Rev It Up

by Julie Ann Walker

  “Huh?”

  “That Franklin is Snake’s son? I just got off the phone with Steady who found out from Ozzie. Apparently there was a big to-do at the hospital last night involvin’ blood, brawls, and bombs of the big-honkin’ secret variety.” He shook his head in disbelief. “So which grape on the Black Knights’ gossip vine spilled the beans to you?”

  She was totally confused, and it wasn’t just the alliteration and mixed metaphors. “Nobody. It was obvious the other night when I saw all three of them together, but that’s not what—”

  “Is that what you meant with that whole cryptic statement about all of us keepin’ secrets from each other?”

  “Yes,” she huffed, tossing her platform stripper shoes aside. “But that’s beside the point. Listen, I was downstairs getting clean towels when I ran into Candy who said she saw Johnny come in last night!”

  Rock had spent quite a bit of time over at In the Mood Lounge after the first night when he’d questioned the bartender and the guy said he remembered seeing someone who matched Johnny’s description. But Rock had turned up a big ol’ handful of nothing on that front. And you can bet Vanessa was more than a little happy to be the one to net them some actionable intel.

  Girl power!

  “Come in where?” Rock demanded, jumping from the chair. “Here?”

  “Yes!” She excitedly hopped from one foot to the other. “He’s staying here. Right here in this hotel!”

  ***

  “Your phone is out of batteries now too, damnit,” Michelle cursed from the passenger seat of her Hyundai Elantra, clicking off Jake’s iPhone. She winced and glanced into the back seat to make sure her son hadn’t heard that little slip at the end.

  The last few days had seen her vocabulary deteriorate considerably.

  Thankfully, Franklin had his headphones on, watching the movie playing on his iPad, his soft cheeks absent their usual rosy glow and his little eyes smudged by dark bruises.

  We’ll be home soon, she silently promised him, reaching back to pat his knee.

  He smiled at her so sweetly, lifting the sleeve on his T-shirt to proudly display—for the twentieth time—the press-on tattoo Jake had given him, and her poor, battered heart melted all over the place.

  She winked and pointed at the tattoo, giving him a thumbs up like she’d done twenty times before, and he giggled before returning his attention to the movie. His pale face wrinkled when they inched over a speed bump in Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s underground parking garage, causing her to glance at her watch.

  It was almost time for another dose of pain medication.

  “I’m sure there’s a good reason why she isn’t here,” Jake said from the driver’s seat, pocketing the change the parking attendant handed him before pulling past the gate and taking the ramp up to street level. There was still a cloud of tension hanging between them, but after their come-to-Jesus talk he was no longer giving her the silent treatment.

  Which was a good thing.

  She had enough to worry about without his whole cold-shoulder act adding to it. And for the first time in a really long time, she began to believe there might be hope for the two of them.

  Oh, not that she thought there was any room for a relationship. Because Jake would never forgive her…

  Heck, after seeing the look on his face out when she first told him what she’d done, the shock that’d instantly morphed into rage that’d quickly slid into a sickening kind of anguish, she had a hard time forgiving herself for the pain she’d caused him.

  But even if there wasn’t room for a relationship, maybe there was room for an understanding.

  She would continue to hope so. For her son’s sake.

  Jake flicked on the blinker, and they exited onto the packed city streets. A line of yellow taxis waited by the hospital’s main doors, and The Corner Bakery advertised their daily panini special on a chalkboard easel in the middle of the sidewalk—which reminded her that she hadn’t eaten. Jake had come back earlier in the afternoon with a bag of hamburgers after dropping off his motorcycle at her house and picking up her car, but she’d been too busy listening to the nurse and jotting down notes about medication schedules, maintaining stitches, and food restrictions to eat anything.

  Now she was starving. And worried.

  Worried about Franklin. Worried about Lisa and her brother and…Jake…

  “She probably just broke her phone or dropped it in the toilet or something,” he assured her, still talking about the nanny. “I bet when you get home, charge your phone and check your email, you’ll find she sent you something explaining her absence.”

