6. Julie and Bram
six
Julie and Bram
My mother always said you could judge a man by the way he bled.
I’d seen enough of both to know she was right.
Still, I wasn’t expecting Bram Jackson to start bleeding out in the passenger seat of my Mercedes, grim-faced and silent, with the kind of patience you usually only saw in livestock about to get put down.
The wound was bandaged, sort of, but blood still seeped between his fingers and pooled on my WeatherTech mats. He had one hand clamped to his ribcage, the other resting on his thigh, and his head lolled against the glass with a slow, methodical rhythm. If he was feeling anything, it didn’t show.
I pulled up to the compound gate. The prospect on duty couldn’t have been more than nineteen, acne flaring red against pale skin.
He stepped in front of my car, hand on the butt of his radio, eyes darting between my face and the man beside me.
There was a moment—a full, honest moment—where I expected him to wet himself.
“Can’t come in,” he said, voice barely above the engine tick.
Bram didn’t move. “Open the fuckin’ gate or find a new club.”
That did it. The kid scurried back to the shack, fumbled at the switch, and the steel mesh rolled open with the sound of a dentist’s drill.
I eased through, gravel popping under the tires, and parked as close to the front door as I could get.
I killed the engine. For a second, the silence was so complete I could hear Bram’s breathing: short, controlled, measured out like lines on a ledger.
“I’ll walk you in,” I said. There’s this scene in the first Indiana Jones movie, where Harrison Ford falls into a room full of snakes, and he says something like, “Snakes. It just had to be snakes.” That’s the way this place made me feel.
Just had to be bikers. The very thing I loathed, for good reason.
He didn’t argue, just let me shoulder his weight, one arm slung across my back.
He was heavier than I expected, and I had to dig in my heels to keep from tipping us both into the gravel.
My left sleeve was already ruined, the dark smear of blood seeping from cuff to elbow.
I could smell it, sharp and metallic, mixing with the musk of his sweat and the faint chemical tang of whatever they used to clean gunshot wounds.
“You really know how to show a girl a good time,” I said.
“First dates are always awkward,” he said, chuckling until the pain made him stop.
“We’re not on a first date,” I reprimanded.
“Did I lose count?”
I scoffed at the thought he would consider this anything but a clusterfuck. “You and I are like oil and water, Bram.”
“Which are you?” he asked.
“Just stop talking.”
Inside the clubhouse, everything was familiar and not. The floors, the scuffed linoleum, the cracked drywall, the thick, meaty air that never quite left. I knew this routine, no matter how much I tried to deny it.
No one spoke. There were glances, a couple of nods, and then someone shouted for Doc.
He met us in the kitchen. Doc was what you got if you asked a biker to draw a nurse: thick arms, neck the size of my thigh, hands that could have bent rebar. He wore a wife-beater, jeans, and an apron that said KISS THE COOK, but from the stains on it, nobody had dared in years.
“What the fuck, boss,” he said. “Who cut him?”
A bigger guy, Kodiak, I would later find out, entered the room. He looked at me and then Bram. “Desert Scorpions?”
I nodded. “Same place your prospects are picking up his bike.”
“Let's go, boss,” Doc said.
He got Bram onto a chair at the scarred wooden table, under a humming fluorescent tube that made everyone look like they were already halfway embalmed. He didn’t say a word to me, just pointed at the wall. I backed up, arms crossed, shoulder to the frame. I watched.
Doc cut away the shirt, the blade so sharp I didn’t even see it move.
Bram’s torso was a disaster: fresh knife wound on top of a scattershot of old scars, a history of violence mapped across skin the color of unbleached linen.
The new cut was still seeping, a little pink around the edges, not quite ready to clot.
Doc laid out his tools on a clean dish towel: curved needle, surgical thread, forceps, a bottle of something clear, a shot glass, and a half-empty Maker’s Mark. He poured the bourbon, handed it to Bram, and then went to work.
I watched every pull of the needle, every whisper of thread through flesh.
Bram never so much as twitched. He held the glass steady in his right hand, took a sip after every pass, and looked past me, at nothing, at everything, as though the kitchen was just another checkpoint on a list of things to outlast.
Once, between stitches, he looked at me. Really looked, like he was trying to figure out if I belonged on the list of things to keep or things to let die. I stared back, unblinking.
“You’re gonna be fine,” I said and held his hand.
Bram looked at my hand and then directly into my eyes, owning me with his stare. “Second date?”
“Such an insufferable man,” I said. “You should have stayed inside the bar.”
“You needed help.”
“I had everything under control,” I lied.
I never believed in insta-love or love at first sight.
Maybe it was because of the men I seemed to attract.
Suits and polos. It wasn’t like Barstow was an ocean of choices.
Suits, assholes, drug dealers, or bikers.
I let a little smile slip from my lips, and Bram caught it like an outfielder robbing a home run.
I could see him trying to process exactly what the smile meant.
Hell, I was trying to figure it out. I looked away, sort of.
Doc finished the last stitch and told Bram to sleep.
It was an order, not a suggestion. Then Doc topped off Bram’s glass and left the room, brushing past me with a look that said: God help you if he doesn’t kill you first. The kitchen felt different with Doc gone, like someone had taken the air out and left the walls to close in.
Bram stared at the wood grain of the table.
I stared at the back of his head. No one spoke.
There was nothing left that could make this situation worse, so I said, “I want to thank you.”
He didn’t look up. “For what?”
“The parking lot. For stepping in.”
He drained the bourbon, poured another. “I wasn’t doing it for you.”
