by A. J. Downey
I grunted and picked up my beer, taking a pretty big swallow and clearing at least a third of the glass with it. Dump Truck laughed softly at my expense and I shook my head.
Well played, Little Bird, I thought to myself. Well played.
Chapter Five
Aspen…
“So…” Amber trailed off and gave me an impish look and I rolled my eyes.
“Out with it,” I ordered my lone employee. Her grin widened and motorcycles went by outside the shop. She waited for the roar of the engines to dissipate into the distance before she picked up where she left off.
“I totally know it’s none of my business,” she said, holding up her hands. “And you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but…” and she made an adorable, skeptical little face and squeaked out, “Fenris?”
I gave a light little laugh that edged on nervous and sighed.
Amber was a bright girl. She’d attended a round of my pottery classes, had a natural talent at it, and so I had hired her when she’d said she was looking for a part-time, after-school job. She was a student at South Seattle Community College and I needed someone to run the counter for walk-ins while I ran the evening paint nights and classes.
She was nineteen, mature for her age, and I found myself surprisingly desperate for someone to confide in, so against what should have been my better judgment…
“I don’t really know what to say,” I told her. “I went out with Lindsay—” She wrinkled her nose in distaste and I frowned but glossed over it for the time being. “And the next thing I know, it was the next day and I woke up at the bouncer’s house.”
Amber’s dove gray eyes went wide and her mouth dropped open.
“Aspen!” she cried. “That is totally not your scene! What the hell?”
“I know, I know!” I cried. “I don’t know what happened, I swear. I only had a drink or two, but Lindsay went off with these couple of cowboys and I know I had to have been a total drag with everything going on with—”
“Stop!” she cried and held up a hand. “With he-who-shall-not-be-named,” she said firmly before I could utter Charles’ name. I rolled my eyes but smiled.
“Yes, with everything going on with him,” I said and sighed. “Anyway, the bouncer thinks they maybe slipped me something to make it easier to take Lindsay or for the three of them to get away from me but it was really bad, I guess. I mean, I don’t remember any of it at all.”
“Oh, wow… was Lindsay okay?” Amber dropped onto the stool I kept behind the register while I counted the money.
“Oh, yeah,” I said following it up with an explosive breath. “She had the time of her life, apparently.”
“Yeesh.” Amber made a face, and I nodded.
“My sentiments exactly,” I said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong – I know how awful that just sounded and oh, my God! Not how I meant it to come out, I just mean—”
“How could you leave your vulnerable and emotionally shattered friend to her own devices so you can go off and ride a couple of cowboys?” Amber asked, and she winced adorably as she said it.
I winced too. “Yeah, and I know exactly how pathetic that makes me sound but, I mean, I guess I am.” That awful bereft feeling swept through me and I held back the flood just barely.
“You’re not pathetic!” Amber said sternly. “You’re just going through a lot. All at once. And it’s ridiculous.”
I nodded, at a loss for anything else to say and she finally prompted me, “So… Fenris?”
“Right, sorry, he’s the bouncer that took me home with him,” I said.
Her mouth dropped open. “Is he hot?” she asked. “Because he sounded hot.” She fixed me with a look and said, “I bet he’s hot.”
I blushed and said, “He’s definitely… different.” It took me a moment to settle on a word that didn’t sound judgy, rude, or whatnot, but I honestly didn’t know how to describe the man.
“Okay, dish,” she demanded. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well, he’s a biker,” I said and Amber’s gray eyes widened and she swept her long auburn French braid over her shoulder and gripped it with both hands.
“Like an actual biker?” she asked.
“Like, a Sacred Heart biker.”
She froze and her eyes grew impossibly wider still and she asked, “Are you for real?”
“Serious as a heart attack,” I affirmed.
“Those guys are really bad news!” she said, and I nodded.
“They don’t have the best reputation, it’s true.”
“Okay, so what else? I mean, what’s he look like?”
“Well, he’s blond and has blue eyes. He had a beard, long, and he braids it and has these silver cylinder beads in it.”
“What, like a Viking?” she asked.
“Pretty much exactly like that. His hair is shaved underneath and long like a mohawk, but he has beads and tiny braids throughout that, too.”
“You were rescued at a bar by Ragnar Lodbrok from the TV show Vikings?” she asked. I paused to think about it and finally nodded.
“Except better looking than the actor.” I made a face. I couldn’t believe I’d just confessed that out loud. Amber’s face lit up, her nude-glossed lips splitting into a grin as she laughed.
“You like him,” she said and I couldn’t look at her.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said simply, my mind drifting back to the moment I’d broken down on this strange man’s stairs in the middle of his house wearing nothing but his shirt and how he’d helped me. How he’d gotten me through it. I don’t think I could express to anyone the depths of my gratitude for that alone, let alone that I had felt absolutely no judgment from him after the fact.
“Of course, it matters!” she cried. “My grandmother always said, the best way to get over a man is to get under a different one.”
“Amber!” I cried, blushing furiously, cheeks hot with… well, I don’t know what.
“What?” she cried. “It’s true!”
