Chapter 19 Isla
ISLA
Ileave their house and jog across the road, and the whole time, my heart does this ridiculous hiccupping in my chest. The cold air doesn’t help. Breathing is already hard enough.
But every step toward my door feels like I’m walking in wet cement.
Jackal kissed me.
Kai kissed me.
And even wilder, he told me to talk to Garrett about it.
Like that’s a normal sentence.
Like any of this is remotely normal.
How on earth am I supposed to walk up those stairs, see Garrett, wave, say hi, and then tell him, Hey, your partner kissed me in the kitchen. How do you feel about that?
Once I get into the house, it’s marginally warmer, but not warm like the house across the road. I should probably search up how to bleed radiators or check boilers or however this house is heated.
Instead, I find myself tempted to research polyamory, and how it works out in the long-term when a woman stumbles into a relationship with two men who are already…well, together.
I drop my keys on the little table in the hallway, and the familiarity of aging floorboards and flaking wallpaper grounds me. It still smells like my nanna’s house, and I hate the idea that, by renovating, I’ll slowly but surely remove almost every sign she was ever here at all.
I walk down the hall to the bathroom, and steam fills the tiny shower stall as I crank the tap to full heat. The tiles on the wall are cracked but clean. I made sure of that the very first day after Kai helped me remove the fence posts.
Peeling off my clothes, I catch sight of myself in the bathroom mirror.
My body is looking a little fuller now that I’ve stopped going without food to remain as skinny as possible.
My skin is clear because I’m taking better care of it.
I can’t count the number of nights I would simply sleep in my makeup because of where I was or who I was with.
Grudge used to love seeing tear track marks down my face. For a moment, I wonder if he loves seeing the same thing on Lucy’s face, but I realize none of that is my business.
“You’ve changed, Isla,” I say to the girl in the mirror. “You don’t have to go back there.”
When I step under the spray, I exhale like I’ve been holding my breath since Kai’s lips touched mine.
“Stupid,” I mutter, dragging my fingers through my hair. Because feeling anything for a biker is foolish. Feeling something for two bikers is a death wish.
I place my hands over my face and press the heels of my hands to my eyes.
But I need to know if you wanted me to kiss you.
The two of us agreed we’d both like to explore this with you.
He said the words so casually. Like hearing that both of them liked me didn’t knock the stuffing right out of me.
And Garrett. Oh, Lord. How do you find the words to tell someone you kissed their partner?
I soap myself thoroughly, rinse, and then turn off the shower.
As I do, I wonder if there’s a way to keep the two things separate.
There are two men across the street that I have growing feelings for, who both seem to like me.
Maybe we could date. Hang out. Take things at the kind of pace normal people carry out relationships at.
Then, there’s the club I want no part of. I know there are some old ladies who are classed as civilian wives. They have no connection to the club, at all. Could that be me someday?
By the time I’m dried off and dressed in clean yoga pants and a fresh long-sleeved T-shirt, my breath has steadied, and my hands no longer shake.
For the next hour, I need normality before I head over to check on Garrett.
First, I make some calls to some roofers. I hang up the phone on the fourth builder in frustration. How can new roofs be so expensive? And why do I have to wait seven weeks until the first roofer is free?
I give up on that and throw myself into dealing with the kitchen.
“Hey,” I say toward the camera on my phone.
“So, today, I’m gonna begin cleaning out the kitchen.
Some would probably call this an embarrassment.
From its yellowed cabinets that were installed in the seventies to the peeling laminate counters, it is in definite need of resurrection.
But to me, it’s also the place where my nanna made every meal I ever ate here.
She taught me to make pastries and deep-fry food.
I sat at that table and did homework while she rustled up a snack for me.
My childhood was bumpy, but here was calm.
And that’s what I want to recreate with what I do here. ”
I press pause and take a breath. Thinking about the safe haven my nanna created for me makes me swallow hard. I was nine when she realized I was becoming more withdrawn, how I flinched around some of my mother’s friends. She swooped in, even though she couldn’t afford a second mouth to feed.
