94. Chapter 94
He went home.
During a lull in the weather, Jase rode hard and fast on slick roads to the house where he grew up. He didn’t have a plan beyond the groveling her dad mentioned.
Lindsey’s Wrangler wasn’t in the driveway.
Every light in the house was on. He made his way through the rooms, flipping switches off as he went.
Her suitcase was gone and the box his dad intended her to open was still under his bed. Jase wrapped it in plastic—his saddlebags weren’t one hundred percent watertight—and headed back out.
She wasn’t at her apartment either. He’d checked when he left Smitty’s and checked again now just in case.
Driving away, the sky opened and he ducked his head through the deluge to the other side of Dayton to the squat two-story complex with broken windows patched with duct tape and a stairwell reeking of unwashed clothes.
A note on his apartment door from the landlord read, “The fuck, Jase?” above a sloppy dollar sign.
Well, he hadn’t been evicted.
He ripped off the note and shut the door behind him. It smelled like unwashed clothes inside too.
He dropped his keys on the small table between the kitchen and living room, the clatter sending the mice scurrying. He never actually saw mice, just suspected they came out and used the place when he was gone, which was often.
He tried a lamp. The electric company was less forgiving than his slumlord.
Lindsey’s dad would take one look at his apartment, if the lights worked, and tell Jase to forget everything he’d said about the kind of man Jase was.
He stripped out of his damp clothes and stumbled around in the dark for anything worth packing.
A handful of clothes in the dresser made the cut.
The skin mags by the bed did not. In the pitch-black bathroom he knocked a tube of pit stick and a toothbrush into the tiny porcelain sink and felt something drip on his head.
He wiped his hair, smelled it, and guessed the slumlord hadn’t fixed the leaky ceiling tile Jase told him about two months ago.
After spending the last week in his childhood home, a place fully stocked with matching cups and plates—enough to feed more than one man a meal—cleaning supplies under the sinks, thick blankets on the beds, and furniture not bought secondhand, Jase’s unintentionally minimalistic way of living stood in severe contrast. He didn’t enjoy living with almost nothing.
There just didn’t seem to be a point in accumulating more since he was hardly there to use it.
He was hardly anywhere long enough for it to matter.
He hated this shithole.
Jase opened his phone to call Lindsey. The black screen mocked him. Fully charged, it was little more than a paperweight anyway. He couldn’t remember the last time he plugged it in. He’d gotten Chloe’s texts earlier and then…nothing.
He rummaged around for a charger in the dark and couldn’t find one. Gas stations didn’t sell cords for flip phones anymore either. The lone cord he usually toted with him was plugged in at the house next to his bed.
Another storm was rolling in. Jase would be able to make out the finer details in those skin mags with the constant lightning. Small hail pecked at his windows and would hurt like a son of a bitch on his bike.
Jase fell back on the gray sheets covering the lumpy mattress he vowed he’d never sleep on again after tonight. As soon as the storm let up, he’d charge his phone and find her.
Leroy and Luke’s assertion that he saved Lindsey’s life wasn’t enough to rewrite the man Jase had always been, the one who left—home, women, his dad at the end. But it was the beginning of a new story. With her.
If she’d have him.