Chapter Thirty-Eight
“Ah…boys…”
I hurl around to see Kali standing frozen at the door, and Laiken curling into the bin beside her.
“The fucking freak knocked out her teeth, overheard the coroner say he’d sodomized her fucking face.”
She’d heard it all.
My slick fingers stiffen around the neck of my beer bottle and before I can reel myself in, I haul it across the room. The glass bottle shatters against the brick wall.
Rage like no other clamps around my bones.
How could we have been so fucking stupid to think she wouldn’t hear our conversation?
“Fuck!” I growl, dragging my sweaty palms through my hair and tearing at the strands.
I stride toward Laiken and wrap my arms around her. But they’re only there for a moment before she shoves them away.
The action drills the hollowness in my chest down that much deeper.
My next instinct is to reach out and not let her go, but the one after that tells me to do the exact opposite…to let her go.
I choose neither, freezing right where I am, weighing my options like I even have a choice, begging her to look at me.
Only, Laiken keeps her eyes to her feet and whispers coolly, “Just…just…leave me alone, okay?”
I watch her take herself out the door, and my gut clenches at her request. The words bang between my ears when I feel the proverbial slap from our past swirl back around to hit me.
I grit my teeth.
Three years ago, I told Laiken that I couldn’t stand looking at her, didn’t want to see her, didn’t want to be around her. She clocked it. She pivoted and took the broken pieces of herself away.
I could never be that fucking graceful.
I take a step toward the door she just left through when a hand wraps around my bicep, halting me in place.
I look over my shoulder and see Rusty standing behind me.
“Cool off, son. Come have a beer with me.” He jerks his head toward the old beat-up bar, and yells, “Harlen, go see Lai—”
I tug my arm from his grip and we stare at each other, my eyes flicking between his. “Not today.”
And there’s a small pause. Harlen stops moving too.
Knowing presses, and closes in.
I swallow, spin and head for the door.
I flick my eyes around the lot, pausing when I find Laiken bent over the passenger seat of my truck.
My T-shirt has ridden up the back of her thighs, and a sliver of her bare ass is peeking from beneath the faded fabric.
The beat of my blood hammers against the organ in my chest.
I don’t move forward, but I do let my knuckles slip from the tinny door, dropping my eyes to my feet.
When it slams shut behind me, I look up, and Laiken does the same.
And with a cigarette dangling from her rosy, bitten lips, her chin hooked over her shoulder, she looks at me and stays bent over only for a moment longer before jarring upright, slamming her head against the door jamb.
“Bastard,” she mumbles, palming her temples.
And I can’t help but notice how her cheeks heat, the flush of pink that blooms to the surface of her pale skin, and how she tries to hide it by screwing her chin to her chest, jumping to her feet and slamming the door shut with more force than needed.
She leans against my truck, cupping her palm around the cigarette she took from my center console, lighting the trunk.
And I move toward her—toward the hood of my truck—a static silence hanging in the air.
I’m grasping for my own cigarette, shoved deep in the pocket of my jeans, sparking it up, drawing on it, then holding the smoke in my lungs. “I’m sorry you had to hear that.”
More silence.
Out of the corner of my eye, I watch Laiken suck another stream of nicotine down the length of her throat. It tightens, clamping the release before she blows it out, flicking away the loose ash.
She doesn’t look at me when she says, “Don’t mistake me for weak, Chase.”
I take another pull, rasping, “I didn’t say you—”
“I want to know something,” she cuts me off, and I turn to her, but she’s still staring ahead.
“Why is it that you walk back into my life just as something bad happens?”
I drop my chin, suck on my front teeth, because the truth is, I didn’t know how to tell her that I’d been watching her on the anniversary of Jade’s death every year, looking for evil, waiting for it, ready to save her the way I couldn’t then, and needed to now.
Laiken’s head swivels so slowly toward me when I choose to keep that small truth to myself.
She throws the cigarette to the ground and stamps it out.
And I bite into my bottom lip, noticing that same dead look I saw register across her green eyes back in the clubhouse.
It’s a look I recognize because I’ve seen the same one settle across mine.
“Who gave you the right to choose when I would need you.” It’s a question, but Laiken poses it as a statement.
It heats me.
Words curl around my tongue, trapping themselves behind my teeth. I don’t move, I don't speak, I just take another hit.
She drops her chin and shakes her head, dragging the tip of her shoe across the loose orange rock.
She mistakes my silence for coldness.