But there’s work to be done for this place to become mine.
I set my phone to record a time-lapse, grab a trash bag, and start clearing clutter away, one cupboard at a time.
I toss things that have gone out of date or are in cracked and damaged packaging.
Once done, I give the inside of the cupboard a thorough scrub and then put the things I’m keeping back inside.
The piles for the garbage and donation grow. I mean, how many casserole dishes and baking sheets and lead crystal vases does one girl need?
Suddenly, the timers on both my watch and phone vibrate, causing the phone to slide face down onto the counter where I perched it. I press pause on the video and hurry across the street to check on Garrett.
Their house looks cozy from the street, and a steady stream of smoke trails from the chimney.
I let myself in and head straight to the family room off the kitchen to stoke the fire and throw on some more logs. Then, I take the steps up to the bedroom like I’m walking the Green Mile.
I knock, twice. So tentatively, it’s as if I don’t want him to hear so I can leave but say I did my duty.
“Door’s unlocked,” Garrett says, his voice low and gravelly.
When I step inside, he’s sitting perched up a little in bed. His hair is a mess, his eyes a little glazed, but he looks like some of the edges of his pain smoothed out overnight.
“You came back,” he says, sounding oddly relieved.
There’s a laptop and a tray of dirty dishes on Kai’s side of the bed, and I walk around to grab the tray and place it on the floor by the door. “I did. How are you feeling?”
“Probably how you’d expect to feel if you came off your bike.” He huffs at his little joke.
“That’s not funny. You scared us all.” I hover awkwardly in the doorway, arms wrapped around myself, suddenly uncertain. He’s wearing a plaid shirt, and I have no idea how Kai got him into it.
“I’m sorry I scared you, Isla. Wasn’t my choice to come off the bike, but the end is the same.” He pats the side of the bed, encouraging me to go sit with him. “You wanna come sit here and talk to me about your kiss?”
I choke on pure air.
Garrett smirks, barely. Just the corner of his mouth lifting in a traitorous twitch. Such a micro-movement, but it completely changes his face.
“I’m not…I didn’t…I mean, I did…I…”
And then, the last of my attempted words withers on the vine.
“Come here,” Garrett says, and this time, there’s something in his tone that has my feet moving before my brain catches up. “It’s easy to kiss Kai. Always has been. I get it.”
“You say that like it’s an ordinary sentence.”
Garrett shrugs. “It is, really. I don’t blame you for kissing him back. He’s kinda hard to say no to sometimes.”
“That’s not…it wasn’t like…” I inhale hard and then sit. “He told me to talk to you.”
“I know.” Garrett reaches for my hand and holds it gently. His hands are calloused, his fingertips rough, his nails perfectly trimmed.
“He told you?” I ask, my mouth wide.
“Mm-hmm.”
“And what did he say?”
“If you want to know what Kai told me, you need to talk to me, about all of it.”
Heat climbs up my neck. “He said you’re a couple, but also both interested in…
well, me. I told him I can’t do casual. I want something real.
But he suggested we could all do that. With each other.
I guess you’re open to finding someone who you could both love and who would love each of you while you continue to love each other.
And that you’d want to talk about it, which is… odd.”
Garrett laughs. Like, full-on belly laughs and then winces as he tries to bring it back down to a chuckle. “He’s right, that’s the truth of it.”
He calms himself and takes a few deep breaths.
His thumb runs over the back of my hand.
“We’ve been monogamous, at my request. But you’ve changed how I think about that, now.
Because you’re not just some generic person who would fit with us, who we could trust. You’re the someone we hope is open to the idea of loving us both, not just as a couple, but as individuals. ”
My throat tightens. “That’s a lot to take in, Garrett.”
“It is. Kai has always been poly. It’s a…newer thing for me. Because of you. So, yeah, we don’t just want another someone. My boundary is it’s you.”
Tears burn my eyes. “Then, why didn’t you do something when I was still at the club? Did you have the whole ‘club girls are good for fucking and nothing else’ mentality? Because I’m still that girl, Garrett.”
