I take a step back. I need to focus on the things I can control. “Can’t today, Ava. Maybe the first night off or something.”
“You headed out?” Her eyes drop to my shabby clothes, and I know I can’t say I’m going to an interview.
“I’ve got somewhere to be.” Like far away from her before I do any number of stupid things. I take a couple steps back. “I really am sorry. Catch you later, okay?”
I hit the stairs instead of the elevator and run down all the flights, until my legs burn and it feels like the only movement my body has ever made.
Sweat dampens my shirt by the time I push through to the lobby and pay the bellhop twenty bucks to slip me out the service entrance. I hail a cab one street over from the hotel, and slide out of the rain and into the backseat, keeping my head down. “Rainier Avenue, please.”
The cabby glances back at me. “For an extra ten, maybe. But you’re gonna have to catch a bus back. Most companies won’t send a taxi down there even if you call.”
“Yeah, no problem.” I send a quick text so they’re expecting me, then close my eyes and try to yank myself into the right frame of mind for what I’m about to do.
When we get there, I pay the cabby, then take an extra twenty out and stuff it in my sock, so I can still get back to the hotel if I get rolled for my wallet. Popping the door open, I pull up my hood and keep my head down, scanning the area from beneath the edges of the dark fabric.
A cab pulls up behind mine, and I swallow a curse. I turn into an alley, walking fast but keeping my muscles relaxed as I lead whoever is following me away from the main street. Looking nervous isn’t going to bring any favors down on my head. As I walk, gritty water drips off the filthy buildings around me, the rain soaking into my hood.
It takes me three blocks out of my way, but I manage to loop past a Legal Aid office before I cut through an apartment building and disappear. It’s not as good as a police station, but it’ll provide a good refuge for whatever fan has been naïve enough to follow me here. The pro bono lawyers will help her get a ride home.
That done, I break into an easy jog through a couple deserted alleys, and then duck through the side door that was left cracked open for me. Seattle is close enough to home that we play here a lot, even when we’re not officially on tour. This isn’t my first visit to Rainier Ave, though I used to come for a very different reason.
I swipe my hood off and smile at the stout, steel-eyed woman organizing cans in the room I just entered. “Hey, Lucia. Save me anything to do?” I try to push the door closed behind me, but the latch won’t catch.
“Broken,” she grunts. “Won’t stay closed unless we bolt it.”
So they didn’t leave it open for me. Way to be self-centered, asshole. I nod and pull the smile off my face because subconscious or not, I’m trying to be charming so she’ll like me and that’s not the point here. “What can I do?”
“Laundry?” Lucia says it like a question, eyeing me.
“Yup, absolutely. Just show me where the machines are.”
The door comes open just then, cold air swirling against my back. Oh, shit. They keep a lot of food, medicine, and other valuable supplies in this room, and I’m betting that lock isn’t broken by accident. I whirl, stepping between the opening and Lucia, even though she outweighs me and probably fights dirtier than I do. But when I see who it is, my whole body goes rigid.
The white of Ava’s outfit stands out like a beacon in the grim alley. Her jaw sets hard. I start to fidget and then stop myself. I’ve got absolutely no reason to feel guilty right now. She’s the one who should be apologizing, because she just screwed up everything I’m here to do.
“The shelter is closed until dinnertime, and no overnighters are admitted until 6 p.m.,” Lucia recites, and then steps back enough to see around me to Ava. She harrumphs, unimpressed. “You brought a date?”
“Can we have just a minute alone, Lucia?”
She jerks her chin to the alley. “Outside. I got work to do in here. You come in when you’re ready to work, too.”
I don’t want to take Ava out in the rain, or anywhere near that fucking alley, but I’m not about to start pushing Lucia for special privileges. I come here specifically because she treats me the same as everybody else.
I move past Ava, not looking at her, and check up and down the alley before I let her outside. Near the main street, a guy slumps against a wall, but I can’t tell from here how big he is, or even whether he belongs to the bell-bottom or the grunge generation. I keep half an eye on him, turning to face Ava. “What are you doing here? I told you I was busy.”
