10. Chapter 10
BLUE
Aaron: You angry?
Blue: Completely.
Aaron: God, what I wouldn’t give to taste that anger on your tongue.
Blue: Aaron, it only annoys me even more when you’re sexy and charming while I’m trying to be mad at you.
Aaron: Yeah, it’s part’a my charm ;p
Blue: I should be angry, but how can I be? Lin and Mei are amazing. Eugene was grumpy but kinda sweet in his own way. I get to work doing something I love.
Aaron: Mission accomplished. You can be angry with me any day if it means you’re happy the rest’a the time.
Blue: Stop it!
Aaron: ??
Blue: Stop trying to make me fall in love with you. I told you, this isn’t happening.
Aaron: It’s already started, Blue baby. Best you can do now is hold tight and enjoy the ride.
Of course, Aaron’s friends made it so that I could have my cake and eat it too.
Rooster expected me to work at Eugene’s to gather intel about The Fallen and the underworld of the Sea to Sky so I would work there three nights a week, Thursday through Saturday. But from ten to six, Monday to Thursday, I’d be a cosmetologist at Lin’s Beauty Emporium.
How fucking cool was that?
Lin had only recently branched into offering hair styling services, and I was her second hire there, so I had my own chair and station in the salon. When I had gaps in the schedule, I’d do nails and makeup for special events.
It might have seemed like such a little thing to anyone else, but when I walked in that first Monday morning and saw my station with an ice-coloured neon sign that read Blue , festooned in blue and silver balloons with a card sitting on the white countertop that read ‘Blue Baby,’ I burst into tears.
Lin was the only other person there that early, and after giving me a brief hug, she busied herself with opening shop so I could have the semblance of privacy to read Aaron’s card.
Blue,
Don’t think Lin’ll go easy on you. Already got half the club’s Old Ladies booked in to see you this week ’cause they’re all nosy as hell. They’re harmless, for the most part…just avoid Harleigh Rose if you can. She’ll have you confessin’ all your sins before her nails are dry. Wish I could be there to see you shine your pretty light on everyone you leave a little more beautiful today, but I got a vivid imagination, so I figure I’ll be alright.
Happy for you, my girl.
ABC.
I blinked down at the chicken scratch scrawl, thinking it was the prettiest thing I had ever seen.
“Hey, Lin? Do you have any magnets?” I called.
A few minutes later, the card was in the corner of the rounded mirror at my station. I took a selfie sitting in the chair, surrounded by the balloons Aaron had bought, smiling into my reflection and sent it to him.
Blue: A document of the happiest moment in my life.
It was later, at a more forgiving hour of the morning, when I was just finishing with my first client, an older woman who worked at the local library, when Aaron responded.
Aaron: We gotta work on that. You deserve a whole life’a happy.
The other girl who did hair was a few years older than me, but she was an outgoing, happy-go-lucky woman named Mal with blonde-tipped dreadlocks and flawless dark skin. She had me singing along to Taylor Swift by the time I was done with my morning clients and had to head to the nail station for my next appointment.
That was how he saw me when he came ambling through the doors, eyes closed, a bottle of gel polish held like a mini microphone in one hand as I sang the lyrics to “Gorgeous.”
When I opened my lids at the sound of the chair scraping against the floor on the other side of my station, Aaron was sitting in it, elbows braced on the table, tattooed, ring-laden hands fisted under his chin.
My breath arrested in my lungs, struck by his sheer beauty.
God, I’d almost forgotten how terribly gorgeous he was in the few days since I’d last seen him.
Those dark eyes gleamed like water on a moonlit night as he grinned at me.
“Hey, happy girl,” he said softly.
It took me a full second to recover my wits. When I did, I looked around the salon as if any of the White Raiders would be lying in wait.
“Aaron,” I hissed. “What are you doing here?”
“I lied. My imagination wasn’t good enough. Had to see you in your element,” he declared. “Glad I did ’cause I’ve never seen happiness look so fuckin’ good on anyone else.”
Some of my panic dissolved in his sweetness. “It’s not safe to be seen together. Rooster keeps an eye on me. Does random drive-bys.”
Aaron raised his dark brows, opening his palms for me. “He drives by, all he’ll see is a guy in desperate need’a a little self-care.”