I shook my head and said, “I just don’t work like that.”
“Maybe,” she said sliding off the stool with a pointed look, “you should.”
I huffed out an aggravated breath, though I couldn’t tell if I was really annoyed with Amber or if I was really annoyed with myself. I wished Copper was here, that I could call him and talk to him. My older brother always knew what to say to make me feel better – no matter if I was fighting with Mom, Charles, or anything else was bothering me. He just always seemed to have the answers.
I finished up closing with Amber, hiding behind a mask of ‘everything’s fine’ all the while internally dreading going home to my mom’s house which was empty of any and all emotion and just chock-full of useless stuff. I was only one person, and I was drowning on every front. I didn’t know what to do with everything from the mishmash of mine and my mom’s things, to the divorce proceedings with Charles, to lawyers I couldn’t afford and my business barely breaking even at the moment and to my brother being gone and my mom being gone and just all of it…
I turned out the open sign and watched as Amber got into her car at the curb and sighed.
“Just keep going,” I reminded myself out loud. It was all I could do.
I drove back to my mom’s house. It didn’t really feel like home. I mean, I know I had a roof over my head and that I should be grateful for it, but I still felt like I had lost everything, was barely holding what I did have left together, and that the rest of me was just hanging by a thread.
I stepped over the pile of mail that’d been delivered through the front door’s slot and set down my briefcase and the box of ceramics I wanted to try and paint on my own time so that I could retrieve the letters and junk fliers to sort through them.
I paused a few pieces of mail down and drew in a deep steadying breath at my soon-to-be-ex-husband’s divorce attorney’s letterhead.
I opened the envelope, scanning the letter inside and felt the color drain from m
y face. He was going after half my business… Clayrity.
I shook my head, a jumble of emotions tumbling out of their hiding places like an overloaded closet when the door has finally been opened. I stood there with the shattered pieces all around me, twinkling in the dim light from the overhead light of the kitchen stove which I always kept on, and felt like this was it. That that was the last of it and there was nothing left.
I pulled my phone out of the pocket of my coat and tears welled.
I’d been so successfully isolated by my cheating ex-husband, my mother dead, my brother gone – his wife and I never any kind of close… I literally had no one to even call.
Or did I?
Desperate times called for desperate measures.
I went to my little black book on top of the boxes by the front door and flipped it open. Bringing up the keypad on my phone, I dialed and held my breath as the call connected and started ringing.
“Hello?”
I closed my eyes and took a desperate leap.
Chapter Six
Fenris…
My phone started buzzing across the table in front of me and I picked it up. It was a number I didn’t recognize.
“Hello?”
“Hi.” The voice was soft, feminine and held a strained quality to it. I didn’t like it, but I was thrilled because I knew instantly who it was.
“Aspen?” I asked, and Dump Truck and Little Bird exchanged a look.
“Yeah, um,” her voice cracked, “I think I need help.”
I sat up straighter and asked, “You at home?”
“Yeah.” She sounded mournful.
“Say no more, I’m on my way.”
I ended the call and got up, reaching for my wallet.
“I got it, go,” Dump Truck said, and he fixed me with a look that said he absolutely understood. I looked at Little Bird and she gave me a sympathetic nod.
“Thank you, brother.”
I went for the door and got on my bike. I was a good forty-five or fifty minutes from her place and remembered exactly how to get there like I’d dropped her off just yesterday instead of a couple of weeks ago.
When I pulled up to the curb in front of her house, the windows were dark, but the front porch light glowed dimly. I pulled off my lid, smoothed a hand over the top of my hair to tame any random frizz and marched up the front walk to her door. I knocked twice and held my breath.
She opened it and looked up at me with a tear-stained face, her makeup in muddy tracks down her cheeks.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, and she stared stricken for a few heartbeats as if trying to decide how much to tell me. Her expression crumbled, and she started to cry all over again and said to me, “I just don’t think I want to be alive anymore and I’m scared.”
“Oh, baby. Fuck,” I muttered, and I pulled her toward me. She crashed against me, sobbing heartbrokenly into my chest.
I stepped into her, over the threshold and kicked the door shut behind us and just let her cry.
I had no idea what the fuck had happened, but it said something to me that I, the fuckin’ guy she’d literally just met, was the only person she had that she could call at a time like this. I mean, that was something fucking tragic. Wasn’t it?
“I’m so sorry! I’m sorry!” she cried between her sobs, and I just clutched her tighter to me.
“It’s okay, I got yah. It’s alright now. You just let it out.” I didn’t know what else to say. What else to do. So, I just did what my mom had done for me when I was a kid. What I’d seen her do for my sister a thousand times. I gave her a safe place and permission to cry it out. Then I would ask some questions and figure out what needed doing to fix it, if there was even anything to fix. Sometimes with women, that wasn’t what they wanted. Or so my sister had told me, once upon a time.
Sometimes all they wanted was to cry and to vent.
