Chapter Seventeen
Chapter
Seventeen
Every Kind of Love
Jagger
“You cold?”
“Nah.”
“It’s cold out here, bruh.”
“I’m fine.”
Even if Mal said that, Jag shrugged off his leather cut and
put it over Mal’s back.
And Mal didn’t hesitate to settle into it.
They were out on Mal’s front stoop. Arch was inside with his
mom, Shanta, and a couple of Shanta’s friends. Shanta was nursing a glass of
wine and a phone conversation with her sister, Arch and Shanta’s girls were
making calls and to-do lists.
Mal’s aunt lived in Phoenix, and she was going to head up.
They’d been to the hospital and obviously had come back.
Earlier, when they first got to Mal’s, Shanta had been
understandably out of it. But she got it together, and that was when Arch
kicked in and got the friends involved.
Mal’s grandmother had been battling cancer. It wasn’t
looking good, but she was in treatment. However, she’d been battling that shit
so long, her heart was weakened and it just…gave out.
So her life being shortened wasn’t the surprise, it being
that short was.
It was getting late. It was definitely cold.
They should probably leave, but he wasn’t sure where Mal was
at, and he didn’t feel good leaving him unless he knew the kid was good being
left.
And Mal was being his usual quiet, so Jag wasn’t figuring
that out.
“It’s why I was acting like a dick,” Mal suddenly said.
“Sorry?” Jag asked.
“At S.I.L., to Archie. When I got kicked out of group. It
wasn’t the bullying or just acting out. It was Grams. I didn’t…” He cleared his
throat. “I wasn’t…I guess I just wanted to be seen.”
“That tracks,” Jag said quietly.
Jag felt Mal’s gaze, so he looked at the kid when Mal kept
talking.
“This is why the Harris brothers don’t matter. Their damage,
it’s stupid. It doesn’t mean anything. Mom is…uh, was real tight with
Grams. We were…we were all, uh, real tight. And this hurt her.
Watching Grams go through this. It hurt her and I didn’t…I didn’t…”
Mal trailed off.
Jag didn’t say anything.
Mal kept going, and when he did, it was the first time since
Jagger met him that he sounded like a little kid.
“There wasn’t anything I could do to make things better.
She’s my mom, Jag, and she hurt, and I didn’t know how to make things better.”
Christ, he felt those words.
He felt them deep.
“I get that, buddy,” Jagger said quietly.
Mal shook his head, turned away, and there was a thread of
disgust in his voice when he said, “You can’t get it. No one—”
“My dad died when I was three.”
Mal’s head whipped back around so he could look at Jagger.
“I don’t remember him, not at all,” Jagger told him. “But my
mom loved him, brother. I mean, like, for real. Like,
once-in-a-lifetime, lost-forever love. All my life, she was in pain. Every day
of it. And I had to see that and couldn’t do dick about it. So when I say I get
it, Mal, I’m not handing you a line of bullshit. I really get it.”
Mal just stared at him.
Jag held his gaze.
Then Mal turned away again, but after several long beats, he
fell into Jag’s side.
Jag slid an arm around his shoulders.
“I’m sorry about your mom,” Mal mumbled.
“She’s good now, happy. Found another love, and it’s
once-in-a-lifetime too. And just to say, we’re lucky, because that’s what every
kind of love is. You just gotta open yourself to it.”
“Yeah,” Mal said.
They were quiet.
Mal broke it.
“Sorry about your dad.”
Jag swallowed.
Nodded.
Realized Mal couldn’t see him nod.
So he said, “Yeah. And goes without saying, but I’ll say it,
sorry about your gramma, bud. Losing someone you love sucks. And that’s just
all there is to it.”
It took a sec, but eventually, Mal replied, “Yeah.”
After that, they sat together on the stoop, in the cold,
until Archie came out and said it was time to get Mal inside, warm and with his
mom, and then it was time to leave.
So they took care of Mal, gave hugs to his mom.
And they left.
It was under his seriously watchful eye that he and
Archie walked into her apartment after leaving Mal and Shanta.
Now, you could be the most mellow person in the world, and a
night that intense was going to fuck with you.
In other words, this night had to have fucked with his
woman.
But this was one of those times.
One of those times like she gave him, so it was one he had
to give her.
A time for space.
A time for her to share with him when she was ready, if at
all.
And like usual, it was fucking with him.
Because she just got in her brother’s face about his rampant
grief running roughshod over their family, grief that was hers too and she
didn’t get to wallow in it and let others take care of her like her brother
did.
And for the last three hours, they’d been neck deep in the
fresh grief of Mal and Shanta.
Archie had to be feeling it.
Now, she was wandering into her kitchen while Jagger turned
on lights and watched her.
