Chapter Six – Jaxon
I let out a sigh as I stepped through the door to my apartment, the familiar smell of paint hanging in the air, and tossed my jacket onto the couch before I headed to the kitchen to make myself a coffee.
I had left Star asleep in the small room above the tattoo shop – I was just across the street, not far from her, but I still felt a little guilty about leaving her behind like that. I hoped she didn’t hate me for it. I got the feeling she was totally lost in this world, totally unsure of how to navigate this new life that had been laid in front of her, and I couldn’t say I blamed her. After all, she had come from one of the highest echelons of society, crashing down to land with us. It would be weird if she was anything other than totally shaken up by it.
I poured a strong coffee into my cup and took a long sip – caffeine was the only drug I allowed myself these days after I’d quit smoking the year before when I had noticed the nicotine staining the tips of my fingers. I hated being addicted to anything, after how far that shit had gone to ripping my life apart, but I figured that one more thing to take the edge off wasn’t going to be that much of a problem.
Placing the coffee on the sidetable, I headed through to my bedroom, which doubled for my art studio – in this tiny place, it wasn’t as though I had much room to work, and I would have been lying if I said it didn’t get to me sometimes. But the small stipend I received for my work with the Dogs wasn’t enough to afford somewhere bigger, and I didn’t want to go out and get myself a new job, not when this one meant the world to me, and gave me family I never had before.
I had a couple of easels set up, and I was working on landscape pieces of the street below, the tattoo shop opposite my window. I grimaced as I looked one of them over. I had thought it looked better last night, but here, in the cold light of day, it looked pretty amateur, some of the colors too bright for the gray outside.
I grabbed one of the tubes of paint that I had cast aside on the windowsill and squeezed a generous amount onto the takeout container I had turned into a makeshift easel, picking up one of the brushes so I could make some changes to this particular piece. Painting was always what I did when I needed to get my mind off of something, what I always used to calm myself down when it felt as though the world was spinning out of control around me – in truth, I was sure that bringing this girl into my life was going to make things a whole lot harder, but, when I looked into her eyes, it was hard to care.
Tongue between my front teeth, I re-painted the street in the picture carefully, trying to capture the way the sunlight bounced off the puddles from the rainfall we’d had the week before. The bikes were lined up outside the store, a few of the Dogs stopping by to update Chuck on what was going on with the new systems we had put in place for moving our product around the city. A few of the other biker gangs had started getting too big for their damn boots and pushing into our territory, but a little dissuading, and they would soon remember their place in all of this.
As I worked, my eyes drifted up towards the room that I knew Star was sleeping in. Strange, to think she was so close, right there opposite me, almost within reach. She had seemed exhausted when I had gone in to check on her earlier, and, given everything she had been through, I couldn’t exactly say that I was surprised. It seemed a miracle she was even upright after everything that had happened, and I could tell from the way she looked at me that she was still wary about all of this, still wondering if she had done the right thing by trusting us.
Not that she had a whole lot in the way of choices right now. With Lombardi likely looking for her, not to mention her father on her tail to pull her back into her family duties, she’d have to be looking over her shoulder every chance she got. Here, with us, at least she would be able to rest for a while.
No, not with us. With me. I needed to remember that. Chuck had made that about as clear as he could, that he wasn’t doing all of this out of the goodness of his heart – he was doing it because I had agreed to step up and handle it, and if I fucked up, then it was going to be on me.
Even the thought of it was enough to set my teeth on edge. I didn’t do well being under this much pressure. I knew, all too vividly, what it did to me, and I could already feel those familiar cravings creeping in to the back of my mind.
I had been young when Chuck had pulled me off the streets, but that addiction felt as though it had been with me for years – I had started in high school, the same way everyone else did, drinking, smoking weed, nothing too serious.
But I wasn’t like everyone else. No, everyone else seemed to be able to stop at a certain point, but I would always be the last one awake at the party, the one who was doing everything to keep himself going – pouring out the last of everyone else’s drinks and downing them, picking up joint ends and smoking them up, anything, anything I could do in order to keep the high going.
My family didn’t give a shit. My mom was an alcoholic herself, and hardly paid attention to me at the best of times – she was just glad I was out of the house so she could drink herself into a stupor without having to worry about me. My dad left when I was a kid, and I had no idea what he was doing with himself, whether he was dead on the side of the road somewhere for shooting his smart mouth off at someone he shouldn’t have. It seemed like a blessing, at the time, a chance for me to just give myself over to the intensity of my need to get out of my mind, but looking back, fuck, I wished someone had been there to step in and tell me that I didn’t need to live my life like that.