I gaped at him. “Are you seriously suggesting I do your nails?”
“Paws and claws,” he agreed soberly, but his eyes shone with mirth so bright I had to blink away the sun spots.
A giggle escaped before I could slap my hand over my mouth. When I was under control, I said, “Well, as much as I would love to do that for you, I have a client. Claire Lafayette.”
Aaron’s grin was wide and triumphant. “Claire for Aaron Clare and Lafayette’s the surname of Zeus’s and Priest’s women, Loulou and Bea.”
“So you’re my noon appointment,” I clarified, a little dazed.
Aaron slapped his big, scarred, and tattooed hands on my pale blue mat and wiggled his fingers. “Hop to it, Blue. These suckers’ve never been seen to, so it’ll probably take you a while to get them up to snuff.”
Emotion surged up my throat so strongly, I almost gagged. It was joy so sharp it made my teeth ache. Unbidden tears stung the backs of my eyes and pooled in the ducts.
“Hey, hey,” Aaron crooned, leaning forward to tuck a lock of my hair behind my ear and cup my cheek. “What happened to the happy?”
“I am happy,” I whispered through the crush of tears in my throat. “I think it’s just a shock to my system.”
His full mouth flatlined, and I watched his gaze dip to the exposed line of my throat that my hair had been covering. I’d covered the vivid bruises from Rooster’s choking grip with about a pound of concealer, but Aaron’s eyes were too keen. I swallowed thickly as his hand trailed from my cheek along the soft edge of my jaw to my throat, palming my neck the way Rooster had done, touching the bruises like Mei had on my wrists. His touch was feather light, thumb dragging softly over my tripping pulse. I watched as emotion stormed through his expression and then as he visibly swallowed it down and shifted back, dropping his hand.
When he smiled, it was almost normal—bright and arrogant in that way that made women combust. But I could see the tightness beside his eyes and knew he was making an effort to be cool so he wouldn’t ruin my happiness.
Fuck, how was I ever going to resist a man like him?
An outlaw biker who’d come to get his damn nails done just to see me.
I sucked in a tremulous breath and smiled back at him as I took his hands and laid them over the bolster. “You do know I’m going to have to paint them something real pretty…I’m thinking blue.”
Aaron laughed, that gorgeous sound deep from the belly, and I wanted to throw myself into his arms and beg him to laugh with me every day for the rest of my life.
“Blue suits just fine,” he agreed.
I took a moment to stroke over his big hands, tracing The Fallen MC skull and flaming wings symbol on the dorsal side and the four thick silver rings on each hand. I lingered over the signet ring etched with spidery calligraphy, trying to read the letters upside down.
“Ximena Sofia Escalante,” he answered my unspoken question. “It was my mother’s ring and, before that, her mother’s. The eldest daughter was named Ximena in my family until my sister was born.”
“Why the break in tradition?” I asked as I started to prep my station to give him a manicure.
He hesitated for a moment, that energetic vibrancy dimming in a way that made me stop what I was doing to search his morose expression.
“My parents died a few weeks after she was born in a car crash. When we went into foster care, they decided Ximena was too hard for people to say, so they used her middle name, Elsa.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, taking his hands to give them a squeeze. “Were you always Aaron?”
“Aarón,” he said in a rolling Spanish accent, amplifying his name to even more beautiful heights. “But it was easier to go by Aaron. There isn’t a huge Latino community in the province. Honestly, I got lucky with the club. I didn’t learn Spanish until I patched in and got the chance to speak it with Nova and his Old Lady, Lila, and Ares, Zeus and Loulou’s son. Lou’s tryin’ to learn, but she can’t roll her r’s for shit.”
I laughed, rolling mine on my tongue.
Aaron shot me a heated, lazy grin. “Why did I know you’d be perfect at that? Makes me think what else you could get up to with that tongue.”
I bit my lip to hide my smile. “Behave, we are at my place of work.”
“Woulda taken you out properly, you gave me the chance,” he reminded me.
“I’m married,” I countered. Even the words felt like a knife I’d stuck through my own chest.
I pulled out the nail drill and flicked it on, only to watch Aaron’s eyes blow wide.
“What the fuck is that?” he asked suspiciously. “Didn’t come here to get tortured, Blue. Coulda asked Priest for a session if I wanted to get fucked up.”