“What do you think I’m doing here?” She hugs her sweater around herself, stepping out of the brackish drip line of the building. “I thought you were headed to score, dressed like that.”
“So you followed me? Dressed like that?” I shake my head so hard my neck pops. She might box beautifully in practice, but there’s a Grand fucking Canyon of difference between throwing punches at a pair of mitts and a real fight. “Where’s Dean? Or did he get knifed already?”
“I didn’t bring him.” She presses her lips together, rain dripping down her nose. “If you were really relapsing, I didn’t want anybody else to know.”
The next words I was about to hurl at her shrivel on my lips. I check behind us as my shoulders start to sag. The guy at the end of the alley hasn’t moved. “And what were you going to do, Ava? Tackle me? Give my dealer a stern scolding?”
“I don’t know.” Her chin jerks up, and no matter how hard she presses her lips together, they still tremble. “I know better than to try. You can’t keep a junkie clean. That has to be their choice, and most of the time when you think you’re helping you’re just giving them an authority figure to fight.” Her voice starts to choke up, and fury torches through me. At the idea of how she learned that. That she’s still here, in spite of it.
I blow out a breath and pull off Danny’s black hoodie, wrapping it around her shoulders to protect her sweater from the gritty splotches of rain. I lift the hood so it covers the slightly mussed strands of her hair.
“I’m not here to score.” I grit my teeth against the rest of what I want to say. She was trying to help me, was going to try to keep my secret from the media. She wanted to take me sailing today, for Chrissake. The least I can do is not be an asshole. “Come inside. You can wait in there for Dean to come pick you up, okay?”
Ava wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand, and then looks up at me. “You’re here to volunteer, aren’t you? God, I’m such an idiot.”
I glance away. “Look, I might as well just come back with you. No big deal.” There’s no point in staying anyway, not now that someone knows I’m here.
She shakes her head. “Let me help out. It’s the least I can do, after stalking you and accusing you of buying drugs when you were freaking feeding the homeless.”
I shake my head. “It’s between meals, and I can’t help up front anyway.” I gesture at my face. “Too recognizable. I do the dirty work in the back.” It suits my purposes better that way, anyway.
“So? I can clean or whatever else needs doing.” She rolls her eyes. “I may seem like a princess when I’m on the road and I don’t have the time to sneeze for myself, but I swear I do my own dishes when I’m at home, Jax.”
I glance down at her white Keds, already stained black at the edges. There’s a splotch of something bright yellow across the toe from kicking through the trash in the streets.
There are no clients in the shelter this time of day, so she should be safe enough inside, and we can call Dean to get her home. Still, if something were to happen, and there were too many of them for me to take on my own... “Let me call Danny to come down and hang out with us.”
We’ve faced more than one bar fight together—mostly due to me being a dipshit—and we’re a viciously good team. Danny’s scrappy and unreasonably strong, and I was in competitive boxing in high school and all the way through college. Plus, it w
on’t really reveal my secret, because I can say it was Ava’s idea to come down.
Unfortunately, Ava has no intention of waiting for backup. Before I can take out my phone, she’s already pulled the door open to go inside.
Lucia gives us a big rolling hamper and a couple sets of rubber gloves, and sets us to stripping last night’s sheets. There are shower facilities here, but judging by the streaks on some of the sheets—and the smell—a lot of the patrons didn’t take advantage of them. I nudge Ava aside, trying to roll the sheets with the dirty parts to the inside before she can touch the bundle.
“You know, it’ll work better if we spray the stain remover before we roll them,” she says.
I unhook the spray bottle from the edge of the bin and toss it to her. My stomach still squirms that she’s having to see this stuff, but at least the spray bottle will keep her at arm’s length, and I can’t ignore the efficiency gains of doing it her way. It’s a measure of how messed up my head is that I didn’t even think to design a faster system for the two of us to do this. Obviously, I’m not going to be able to concentrate until I get one thing straightened out with her. “Look, can you do me a favor?”