It didn’t take long before I started seeking out the harder stuff, that stuff that would give me even more of a break from my stressed-out brain. Coke, pills, molly, anything I could get my hands on. Everyone else seemed to be doing it to just have a little fun, but me? I was doing it because being in my sober mind was more than I could handle. I didn’t know what the hell was wrong with me, why everyone else seemed so able to handle their shit when I felt as though I would fall apart at any moment, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I sank into that addiction like an old friend, like it had been there waiting for me the whole time, and I was happy to embrace it, once and for all.
By the time I was seventeen, I was smoking heroin, and from there, it got worse– snorting the shit, and then, someone’s big brother had taken me into a bathroom at a party and shown me how to shoot it up. I could still remember, all too well, the feeling that had spread through my body the moment that high first hit me, like everything else in the world drifted away – I was in this warm, golden bubble, and nothing could reach me. Not my drunk mom drooling on the couch, not the concerned glances of my classmates wondering how much I was going to put away before I finally stopped – nothing. None of it mattered. None of it came close to mattering when I felt as good as I did in that moment.
I stopped going to school after that, gave up on my vague plans to head out to college and study art – I used to love creating, locking myself up in my room while my mom got hammered with her friends and focusing on painting with the crappy little set I’d gotten as a kid. But I didn’t need painting to make me feel better now, no – I didn’t need anything. I could just give myself over to this delicious sensation of being high and forget everything else.
The usual story. More, more, more, more drugs, more shooting up, until I was out of money and living on the streets – moved along by cops, shifted from doorways so I wouldn’t bring down the reputation of a good neighborhood. That was how I had ended up in this part of Atwood, how I’d ended up working with Chuck. When hefirst offered me a job, I had seen it as a way to earn enough to keep getting high, but the more time that passed, the harder it became to justify going back to what I had known before. I hated being sober, but I hated being high even more, the ugly, useless mess that I became was too humiliating to return to. I knew, if I kept going the way I had been going, I was just going to end up like my mother, and the thought of letting that happen had been more than I could handle.
That was eight years ago. Eight years since I had last used. There had been a few slips with other shit, drink and weed and coke, but I soon put a stop to that when I realized that I still didn’t have the off-switch that other people my age did. Much as I wanted to get out of my head, turn off my brain for a while, I couldn’t just restrain myself and have a couple of drinks.
I had thrown myself into painting instead, not that any of the guys knew anything about that. I knew the shit they would give me if they knew I was coming back to my apartment and playing Michelangelo behind closed doors. I used some of the skills I had developed to improve the tattoos we gave at the store, and I figured that was the best thing for it. I didn’t want them to find out what I was really up to, what I was doing when none of them were looking in my direction.
Now I was part of the Dogs, I had their reputation to consider too – and I knew Chuck would have no problem kicking me out if he thought I was doing harm to their business.
He was a hard-ass, but in the best way possible. He expected a lot from us, from the guys who worked for the Dogs, and that’s how I wanted it. He and Lee had pulled me out of the pit I’d been stuck in for so long, and if I had to stay sober to repay them for that, I could handle it.
Even if what was going on with Star was starting to make me question it.
I tried to focus on the painting before me, but I couldn’t seem to make the colors work. I couldn’t stop thinking about her, those bright blue eyes staring back at me as she asked me why I was doing all of this – why I was helping her the way I was, why I didn’t just turn my back on her. Had she dealt with a lot of that over the course of her life? People who just gave up on her.
I knew what that felt like. I couldn’t let her know what I had been through, what had brought me to this point – I knew what she would think of me, how she would look at me. She had to trust, and she couldn’t do that if she knew I was some barely-restrained junkie hanging on by his fingertips to a coffee to get him through the day.
Something in me wanted to keep it all from her, even though I knew there was no real reason for it. It wasn’t as though I was trying to impress her or anything. I didn’t know her like that, and I wasn’t going to try and take advantage of the situation that had been laid in front of me to get closer to her. And yet...
And yet, there was still a part of me that wanted to see just where this would go. My hand hovered over the window where she was sleeping in my painting, as though there was something I wanted to change about this picture.