I felt helpless in this situation, but I knew in the front of my head, that I wasn’t. I was doing exactly what I needed to be doing right this minute by just being here for her. It was my own thoughts and feelings that were racing, that were whispering I should go out and find a motherfucker and do harm. I wanted to hit something, someone, anyone. I wanted to rend flesh, and I knew it was an impotent rage that was stirring in the center of my chest. I was just angry for the sake of being angry because she hurt and there wasn’t anything I could do to stem the flow on it.
We ended up on the couch and she wept brokenly for what felt like an age and I just did what I could to hold her up.
She seemed so fragile; as thin as glass, and I worried gravely over what she’d said… about not wanting to be alive anymore. She was begging for help, crying out, and I was here, but I was no psychologist. I was a hammer where fine surgical instruments were required. I wasn’t cut out for this… but she’d called me and I wasn’t about to let her down.
I couldn’t save my sister, but maybe, just maybe, I could save Aspen. It was a unique set of circumstances and for me to know what I was up against; I would need to pull back some layers.
“How you doing?” I asked when she’d quieted down and settled.
“I honestly don’t know,” she whispered back dully.
“That’s alright,” I said and massaged up and down her arm with my hand.
“I’m really sorry,” she whispered brokenly, and it was a strange sort of intimacy created by the dark in her house. The only light on in here appeared to be emanating from somewhere in the kitchen, the rest of the house plunged into a dim, close dark that cradled us both in the palm of its hand.
“Stop apologizing, babe. You have nothing to apologize for. Everybody goes through it. I’m just glad you called me so you don’t have to go through it alone.”
She sniffled and laid her head on my shoulder, the leather of my jacket and cut creaking in the dark. I was warm in here, bordering on too warm, but I didn’t want to move her. Didn’t want her to think anything negative about herself or this interaction when I could already tell that was where her head was at. She was apologizing for every damn thing and I was expecting any second that she would apologize for simply existing. I wanted to know where she got these ideas from and put a hurt on the motherfucker that’d given them to her.
I seethed and simmered in my chest beneath her head, but I don’t think she knew. I aimed to keep it that way. She didn’t need any more stress.
“Thank you for coming,” she murmured and swallowed hard. I couldn’t see her face but I could imagine fresh tears tracking down her ivory cheeks just the same.
“Anytime, and I mean that,” I said, giving her a light squeeze. “You want to talk about it?”
“No,” she whispered. “You’ve already put up with so much I—”
“I’m not ‘putting up’ with anything, Aspen. I’m not that kind of guy. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want to be.”
She sucked in a breath and held it for a moment before saying, “I apologize, I didn’t mean to offend.”
“You didn’t. It’s late. I promise no funny business, but let’s get your face washed and get you into something that’s more comfortable than these work clothes. I’m staying here tonight. What you said? It’s got me worried.”
She held still, contemplating my words for a moment before finally nodding.
“I’m worried too,” she said. “And I don’t want to be alone.”
Jesus, fuck. She sounded so vulnerable.
“You’re not alone. You’re not going to be alone. I’m right here for whatever you need.”
“You’re too kind, you know that?” she asked.
I barked a laugh and bit down on it when she jumped at the abrupt sound.
“Sorry, just never been accused of that, you know what I’m sayin’?”
“What? Of being kind?” she asked, pushing off of my chest and sitting up on her own.
“Yeah.”
“That’s a shame,” she said, and I could barely make out the glitter of those fantastic green eyes in the d
ark, back lit as she was by the dim light in the kitchen behind her.
“It just is what it is,” I said with a gusty sigh.
“I think I’m all cried out,” she said, and I nodded.
“How do you feel?” I asked.
She thought about it for a minute and sighed saying to me, “Uncomfortably numb.”
“Yeah, time for bed for you,” I said. “Things ’ll look better in the morning.”
She got up, and I followed her to my feet, shrugging out of my jacket and cut and laying them over the arm of her couch.
“Um, you really don’t have to stay,” she said. “I mean, if you don’t want to.”
“I want to,” I said evenly. “And I’m not going anywhere tonight after what you said when I came in here.”
She hung her head, hugged herself, and said, “I don’t think I meant it. Not really.”
I sighed and felt my shoulders drop and I shook my head.
“My sister…” I started and stopped a moment, getting choked up like I always did when I talked about Lacy. “She, uh, didn’t reach out or ask for help. She came back from college up in Bellingham. Wouldn’t say what happened. I found her in the bathtub. I couldn’t save her.”
She covered her mouth with one hand and stared up at me, eyes wide.
“I’m so sorry, I never would have—”
I made a hissing noise to cut her off and raised a hand.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’m not going away. Not tonight. I’d like to think the gods put me in your path for a reason. Maybe this is it.”
She piped down, a tension leaving her shoulders as she looked away for a moment then back up at me.
“Okay,” she said. “I won’t argue.”
“Thank you. Lead the way, where’s your bathroom?”
She took me through the master bedroom and gestured at the bathroom door in here.
“Grab whatever you’re going to sleep in,” I told her and switched on the light in the bathroom going for the medicine cabinet and the razors. She had a little basket of washcloths on the back of the john within reach of the shower. I stacked the cloths on the counter and started tossing sharps and pill bottles into the basket.