She peeks over at me, then sprays down the next set of sheets as I rush to get them off before she has to touch them. “I think I definitely owe you one or two at this point,” she says. “What do you need?”
“Can you just...not tell anybody about this?”
She’s quiet through stripping two more beds. “This is your thing, huh?” she says finally. “Just for you?”
I swallow, dropping in the next ball of sheets. “Bin’s full,” I say, and she falls into step behind me as I shove the heavy, wobbly thing over the cracked tiles toward the laundry room. “Remember how I told you I tried meditation, and I sucked at it?”
“Sure.” She opens the industrial-sized washer and starts pushing sheets inside, standing her ground when I try to crowd her aside to do it myself.
“Well, in—” I hate saying the word “rehab” like some people hate saying the word “moist.” I force it out anyway, because it’s true and hiding from my past is just another form of lie. “In rehab, they’re big on meditation, spirituality. I don’t believe in much, and I’m shitty at sitting still, so it was tough for me to get a handle on the eleventh step. Until this dude came in one day to give a presentation on karma yoga.”
Ava pauses and arches an eyebrow. Under the sputtering fluorescent light, her face is unreasonably beautiful. “I’m guessing that’s not about making sure your yoga mat is made out of recycled grocery bags.”
I smile. “It’s not like twisty yoga. It’s more like you do something and you don’t tell anybody about it.” I don’t look at her, because from what she’s said, I know she feels like I do. Like all the parts about us that are worthwhile only exist in front of a camera. “Everything I’ve ever done, I’ve done because somebody was watching. This is...different. It’s just between me and the world.”
I look away, and the overloaded shelves catch my eye. I quickly rearrange a stack of sheets so the soap can be within easy reach of the washer, so it’ll be a little more efficient for the next person who uses this room. Ava decodes all the unfamiliar buttons to get the washing machine started. When she’s done, we both watch the wad of sheets through the little window, water pouring in until white suds start to obscure the glass. “So it’s your penance?” She sounds sad.
I cringe. “No, actually the opposite. It’s about moving forward. In recovery, your worst enemy is self-pity. It leads to making excuses for why you have to use. I’ve got problems, Ava.” I say it flatly, thinking about the look I saw in her eyes today and in San Francisco. I care about her too much to let her keep that sparkle, at least not when it’s aimed at me. “I’m still making amends for all the ways I screwed my life when I was high, and how much I hurt the people around me. But I also grew up on Park fucking Avenue in New York City. When it starts to rain...” I gesture toward a brown stain on the ceiling where there used to be a leak. “I’ve never had to think about if I have a dry place to sleep. I’ve always been able to get a job, if I needed more money. I’ve been hungry, but I have never been without food, you know?”
“And this reminds you to be grateful?” she asks quietly.
“It reminds me I’m not the only one who is struggling.” I drop my eyes to the floor, scuffing my shoe over the dusty concrete and remembering nights when I’ve slept on things just as cold, not because I didn’t have anywhere to go but because I was too high to care. “A lot of days, it’s all I can do to keep breathing and keep a bottle out of my hand. But I can still fucking do laundry.”
She smiles. Slow and wide and lovely. “So let’s go do some more laundry,” she says, and grabs the bin.
I SHOVE MY HANDS IN my pockets, listening with half an ear to Ava chattering away in Spanish to Lucia. “I’ll go see if Dean is here yet,” I offer.
“No, I’ll come with you.” Ava turns to Lucia with a smile and a shy duck of her head. “Gracias por invitarme.”
Lucia smiles, and I blink, trying to remember if she’s ever done that on any of my previous visits. The older woman touches Ava’s arm. “Dios te bendiga, hija.”
The pushbar thumps as Ava shoves through to the alley, the remnants of the rainstorm still bleeding off the edges of the surrounding roofs.
“Didn’t know you spoke Spanish.”
“Brazilian Portuguese, for my dad’s family. Spanish was an easy add-on from there, though I’ve been told my accent is weird.”
Shit, that’s sexy. Freaking Portuguese? “What did you say to her?”
