It’s sad really; a measly pack of cigarettes, or hell just the thought of one, puts this much pep back into my step. Especially after this exhausting fucking day. And the fact that I’ve just heard from my sister for the first time in four months, I’m sure, seems even more pathetic to you...but still, I’m damn near skipping as I flounce into the living room on my way to fetch my cigarettes. I haven’t been this excited to find something in I don’t know how long. Skipping, I tell you. I’m damn near skipping when I enter the living room.
It’s his words, and their unique ability to strike through a silent room with the stealth of a goddamn ninja, that has me screaming bloody fucking murder before leaping twenty-four inches off the ground with my bare feet. “It’s my vagabond. There she fucking is.” His voice may as well be a razor on silk thread just before he slowly claps three times.
Once. Twice. Thrice. Three claps of his huge hands ring out through the living room.
And the same damn voice that’s riddled my dreams for the past ten years, and every halfass attempt at every halfass relationship I ever entertained the thought of over the last ten years. They never stood a chance in hell because of the owner of that damn dark voice.
I can’t tell you how long it took my eyes to find him sitting on my Snuggler recliner in the corner of the dark room. I can tell you, until I did, the breath in my lungs didn’t move. Nor did a single other motherfucking thing in the house. If it weren’t for the full moon hanging so low in the midnight sky, I don’t know that I would have been able to see him. ‘Cause all I’m currently barely able to stare at through the dark room is his beautiful fucking silhouetted profile.
Once his claps have ricocheted from my silent living room walls, I find my voice and speak. “Jacques Cain. What in the hell do you want? With me?” I lie and tell myself he can’t see me wince when I realize the ‘with me’ part of that statement made it past my lips. But I am able to hold back the curse.
“Pipsqueak, do you know how long—” His sinister chuckle causes every damn hair across the surface of my skin to rise on end. And when his laughter stops, he rubs his hands down the front of his worn out looking jeans and pauses. Then a few seconds after, he reaches over and flips on the light.
Then it’s his eyes. It’s at this point when his voice and the words he’s speaking to me are lost. All I fucking see is a sea of navy. On a matte canvas of tanned tattooed skin. With the beginning of salt starting to pepper throughout his dark long hair. But those eyes though...those goddamn navy blue eyes.
They feel like knives carving out chunks of my soul. “There’s no way you can know. There’s no fucking way.” He coughs before standing and opening one of the screen doors—the one which wasn’t already open to the back deck. Two feet away from where I just went through my bills, and read a letter from my sister.
And when he stands, only when he does, it looks as though he’s still standing he’s so damn tall. I wonder why his height wasn’t something that stuck out in my memory all this time.
Oh yeah, because the only time I saw him over the age of...hell, twenty? He was on his back, and that was only when I was sober.
Good Lord and heaven’s angels. When they sing, I bet it’s songs about men who behave like the devil and look like him, as he comes to his full height inside my living room. His dark, long hair falls around his shoulders until he runs his fingers through it and leaves it tucked behind his ears. This shit isn’t even fair. What the hell? It’s like George Clooney mated with Matthew Mcconaughey. It’s ridiculous! My heart sinks to the bottom of my stomach and I quickly decide to turn it into something a little more productive, like, I dunno, anger. Better than vomit at this point.
When his navy blue eyes narrow back on mine, I blurt out, “Is that all you own? Just a closet full of worn out denim and leather?” I can’t stop the snide remark from falling off the tip of my tongue if I tried, ‘cause of the wreck of the remains he left alongside what was once my heart. Why couldn’t he just stay away? I was doing so well. So perfectly well, and alone. Why?
After he stops but before he speaks, he slowly turns around. When there’s less than a foot between us, he stops.
And then he doesn’t move. Not another inch.
Nope, he just pierces my eyes again with his, putting everything else in the world but he and I in another time, then speaks. “Do you have any idea how long I thought I fucking stole your sister’s V-card? When in reality, all along...it was you? Do you even know who the fuck I am, little vagabond?”
