“Yeah. That’s her.”
“She looks like you,” Virginia said.
“You mean I look like her?” Tourmaline asked.
“No. I meant she looks like you. Do you have any other pictures of her?”
Tourmaline heaved herself up and nodded toward the hall. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
Tourmaline opened one of the hall doors and Virginia followed her into the dark, cool room. Heavy wooden shutters kept out the sun, and the air felt stale and still. A rudimentary office occupied the shadows. It had the depth of something sacred Virginia didn’t know how to explain to herself.
Tourmaline turned on a lamp and the pale light fell across opened photo albums. “I was looking at them last night, before Jason called. Trying to figure out what . . .” She sighed. “What to do, I guess.” She flicked quickly through the photos, and Virginia only caught the brief blur of men and motorcycles.
Cash. This wasn’t just a boy to Tourmaline, it was a life. At least for as long as she wanted to be with him.
But Tourmaline pulled out a shoe box from the desk drawer and set it on top of the scrapbooks, lifting the lid. “These are my family’s. Not as much club. Though you’ll see there’s a lot of overlap.” She started picking through photos, handing certain ones over to Virginia. “Jason when he first got here. He worked for the landscaping business for a while before he even started hanging around the Wardens. They wanted to give him time and he needed to figure out how to build a life.”
Virginia took the picture, her heart squeezing tight. Jason looked like a boy in the photo. A terrified boy. A hunted boy. She wanted to find him, right then, and hold him.
“Do you know of a Ray?” Tourmaline asked suddenly.
Virginia handed the photo back. “Like, my old man?”
There was a moment full of silence.
Tourmaline exhaled a long breath. “Never mind.” She handed over another photo. “Him and Cash’s dad when they all came down one time. Cash’s dad sponsored Jason to become a member, but he wasn’t local anymore, so he had to find someone who would do the work of being a sponsor. My dad agreed to do it, for Old Hawk.”
Virginia looked at the photo. The terrified boy was still terrified, but smiling. He wore a tan Army T-shirt and was being held in a headlock by a big, laughing black man who looked vaguely like Cash.
“And so Jason is doing it for him now,” Virginia thought out loud.
Tourmaline nodded. “It’s a big deal. Jason and Cash are changing things about the club. But I think that’s what they meant to do.”
“What’s the point of rules if you don’t break them now and then?” Virginia said with a smile, still staring at the photo.
Tourmaline chuckled. “You remind me of my mom sometimes. Like, how I imagine my mom was when she was young. Before everything shitty started.”
Virginia’s heart raced a little.
“She’d have liked you. She would think you would make a good queen. That’s not a word anyone uses, by the way, it’s what I call it.” Tourmaline handed Virginia another photo. “I always thought my dad would get a new girlfriend or something and she’d take that role, but I don’t see that happening. It’s not working that way. Jason is changing the club. He won’t be president for a long time, but he almost doesn’t need to be. It’s changing and my dad is allowing it to happen.” Tourmaline shrugged. “My mom would think you’re good for Jason. You won’t let him get away with this shit he tries to be.”
Virginia smiled. “I’m not sure I have that power, but I like the idea of it.”
“You do. You can’t see the way he looks at you, but I can.” Tourmaline made a face. “My question—which I can’t ask anyone—is, what does this mean? Is everything in a moment of change? If I just go along with what’s always been, am I betraying myself? If I try to change everything, am I betraying the club? The club has always been family to me. But now, it can’t be, unless I decide to make them my family.” She gave a heavy sigh and took the photo back, digging deeper into the box. “Oh.” Her tone dropped into disgust. “Ugh, look. Wayne and my mom.” She handed it over.
Virginia froze. “This is Wayne?”
“Yeah, he looks sort of weasel-like, right?”
Virginia stared at the photo. At the beady eyes and thin shoulders and stained fingers. It was the 9:15. The 9:15 who’d been so amused to watch her demise. The 9:15 who got all her clients, her bags, and Hazard’s trust. “Fuck,” she breathed.