“Thanks for having me.” She pulls off Danny’s hoodie and hands it back to me, the air warm and soggy now that the sun’s starting to come out. I take it, squeezing the fabric in one fist until my knuckles ache. “I should say the same to you. Today has been...illuminating.” She smiles, her eyes serious. “You’re a hard man to know, Jackson Sterling.”
Guilt adds a stone to the growing weight in my stomach. In just a few more minutes, I’ll have to face Danny, and Kate. Try to keep Jera from reading the whole messed up story on my face. Go back to everything I can’t fix. The last thing I need is the pressure of Ava thinking I’m some kind of good Samaritan.
“Ave, don’t. Like I told you, I don’t volunteer because I’m a nice guy.” A scrap of a laugh huffs out of me. “That’s pretty much the opposite of why I have to come here.”
“You’re the kind of man who helps people, and doesn’t want any credit for it.” She moves closer. “You can try to spin it however you want to, but you’re here. That’s the truth. And I respect you for it, even if you don’t want me to.”
“Ava...” Helpless longing wrings my chest and the familiar weakness blurs the edges of me. Why shouldn’t I let her have what she wants? What’s wrong with indulging everything we want? We both work hard. We’ve earned it. It would be so easy to give in.
I swing away from her, my shoe slipping a little on some slimy plastic as I check both up and down the alley. A kid crosses the opening, his walk older than his body. When he glances at me, the shadow on his face might just be a shadow, but I think it’s a bruise.
I whirl back. “You know where you end up when you start caring about a guy like me?” I gesture sharply, Danny’s hoodie swinging out from my hand so one of the sleeves flicks her in the arm. “Here. Chasing him through alleys, never sure what he’s doing.”
As if I summoned it, a siren pops on, less than a block away. But it wasn’t planned. It’s just inevitable in a place like this, around people like me.
“You know junkies.” My voice is sharper than it should be, meaner than she deserves. “From what you said earlier, I fucking know you do. You should know better than to—”
“You’re not a junkie, Jax. You’re more than that.” One fist balls in my shirt and she yanks me forward. “And you can’t talk me out of how I feel.”
She pulls my head down and then her lips are telling me a thou
sand things I don’t know how to hear. Tingles start in the base of my spine and rise, weightless, through my ribs and thick shoulders, the arms I’m suddenly cradling her with, the air around us.
She’s small, perfect. I turn into her, the wall at her back and my arms protecting her, drinking in the comfort of having her so close. My neck kinks but I bend farther to her level so I don’t miss an instant of this.
“Jax...” she half-moans my name, her breasts melting into my chest. My knee presses between her thighs, the tight yoga pants shielding none of her curves, none of her heat.
I slip my hands up to cup her neck, her pulse throbbing against my palms, my thumbs finding the tiny, secret hollows beneath her earlobes. Only then do I realize I’ve been kissing her without thinking of whether I’m trying to convey urgency or tenderness, without calibrating my use of tongue to her reactions. I’m like a teenager, so drunk on sensation that hormones have entirely erased tomorrow.
Ava squeaks and flinches against me. I pull back, afraid I did something wrong. She steps aside, rubbing her side and glancing back at the old steel bolt sticking out of the wall. Thick with rust, it used to secure something I can’t even imagine right now.
“Did it cut you?” I turn her, pulling up just the hem of her sweater to check for blood. Grit hangs heavy on the soft, white yarn, a streak of something oily crossing her back from where I pressed her into the wall.
“I’m okay, it didn’t break the skin.” Ava catches my hand, but I pull away before she can get a grip.
“Shit. I ruined your clothes.” Not to mention she probably needs a tetanus shot. “I’m so sorry, Ave, I shouldn’t have done that.” My hands are empty, and I look around, swooping Danny’s hoodie off the ground from where I dropped it, something in my chest clapping shut like my ribs have grown teeth.
I forgot about him. What the fuck kind of friend am I that I could forget, even for a second?
“I did that,” Ava says, coming after me. “And don’t you dare feel guilty about it. Nobody makes my decisions for me.”
Insatiable (Sex, Love, and Rock & Roll Book 3) Page 12