The laughter that burst from me was so loud, some of the other patrons turned to see what amused me. I caught Lin’s eye, but she only shook her head with an indulgent smile.
“It’s a nail drill, silly.” I took his hand to show him how gently I could press the tool to his nail to clean up his cuticles. “We do dry manicures here, which means no soaking in water or chemicals. It’s more precise.”
I laughed again at the face he made but continued to work on his ragged nail beds. There was motor grease under his nails and dirt ground into his skin.
“I don’t even know where you work,” I admitted softly because it was so strange to know he was almost a perfect stranger to me while everything in me yearned for him on an atomic level.
I felt I had known him all my life or, if not known, that I had been waiting for this man to arrive.
Not to save me, exactly, but to give me the hope I needed to endure my circumstances and find my way out of them.
“I’m a mechanic at Hephaestus Auto,” he offered easily. “The club owns the garage, and we put most’a the prospects to work there ’til we figure out what other skills they might have. Ransom’s provin’ to be real good with bodywork, and Carson’s got a mind for engineerin’, so we’re puttin’ him on the newer models that need diagnostic scannin’ and shit. Pigeon hates it, so Nova and Axe-Man are thinkin’a takin’ him on at Street Ink Tattoo to see if he’s any good at that.”
“What if he’s not?” I asked, curious about how the inner workings of The Fallen played out.
The Calgary chapter and now the White Raiders were different beasts entirely. What Rooster said went, so even if the brothers didn’t like their work or their chores for the club, they did them without fail.
Aaron shrugged. “Then he can do whatever the fuck he likes. We got some other companies and shit, too. King works at Hephaestus to fill in sometimes, but he and Curtains and Axe-Man mostly run the club financials and businesses. Buck’s got Edge Truckin’. There’s a shit ton Pige can do and if he doesn’t like any’a it, then he can get a job outside’a the club. Plenty’a brothers do.”
He peered at me for a second, probably taking in my look of disbelief. “It’s not slave labour, Blue. We only get the prospects doin’ work for the club ’cause they usually come to us with no money and no fuckin’ idea what they wanna be doin’ with their life other than ridin’.”
“What do you want to do?” I asked, hiding behind a sheaf of blue hair as I worked on his thumb. “With your life.”
He was quiet, but the silence held weight as if he was giving my question serious consideration. When he finally spoke, it was more muted than usual, somber in a way that etched the words into my bones.
“Used to want for nothin’ really. Felt like a miracle I had a family after losin’ my parents and then Elsa. A family that saw me and wanted me for exactly who I was. I got more brothers than most folks and so many women to love and be loved by, their kids to spoil rotten, it just seemed…I donno, selfish maybe? To dream’a more.”
He paused because I had, the nail drill discarded on the table, my fingers hovering over the nail polishes as I stared transfixed at the man before me.
“Then I met you, and it wasn’t like anythin’ I had before became less. It was that I realized how much more it could be with the right woman to share it all with.”
“Aaron,” I breathed. “I hate to sound like a broken record, but you don’t know me very well, and honestly, there are dozens of other women out there who would fall at your feet with ten times less baggage than me.”
He shrugged. “Don’t want any’a them. I wake up every mornin’ with the colour blue behind my closed libs and a punch to the gut when I open them to find you’re not sleepin’ beside me.”
My heart felt pulverized by his words and the hope they invoked. Who knew hope could be so brutal? Who knew it had fists and claws and teeth?
“I talk in my sleep and hog the covers,” I retorted because I couldn’t give him any of the mess in my chest. I didn’t know how to articulate it.
He grinned. “I run warm and sleep heavy, so that suits me just fine.”
Just for that, I picked a pretty pale blue from the options and brandished the wet brush like a weapon, a maniacal grin on my face as I bent to start with his pinky.
“Just a shade lighter than your hair. Love it.”
“Aren’t your brothers going to make fun of you?” I asked because in the Raiders, if a man showed up with painted nails, even done by his daughter, he’d probably be beaten as well as ridiculed. They subscribed to entirely outdated views on masculinity and machismo.
“Nah, they’ve done stupider shit to get noticed by their women.” He leaned in conspiratorially. “You know, King was Cressida’s student when they met. Left her poems pinned to apples every day on the side’a her desk ’fore she agreed to go out with him for real.”