Tourmaline’s head snapped up. “What?”
“He’s working for Hazard.” She dropped the photo and stepped back, finding Tourmaline’s eyes. “They’re moving in heroin. Together. And the—” The Impala! The cop car with the gold clubs being pulled out of the back was the same car that had been in the parking lot yesterday. The one Tourmaline said was the state detective. Virginia screamed, because the words were so big and the connections were falling like dominoes and the whole world spun with her fear that she’d never escape. The Impala. The cop Hazard went golfing with. “Fuck the cop,” Virginia sputtered. “Your cop. He’s working with them. They’re all in on it.”
Tourmaline didn’t say a word. She stared at Virginia and sank into the chair as if her legs had given out.
The front of her truck stood stripped back to the engine. Pieces of fender and front grill and engine parts littered the floor, arranged in a carefully disordered pattern. The long tubes of fluorescent lights hummed against a turned-down country station and the chorus of bugs and tree frogs outside the open garage door. Oil and gasoline mixed freely with the heavy musk of honeysuckle and warmed pine.
Virginia sat on an upside-down milk carton on the floor, elbows on her knees, as she watched Jason and Cash work on the mangled truck.
Tourmaline perched silently on Cash’s motorcycle.
Finding a way to stop Hazard, the cop, and Wayne seemed impossible. They didn’t even know where Wayne was. Or how to get him to violate parole—though that seemed to be the only thing they could do. It’d been a few days and they were still arguing in between yards and weeds and mulch. Still trying to hash out a plan. But they’d made no great advance.
This wasn’t a game.
“He’s not in the same house. I went by this afternoon.”
Virginia twisted on the crate. “You went alone?”
“I was riding the bike.”
“Don’t do that shit alone. I’ll come next time.” Virginia kept her voice just above a whisper so as not to attract attention. Sighing, she flicked a mosquito off her ankle. “He’s like a dog. He’ll just trot back and forth on the same path until someone kicks him off.”
“So where does a dog go when someone kicks him out of his bed?”
Virginia shifted on her crate and shrugged.
They fell silent then.
Virginia’s eyes wandered back to the stripped-down truck and Jason’s arm buried in the engine. His muted red T-shirt was ripped at the shoulder, and part of a slick perfect biceps twisted out as he worked. It’d be easy to disappear around him. That’s what she should do, so as not to remind him of what she’d done. Who she was. Except, she didn’t want him to ignore her. She wanted to bite that muscle in his arm until he moaned.
Stretching out her legs, she sighed and spoke in a normal tone. “Are y’all gonna feed us anytime soon?”
Jason didn’t look up. “No.”
“I can order something. Have them pick it up,” Cash said, wiping his hands on a shop rag. “Want Harry’s?” he asked Jason.
“Mmm. I want those whiskey-and-molasses wings,” Virginia said. “That’s Harry’s, right?”
Jason rolled his eyes.
She caught his glance and meant to smile, but froze halfway. What if he regretted every thing he’d ever done with her? He had to. She would if she were him.
He went back to working.
“What do you want?” Cash asked.
“Nothing,” Jason grunted, angling the can of WD-40 into the engine.
 
; Cash shrugged and dropped the shop rag.
“I’ll come help you order. Wings, Virginia?” Tourmaline said, hopping off the bike. All that eagerness simmered right beneath her words, her body strung as tight as a pulled-back bow.
Even Jason looked up and narrowed his eyes as he looked between Tourmaline and Cash.
No way were they going to get away with this for long. You could practically smell the heat.
“Virginia?” Tourmaline asked again.
Virginia looked up. “Yeah. Sorry. That’s good. And some fries.”
Jason shifted so his back was to her.
Tourmaline practically bounced after Cash into the dark.
Standing, Virginia pushed her hair behind her ears and walked to the side of the truck.
“What’s going on with them?” Jason asked.
“Not a clue.”
