my head and leading me away from the wall with an arm around my shoulder.
We ended up in the back room of the bar where Kevin kept the kegs and did all his washing for the place. The room was a bit quieter, muffling the sounds from the stage. Kevin brought us all shots and joined us in a quick drink before he rushed back out to deal with his full house of customers.
The whiskey helped. I felt my muscles loosening under the warmth. Slowly, my mind started to reconnect with the rest of my body.
Noah only stood in front of me, holding my hand, rubbing it gently in his. He waited. “Did he hurt you?”
I shook my head immediately. “No, no.” He had grabbed my breast pretty hard, but already the pain was fading. “It just happened so fast, it scared the shit out of me.”
“I can’t fucking believe that just happened in my club,” said Noah with an angry shake of his head. “If that asshole dares show his face around here again, he won’t live to regret it.”
My mind was racing with confusion. Noah really was violent, he had just proven that beyond a doubt—as if his record didn’t already prove it. And yet as angry as he was, and as badly as he hurt that dude, he still didn’t kill him. He still showed restraint, and in a moment when probably everyone else in this club would have understood if he hadn’t.
Noah was violently loyal. He’d give up everything to protect his roots; and he’d kill to protect his friends. Or his girl.
Is that what I was?
He seemed to suddenly be aware of the weight of his words, given the situation. Noah’s face flushed, and the hand stroking my hair slowed. His eyes darted around. “I mean… fuck, I… I really should not have said that.”
I grasped the hand on the side of my face and brought it to my mouth for a gentle kiss. “No. Don’t apologize. I’m lucky you were here to protect me.”
Something like hope flashed across Noah’s face. He mimicked my affection and brought my hand to his lips, pursing them there against my skin with his eyes closed.
“We can get out of here,” he said. “I understand if you don’t want to stay in here after that.”
I stroked his beard and smiled. “You’re sweet to worry. But I’m okay, really.”
“What if I said I wanted to get out of here?”
I shrugged. “I’d say sure. Metalcore never really was my jam.”
“There’s just too many people here tonight,” said Noah. “There’s too much in my head tonight. I want to go somewhere peaceful with you.”
“Sounds wonderful,” I said.
“Good,” said Noah, taking my hand. “Come with me.”
Chapter 12
Noah
After what happened in the club, all I could think about was getting Laurel somewhere safe. Even though she’d been to shows a million times and had no doubt dealt with way worse jerkoffs than the dude who groped her tonight, it felt like I had personally failed her. All this rumbled around my head silently as I wrapped an arm around her shoulder and pulled her close to my side on the dark, winding drive.
Not too many miles from my house, in the more isolated parts of Thornwood, a small river tributary ran through the dark woods. The flat, soft beaches created by the slow-moving parts of the river were popular places for peace and quiet, and one in particular had always calmed me down. A makeshift parking lot of gravel carved on the side of the unke
mpt highway road was the only indicator that anything was worth stopping for. Tonight, we were the only ones here. I pulled my truck to a stop in the dark.
“Is this the part when they find my body wrapped in plastic on the beach, and you start having crazy dreams about red curtains and giants?” said Laurel as she looked around through the windows.
“Why don’t you sound sadder about that possibility?” I laughed.
“Hey, I like a good mystery as much as the next girl.”
I kissed the top of her head. “I come here sometimes when things get too loud. I’ve got some dry firewood in the tool box in the back. What do you say we have a little bonfire?”
“That sounds lovely!” said Laurel with a smile. “Isn’t it funny when you live your life around heavy music, but still need so much quiet sometimes? People always gave me shit for that.”
With a smirk, I nodded. “They’re not living their fullest lives without both.”
Laurel smiled up at me like we had a secret together. She leaned up my body and kissed me sweetly, still with the same sexual hunger she always seemed to possess, but with an added tenderness. Was that there before? Or was I just now noticing it myself? The thoughts melted away when I wrapped my arms around her waist and pulled her close, into the kiss.
Before she could get me so hard I couldn’t say no, I pulled away from the kiss and got out of the truck, helping her out behind me. The firewood was wrapped in plastic and wedged in the toolbox; by the time I got it out and turned around, Laurel was already shivering in the unexpectedly cool night air. She had dressed for a night indoors at the Graveyard Club, and I hadn’t thought to have her grab a jacket before we left her car at the lot.
“Oh, fuck, sugar,” I said, dropping the wood on the ground. Keys fumbling, I pulled the truck door open and dug around until I felt the fabric of the spare sweatshirt I always kept in the cab. After giving it a firm shake and a smell, it seemed clean and dry. I turned it over to the front and realized it was my old Rising End sweatshirt.
“Here,” I said, helping it over her head. “This is a warm coincidence.”
Laurel giggled a little as I invariably made the getting on of the sweatshirt more complicated than it needed to be. Her eyes were shining with laughter when she finally popped her head out of the neck hole, hair alight and floating in a million different directions.
“You’re the scariest thing in these woods right now,” I said, smoothing her hair down with my hands.
She batted them away and made a grumpy noise. “Doesn’t speak very highly of your woods, then, does it?”
“Is that a hidden insult about my dick?”
