Chapter Seven
Jade
The sign above the door to the bar was a skull wearing a motorcycle helmet, hand-painted and slightly uneven on one side. I stared at it for longer than I needed to while Violet held the door open and waited.
“You don’t have to go in,” she said. She wasn’t being kind about it, just stating fact.
Violet had that quality. She didn’t soften things unnecessarily, but she also didn’t push.
“Hannah thought it might be good for you to get out. See some people. But it’s your call.
I will happily walk down Music Row or go to a park or something if you want. ”
I knew what Hannah thought. Hannah had said it herself, two days ago over coffee in the Haven kitchen.
Did I want to go someplace else? I used to love places like this.
When I looked back at Violet, her features softened.
“Trust me when I tell you, I get it. You’re healing.
But healing in isolation has a ceiling, Jade.
At some point you have to let the world back in a little.
” God, she was right! She was so fucking right.
“I’m going in,” I said. I put my shoulders back as best I could and opened the door, stepping inside.
The noise hit first, classic rock hammering out of an ancient jukebox somewhere in the back, loud enough to feel in the chest. Then the smell, cigarette smoke and beer and something underneath that was just years of use, of bodies and leather and motor oil worked into the very soul of the place.
I stopped two steps inside the door and pressed my back against the wall without meaning to. I wiped the back of my hand over my upper lip to catch the sweat beading there and made myself take stock of the room to get my bearings.
The long bar to the left had a sticky-looking oak top, every stool occupied.
Pool tables in the back and mismatched tables scattered between were mostly full.
Voices layered through the music sounded rich and carefree.
Laughter. But when somebody dropped a glass, I felt my hands snap into fists at my sides before I forced myself to relax.
I twisted the ring on my right middle finger.
I’d picked it up at the donation box at Haven, a plain latex band, a kid’s toy.
I’d started wearing it for something to do with my hands.
Eric used to comment on my hands. Said they were always doing something useless.
I pressed my thumbnail into my palm instead and made myself focus on the room.
“Donation boxes are up at the bar,” Violet said, appearing at my shoulder.
Two boxes sat at either end of the oak surface, neatly labeled with the Haven logo on a white printed card, the kind Hannah made on the community printer.
“Club’s been running a monthly collection night.
Most of these guys match dollar for dollar on what they spend on themselves in here. ” She grinned.
Surprisingly, her revelation didn’t surprise me. If I’d learned anything about the men at Kiss of Death, it’s that they played hard, worked hard, and protected those they considered theirs to the death. They’d do whatever they could to encourage everyone they knew to help however they could.
I breathed out through my nose and made myself step away from the wall and follow Violet deeper into the bar.
The crowd wasn’t what I’d call friendly, but it wasn’t exactly hostile.
A couple of men glanced at me and glanced away, but nobody stopped to stare.
I kept my eyes forward and my shoulders square and told my nervous system to stand down.
It didn’t fully listen, but I managed to stop trembling at least. I hated feeling this on edge.
Violet dropped a folded bill into the nearest donation box.
I did the same with the twenty I’d brought for exactly this purpose and stood at the bar while she flagged down the bartender for my Coke.
The man behind the bar was broad-shouldered, tattooed to the throat, with a thick beard.
He set my drink down with a nod of acknowledgment and moved on.
I’d positioned myself with my back to the bar, so the room was in front of me, the way I’d noticed Rip and some of the other guys doing.
Speaking of, I heard Rip before I saw him as he spoke to a couple of the guys from the club.
He appeared at my left side, putting himself between me and the section of the bar where two men were getting loud about something on the panel of television monitors along the back wall.
He stood next to me at a comfortable distance with a bottle of beer in one hand and his gaze moving across the room in that steady, methodical sweep I found reassuring.
“You came,” he said.
“Violet is persuasive,” I said with a small smile.
“You doing OK?”
“Surviving.” I looked down at my soda. “I’ll get there.”
He didn’t push it. That was the thing about Rip, he never pushed. He didn’t need to fill every silence with reassurance or commentary. I think that steady way he had about him transferred to me when he was near. Maybe I trusted him more than I’d realized.