“You lying?” He looked underneath his arm and cocked an eyebrow.
“Probably always.” She curled her fingers tight over the opened engine block.
He didn’t say anything, but the edges of his mouth tightened as if he were trying not to smile. He strained against the bolt smashed up inside the engine.
“How bad is it?”
He shrugged and kept working. “The conscript is pretty good at fixing shit. I’m relying on his diagnosis once we get it stripped down.”
She squeezed her fingers on the sharp edge of the engine cavity and swallowed, wanting to explain in this brief moment alone with him that before him no one would have remembered the truck, let alone gotten a tow, or put this much time into anything of hers. She wanted some way to tell him how much she wanted him to hold her bones in his hands and turn her again into the girl she wanted to be.
But all those things Virginia felt a deep ache to say and do were like everything else in her brain—scattered and fragile and broken. She could only look at them and know they went together somehow. It was a terrible feeling. Terrible. Her hands were sweating and she tightened her fingers even more on the sharp edge until bright, rusted pain cut through the choking feeling, and she only heard the humming lights. And this feeling, this moment, was what she’d fought so hard to preserve. It seemed strange. Without smiling, she whispered, “Thanks.”
He stilled, his back tightening for a split second. As if the word had caught in his body, snagging in his movement. “Don’t think of it.”
She loosened her grip and it all came tumbling down—pulling back and forth in her stomach as she watched him work in the silence. “I don’t have words,” she choked out. “I mean. I have a lot. For this. But I don’t often have to use words.”
He straightened then, a serious look on his perfect face.
And she was sure feeling would be the thing that, in the end, killed her. But for him it was worth it.
“How’re your ribs?” he asked, voice deep and husky.
“All right. My hair managed to survive, too.” She touched the shortened strands that had decided to pull up into rough curls in the humidity. “Sort of.”
“It’s nice. Doesn’t drag you down like . . .” But Jason didn’t finish the sentence.
“I can’t hide behind it, though. I miss that. It was my dark curtain thing.”
His gaze briefly slid down her throat and came back up, mouth turned up in a tight, but amused smile. “You weren’t ever trying to hide anything that hair covers.”
She knew it was there, under his skin. The part of her that wanted to bite his shoulder knew he wanted to feel the sink of her hot teeth while his hands gripped raw and hungry on her hips. The part of her that wanted to spin in his hands and sink back into him knew he wanted to thrust forward and slide a hand up her spine to grasp the back of her neck.
But he just stood there, powerless in his eyes and unyielding in his body.
“You’re going to fucking kill me,” she whispered. Kill her with shrugged-off kindness. Kill her every time she looked at him and he looked away.
He didn’t say anything.
Virginia didn’t want to step toward him this time. She wanted him to come to her. She took a deep breath and tightened her jaw, forcing her body to stay put.
He blinked and turned away, picking up where he’d left off with the bolt.
There was something about walking across the threshold of Cash’s that Tourmaline felt very deeply but couldn’t identify. Something that made her feel as if she weren’t ready. That she hadn’t been ready for any of this, but now she had arrived—with new skin, and new edges, and new places in the world, dark though they might be.
The house wasn’t anything special. Cheap and clean, Cash had said when walking into the kitchen. She wandered after him, eyeing his stride and the movements of his body as he pulled a menu out of a noisy kitchen drawer.
He leaned against the counter with the menu and tucked the phone into his shoulder, boots braced on pea-green linoleum. But the orange cupboards and yellow countertops were absolutely spotless, looking as if a man lived here and not a young, wild conscript in a motorcycle club. A tea towel hung neatly folded on the stove handle. A cinnamon-scented candle sat in the middle of the small kitchen table.
She wanted to open up his chest and see which parts were tea towels and orderly houses and which parts were wild conscript and weigh them out to see the balance, but she just crossed her arms and headed toward the stairs to explore.