“I know.” I uncrossed my arms. “Doesn’t matter. I’m still saying thank you.”
He just looked at me, eyes unreadable. “You’re welcome,” he said, eventually. Then he poured himself another shot, and I got the message: conversation closed.
I picked my keys up from the counter. “I’m leaving now,” I said, and for some reason my voice felt like it didn’t belong to me.
He didn’t answer. He didn’t even look up, just watched the glass spin a slow circle on the table.
I walked out, past the same women at the bar.
They didn’t bother hiding their curiosity, or their contempt.
The compound yard was full of men in varying degrees of busy: welding, fixing bikes, stacking crates in the half-light.
Every one of them looked up when I stepped outside, as if they’d been keeping a tally.
“Ms. Sparta,” Kodiak called from behind me. “Thanks for bringing Bram back to the club.”
“Sure,” I said indifferently.
“Look, Bram can be an asshole sometimes. But he’s a good man.”
“He probably saved my life, so I know he’s a good man. I also know he’s an asshole.”
“Losing Millie sent him to a dark place he could never quite get out of.”
“I’m sorry for his loss.” I turned to leave, but he put his hand on my arm. Tattoos ran up both his bare arms. His dark beard flapped in the breeze. All bikers seemed to be rough men, broken, suffering from some sort of tragedy from younger years.
“The thing is, I saw the way he just looked at you.”
He was right. I saw it in Bram’s eyes.
“I guess what I’m trying to say his don’t write the asshole off. He likes you. Really likes you.”
“I get it,” I said, doing my best to understand.
“He has trouble loving because he lost the one thing he loved the most.” He nodded. “Anyway, thanks again.” He went back inside, and I walked away.
The prospect from earlier was waiting for me by the gate, where my car had been moved to. “Thanks for bringing him in,” he said.
He must’ve been new, because he stood there expecting me to say something comforting. Instead, I walked to my car.
The Mercedes reeked of blood and sweat. I climbed in, shut the door, and sat with both hands on the wheel, engine off. I could see the compound in the rearview, the windows yellow and low-lit, the men like shadows moving from building to building.
I didn’t start the car. Not right away.
I thought about the night and tried to play it back in order.
The Scorpions at the bar. The first one’s hand on my arm.
The way the tall one smiled when he called me “sweetheart.” The back door.
The way Bram’s hand looked when it closed around the knife.
The sound of a skull hitting metal. The blood, black and slick on his shirt.
His voice, telling me it was fine, don’t call an ambulance, don’t panic.
The way he’d looked at me—really looked—while Doc worked the needle.
Not like a man in pain, but like a man who’d made up his mind about something and was just waiting for the world to catch up.
I ran it all back, then forward again, like shuffling a deck until the cards made sense.
I looked at my sleeve, the stiff patch where the blood had dried, dark brown at the edge, still tacky in the middle.
Eventually, I turned the key, waited for the engine to settle, and rolled down the window for air. The night was cold and clean. The wind cut through the inside of the car, lifting the smell of blood off the seats.
I waited until my hands stopped shaking, then put the car in drive and rolled out through the gate.
I didn’t look back.
Bram
Two prospects half-carried me down the hall, one under each arm, doing their best not to show how heavy I was. I could have walked, but they needed the practice, and my legs were jelly anyway. The pain was bright and clear, and for once I didn’t try to outlast it.
The back corridor was narrow, just enough room to walk two abreast. Everything echoed: footsteps, voices from the kitchen, the squeak of the battered cart someone used to wheel supplies down to the bar.
The door to my bunk room was painted shut at the bottom; one of the kids shouldered it open, steady and careful.
Inside was exactly as I’d left it: bed against the wall, metal locker, lamp on a crate, window overlooking the yard and the desert beyond.
There was a water stain above the bed that looked like a map of Texas, and sometimes at night I’d trace the highways with my eyes until I could sleep.
“Here we go, boss,” a prospect said.
They got me to the bed. I sat, made a show of flexing my shoulders, then told them to fuck off. They lingered in the doorway, unsure, until I nodded and they vanished. The room was empty again. Just me and the lamp and the pounding of my own pulse.
I didn’t bother undressing. I lay back, arm across my chest, feeling the stitch pull tight with every breath. The blanket was rough, stank of old sweat, and the ceiling was close and yellowed, even with the lamp off.
I tried to sleep, but the night wouldn’t let go.
Not the fight—that was just motion, training, something I’d done before.
Not the pain, either. It was the moment after: Julie standing in the parking lot, her sleeve stained with my blood, her eyes bright and angry and not backing down.
It was the way she didn’t flinch, didn’t break, just watched and waited.
Most people looked at me and saw a problem.
She looked and saw a man she could keep alive, at least long enough to finish the job.
It bothered me more than the knife.
I stared at the stain on the ceiling, let my eyes find the old rivers and dry beds.
I tried to follow them somewhere, anywhere, but my mind kept doubling back to her, to the look on her face, to the feel of her arm around my back when I’d let myself lean on her, even for a second.
To the way she’d thanked me, even though she knew I hadn’t done it for her.
Or had I? This is what women did to a man when he started to obsess over her. Just fucking confusion.
Would I do it all over again? Yeah, I would. I’d killed for her and would do it again if another man touched her. She needed to know that. I didn’t like the way I let her leave. She needed to know that, too. Fuck, was I in love with her?
The hallway outside stayed bright, voices coming and going, the business of the club grinding on. I listened, waiting for the world to shift, for something to tell me when it was safe to get up again.
I waited a long time.