Chapter 5 #2
He keeps going anyway. Men like this always do.
“Jameson,” he says, like he tasted it once and resented the sweetness.
“Yeah. We go back, me and her. She used to—” he makes a crude shape with his fingers like a grade schooler drawing a dirty picture in the air.
“—work for a friend of mine. Best I ever had. Shame about what the street does to pretty. You boys know the saying, right? Can’t make a hoe into a house—”
I’m on him before the last word fits through his teeth. I don’t remember making the choice. I remember my boot leaving the ground, the way the little gap of air between us feels cold, the sound his back makes when it hits the corrugated metal. Then it’s hands and flesh beating into flesh.
“Don’t,” I snarl, voice from somewhere I don’t visit often. My fist connects with something soft and wet. His head snaps sideways. “You don’t ever say her name. Not yours to say.”
There’s motion in my periphery—one of the kids going for his waistband, Crunch moving faster, Red’s growl.
Tripp’s barked order. “Don’t.”
The air charges. I’m not listening. I’m busy.
The mustache tries to put a knee up. I bury a forearm in his throat and hear the noise a man makes when his trachea is reminded it’s a pipe.
“Say it again,” I tell him, calm like I’m ordering coffee.
“Finish your sentence, and see if you can still chew.”
He doesn’t. Somewhere behind me, metal scrapes concrete and shoes scuff and then nothing moves except my hand and his face. It’s not smart. It’s not the plan. It’s not how we keep doing clean business with people who know our names.
I know all that, and still the only picture on the inside of my eyelids is Jami—lips bitten, eyes wide, the night she told the doc no narcotics, the time she carried a five-gallon bucket full of drywall scraps across a room twice, the morning she kissed me with dish soap still on her fingers and told me thank you for the coffee. The simple way we exist together.
The idea of this man reducing all that to something he could buy—that’s the kind of thought that eats holes in a person.
Hands hit my shoulders, a wall slams up between me and him. Tripp’s voice is a shot of reality in my ear. “Enough.”
I suck air and taste copper that isn’t mine. The mustache wheezes. Tripp steps into my space, blocking my line of sight, eyes flat as ice. “You good?”
“Ask him,” I say.
“I’m asking you,” he remarks, softer. “Because if you’re not, I gotta handle it a different way.”
I blink. I’m vibrating, the kind of hum you get after laying a bike down and getting back up on adrenaline. I flex my hands. They hurt. “I’m good,” I lie.
“Back to the bike,” he orders, and he doesn’t move until I move first in the direction he commanded at that.
Crunch is at my shoulder before I’ve taken two steps, and I hate how relieved I am to feel my brother there like my safety net. He doesn’t say you idiot or what were you thinking. He just walks with me, one body-width away, a shadow that doesn’t judge.
Behind us, I hear the mustache spit, and the younger one say something that sounds like words with lawsuit.
Which is laughable since this entire encounter could put us all behind bars for some time.
Red’s voice drops two octaves and the subject changes to seals and manifests and logs because Red can make an argument sound like a bedtime story and a threat sound like a prayer.
Moments later, my brothers all around, the problem settled, and time to exit is in front of us. We each swing a leg over and fire up engines. The run that was easy is now everything feels heavy. I knew better than to let some fucker get to me.
We split at the county line. The box truck peels one way, the bikes another, the pickup in a third. We don’t travel in a clump when we don’t have to, not when it feels like somebody’s mood could catch like dry grass and ignite a forest fire. Today I’m the spark looking to ignite.
When I roll through the compound gate, the sky is purple and late.
I kill the engine and sit on the bike longer than I should.
The adrenaline drains slow, leaving the weight of what I did settled in my shoulders and hands.
I can already hear Tank’s voice when it gets back to him.
Control is your job, son. The road has no use for a man who breaks because somebody says a word.
Maybe. Let him say it. He never watched her shake in her sleep and say please, it hurts to a ghost that hadn’t paid rent in years.
I head home. I don’t stop inside the clubhouse like I normally would.
I don’t go check the shop. I don’t do the sensible thing and rinse the blood off my knuckles.
Unable to stop the need inside me to see her, hold her, know that she is real, I do what my damn soul craves and let the road lead me home to her.
The house is dark except for the little lamp Jami leaves on, the one with the crooked shade she won’t let me fix because she says it has personality.
The scent that hits me at the door is lemon cleaner and a little bit of whatever she baked this afternoon because she stress-bakes and we eat like kings when she worries.
I close the door soft. My knuckles throb in time to the kitchen clock.
“Tommy?” Her voice comes from the hall, sleepy, careful. She appears in the doorway in one of my shirts, hair up in a knot, bare legs like a sin you can pray about later. Her eyes go straight to my face. They go wide. “Oh my God.”