“Oh my gosh, that’s so cute!”
“So what’s Blue’s version of an apple poem?” he asked, curling his hand around mine to still me, bringing me closer so his mouth was an inch from mine and his devastatingly handsome face was all I could see. “’Cause baby, I’m gonna find what you want and need and give it to ya until you agree to be mine.”
“You’d be taking on an entire club to get me,” I pointed out, a little breathless because his breath was sweet like cinnamon candy, and I wanted so badly to see if it tasted the same.
“Hate to break it to you, Blue, but we were takin’ them on already. They’re comin’ for what’s ours, and even if you don’t acknowledge it, that includes you.”
“One night together doesn’t make me your possession.”
“’S not about me possessin’ you,” he argued. “Don’t you get that yet? It’s you who's got your name carved into my bones now, Blue. It’s you who's got possession over me. I’m just askin’ ya to give me some relief, and let me try to convince you I’m worth inkin’ onto yours.”
But I feel you there already, and it scares me , I thought but didn’t say.
If I ever thought to dream of the perfect man, it’d be you. Blue nails and all.
He searched my eyes like an archaeologist with a careful, deliberate intent, stirring up things I wanted to keep buried.
“For now, I’m just a man gettin’ a manicure from the best girl in Entrance,” he said, slowly leaning back in his seat, a manly sprawl of spread denim-clad thighs and slouched, broad shoulders that made my mouth water. “For now, I’m just askin’ to get to know you a little more. So play a game with me.”
I peered at him through my lashes, unable to resist the wicked little grin on his mouth. “I like games.”
That grin widened. “Excellent. So would you rather hafta live in the nude for six months or not be able to bathe for one year?” When I laughed, he added, “I gotta tell ya, I got a preference for you pickin’ to live in the nude.”
I did his fingers and his toes, but he demanded a cobalt blue for those “the same shade as your hair.” By the time I finished, he had the other women in the pedicure stations beside him gasping for breath as they laughed over his story about the night Curtains and he tried to install a new laundry machine and ended up setting fire to their house.
“I still feel the trauma every time I do laundry. It’s my excuse for bein’ lazy, at least,” he finished, eyes crinkled, pink mouth split wide by the kind of smile that dazzled like a sunrise at dawn.
You could love him if you let yourself , a little voice whispered in my head. You wouldn’t even have to try .
He was just a loveable man. Confident enough to get a mani/pedi and regale other clients about his trials and tribulations. Sexy enough to make my gut pool with heavy warmth. Even his feet, long and lean with tanned skin and high arches, were absurdly attractive, and I’d never before entertained the idea of a foot fetish.
He was a supernova or a daytime eclipse, something so outlandishly magical it was impossible to look away.
So I stopped trying.
When I went to dump the water out, I heard one of the women approach him and ask him for coffee. The bottom dropped out of my stomach, and all the happy hope that inflated me rushed out on a whoosh of punched breath.
I waited, arms straining as I held the heavy tub over the sink, unwilling to spill it because I wanted to be able to hear his response.
“Sweet’a you, but I’m taken.”
My heart commenced thudding inside my chest.
“Girlfriend?” the woman asked dejectedly.
“It’s complicated, but I’m waitin’ for her to un-complicate it by lettin’ me take her out on a date.”
What would a date with Aaron look like?
I wanted to know so badly that it was as if every molecule in my body was magnetized to his. But it was also impossible to ignore the fact that Rooster would kill him, and maybe even me, if I went back on my oath not to run away again.
In fact, knowing my father, he wouldn’t stop at Aaron and me. He’d kill Grouch and Zeus and the entire club, the final spark to ignite the bonfire of hatred he’d compiled against perceived wrongdoings by The Fallen MC over all these years.
My happiness simply was not worth that price.
Aaron must have seen the conviction on my face when I came back to his station because there was a frown between his dark brows that didn’t suit him well at all. I led him to the front of the shop silently, and when he tried to pull out his wallet at the reception stand, I waved him off.
“My treat,” I stated firmly. “As thanks for everything you did to help me that night.”
That frown tightened into a glower. “Don’t insult me by implyin’ I need payment for services fuckin’ rendered, Blue.”