His room was as neat as the kitchen, bed covered in a smoothed-out navy quilt, and the walls a soothing gray. Curtains on the window soaked in the last glow of twilight, and at each side of the bed stood a nightstand and a lamp. A million different things pulled under her skin at the sight of his room and his bed. At the heavy scent of clean sheets and old wood floors. She took a deep breath and walked in only far enough to glance at the dog-eared books on the table. Dante’s Inferno. She frowned and moved it aside. Underneath it, a Bible. On the table was a framed picture of a man Tourmaline recognized as Cash’s dad and a woman whom she assumed was his mom. They were both on bikes.
Cash’s mom rode.
She stared at it. Studied it. Longed for what that photo depicted in a way she’d never expected to long for a future. Suddenly she hoped Cash’s mom would like her. More than like her—accept her.
Her father wouldn’t be angry about their relationship because of their races—he would think of their ages and Cash’s membership in the club long before he got to black and white. But it was hard to know whether a thread of the belief that they simply shouldn’t be together didn’t still exist, maybe so deeply buried that her father wouldn’t even recognize it in himself. And she hoped, looking at Cash’s mom, that it wouldn’t be the same. That his mom wouldn’t have a deeply buried belief that they simply shouldn’t be together.
The second bedroom was an office of sorts, messier than the rest of the house but with a computer open on a desk, rolled papers, and shelves filled with thick books that boasted titles like Heat and Mass Transfer, Mechanics and Thermodynamics of Propulsion, and Mechanical Vibrations.
She shut the door and turned back down the stairs.
“Done snooping?” he asked when she came back into the kitchen.
“For now.”
“Food should be ready in twenty minutes. You and Virginia can take my truck.”
Tourmaline nodded, leaning her hip into the counter and looking around. The future seemed to fade and pulse with her heartbeat. It’d seemed perfectly clear on the road under the moon. It was less clear back on earth with everyone else.
“What did you think?”
“I think an old man lives here,” she said with a grin.
Cash groaned and shook his head. “Don’t say that.”
She hoisted herself up to sit on the counter’s edge and swung her legs back and forth. “How long do you think it will take them to get suspicious we’ve been gone too long?”
“Well, Jason knows we’ve been talking.” He shifted off the counter and stepped closer. “Obviously.”
Automatically her
knees opened, though she wasn’t sure how far he’d go. Her heart raced, breath tumbling over itself.
His hands came to her legs, fingers curling around the tendons and softness behind her knee—pulling her just the slightest toward him.
The backs of her thighs stuck to the countertop and he released the tension, but kept his hands where they were.
“Are you in trouble?” she asked. She was on his level. Knees at his waist. Easy to settle her arms on his shoulders. Easy to pull her chest toward him.
But he didn’t quite answer.
The space between them shrank.
Cash’s hands slowly slid up her legs, just above her knees. His fingertips pushing on the edges of her skirt.
She looked down, wanting to see his hands there, on her legs, against the yellow floral laminate countertop. Blood pumped in her ears. In her fingertips draped on his spine.
His fingertips sank into her skin, as if responding to her look. His breath was on her neck. On her jaw.
All she had to do was lift her head and his mouth was there. Lips parted. Waiting for her.
Her mouth watered.
The door opened. They shot apart.
“It’s just me, relax,” Virginia said. “The bathroom?”
Cash cleared his throat. “Upstairs and to your left.”
“Thanks.” She stomped up the steps.
Tourmaline heaved a sigh, fingers trembling.
“Jason’s grumpy,” Virginia called from upstairs.
Tourmaline glanced at Cash.
“I think we should tell your dad,” he said. “I told Jason we’re only talking. To go any further, though . . .”
“No.” She gulped, still running after her heartbeat. “We’re not doing that. You won’t patch out.”
“It’d be better to tell him sooner rather than later.”
She bit down on her lip and looked at the floor.
“Tourmaline, he’s not going to like things happening behind his back. That’ll bother him more than if we’re honest with him. I can’t disrespect him like that.”
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