After the brothers and I survived the attack on the club, I spent three months on the fourth floor of Mt. Sinai and another eighteen in and out of physical rehab. Apparently a man isn’t supposed to take two to the chest and one to the stomach and make it out alive. But I did. And I’m paying for it every fucking day since.
I don’t think the human body is supposed to be subjected to the anesthesia associated with that much time under the knife. My theory is, it does something to the muscles around the bone. I don’t know, maybe there isn’t enough oxygen or some shit. I just know my damn body hurt a hundred times worse after every surgery.
I really don’t know how to tell you this, honestly—and I may be rambling. Possibly to ward off any lingering pain from the old scars around, coincidentally, both my heart and my body.
So, other than just say it—fuck it, I’mma just say it: Pops didn’t make it. Sorry. With his heart, even if he would have lived through the first surgery, he wouldn’t have made it through the one after they could find him a heart. I think it was my mother who once told me sometimes there’s a blessing in a curse, and there is such a thing as worse than being dead. It’s living a lifetime of pain and agony that’s worse.
And I can’t really fault her for that conclusion, because the older I get, the more I realize just how right Jacqueline Cain was about most of the shit she said or believed in. Especially when compared to the bullshit my old man used to spout.
To say life after Pops has been hard is a bit of understatement. And it’s not only been hard on me, either, but every other member of the fucking club as well. As I think you’ll recall, I wasn’t ready to run that garage, nor that MC, before the fuckers with no colors pulled up and riddled me and my club and my brothers with bullet holes. By the time Ben and a handful of brothers who rode into town earlier with him made it to the club after they got the first call—no one had seen or heard of any outside clubs coming or going from NYC—it was too late. They were too late. And as far as anyone knew, no one knew anything. Everyone was fucking hush-hush. Meanwhile I was fighting for my life on the fourth floor at Mt. Sinai and Pops was being rolled down to the morgue.
Between Ben and Dreads, the only ONLY two motherfuckers I could trust when I came to after the second surgery, I didn’t know whose advice to take. So I took neither. I did what Pops always told me to do if I ever came to a point in life when I couldn’t chose left or right: ‘Just flip a coin, Jacques,’ he told me. ‘Come up with three solutions and flip a coin. Best two out of three wins.’ Well, that day it was the only halfass solution I had, three hours after undergoing a six hour surgery, against theirs. Mine won. Then I pulled another Pops by pulling the brothers in closer, almost totally closing off the compound from the rest of the world. And then I went to PT and got the fuck better. Seven surgeries. That’s twenty-four hours, a full circle of the sun around the earth—one whole day of being under the knife. That’s what was required to put me back together.
And when I came back—to the club that I was fucking born in—and it wasn’t half of what it was before?
I shut the fuck down. All but closed up shop.
Running bikes and slinging ink. Dreads is on the ink. He’s the inkslinger. I’m the mechanic. And other than that, I haven’t been really doing much. The books, though, between me and Pops, we kept the books in good enough relations with the actual numbers, and it’s putting it lightly when I say that Pops and Ma made sure I was taken care of. Just not the club. And unfortuna
tely, as of late, it fucking shows.
Besides the originals and the position holders, we might have twenty regular members on any given Sunday at the steeple on Church day. That’s a bit paler than seventy-five, though, any fucking way you cut that pie, wouldn’t you say?
I zero my eyes on my prey, focusing on all the tiny details from my spot on the recliner after opening the un-opened side of the double doors leading to the deck.
Her over swallowing and the constant re-licking of her already swollen, chapped lips are dead giveaways. As are her dilated dark brown—not blue eyes when they wince. And yes, I noticed, even in the dark. As did I notice all that fucking bare naked flesh when my voice broke chill bumps across every square inch of it. Yeah—yeah, believe me. I was fucking there. Here. I notice.