She came toward me with a wicked grin and ran a finger up and down my chest. “Now, what could there possibly be to insult about that?”
“Nothing, I just like to hear it from someone else every now and then,” I laughed.
Laurel rolled her eyes and gave me a soft punch in the stomach. She turned and followed the clear-cut path through the greenery that led down a slight hill toward the riverbed. I grabbed the firewood and followed her down after making sure the truck was locked tight.
This beach was my favorite because of one specific feature: the driftwood. Lots of it inevitably got picked up by local artists or asshole tourists, but the piece that somehow wound up in this tiny little gully was enormous, easily thirty feet long, rolled by the sand and sea into a soft, rounded ghost of its former self. The trunk sat parallel with the river, its most gnarled end planted in a curve in the river like ancient roots. The opposite end, however, was firmly on dry land, and was just as comfortable a bench as any I’d ever found. Laurel was drawn to it without direction. She sat in the twilight, huddled in my sweatshirt, watching me set up a little pit for the fire. It only took me ten minutes to get her roaring, and the warmth scattered the gully with dancing light.
With my back to the driftwood, I sank down into the sand, and beckoned Laurel to me. She sat down between my legs and leaned on my back as my arms wrapped around her, swallowing her completely. She wasn’t shivering anymore, not with the fire to her front and me at her back.
We didn’t talk for a while, and that was fine. I could feel the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed, and the beat of her heart against me. My cheek resting on the top of her head, I smiled when I realized her wearing my shirt was mingling our scents together in my senses.
“This is perfect,” she said after a while in a dreamy voice. “Feels like I never get moments like this anymore.”
I kissed her hair. “Why not?”
She was quiet, and then she shook her head a little. “I’m not… I’m not the best at moments like this. It’s hard for me to be close to people. I’m much better at work… at my job.” She sighed. “But even the good days at work don’t feel like this.”
“You don’t have to sacrifice this for your ambition, you know,” I said to her. “There are men out there who would be glad as hell to have a woman who gives a shit about something. There’s almost nothing sexier than watching a professional work.”
Laurel let out a bitter scoff and turned her eyes down, away from the fire, and suddenly I worried I had struck a nerve.
“What is it?” I asked, leaning my head next to hers.
There was something I wanted her to say. But I didn’t know if she felt it.
“I just…” She stopped when her voice cracked, and I realized how close she was to tears. The smile on her half-turned face was pressed, forced. “I’ve been hearing that for a long time now, and it still hasn’t been true. I’m starting to think everyone just doesn’t know what else to tell me.”
She wrapped her arms around herself, and in turn, I wrapped my arms tighter around her. Lips against her hair, I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. And I don’t know about everyone else… but I really mean it.”
“Really mean what?”
“What I said. Watching someone who is good at what they do is the hottest thing. I’d consider myself a lucky man if the woman I ended up with was so talented.”
Laurel inhaled sharply under my touch, and something about it made my heart stop. But the moment fell silent between us, filled by the sounds of the crackling fire and softly flowing river.
I didn’t understand what I was feeling for Laurel. When I wasn’t thinking about this disaster with the band, or how badly I wanted to beat Duke to a pulp, I was thinking about her. When she was next to me, I felt like I could handle whatever the world threw at me. And being apart from her was starting to feel a lot like being apart from something vital to my life.
In that moment by the beach, I wanted to spill everything to her. I wanted to hand her my darkest secrets and see if she could hold them, see if she would still want to kiss me when it was all said and done. I craved to know if what was building in my heart had any bearing on the real world, or on her. I wanted to cut open a vein and bleed everything out.
Just like with the festival, even though I knew I did the right thing back in the Graveyard Club by stopping that guy from assaulting her, guilt still raged through my mind. Guilt that Laurel had seen me, up close and personal, at my most violent. Duke’s bitter accusations rang in my ears, and I realized I actually was scared that Laurel saw me as an animal. I didn’t want her to think that of me. The thought was unbearable.
“I want to tell you something,” I said. “And I know we haven’t talked about this yet… and you’ve been… you’ve been really amazing to just spend time with me and get my mind off what’s happening without bothering me to bring it up.”
Laurel said nothing, waiting for me to continue. Her body shifted under me, though, scooting closer, grasping the cloth of my jeans.
“I’m not allowed to say much to anybody, but not talking about it is fucking killing me. The festival… the festival was an accident,” I said. “Not just an accident, but…a complicated one.”
“What do you mean?” said Laurel. She turned in my lap to look at me, sliding in the sand until her
gaze met mine, and I could tell by the worry in her eyes that I looked sadder than I realized.
“Look, I told my band, I told the cops, and now I’m telling you, even if you don’t believe me like the rest…” Anxiety spread through my veins.
“Believe what, Noah?” Laurel rubbed her hands up and down my chest, and then grasped my hands with hers. “What happened?”
I took a deep breath. Pulse rushing in my ears, I spilled out the words before I could lose my cool. “The man who fell… who I killed that day… he had a knife when he climbed up on-stage. I saw it. I saw it with my own eyes. He had a knife, and he was going for Quinn. That’s why I shoved him offstage.”
Laurel’s eyes widened, but she didn’t lean away. She gripped my hands tighter.
Dirty Jock Page 89