  That made sense. Lisa did have a bad habit of going through cell phones. She was always leaving them on the El-train or forgetting them in class…

  “Maybe you’re right,” she said, although she couldn’t shake the niggle of unease that teased at the back of her brain. Of course, maybe that was just light-headedness brought on by having gone nearly twenty-four hours without food.

  Digging in her purse, she pulled out her emergency granola bar and peeled off the wrapper, eating half the thing in one bite.

  “Mmm,” she murmured. Never had nuts, fruit, and rolled oats tasted so good. “I’d offer you some,” she said around the mouthful, “but I’m afraid I might eat your hand should you reach for it.”

  He smiled, his green eyes flashing, his dimples deepening in his shadowed cheeks. The expression was so shocking and unexpected given the events of the last day, the granola turned to dust when she tried to swallow it.

  Finally managing to choke it down, she decided now was her chance to ask him his intentions.

  “What are you going to do, Jake?” The words tumbled from her lips.

  “About what?” He turned to frown at her.

  “About Franklin.” She held her breath.

  He glanced into the rearview mirror. “He can’t hear us?”

  “Not with those earphones on. And he won’t take them off for an instant while Tangled is playing. He loves the horse.”

  He nodded, remaining quiet for too long, then, “I want joint custody,” he blurted.

  She nearly threw up.

  “But how…but where…I mean…” There were so many questions, and she had so many objections, she didn’t know where to begin. So she just stopped and swallowed the last bits of granola in the hopes that it might actually stay down.

  Joint custody?

  But then she’d only get to see her son three or four days a week! Just think of all the things she’d miss…

  Kinda like the things Jake has missed over the past three years? a little voice whispered.

  Oh, dear Lord.

  “Boss has offered me a job,” he said, oblivious to the fact that she might be having a nervous breakdown in the passenger seat. “So I’ll be living here in Chicago. And I know how you are about Franklin’s schedule not getting interrupted, but kids are more resilient than you think. I don’t see why us splitting time with him should be a problem.”

  And just as quickly as the panic had seized her, it slid away, leaving her with a feeling of numbness. Helpless numbness.

  “You know,” she murmured after a while, staring out the window even though she was blind to the traffic whizzing by, “my brother thinks I stick to a routine with Franklin because of our father leaving. He thinks it’s a control issue brought on by a childlike need to ensure nothing bad ever happens to me again. But that’s not true.”

  “No?” Jake asked as he inched onto the highway running between the city and Lake Michigan.

  “No,” she shook her head, absently watching a dog owner chunk a stick into the water at the edge of Oak Street Beach. A black Labrador retriever raced into the choppy waves after it, and for a moment she wondered how the world kept on turning, how everything kept on moving, when her entire life was spinning out of control.

  Joint custody…

  “Dad was a douchebag of epic proportions; there’s no question of that,” she admitt
ed distractedly, her mind only half on the conversation. The other half was busy silently screaming. “But Mom was just as bad. Maybe worse. Because even though she stuck around, she was no kind of mother. After my dad left, she decided the best way to bury her sorrow was in a daily bottle of Stoli.”

  “Christ,” Jake spat, and she could feel him glance over at her, feel his sympathetic gaze heating her face and somehow that made everything worse. She didn’t want his sympathy. She wanted his understanding. She wanted her son. She wanted…so many things that could never be…

  “I learned to live in fear of the unexpected. Like the day I came home from school to find the man from next door tearing away my mother’s clothes as she lay passed-out on the living room sofa. I don’t remember much about what happened after I flew at him, mainly because he hit me hard enough to knock me senseless, but sometimes, late at night when I’m just drifting to sleep, I have these brief flashbacks of Frank barreling through the open front door and tackling our neighbor to the ground.”

  “Good for Boss.”