“It’s nothing,” I explain. Stupidest sentence I’ve said in a month.
She pads over, hands hovered like she wants to touch me and doesn’t know where it won’t hurt. “What happened?”
I shake my head. I can’t give it words. I won’t put that man’s mouth in this house. The thought of telling her what he said—of handing her that filth—makes my stomach roll.
“Tommy,” she mutters again, smaller. There’s a cut-glass quiet to her voice that means she’s lining up her own ghosts behind me in the dark.
I should tell her. I should say nothing you ever were for survival has anything to do with who you are now, that her past doesn’t get to tag along unless we invite it, that the world can burn itself for all I care before I let it pour itself into her ear.
Instead, what comes out is raw and wrong and exactly true. “I need you,” I say. “Right now.”
Her eyes search my face. She doesn’t flinch from the bruise or the blood across my knuckles. She looks for the man under them. “Okay,” she says, like it’s the simplest thing she’s ever been asked. “Okay.”
She turns the lamp off, takes my hand, leads me down the hall. My boots thump the way thunder does when it’s walking away. At our bedroom door, she pauses, face tipped up. “Tell me if I hurt you,” she whispers, thumb ghosting the edge of my bruise.
“Can’t, because,” I tell her, catching her wrist, pressing my mouth to her palm. “You don’t ever hurt me.” Sliding to our bathroom, I wash the blood from my hands and clean up for her.
We move slow because I’m big to her tiny frame and because she deserves slow, always.
The shirt slides off her shoulders. I get clean hands on her, greedy in that quiet way a starving man is when the food is finally just right for him.
She’s soft under my mouth, warm under my palms, familiar like the road home you can do with your eyes closed and still you look just to see it.
I don’t say much. I’m not a talker in bed on a good night and tonight my words are all action.
I tell her with my hands. I tell her with the way I kiss, the way I lay my weight until she makes that sound that lives under my ribs, the way I hold her face like it’s a fucking treasure.
Mine, I say without putting it into words.
Mine in the way that means protected, not owned.
Mine as in treasured, valued, and secure.
She answers with her body the way she always does—no doubts, no questions, just trust. Her legs hook behind my thighs. Her fingers pull at my hair. She whispers my name with that breathy break in the middle like it’s cracked open and remade and I crawl through it to where she is and plant a flag.
It’s different tonight. Not rougher, not faster. Just a giving, receiving, and claiming. There’s a way a man can look at a scar with his fingertips and tell it ‘you’re beautiful because you’re healed and because you happened and because the dark side didn’t win.’
There’s a way a woman can put a hand over a man’s heart and tell it ‘I hear you, I hear what you’re not saying, I feel your very depths so you didn’t have to cry.’
We speak those ways. We’ve been learning this language for years. Tonight we’re fluent.
After, I don’t roll away. I stay in her, wrapped around, one hand at the base of her skull, one palm open on her back where the breath moves.
The room is black and light, quiet and loud as a clubhouse party at the same time.
My pulse slows. The edge comes off the world.
My body remembers it is not a weapon unless I ask it to be.
She brushes my jaw with her thumb. “You don’t have to tell me,” she states steady, voice low. “But you know I can take it, right? Whatever it is. You’ve always taken on my demons. I don’t mind facing yours.”
I swallow. She needs this. She needs to know I see her strength. She isn’t the broken woman she was. The words are heavy. “A man said something filthy,” I manage to get out. “About you. About… before. I didn’t give him the chance to finish.”
There it is. Enough to name the thing without bringing its weight into our bed. The corner of her mouth lifts, not in humor, in understanding. She nods once. “Thank you,” she whispers.
“For what?”
“For not letting him finish.” She shifts, winces at a hair pulled wrong, settles again. “And for coming home to me instead of finding him for another round.”
“You’re my anchor,” I share with her. “And my first place to run to. And my forever place to fall.”
She huffs a laugh that hits deep in my chest. “Poet.”
“Don’t use that word on me.” I find her hand in the dark and kiss her knuckles. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” She stays quiet for a long beat. “Are you?”
I could say yes. I could lie to help her sleep. But we don’t do that anymore. “I am now.”
“Good.” She tips up, kisses the edge of my mouth where it isn’t swollen. “Tomorrow, you’re putting ice on that eye, and I’m making you eggs.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
We drift. There’s a moment right before sleep where the brain decides if it’s going to take a ride through nightmares or if it’s going to sit steady after a good, quiet ride and stare at the stars.
Tonight, mine sits steady. It’s because of her. Because of what we share without saying.