15. Julie
fifteen
Julie
Emma stared at the fingers the club medic held up in front of her. “Two.” She spat it out, then looked away, back to the wall where the cinder blocks had cracked into a map of nowhere. Her jaw was already swelling, the color gone from last week’s peach to this week’s raw liver.
“How bad is it?” I asked.
“Cracked, maybe broken,” the medic said, feeling along her ribs with the backs of his knuckles.
“You’ll live.” He said it with the hard certainty of someone who saw worse every day, but he wrapped the ribs anyway, snug and efficient.
Then he wiped her cut lip, dabbed antibiotic, and set out pills in a plastic cup like it was all just a normal Wednesday night at the Jackson Brothers MC.
“I feel like shit,” Emma said. She looked at me. “I want at them!”
“We’ll let the club do what they do.” I glanced at Bram, looking for backup. I knew he wouldn’t disappoint.
I stood in the corner alone at first, but then Bram drew a chair up next to me, his knees wide and his elbows set on them, hands open but empty.
The sight of his hands always made me feel some impossible thing, even before all this shit went down— the knotted scarring, the half-moons of road grit embedded along the knuckles, even the new stitches above his hip.
He looked like a man who could crush granite, or the world for yours truly, but the way he sat made it seem like he was afraid to touch anything delicate. Like me.
“Tell me you have a plan to make this all stop.” I motioned at Emma. “Family is all I have. Fuck the DA job.”
“Still love me?” Bram asked and chuckled.
“To the moon and back,” I said. “Unless, of course, that includes getting fucked up by a gang of bikers on the way.”
“You’re not allowed to leave my sight. Not until this is all over.”
“Fuck that,” I said. “I’m not letting these assholes dictate my life.”
Bram stood, towering over me, the smell of leather and biker man overwhelming. He held my chin up with a single finger. “I’m not going to let another fucking thing happen to you, babe. You’re under my protection. You don’t have a choice.”
“You can’t keep me here, Bram.”
“Watch me.”
“I’ll burn it down.”
Bram chuckled and pulled a lighter from his pocket. “Start blazing, baby.”
“You’re acting as if you own me.”
“Acting?”
“I’m a motherfucking DA; nobody owns me.”
He moved his lips to my ear, kissed the lobe gently, and then whispered, “I know you’re wet, Julie. I can even see your pulse almost beating out of your fucking neck. You want me as bad as I want you.”
“I…”
“You’re fucking staying right here with me.”
I wanted to protest, or maybe knee him in the balls. I didn’t take orders from men. But Bram was different. He was confident without being arrogant. He was an asshole without being a total dick. And, he was right. I wanted him like I’d never wanted another man.
“For now,” I whimpered.
“Forever,” he growled in my ear.
He pressed his lips against mine and the whiskey he’d been drinking bit my tongue. Our mouths opened, heat building like a furnace between us. His arm slipped around my back, and when he eased me against him, I could feel his cock pressing against my stomach, another log on our fire.
“Break it up, you two,” the medic said.
Bram grunted and stepped aside. I guessed it was one of the few times the man had ever followed an order.
The medic moved in front of me, though I kept my eyes on Bram. I hurt too much to ask the universe what the fuck I was doing with my life. This had not been on my bingo card.
“Nose first,” the medic said. He didn’t ask if I was ready.
He just put his fingers around the bridge, braced my head, and yanked.
The break reset with a crunch, and I heard the noise in stereo: once in the air, once inside my own skull.
I kept my mouth shut, but the pain made my vision pixel out for a second, like the world wanted to switch itself off. I let it.
He pressed tape across the bridge, then checked my eyes for dilation. “Concussion,” he said, matter-of-fact. “Nothing a night’s sleep won’t fix.” He worked down to my ribs, fingers prodding along the edge. “Inhale?” he said.
I did. The pain was a hot wire straight through my chest, but I kept my back straight and let him wrap the compression band. He finished at the arms, pouring alcohol across the rope burns. That made me hiss, the first sound I let out all night.
When he finished, Bram moved his chair closer. His thigh brushed mine, and I felt it through layers of denim and bandage. He didn’t touch my hand. He just waited, like he was making sure I wouldn’t vanish if he blinked.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I said and turned away. I looked back at him, and he was smiling, staring at the tape across my nose. I looked at the tape cross-eyed, and Bram laughed.
“I should punch you in your stitches,” I said.
“You’ve never been so beautiful.”
“And you’ve never been so full of shit.”
I looked around the room, and although most club members were preparing for war, Rusty was not.
He leaned against the door. He hadn’t said a single word since we got here.
His arms were folded, his biceps bulging under the cut-off shirt, but there was something weird in his face.
Not pity. Something colder. I realized he was watching Emma, not me, and his eyes flicked to her every time she shifted in her seat.
Bram broke the silence. He didn’t look at my injuries. He looked at me, like he could burn through the blood and bruises and see what was left inside.
“Who did it?” he asked. “The guys we killed?”
