by Tracey Ward
I’m watching Birchart chat up the group of girls at the bar when Haskins reappears. I smile at him, feeling awkward and wondering what the hell I’m going to talk about with this silent bastard while we wait for Jax to get back.
“Can I get you another drink, Wren?” he asks.
My jaw drops in shock. He really can speak!
He smirks down at me and my traumatized expression. “Jax told me you weren’t convinced I know how to talk.”
I laugh, smoothing my expression. “I had my doubts, but holy shit, you can. And beautifully.”
His voice is ridiculously low, deep in a guttural kind of way that sounds husky without reason. It’s the kind of voice you expect from an actor or a senator charming the pants off the nation, not a tall, gangly guy eternally wearing cargo shorts and a Star Wars T-shirt.
“Drink?” he repeats.
“Yes, please. That’d be great.”
He heads to the bar and I carefully clear the table of the empties and half-drunk bottles littering it. Sanchez barely touched his last one and I’m tempted to steal it, but we’re not exactly that close. I’m not down with putting my mouth places where his has recently been.
Haskins sits down across from me, putting as much distance between us as possible, and sets a sweating bottle of beer in front of me. Top still on.
I look up to find him watching me, grinning faintly.
“You remember from Munich,” I say.
“I do. It’s smart. Better safe than Birchart.”
I laugh, popping the top. “I wouldn’t have taken a beer from him, cap on or off.”
“So, how’s my English? Holding up?”
“Where are you from?”
“Washington. Olympia.”
I sit up straighter, pointing to my chest excitedly. “Pocatello, Idaho!”
Another small grin. “I know. Jax asked me if it was a real place.”
“No faith,” I lament dramatically. “So what’s your situation, Haskins?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Your situation. Work, girls, family—all of it.”
“That would take a long time to answer.”
“Where have I got to be? I’ve got you talking, I want to hear what you have to say.”
He chuckles and takes a sip of his beer slowly. I watch him and notice how steady he is, but I wonder if that really says much about his sobriety. When he walked up to the bar I noticed a list, a little drifting. Not swaying, just tilting, like a sailboat at sea. He’s obviously not a hundred percent, and that’s working to my benefit because the guy is actually speaking to me and I fully believe booze is to thank.
“I’m a mechanic, just like everyone else in the shop,” he answers.
“Do you come from a military family?”
“My dad was Air Force for six years. He got his degree and quit.”
“Are you doing any school?”
“Yes.”
He doesn’t elaborate and it makes me smile slightly. “What about girls?”
“What about them?”
“Are you dating anyone?”
“No.”
“Do you like girls?”
“Some of them.”
“Only some?”
“Do you like all guys?”
“No, okay, I see your point.” I pause, eyeing him. “Do you like all guys?”
He smirks. “I’m not gay.”
“Okay. I was just asking.”
“No, you didn’t ask, not directly.”
“I’ll be more direct next time.”
“Do you know why I’m not dating anyone?” he asks suddenly.
“Uh, no. I don’t know. Why?”
He gestures between the two of us. “Because I’m not very good at this.”
“At talking?”
“At talking to women. Do you know what I am good at?”
“Mahjong?”
He smiles. “Jax told you that, didn’t he?”
“Yeah. I have no idea what it is.”
“It’s a game, but no, that’s not what I was going to say.”
“Lay it on me. What are you good at?”
“Magic.”
I blink once, hoping I didn’t hear that right. “Magic?”
“Yes.”
“Like Magic the Gathering? The card game?”
“No.”
I breathe out a sigh of relief. “Oh, thank God. ’Cause that shit is nerdy.”
“Stage magic.”
I frown. “And so is that. Oh, man.”
“That reaction is why I don’t date. Women, it is staggering to discover, do not enjoy magic tricks.”
“But you’re good at it?”
He nods once. “Very.”
“Show me.”
“No.”
“Yes! I want to see a magic trick. Can you do one here? Do you need props?”
“I have…no.”
I eye him suspiciously. “You were going to say you have some stuff with you, weren’t you?”
“Women also are not impressed with men who carry magic paraphernalia in their pockets.”
“What is it? Is it a deck of trick cards? A flash bang? Is it a rabbit?!”
“No.”
“Can you pull a quarter from behind my ear?”
“Yes, and so can my four-year-old niece. Wouldn’t it be more impressive if I could pull a quarter from your wallet?”
“You mean rob me?’
He laughs. “Kind of. You really want to see something?”
“I so fucking do, Haskins. Yes.” I scoot around the booth toward the back where the bench meets in the dip of a U shape. I motion for him to meet me there. “Come on. Amaze me.”
He moves reluctantly, but soon we’re sitting face to face. I want to be able to see what he’s doing without him hiding things under the table. He opens one of the pockets of his shorts and pulls out a deck of red-backed playing cards.
