Chapter 7 #2
I turned my head just enough to see the man above me.
He was broad-shouldered, with a work jacket draped over his forearms and a soft beard dusting his face with gray linked in the blond even then.
He crouched down like he wasn’t afraid I’d lash out.
His bravery showed in his years of military service as much as in his stride.
“I can call an ambulance to take you to a shelter you’ll probably run away from,” he said. “Or I can buy you breakfast.”
I laughed, and the sound came out wrong. It was nothing but a wet, broken sob. “Ambulance costs money, Sir,” I muttered.
“So does breakfast,” he replied. “Difference is, one offers me your sparkling company.”
That was when I finally looked at him. “I am not down for whatever you’re after. I don’t sell tricks. My body ain’t worth nothing, okay? Just leave me alone.”
He laughed at me, actually laughed a full belly roll type of laugh, and whacked my leg as he crouched to my level, making us equal.
“Lucky for you, I’m happily married. My wife would sooner pulverize your nuts, and mine, than share.”
I didn’t know his name yet. Just the sparkle in his blue eyes that were steady and warm, and the way his hands were clean in a way only honest work gives you. He wasn’t trying to hurt or trick me. I couldn’t be sure, but I just went with my gut.
“You got a name?” he said.
I hesitated. The streets had taught me one thing: Don’t trust a soul.
Your name is the one thing people can’t take from you, and names were dangerous. Names meant people could find you.
“Jed,” I said finally. “Just Jed.”
“Alright, just Jed.” He stood and offered a hand. “I’m Jerry.”
I stared at it like it was a trick. Everything on the streets came with a price. A lot of times, that price was another piece of your soul. The things I did to survive the six months I had been here were enough to sign me over to the devil alone.
The ‘doctor’ in the alley saved my life from the knife wound, but entertaining him and his friends after I healed made me wish I hadn’t lived at all.
“If you don’t want sex, you gonna stab me? Take my sleeping bag?” I said.
He smiled a little. “I got my own sleeping bags, and only if you try to steal my wallet or try to hurt me.”
“Try?” I challenged, taking his firm hand.
He locked eyes with me, and I saw the dog tags sway from his neck. “Yes. Try.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I thought I was a badass because I won every fight I had been in, and accidentally murdered a guy six months ago, but it wasn’t honorable.
This man was a soldier. That was what real men did.
He didn’t seem old enough to be a soldier. I was nineteen, so how old was he?
He smiled. It was warm and solid. The first real thing I had seen in a while.
That was the first thing that broke me.
He took me to a diner and let me eat until my hands stopped shaking. Didn’t rush me once and didn’t stare. He just talked about the weather and his kid, who was a little baby.
Hell, the way his face lit up when he spoke about his son, Elias, was the biggest reason I learned to trust Jerry. That and how Dawn hated when he tracked sawdust into the house from the shop he built from the ground up after coming back home with a purple heart.
He’d lived a hard life in the military. It wasn’t easy, and his scars were there, some visible but most internal.
I could see it when a waitress dropped a glass on the ground, and the way the shattering sound seemed to take him away, back to a memory and place he would rather forget.
He didn’t lash out, though. He swallowed and let that darkness fade back into the light as quickly as it came, all while talking about his love and his baby.
When I finished, he studied me the way men do when they already know the answer.
“You can’t stay out there, ya know, Monticello is kind, but the cold will kill ya,” he said.
“I don’t need charity.”
He shrugged. “Good ‘cause I’m not offering it.”
He leaned back and said the words that rerouted my entire life.
“You can stay with us for a month. We got a couch, shower, and clean clothes. You help where you can at the shop and at the house. You don’t bring trouble to my door, and I won’t boot your ass out of it. Ya got it?”
I laughed again, sharper this time. “You don’t even know me. No one offers a stranger their home. Not even in this fairy tale town of yours.”
“I know enough,” he said, writing a check and bagging up the extra food.
I knew that was for me, and dammit if I didn’t have to wipe a tear off my cheek. Jerry was too good for the world.
“What do you think you know?”
He smiled again, that big cheeseball grin I grew to find such comfort in. “You didn’t take the wallet.”
That night, Dawn handed me a towel like I was an expected guest, not a lowlife homeless man invading her home. They both made me feel like I already belonged there.