I keep trying to distract myself. I’m trying like hell to pull my eyes from her tits under the t-shirt she’s wearing with Lynyrd Skynyrd printed across the chest, and I gotta tell ya, even though I know I’m here on some real shit, I’m having some difficulty. Serious difficulty. I get up and open the door that was closed when I came in about four minutes before she did after her shift at Charming Charlie’s and then sit back down in the Poppa chair she has in her living room corner. It’s here, when her mouth, or maybe it was her eyes...I glance back to her eyes again when she speaks, deciding halfway through her statement that watching her mouth was a bad idea.
“Is that all you own? Just a closet full of worn out denim and leather?” I’ve put ten inches between us a split second later, and whether or not it was ten out of pure coincidence is your call. I’ll let you be the judge. But I don’t stutter, nor do I blink when I start laying down some ground rules and regulations. Need we forget there’s a necessity for respect and protocol?
“Do you have any idea how long I thought I fucking stole your sister’s V-card? When in reality, all along...it was you? Do you even know who the fuck I am, little vagabond?”
I mean, it’s obvious she knows who I am—but I mean, who I really am? Who the fuck am I kidding?
I rake my hands through my hair before sighing, trying to decide how much of the truth she can handle, and how much more of this co-habiting I really think I can do before losing my shit around this girl. Fuck, Dreads said three days tops before the intel came in...
And it wasn’t my fault she lived on the outskirts of Daytona. On one of the routes for the only rally I’ll commit to these days after Pops. I don’t like the public. And I like little girls even less. Especially little vagabond girls.
“What, were you waiting on your ma that day? In the park?” Her brown, not blue—not like her fucking sister, Eden—the Ilsa kid I’d met and tried to keep off my cousin from the time she was five, and could ride her bike without training wheels. No, not those eyes, and not that girl. This girl was Eve.
The poor smuck kid. My father and his asshole old lady had already taken off and left that day. The poor thing. I wonder if I’d known—nah, I wouldn’t have done it different. I wouldn’t have done a single thing different.
Her eyelashes are black as mink’s furs when they soak with tears, and I’m sure she’s held ‘em at bay for a while. Especially based on the flow of the waterworks when she starts.
God dammit. Shit. Fuck. Hell.
I wrap my arms around her, and immediately question myself and my motives—wait, they were generally good intentions, right? Before I had her ushered to the Poppa bear chair and wrapped up in my lap? I still question myself when I feel her entire frame tense. Questioning myself then wondering why in the hell I even care if I’m doing something wrong.
But then I decide, fuck it, I don’t care if she likes it. There’s going to be a lot about this she isn’t going to like. “I remember being pissed because we had to pick up one of Pops’ old lady’s kids,” I whisper, telling her in the dimly lit room. “But when I met you, I didn’t know— any time we’ve ever met, I didn’t know who you were…” I explain, trying to comfort her and probably failing miserably.
The silence she responds with is resounding. It speaks louder than any words she could've said. I feel more than hear her breathe as her rib cage expands before slowly recoiling in my arms. And if I didn’t know any better, I’d say she’s counting her breaths in an attempt to process all this. And I understand that. Hell, maybe I’m not as irresistible as I think, nor that memorable.
The thought stills my hands rubbing up and down her back. My fingers barely twitch as I ask, “Wait, shit. You do remember me, right? At the club? How much older are you than Eden?” Shit, maybe I’m not the bad guy I always thought I was. I felt bad when Rox came back with her tail between her legs to nurse me back to health. Leaving Ben. I felt terrible, but Ben said it was all cool. He said he couldn’t stick in town anyway. And she wanted a local brother. Well—age wise, that leaves me and Dreads. Dreads for damn sure don’t want Roxy’s crazy ass. So she’s been my burden to bear.
And now I’m the one who feels like shit every time Ben comes back into town and they stare at each other like star-crossed lovers. For how long? How long have I let this shit eat me alive? How long has this shit pushed me? This need for answers? Too damn long. Way too fucking long. When not only did I not sleep with his child bride, Eden, maybe I didn’t even sleep with an underage girl at all! I scoot up in the recliner we’re in before leaning back and trying to get a better look at her face. Mainly to see if her thought process is nearing frantic like mine, but also because she’s so damn quiet.