  “Yeah,” she nodded, remembering very clearly the fury that’d contorted her brother’s young face when he flew through the door. Killing rage. That’s how most people would describe it. “At fifteen, he was already bigger than most full-grown men, and though my recollection of the exact chain of events is sketchy at best,” she absently drew a broken heart in the condensation that’d formed from her breath on the passenger side window, “I do remember three things. The neighbor ended up in the hospital. Frank installed triple locks on our front door. And I was never allowed to walk home alone again.”

  They drove in silence then, both lost in their own thoughts as the white-capped waves of Lake Michigan rolled onto the beach to their right and the twinkling lights of the skyscrapers cut through the coming dusk to their left. Then Franklin giggled in the backseat—undoubtedly it was a scene with the horse—and Michelle was dragged back into the moment.

  “I swore that day, I swore then and there,” she breathed, reliving the fear and uncertainty of that instant when she walked through the front door to see what was being done to her mother, “that if I ever had kids they’d never have to live through the kind of childhood I had to live through, an unstable environment created by a drunken mother and exacerbated by an absent father.”

  “Shell—”

  “Anyway,” she cut him off, still staring out the window, “that’s why I’m such a stickler for Franklin’s schedule. Because I never had one as a child. When I walked through my door each day after school, I never knew what I might find.”

  “I’m so sorry that happened to you,” he said, and there was genuine regret in his voice.

  “I’m sorry it happened to me, too,” she admitted with a shrug. “Maybe if it hadn’t, I would’ve done things differently. Maybe I would have been braver, not so hell bent on trying to create that perfect family…”

  He grabbed her hand, his palm warm against her cold fingers. “Why didn’t you tell me about Franklin after Preacher died? After there was no hope of creating that perfect family? That’s the part I just can’t get past, Shell. You had four years.”

  “I tried, Jake,” she choked on a sob, refusing to look at him when there were tears standing in her eyes. “I was going to tell you after the funeral, out of respect for Steven, but you left early. And then, when I went to find you, I discovered you’d already transferred to Alpha Platoon, caught a transport OCONUS. You were gone for two years, Jake. For two years nobody knew where you were, so how was I supposed to tell you?”

  She turned to him then, her eyes beseeching him to understand.

  “But I came back—” he began, and she interrupted him.

  “And I sent you a letter begging you to come here.”

  He rolled in his lips, a muscle ticking in his jaw. “The letter said nothing about my having a son, Shell.”

  “Yeah,” she swallowed, once more facing the window. “I suppose that was a test of sorts. If you’d come, if you’d shown a modicum of interest, I’d planned to tell you.”

  “You know why I stayed away,” he growled.

  “Yes,” she sighed. “I know now why you stayed away.”

  Again they fell into silence, only this time the strain of it was a palpable thing. It stretched between them like the string of a kite caught in the wind, threatening to snap at any moment.

  Finally, after several excruciating seconds, Jake ventured quietly, “And after I came here, after I’d explained everything, why didn’t you tell me then?”

  She swung to face him, her jaw slung open.

  He really didn’t get it, did he?

  “Because you’d already proven yourself true to form!” She tossed her hands in the air.

  “I’m nothing like your father,” he snarled. “And I’m getting real sick and tired of the comparison. I. Am. Nothing. Like him.”

  And for the first time since his arrival, seeing the adamancy and sincerity on his face, she began to wonder if maybe he was right. If maybe she was the one who’d been wrong all along. If maybe her own childhood had blinded her, making her jump to conclusions about men and—

  Oh God. The thought was too horrific to bear. Because that would mean she’d wronged him, robbed him of the child he would have protected and cherished and loved and—

  Remorse and regret settled heavily in her stomach, making the granola she’d eaten turn to burning acid that scorched her throat.

  “I’m sorry, Jake,” she finally whispered. And that didn’t even begin to cover her nearly paralyzing sorrow over the way things had happened, over her role in the way things had happened.

