92. Chapter 92
“Want some?”
Jase rolled over and watched Lindsey take a hit of a joint.
She was still naked and he planned on keeping it that way, even if he was too fucking tired to do anything about it.
If it were up to him, they’d be catching a few winks to recoup some energy for a middle-of-the-night round three, but after Lindsey’s admission (he knew she’d never stopped wanting him) she had collapsed on the bed for all of two minutes before turning on a lamp and fishing through her purse for the joint she passed to him.
“Where did you find this?” he asked.
“In the car in the floor console thing. I almost forgot about it,” Lindsey said. “You couldn’t find us a motel with air-conditioning?”
“Still a pain in the ass.” Jase coughed on the smoke and passed the joint back. “The sign said color TV. I thought it’d be a classy place.”
“It’s not your first time here, is it?”
“No.” He frowned. He hadn’t planned on telling her. “Before you get upset, you should know this motel is special.”
“How so?”
“It has ocean views.”
“Hm. I must’ve missed them.”
Who was he trying to kid? From the paper-thin walls to the bent curtain rod and torn window screen to the rust rings around the drains in the bathroom, this place was a dump.
They all were. Dumps and dives were what he knew.
She hadn’t even gotten the one nice dinner she wanted tonight.
Jase, in what wasn’t his finest moment, left her sitting at the table.
Lindsey pulled a knee up to her chest and took another hit. “What’s next for you?”
“I’m not sure. You?”
She shrugged a sweaty, bare shoulder and set the joint in an ashtray on the bedside table. The hotel they got kicked out of last night didn’t have ashtrays. He doubted they even had smoking rooms.
“Go back to Ohio, I guess,” Lindsey said. “Set the rest of Graham’s stuff on fire. Nothing I shouldn’t have done a long time ago.”
“Yeah.” Jase let out an exaggerated sigh. “I’ll probably meet up with some old flames. Show off the new bike.”
He said it with a goading grin, but it was probably exactly what he would do.
Because women, too, were what Jase knew.
“Don’t do that,” she said quietly.
“I’m an asshole. Isn’t that what you said?”
Still goading. Also making sure she didn’t get too attached.
“I don’t think those were my exact words.”
“You said I wasn’t half the man my dad was, and you were right.”
“You know I didn’t mean it,” she said, sitting up. “I was angry or I never would’ve said something so stupid.”
He kissed her softly and tapped her chin with each word. “You. Were. Right.”
She entwined their fingers. The gesture felt more intimate than anything they’d done in that bed.
“You’re a good man,” she said. “Does this have something to do with what happened today? You haven’t been the same since we met Saul.”
Jase’s head fell back against the headboard.
He was suddenly aware of how tired he felt.
No, tired was pounding pavement and caffeine in the desert.
Now he’d slipped into some bizarre plane of exhaustion where if he stared at Lindsey’s face too long, it started changing shapes.
The redness he suspected was in his eyes could’ve been a reflection of the Vacancy sign out the window or his own blood vessels bursting.
“Talk to me,” she urged.
Jase swung his legs over the side of the bed, and rested his head in his hands. Why is my head so goddamn heavy? The weed? He thought he heard the tail end of a Whiskey Myers song outside, distorted by the fan in the window and the mush between his ears.
“He saved a life.”
Her hand seared the flesh on his shoulder.
“People always said we’re so much alike, but we’re not. We’re not alike. At all.”
“You are,” Lindsey insisted. “Even Billy said she saw your dad in you, and she would know. You both ride.”
“Yeah? So what? We never even rode together. He wasn’t always sick. We could’ve done things, but he wasn’t that man anymore. I didn’t become the way I am by trying to be like my dad.”
“Maybe not intentionally. It happened whether you see it or not.”
Jase stalked to the window and stood in front of the fan propped over the hole in the screen.
He would’ve given his left lung and firstborn son for a cool gust from an air conditioner.
Why was it so goddamned hard to breathe?
And so hot? He felt flayed, stripped and laid bare-assed—more than he was already stripped and bare-assed—for her inspection, and he thought he understood why women pulled the sheets up to their necks after sex.
“We’re meeting people who loved him and remember him,” he said, “and today it hit me—my dad’s dead, but I’m the ghost. I’m the fucking ghost.”
If he wasn’t sure, an inventory of his life sealed it.
If Jase died tomorrow, his entire legacy would consist of the faded T-shirts in the drawer of a secondhand dresser and the mismatched dishes in the cupboard in his apartment in Ohio, a pair of boxer shorts in the nightstand beside Chloe’s bed, a beater car he drove in the winter, and two gifted motorcycles.
Nothing tangible linking him to anyone or anything.
A used toothbrush and disposable razor in a small paper bag.
The only proof he meant anything to anyone was the chin stubble stuck in the blades of a razor in the trash can at the end of Denise’s driveway. His dad left more of an impression on people he met thirty years ago than Jase did on the people he knew now.
“By my age my dad had done things. People gave a shit about him,” Jase went on. “They had a reason to. I’ve never done anything worthwhile to anyone. I didn’t earn that fucking bike. I’m not a good man, Linds.”
“Jase.” Lindsey moved to the side of the bed, clutching the damp sheet to her chest. “You are a good man, or I wouldn’t still be here. We don’t know what actually happened with Saul’s wife. Whatever it was, I know you would’ve done the same.”
“A few hours ago you compared me to Graham.”
Lindsey fell back on the bed and narrowed her eyes. “You’re both stubborn asses sometimes.”
“If I died tomorrow, no one’s building a bike in my memory, okay? No one’s even going to know I’m gone.”
“I would.”
“You’d forget soon enough,” he said. “I don’t even know what you’re doing here with me.”
She sat up on her knees, still clutching the damn sheet. “You finally kissed me.”
“Finally?”
“Like I said—you’re a stubborn ass when you want to be.”
He set his fists on the bed on either side of her and asked, “What do you want from me, Lindsey?”
“Just for you to stop hating yourself so much,” she said. “And for you to get your stubborn ass back in this bed and make me glad I stayed.”
He tossed the sheet aside and scooped her into his lap.
She kissed him and wrapped her arms and legs around his body.
He didn’t need to use his hand to guide himself into her, their every bend and curve lined up perfectly.
As they sank into the bed, he expected his mind to clear the way it usually did, lost inside a woman, but the last thing she said stayed with him.
Just for you to stop hating yourself so much.
He didn’t think he hated himself, he’d just never found much to like.
After she came, he let himself go. A kiss to seal it and Jase closed his eyes, still wrapped up in her.
It was the best sleep he’d gotten since he found out his dad had cancer.