The sigh that unwound from me was as long as an unspooling ball of yarn. “I didn’t mean it as an insult. Honestly. I just…I wanted to do something nice for you, and I don’t have anything else to offer.”
He stepped closer, boxing me into the small space behind the reception desk, one hand against the wall and the other gentle at my hip. I was so much shorter than him that the owl tattoo inked on his neck was as high as I could see until he tipped his head down and gave me those coal-dark and burning eyes.
“You’re the only thing’a worth I want, and that’s got nothin’ to do with owin’ me anythin’,” he announced.
“Aren’t you getting tired of playing this game with me?” I asked wearily because I was.
Tired and suddenly so lonely I just wanted to hug myself in the back room for a few minutes.
“See, that’s the problem here, Blue. You think this is a game, and it fuckin’ well isn’t. This is life , mine and yours, and I’m tryna tie them together in a way I know in my bones is gonna last if you let it.”
The little bell over the door chimed as someone came in so I pushed him away and tried to get my breathing under control. Only for Aaron to grab my hand and pull me toward the exit, calling to Lin over his shoulder, “Blue’s takin’ a five-minute break.’
“Aaron! It’s my first day. I can’t just––” My words tumbled to a stop when the door closed behind us, and he dragged me to his gleaming Harley parked at the end of the row beside a massive truck. He pushed me gently into the gap between the two and then pressed himself against me, a hand to the truck and another tangling in the back of my hair.
“Now, I got you for a second, I need you to listen to me, yeah?” he said, low and serious, eyes pinned on mine so I couldn’t look away, couldn’t even blink. “I’m not some frat boy or Otto fuckin’ Fuck Up you gotta worry about protectin’ or protectin’ yourself from. I’m a brother’a The Fallen fuckin’ MC, the baddest club in the fuckin’ nation, and I can not only safeguard myself from my enemies, but I sure as fuck can keep you safe from yours. You only have to ask me, and I’d burn down the fuckin’ world for you.”
“Why?” I asked, the word like a knife held to his throat, a demand and a threat all at once. “Why would you do that for me, though?”
His entire countenance softened, melting against the heat of my anger until his body was flush with mine, and I imagined I could almost feel his heartbeat through the layers of his leather cut, shirt, flesh, and bone.
He tilted my head back with the hand woven through my hair and lipped at my Medusa piercing before pulling back slightly so I could read the sincerity in his eyes.
“The real question is, who, havin’ met you, would offer you anythin’ different?” he paused when tears pushed at the corners of my eyes, his other hand cupping my cheek. “I don’t hafta know your middle name or where you went to high school or what kinda shows you like to watch to know the quality’a your soul. I saw it shinin’ from your too-blue eyes the minute I entered that gas station, and I’ve been lookin’ at it ever since.”
“I’m not that great,” I promised, but at some point, I’d clutched his wrists with my hands like I couldn’t bear for him to move. “Honestly, ask anyone I’ve ever known save Grouch, and maybe Axe and Cedar.”
“I’m not that great either,” he said with a little shrug. “We can be not that great together.”
I laughed, slightly hysterically, but then slumped deeper into his body and let the last of my tension leak out through my mouth.
“I’m tired,” I whispered, a terrible confession. “I’m tired of living like this, and it only just started. It’s…I thought I got away, you know? And now it’s so much harder to withstand.”
“Yeah, baby, I know,” he murmured, pressing a kiss to my forehead. “And I’m gonna help you stand tall and strong to endure it ’til we can get you outta there safe, yeah?”
Another gusty exhale stirred the thick lock of hair falling over his forehead. How could I resist a man who seemed as strong as Atlas offering to carry some of my burden on his shoulders?
“Yeah,” I whispered so softly it was mostly air. “Okay.”
“Okay,” he agreed, the shape of his smile pressed to my cheek. “That’s my girl.”
“I want to be,” I confessed, grasping his wrists even tighter. “But I’m legally already someone else’s.”
“Well,” he said, completely undeterred. “I’m sure we can find a way around that. But for now, I’m gonna use the next two minutes’a your break to make out with my woman. You got any objection to that?”
I grinned against his mouth and then closed my lips over his in answer.
And when I returned to work two minutes later, I felt like I was walking on air even with the anchor of Rooster, Hazard, and the White Raiders still tied around my ankle.