She didn’t ask questions either. She just gave me a hug that warmed my frozen heart and told me where my room was.
Jerry didn’t judge me when I started crying. He didn’t mock me or call me weak, as the gang had. Instead, he just smiled that Jerry soft smile. “Bathroom’s yours, Jed. Supper’s at six.”
I stood under that shower until the water ran cold, watching months of dirt and blood spiral down the drain. I pressed my forehead to the tile and breathed for the first time in months, in disbelief about how people so kind would find someone like me.
I wondered if this was a cruel trick, a way to get me to let my guard down and finally take me out. I couldn’t sleep even after I lay my head down, waiting and watching the door for Jerry to lead the gang right to my bedside.
It took days for me to breathe finally, and when I did, those goddamn tears were relentless. The worst feeling ever was stealing every bit of oxygen I had left until I was nothing but a wrecked, broken man pouring out the pain I had held in for so long.
Jerry sat at the table nearby, pretending not to notice.
That was love, not loud or intimate…not conditional or transactional. Just a man deciding another man wasn’t disposable.
“Jed.” Jerry’s voice pulled me back again, gentle but firm this time.
I looked at him across the butcher shop table, my eyes zeroing in on his hands slicing meat on the wooden cutting board.
This was the life he’d built brick by brick without ever asking the world’s permission to exist. He came home from war, pulled the girl he always loved into his arms, and built his world.
“You saved me,” I said quietly.
He shook his head immediately. “No.”
“Yes.”
“No,” he repeated, his eyes steady. “I gave you a place to stop running all those years ago. You chose what came next.”
Maybe.
But I knew the truth.
Some men didn’t survive long enough to choose anything.
Jerry Cross had reached down into the gutter he found my sorry ass in and grabbed me by the metaphorical nuts, and made the ‘Get up’ command clear.
Jerry didn’t say anything at first. He just watched me eat like a man, making sure another man stayed upright without saying as much.
That was the thing about him. Jerry never hovered. He anchored and supported you silently so you felt like you were the one holding yourself up all along.
It had to be him who pulled me out of the bathroom last night and bandaged me up.
We sat there in the quiet clatter of the shop, watching the kids play, listening to the hum of the refrigeration units, and the distant thump of a cleaver somewhere behind the wall by his assistant.
It felt domestic in a way that had nothing to do with religion. This was a fellowship without scripture…a contract written in the blood of brotherhood.
“You remember,” Jerry said eventually, not accusing, not prying. Just stating a fact.
I nodded once. “I remember everything lately.”
“That’s usually when it gets dangerous.”
I snorted. “For who?”
“For you.”
He reached out then, his hand closing around my shoulder in a grounding squeeze. His hands were callused from hard work but still warm.
It was the same hands that had stitched me up years ago with Dawn’s sewing kit, the proper way, as he was surgically trained to do in his uniform.
Jerry lived with a bullet near his spine, a phenomenon that he even breathed, but he knew what he was doing when it came to curing and killing. He had helped me heal because the ER would’ve asked questions neither of us wanted answered.
“You’re my brother,” he said quietly. “That didn’t change when you put on the collar, Jedidiah.”
I swallowed hard. Jerry didn’t say things like that lightly. When he did, it was because he meant them so deeply they’d been with him a long time.
“Thanks for last ni—”
Before I could finish, the bell over the door chimed again, and the air shifted. A negative tainted energy buzzed through me before I even saw them.
Miranda came in first, or rather, she was pulled in.
Jack Saint Clare’s hand was clamped around her wrist, his fingers digging in just enough not to leave marks that could be proven later.
He was smiling at us, all teeth and entitlement, like the world owed him compliance and he’d collected it already.
His badge shone the brightest, probably the only thing he polished in his life.
Miranda looked…smaller than the last time I’d seen her at confession.
Frail in a way that had nothing to do with weight and everything to do with erosion of her confidence.
Her eyes didn’t lift from the floor when they entered, and her shoulders curved inward, almost protective, like she’d learned the shape that caused the least trouble.
Behind them came the boy, quiet enough that you’d think he didn’t want to exist in this space.
He hovered near the door, half-hidden behind Jack’s leg, his gaze flicking toward the back of the shop where Elias and Maria were playing. He watched them the way starving men watched food—not wanting to be noticed, terrified of wanting anything at all.