I took a long breath. The air moved weird in my nose now, half blocked, like the wind had to go around a new bend. “Does it matter?” I said.
He didn’t blink. “Yes.”
I looked down at my forearms, at the fresh white tape and the angry pink underneath. The words lined up on my tongue, and I wanted to swallow them. Instead, I made myself say it: “The Colonel.”
Bram’s mouth twitched at the edge. Nothing else moved.
“He found out,” I said. “About us. About…” I hesitated. I didn’t want to say love. I didn’t want it to matter that much, not with Emma in the room, not with the bruises still warm on my face. “…about you and me,” I finished.
“How?” Bram asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “A Scorpion at the bar, someone following me, maybe a bug in the house. He always knows. Even from prison he kept tabs on me.” I rubbed my thumb along the tape on my wrist. “He didn’t do it because he was mad.
He did it because he could. It’s the way he lets you know he has control over you. ”
Bram’s jaw set. The vein at his temple popped up, a thick blue cord. His knuckles went white on his knees.
“He said I embarrassed him. That I needed to understand my place. He explained it while he did it, like a fucking instructional video. Like he wanted me to take notes.”
The silence was a weight. The medic busied himself at the far end of the room, inventorying bottles, pretending not to hear. Rusty’s arms flexed tighter across his chest, but he never said a thing.
I turned to Bram. “Don’t,” I said. “Don’t go off and make this about you. Or about him.”
He stared at the floor, then at me, then out to some horizon beyond the windowless wall. When he spoke, his voice was low and flat. “I have never done anything stupid in my life.”
I almost laughed. It bubbled up, half a sound, then the pain in my ribs cut it down. I grabbed my side, bit down on the noise, and let the almost-laugh hang in the air.
Emma looked up for the first time, her eyes sharp under the swollen lid. She flicked her gaze between Bram and me, like she was tracking the path of a bullet. There was something old in her face. Older than sixteen. She watched the tension stretch out and made the decision not to break it.
“He’ll be back,” Emma said. “None of this stops as long as we’re alive.” She pointed at Bram. “He wants you dead first.”
“He’s gonna learn we don’t always get what we want.”
“The club is ready,” Rusty said. “And I meant what I said earlier. I want a piece of him.”
“Dad,” Emma said. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
Rusty shifted by the door, a low grunt in his throat.
He took two steps and put his hand on Bram’s shoulder, not rough, not even meant to hold him back.
Just a touch. Bram didn’t shake him off, but he didn’t look at him, either.
He got up, slow and deliberate, and crossed to the far wall.
There was a slit window set high in the cinder block, and Bram stared through it at the yard.
It was dark outside. Maybe nothing to see, but he looked anyway.
Emma shifted in her seat. “What happens now?” she asked.
I tried to smile at her. My face wouldn’t do it. “Now we rest,” I said. “You’re safe here.”
“Is anywhere safe?” she asked. The words were a test.
Bram turned from the window, silhouetted in the sick light. “Safe is a sliding scale,” he said. “You slide it as far as you can.”
Emma nodded, like she already knew. “That’s fair.”
“What about Barstow PD?” I asked. “They’ll be all over this. I’m surprised they’re not here already.”
“There’ll be a bigger payoff this month,” Bram said. “Maddox’ll look the other way, for now. But we gotta bring this shit to an end before it hits the regular folks of Barstow. That’s when Maddox will get involved.”
“I’ll give him a call,” Rusty said.
I watched Bram watch me. There was an animal in his eyes, something coiled so tight it could snap bone. But there was a second thing, too. A thing I hadn’t seen before. Not guilt, not rage. Devotion. The ugly, all-consuming kind.
I wanted to tell him to let it go. I wanted to tell him I was fine, that I’d been through worse, that I could handle anything the Colonel threw at me. Instead, I said: “Don’t do anything reckless.”
He smiled, just a crack, just enough to prove he’d heard me. “I wouldn’t know how,” he said. “You gotta trust me on this, babe. I’ve dealt with harder me than your father.”
The medic finished cleaning up. He passed us a jar of painkillers, three bottles of Gatorade, and an order to call if the bleeding started again. “No fucking,” he said before leaving the room. “You’ll bust up those stitches and ribs.”
Rusty opened the door, letting in a sliver of cooler air.
He held it for Emma, who followed, silent as a ghost. She didn’t look back, but she didn’t stumble, either.
I knew then that Rusty had been preparing her for days like this.
When your parents were part of the biker world, you had to be prepared for shit coming your way.
I stayed in my chair. I didn’t want to stand. I watched Bram across the room, his big frame hunched in the window, hands balled at his sides. There was a tremor in his shoulders, so faint you’d miss it unless you’d spent your whole life looking for the cracks in men.
I closed my eyes for a minute. My heart pounded against the tape. I waited for the pain to settle. Then I opened my eyes again.
Bram was still at the window, but the distance between us felt smaller. Like he could cross it anytime he wanted. Like he was waiting for me to decide if I wanted him to.
I did.
I didn’t say it. I didn’t have to. He already knew.