Garrett releases my hand and grabs my chin.
“Stop that. We didn’t see you at the club because you were so masked up in what you thought being a club girl was that you never showed us who you really are.
As for still being that girl? I doubt it.
It’s a part of who you once were. Just like I was an army grunt.
Did it shape me and change me? Sure. Am I an army grunt today? Hell fucking no.”
That might be one of the longest monologues I’ve heard from him.
The knot in my stomach feels a little tighter. For some reason, there’s an imaginary sand-filled timer in my head. That there’s a statute of limitations on a yes and no, even though Kai denied it.
“Hey,” Garrett says. “Look at me, Isla.”
I lift my head.
“I’m never gonna judge you for who you were and what you did to get through a part of your life. Maybe you should do the same.”
I sigh and look out the window. The sun has risen high enough that its rays are creeping over the bed. “I was thinking about grief earlier.”
Garrett releases my chin, takes my hand, and settles back into the pillow. “Yeah?”
“Nanna was the only person on earth who listened to me. Like, really listened to me. She understood why, after the turbulence I’ve had in my life, it felt like someone as solid, stalwart, and fearless as a biker might be the right person for me.”
“How did you end up at the clubhouse?”
I blow out a breath. “I went to school with Karlie, and she’d started hanging around at the clubhouse.
She made it sound so fun. And, at first, the attention felt like everything I’d ever wanted.
For a long time, I mistook being used for being popular and wanted.
Eventually, Nanna tried to warn me, but I wouldn’t listen.
It took her dying to give me a path out.
I’m so broken that she’s gone, yet I’m trying to be grateful for what that loss is enabling. ”
“And what’s that?”
I shrug. “I can focus on having a whole house to fix. Something to keep me busy. She was too proud to let me help her redecorate the place, and it needs a lot of work. But I get to lie in a bed under my own roof and have some time to figure out what I want from my life.”
Garrett lifts my knuckles to his lips and softly kisses the back of them. His scruff scratches me as he does. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course,” I say, although I’m already regretting it.
He gestures between us. “Would you consider kissing me?”
My heart throws itself against my ribs. “Garrett—”
“Just consider. Not now. Not today. Just, sometime, when you’re ready.”
The knot in my stomach pulls a little tighter, even as my core flushes with heat. I can’t help but look at his lips and wonder what it would feel like to press mine to them. “One confusing kiss a day is probably my limit.” I try to make light of it. “I barely survived the first one.”
His expression softens into something that feels utterly safe. “That’s why I said consider and sometime. Not now. There’s no clock running. You don’t have to decide anything today. Or tomorrow. Or this month.”
I meet his gaze and am sure he can see I’m bracing for someone to take advantage of the part of me that craves connection.
“It’s not you,” I tell him quietly. “It’s not Kai either.
It’s me. I don’t trust myself with anything, yet.
I don’t know who I am without the bullshit, and I don’t know what’s real. ”
Garrett nods. “I like it when you open up to me, Isla. Like that you can trust me to hold your feelings safe. We take it slow. And when you’re ready, you come to me and tell me you’re ready for that kiss.”
There’s no persuasion or pressure in his tone.
But there’s certainty, a hint of promise, that the kiss will happen.
His fingers gently close around mine, warm and rough in a way that sends another pulse of heat between my legs, then kisses my knuckles again. This time, he lingers, his breath warm against my skin.
It feels like so much more than a kiss; it makes me shiver.
“Go do your chores,” he murmurs as he releases me. “Take two hours—I spoke to Greer already; she’s coming to collect the cannisters. Then, come back.”
I blink back the ridiculous stinging in my eyes. “You’re not mad.”
“I guarantee there will be plenty of days you piss me off, but today isn’t one of them. And I promise I won’t be, even if you decide this dynamic isn’t for you and say no. Disappointed, sure. But not mad.”
I ignore the voice instructing me to say yes. “I’ll bring lunch.”
With that, I turn and hurry out of the house, forgetting to take the dishes down with me. And the whole time, I wonder if it was a mistake to walk away.