When all her damn hair is in my way, I start tucking that shit behind her ears. “Hey? Are you with me? Hello?”
But as soon as her muddy brown eyes clash with mine, I know she’s home. And I know she knows what’s going on. She knows who the fuck I am.
“That’s a lot of damn questions at one time. Is there one in particular you wanted me start with, or…” Her words trail off and I realize, no....she’s home. She’s definitely fucking home. She’s just a cocky smartass with all the answers. I know her kind. Oh, I know her kind.
“Yeah, you can start with the age one.” Her kind has all the answers. Which is good, because that’s what I need. That’s what I’m here for. And if she knew what else I was here for, she wouldn’t be looking at me through those blurry brown eyes like something she wants to trust more than her next breath. “Jesus kid, what’d she do to you?” The words slip out. Honestly they do. I didn’t mean for them to be said. They were there, on the tip of my tongue, and I tried to bite. I tried to bite them off, but instead they just fell out.
The tension caused by my muttered question initiates every muscle beneath her skin under my palms to go taut and rigid. Her eyes, staring into mine, flash with something that reminds me a lot of hurt, and that old dead organ, that chunk of muscle in my chest twitches. “She? She who? My mother? She didn’t do anything you didn’t do, besides, what the hell is that supposed to even mean?”
“Age, Vagabond. Age. What age were you...that night at the club?”
Don’t say under eighteen. Don’t say under—
“Sixteen. And? Why are you here? I answered, now you answer. Quid pro quo, old man,” she spouts before standing. But when she goes to step away, she trips on my boot and goes flying to the middle of the living room floor. Shit. Fuck. Hell.
A split second later, I’m helping her up. But when she’s able to stand on her own, she shoves me away before somewhat wobbling through the back deck doors. “Shit!” she curses, before storming back into the house, past me and towards the kitchen. And a few seconds later, I’m still standing where I tried to help her from the floor when she skirts by me. Once she has her cigarette lit, she pulls in a slow drag and blows out the smoke before starting.
“Yeah, I was there to meet my mom.” When she reaches the little side table, she sets her cigarettes on it and continues. “She ahh...lost me?” Her chuckle is as dark as the sea behind her. And I wonder just how far past the surface I’ll have to scratch to be able to see her depths. I got a lot of answers to dig out
of my little pipsqueak vagabond. But for right now, I’ll hold my tongue and listen. I’ll keep my cards close to the vest, my intentions out of the circumstance, and my heart, my dead heart—no fucking where near her. “I don’t know what it was about that time, why I was taken away that night. But I think she must’ve been between boyfriends. That’s when it usually happened. We lived in Chicago. And that was when Grams…” Her eyes gaze into mine, as every word she speaks is honest and from her heart. “My Grams—she raised me. But she was sick then. Cancer. Anyway, that was the third or fourth time I remember them coming and taking me and Eden. Like, waking up and there being chaos, seeing my mother crying, feeling like shit, again, because I just knew it was something I’d done. Except that time was the first time they just took me. And well, I guess the last time they did too.” I watch, and just as plain as day, just as plain as if she hadn't done it right there in front of me, I watch every one of this girl’s perfectly wielded shields and armor click into place. She’s a goddamn ice queen when she looks back at me, exhaling cigarette smoke. She nods to the wicker table beside the chair she sits in. “You can read it. It’s from my sister. You probably already heard it.” She motions towards the open deck door that heads into the living room and I nod, acknowledging that I did indeed hear her read the letter earlier. And I also heard her thoughts on said letter after, as I sat unmoved in the chair in the living room she walked right by on her way to her room. “I don’t know what happened, really. I know at some point I learned to pick and choose my battles. I picked Eden. Chose to accept that I’d never make my mother proud. But by the time my mom was able to get her shit straight, we were both sixteen. And Eden... I lived with my Grams at that point. And Eden lived, hell—I don’t know. I don’t know where Eden lived.” And there goes that damn dark chuckle of hers, again. “And you thought I was a vagabond.” She laughs before softly smiling.
If I Should Die: A Kimber S. Dawn MC Novel Page 12