When she got into the kitchen, she looked at something on
the counter, then she lifted her head, caught sight of him, but gazed around
before she came back to him.
She raised a piece of paper and shook it.
A note from his parents.
“Your folks made the schnitzel. We have plates if you’re
hungry.”
He could eat a whole roast pig.
“You hungry?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“I’m good too,” he lied.
She nodded at that, and pointed out, “They also cleared the
table. Cleaned the kitchen. You’re gonna have to give me your mom’s number so I
can text her to thank her.”
“Will do, baby, but maybe now we should go to bed.”
She stood there, watching him across the apartment, and it
felt like it was as closely as he was watching her.
He dropped his cut down his shoulders, tossed it on her
couch, and asked, “You wanna go to bed?”
Not taking her eyes from him, she moved his way.
She stopped close, and still didn’t take her eyes from his
as she touched him.
Putting her hands on his chest, she slid them up to the
sides of his neck.
He put his hands on her hips.
She squeezed his neck. “You good?”
“I’m good, uh…you good?”
She didn’t answer his question.
Her gaze bored into his and she said softly, “Jagger, baby,
you hungry?”
“I’m okay, Arch. You tired?”
She didn’t answer him again.
She urged, “Talk to me.”
He wanted it the other way around.
He wanted her to talk to him, tell him how it felt to lay it
out for Elijah. How it felt to be around Shanta when her grief was so fresh and
raw.
About anything.
He wanted her to give whatever she needed to him so he could
take it from her.
He just didn’t think he should ask.
“Jagger, baby,” she shifted one hand to wrap it around the
back of his neck, the other she moved to wrap around his throat, “talk to me.”
He heard the words, but he didn’t hear them.
Because it seemed like all the blood in his body all of a
sudden had rushed to his head, his vision had blurred, and his mind had blanked
of everything.
Except her hand at his throat.
His voice didn’t even sound like him, it was jagged and
harsh, when he demanded, “Take your hand off my fucking throat.”
She did this immediately.
But he was lost.
Gone.
Blind, he couldn’t even fucking see.
Couldn’t think.
What the fuck?
What the fuck?
Christ, he had to get out of there.
He had to go.
He moved.
She got in front of him, hands to his chest, saying sharply,
“Jagger!”
“I’m takin’ a walk, be back,” he forced out.
He moved to the side, losing her.
She got in his way again, hands flat on his chest, but this
time she put weight into them. “Jagger, what’s happening?”
He tried to lose her, failed.
God.
Fuck.
God.
He shook his head hard.
What the fuck?
What the fuck was happening to him?
She was pushing him back. “Jagger, honey, look at me.”
There wasn’t anything I could do to make things better.
He was moving backward, and he heard Archie demand, “Jagger!
Look at me!”
I have a life and a business and I’m falling in love.
He went down.
Vaguely, he understood he was sitting on the couch because
she’d pushed him there.
He felt her crawl in, straddle his lap.
She had his head in her hands and was gently shaking it.
“Come back to me, Jagger, baby. Come back. Look at me, baby.
Please,” she begged, sounding freaked.
Freaked and distressed and even panicked.
“I don’t know…how to…love you,” he forced out.
“Okay.” She kissed his forehead. “Okay.” She kissed his
cheek. “Okay, baby.” She kissed his lips. “Give me more. What do you mean by
that?”
“I will be the best father to our kids, Hound taught me
that. But I don’t know how to love you.”
“You do.”
“He got his throat slit. Dad. They slit his throat.”
He heard it, the hiss of breath, the sting of pain.
He felt it knifing through him as it cut through her.
Christ, it hurt.
Always…
The hurt.
Then she was kissing his face all over, in between
whispering a tortured, “God. God. God.”
“He died before he taught me how to love,” he told her.
She wrapped her arms around his head and held it tight to
her chest.
“He loved her so much. She loved him so much. He loved
her so much. So much, losing his love broke her. I don’t know how
to love you like that. I don’t know how to take care of you. He died before he
taught me.”
Her body bucked, her sob filled the room, and she held on
tight.
“He died before he taught me,” Jagger repeated. “I don’t
remember…” He swallowed. Hard. “I don’t have any of him. I don’t remember his
love at all.”
Archie was rocking him, he felt her lips at his hair, she
was humming nothing, just a sweet sound from her throat, as her body pulsed
with her weeping.
“I don’t know how to love you,” he whispered, the words
ragged. “I don’t know how to take care of you.”
“Baby, what are you talking about? You’ve been taking care
of me from the second you laid eyes on me,” she replied. “I felt your love all
the way across a cemetery and you didn’t even know my name.”
A noise came out of him, low and animalistic, and his arms
went around her.
He knew by the sound she made when he latched on that he was
holding her too hard.