“Screw you, Chase. You aren’t the guy I thought you were.” Her words are whispered with venom, and I nod, repeatedly.
Her anger is good. Her distaste toward me is even better.
She slices her gaze back to me, and I rest all of my weight on my shoulders, running my thumb across my bottom lip, pinching it, heat pulsing warmer in my bloodstream.
“Are you not going to—”
I cut her off, unable to continue chewing on my words.
“No, Laiken, I’m not the guy you thought I was, and I told you that. You thought I was some good fucking dude, who could take away all your fucking pain because I was there for you when your father offed himself, when in our fucked-up reality we both know I’m just a…”
She takes one step and she’s right in front of me and before I can breathe or even register how close we are, her palm cracks across my cheek.
My head snaps to the side, and I keep it there, for a moment.
Do it again, I wanted to say, show me how you really feel.
I’m flexing the hit from my jaw when she spits her next words in my face, “Just a spineless piece of shit,” she says with permanency, then steps away, shaking out her hand. “Yes, that’s exactly what you…”
I quickly reach for her, but she shoves me right back.
“Don’t fucking touch me.” Then her palms are at my chest and she’s pushing me again. “You bastard.”
She hurls her anger at me with her hands, and I take it, bouncing off the metal behind me until I decide enough is enough. My hands reach out, clamping around her wrists.
I bring them down to her sides, dragging her closer, until the tip of our shoes touch.
My heart pummels against my ribs, and I think she can feel it, how each hit rattles and vibrates my entire chest, pushing through and out to hers.
Her chin raises in defiance and her nose almost brushes the tip of mine, and I try not to let myself think about her tits beneath my T-shirt—the one she’s wearing—that I can feel grazing against my core.
I swallow, my hair falling around us.
And when she speaks, I feel the weight of her agony settle across me.
“How dare you,” she chokes on a whimper, but she’s not crying. “How fucking dare you…talk about my father like that.”
My heart falls to the pit of my stomach like a stone when I realize what I’ve done, what I’ve just said.
“Offed himself, are you fucking for real right now? You cold…”
She stops there, and I want to continue for her, cold, careless, heartless sack of shit.
I don’t though.
“Laiken…”
I try to speak but she tugs at her arm, and when I don’t let her go, she gets closer, so close that our eyelashes touch. Laiken whimpers under her breath, “Let me go.”
But I don’t.
Not even when the clubhouse door clashes in the distance.
And especially not after what I just carelessly said.
I keep hold of her.
And this time, she doesn’t try to move, doesn’t try to pull away. Her green eyes fall to my lips, and I can feel her heartbeat at my core quicken when she realizes now just how close we are.
She keeps her eyes to my mouth as I push one thumb to the pulse in her wrist, feeling it flutter.
“Is that what you want, Laiken?” My voice croaks. “For me to let you go?” I let the question settle between us, then I tell her, “I already did that once.”
A clearing of a throat, Harlen’s, comes in the distance and I hear the steel door slam again before he takes himself back inside.
Laiken’s pulse rises marginally. “I fucking hate you,” she spits her words in my face.
And I look toward our feet, then back at her again, relief settling like pins and needles beneath my skin.
“Good,” I tell her. “You should.”
Laiken’s throat dips as she swallows. She doesn’t like that. Her face contorts; she’s shaking her head. If she had the guts to spit on me, I imagine she would.
“I’ll hate you until the day I fucking die.”
I’m already nodding my acceptance before she’s finished speaking.
“Good,” I repeat.
A heavy silence settles between us.
I press my finger to the pulse at her wrist a little harder, then, acceding to her request, I let her go.
Laiken stays in front of me a moment longer before clicking her tongue against her teeth, taking a step back and pushing both sides of her hair behind her ears.
I know she wants to say more. Her cheeks are red and blotchy, heated with anger and the unspoken, but she turns and makes her way back to the clubhouse.
Good, I think again. For both of us.
And when she reaches the door, I’m still watching her, my entire body having settled into a comfortable tremor now there’s space between us.
I bite another cigarette.
Laiken glances over her shoulder and drops her bright green eyes down the length of me, wetting her lips, and I hate that I shiver.
Laiken Campbell just had to look at me to remind me that I had a heart, and I’ve always fucking hated her for that.
Tilting my chin, I exhale a cloud of smoke, and when she disappears, and the door thuds behind her, I turn and roll my forehead against the window of my truck, screwing my entire face in agitation.
“What the fuck have I done,” I whisper through my teeth.