  She felt him relax next to her then and wished she could do the same. But her nerves were stretched so tight she was afraid to move, even an inch, for fear she’d completely lose what little control over herself.

  “We both made a lot of mistakes,” he sighed. “Mistakes that are hard to forgive, but we’ll manage.”

  She didn’t see how—

  “And don’t worry,” he continued, his next words like arrows to her heart. “We’ll find a way to work out Franklin’s schedule so that it’s not too hard on you. You’ll see.”

  Oh, sure. They’d work it out.

  And all it would take was for her to give up her son…

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Listen up, you greasy piece of shit,” Rock growled, and Vanessa raised a brow, doubting name-calling would get them very far with the wife-beater-wearing guy working the reception desk. “We know this sonofabitch is staying here, and we need his room number. Now!”

  Rock shoved a photo of Johnny at the receptionist, whose dull eyes barely glanced at the thing before he switched his cigarillo to the opposite side of his mouth, chewing sullenly.

  Rock made a move toward the pistol he kept concealed in his suit-jacket, and she grabbed his arm, sidling up beside him. “Look, sugar,” she said in her gravely smoker’s voice, trying to ignore the sour aroma of body odor that assaulted her nostrils when she leaned in close to the bars protecting the man working the desk. The guy was like the Land that Hygiene Forgot. “We need to find this man. He owes me lots of money. And my new best friend here,” she jerked her head toward Rock, “has agreed to help me get it back. Now,” she winked and licked her lips, “I can make this worth your while.”

  The receptionist glanced at her boobs, a spark of interest igniting his vacuous gaze. She didn’t have great, huge jugs like good ol’ Candy, but hers obviously worked in a pinch. Sir Smokes-A-Lot seemed to enjoy them.

  “What didja have in mind?” he asked, pulling the cigarillo from his mouth and sucking on his stained teeth.

  She smiled even as her stomach revolted at the sight.

  Reaching into her top, she pulled out a wad of hundred dollar bills. Peeling off two, she waved them through the bars. “How ’bout we start here. And then, once I get the rest of my money back…” she stuck a finger in her mouth, sucking it slowly before inserting it into her cleavage, “…
I can give you a little freebie just to show my appreciation.”

  The receptionist’s Adam’s apple bobbed in his dirt-ringed throat as he watched the movement, then he hastily licked his thin lips before turning and plucking a key from a hook on the wall. “Room 602,” he said and snatched the key back when she went to swipe it. “Now, I don’t want no mess to clean up,” he warned.

  “Don’t you worry, sugar,” she purred, leaning in even closer, until her boobs smashed against the bars. “I want my money, not a jail sentence.”

  He considered this bit of logic for a while before handing her the key. “I’ll be expecting my freebie when I get off at 2 a.m.,” he called to her when she turned toward the elevator, dragging Rock with her.

  “Sure thing, sugar.” She blew him a kiss over her shoulder. “I can promise you at 2 a.m. you’ll be getting off, and then you’ll be getting off.”

  The sound of his sickening chuckle gave her a good case of the heebie-jeebies, but she managed to control her shiver of abhorrence until the elevator doors closed her and Rock inside.

  “I could’ve just threatened to shoot him,” Rock drawled, grinning down at her.

  “Yeah,” she said, “but then he might’ve been inclined to make a call to the room and warn dear Johnny. This way, he’ll be inclined not to.”

  Rock’s brows climbed up his forehead as his eyes pinged down to her halter top. “Who knew a pair of great funbags could come in so handy outside the boudoir.”

  “You did not just use the term funbags,” she said, shooting him a look of disgust as the elevator doors chimed and opened to sixth floor.

  ***

  “Get him upstairs and into bed,” Michelle said, setting her purse on the kitchen table and rolling her head around her shoulders. She didn’t remember ever being this exhausted, this emotionally wrung-out. Not only was her heart bloody and desecrated, but her entire body was one giant throbbing ache. Her bones actually hurt. “I’m going to try to call Lisa one more time.”