Rip turned and moved down the bar a few feet to talk to Tiny. I watched him out of the corner of my eye while I worked on my soda and watched everyone around me. To my surprise, I’d actually started to relax and enjoy the atmosphere.
The music had settled into something slower. The crowd hadn’t thinned but it had shifted, the energy changing from loud and aggressive to just loud.
I took a drink and the bartender set a fresh Coke on the counter, taking my empty can. Again, he didn’t speak but did nod at me politely.
A heavy, shuffling gait and the kind of laugh that had too much drink behind it came from my right.
He stopped close enough that I could smell him, whiskey and cigarettes and the sour tang of liquor sweat underneath both.
He was maybe forty-five, heavyset, with a reddened face and small pale eyes that had gone glassy.
His cut was from a different club, the patches unfamiliar to me.
He looked at me the way certain men look at women, when they’ve had enough to drink that their internal editor has shut down entirely.
“Com’ere, sweet thing,” he said, and grabbed my elbow.
My body did what my body had learned to do when someone grabbed me.
I fucking froze. Every muscle seized up at once like a blown circuit.
The drink in my hand didn’t move. My lungs pulled in one shallow breath and held it.
My mind went very bright and very blank and stayed there, suspended between what was happening and any possible response to it.
Eric had grabbed my elbow like that. Exactly like that.
In public, where he knew I couldn’t make a scene, where his grip looked casual to anyone watching but felt like a vise to me.
The memory was a visceral, living thing, and I couldn’t have moved if I’d tried.
Which, the humiliating truth is, I didn’t try. I never had.
Then Rip was there. I didn’t see him move.
One second he was twenty feet away with his back half-turned, and the next, he was between me and the drunk and the drunk’s hand was no longer on my arm, and immediately I could breathe again.
Rip had the man’s wrist in his own hand, making a movement that removed the guy’s touch and forced him, stumbling, backward a step.
The drunk’s face changed immediately. He tried to hide his wince and couldn’t.
“Hands off,” Rip said. His voice was low. It didn’t carry past the three of us, which somehow made it worse.
The drunk pulled against his grip and cursed, a short ugly word. His face went red and then redder. “The hell you think you are, you --”
Rip tightened his grip. The drunk cut off mid-word, his breath hissing out between his teeth. Rip leaned in and said something directly into the man’s ear. His lips barely moved. I was close enough that I should have been able to hear it, but I couldn’t catch a single word.
Whatever it was, it worked. The drunk’s face went from red to pale in about four seconds.
The fight drained out of him and his gaze dropped to the floor and stayed there, and when Rip released his wrist and stepped back, the man didn’t look up.
He turned and moved away from the bar without a word, taking a wide route around us toward the far end of the room. He didn’t look back once.
The area around us had gone quiet during the confrontation. When Rip stepped away and picked up his beer from the bar where he’d set it down, the noise from the rest of the room bled back in gradually.
Rip turned and looked at me. “You OK, honey?”
The question was direct, and he waited for an actual answer while I stared up at his concerned face. The man actually cared about my answer. I could see it in the way his brows knit together.
“Yes,” I said. My voice was steady. My hands were not.
He nodded and said nothing else about it, just moved back to his position beside me and put his eyes on the room again.
I stood there and tried to understand what was happening inside my chest. The panic had receded the second Rip stepped between me and that man.
Not slowly, not after I’d talked myself down.
Like a switch flipped. My lungs had opened back up and my muscles had unlocked before Rip had said anything to the guy.
Before the guy left, my panic attack ended and my legs wanted to turn to jelly with the sudden and total relief.
Now, Rip stood beside me drinking his beer while he watched everyone around us.
My confusion wasn’t about Rip. It was about me, about not trusting what my own body told me anymore, about the gap between knowing something was safe and actually feeling it in my bones.
A man I’d only just met shouldn’t feel like the only safe haven for my bruised and battered soul right now.
What if I misjudged him the way I had Eric?
If this man turned violent on me, he’d kill me.