“You said you didn’t have cards,” I accuse.
He grins, smacking them hard against the table to straighten them. “You asked if I had trick cards. I don’t.”
“Oh, all right. I see,” I chuckle, settling in to face him. “First I thought you couldn’t speak, but it turns out you’re a semantics wizard. I’ll remember that.”
“What you should do is watch my hands.”
“So I can catch how you do the trick?”
“No,” he laughs. “You won’t catch me.”
“Bring it on, pal.”
Dude brings it. He’s good. He blows my mind three separate times with the same trick and not even for one second can I imagine figuring out how he did it. His hands are fast and sure, moving too quickly for me to understand what’s really happening. I laugh every time he gets me and he smiles with pride when I continually demand he do it again. Eventually he moves on to a new trick, then another, and I watch him intently as he does each one. He fumbles the cards once, swearing as he shakes out his hand and blames the alcohol, but otherwise he’s flawless. And it’s not nerdy. It’s actually pretty damn impressive.
I tell him so as he shuffles the cards again, obliging when I beg him to do the flourished shuffle where the cards fly across the air from one hand to the other. He smiles shyly at my compliment, smacks the cards once against the table, makes some blindingly fast move with his arms that I can’t follow, and suddenly the cards are gone. In their place in his hand is a small coin that he offers to me on his palm.
I pick it up and examine it, confused. It’s a quarter. “I don’t get it.”
He’s smiling so broadly, so proudly, that it’s quivering. “Check your purse.”
I grab my purse from where it sits between us and dive my hand inside. It immediately connects with something foreign. I shout when I realize what it is. “The cards!” I pull them out and hold them up accusingly. “How the fuck did you do that?!”
“Magic.”
“Liar,” I laugh. “Seriously, how did I not see you do that?”
“Magic.”
I shove his chest, still laughing. “Stop it. Haskins, seriously, you’re good. I’m not so sure women wouldn’t like your kind of magic. Wait, where did the quarter come from?”
His eyes sparkle. “Where do you think it came from?”
“You lifted it from my purse?!”
He shrugs.
“When?”
Shrug.
I smile, rolling the quarter in my hand and watching him. “Impressive, sir.”
He blushes, taking a drink from his beer. “Thank you.”
“Don’t be so afraid of talking to girls, okay?” I tell him seriously, feeling a pang in my heart over this sweet, funny, odd guy. “You’re a lot of fun, and that goes a long way with women. But we can’t know how great you are until you tell us.”
He nods, barely meeting my eyes. “I’ll remember that.”
“I hope so.”
Finally his eyes land on mine again and I smile at him, grateful that I got this time to get to know him. I can see why Jax likes him so much. He’s a good hang, a good friend. He’s funny. He’s smart. He’s talented.
He’s kissing me.
It happens so quickly I can’t understand it. It’s like his magic tricks. It’s full of misdirection as he sets down his beer bottle roughly, nearly knocking it over. I reach for it to catch it, leaning forward, and then my face is in his hands and his lips are on mine and I’m stunned into silent stillness the way I was when he mysteriously picked my card from the deck.
Haskins kisses me softly, his lips lingering against mine as though they’re stunned as well, too afraid to move. I push against his shoulders hard, shouting in protest against his lips. He lets me go immediately and falls back against the booth, his eyes frantically searching my face. He looks as shocked as I feel.
“What are you doing?” I demand breathlessly.
“I’m sorry,” His face crumbles in doubt and disgust. “I’m so sorry.”
I don’t know what to say. I can’t get my mind around what just happened, so instead of replying I grab my purse and bolt from the booth. I jostle the table as I go, swiping my purse across the surface and accidentally sending his cards flying to the floor in a scattered flurry of white and red.
I head out of the bar, bursting past a shouting Birchart, and out into the air.
I run smack into Jax.
“Whoa, you okay?” he asks. He puts his hands under my elbows to steady me. “Are you going to be sick?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Good, ’cause I just watched Sanchez puke in a parking lot and I’m not eager for a rerun.” I don’t smile or laugh and his eyes narrow in concern. “You sure you’re okay?”
“I want to leave.”
“Already?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. I told you, I was good staying in with you tonight. Let’s go say goodbye to the guys and we’ll head out.”
I step to the side of him, pulling away from the door. “I’ll wait here.”
“You already said goodbye?”
“Kind of, yeah.”
The door flies open and Haskins comes stumbling out. His face is distraught and when he sees Jax, he freezes. His eyes flash to mine for one second, then back to Jax, and his shoulders sag.
“I’m so sorry, man,” he says brokenly.
“For what?”
Haskins looks at me again and I guess he’s trying to gauge whether or not I told Jax yet. I stare back blankly.
His eyes find Jax’s and he squares his shoulders. “I kissed her.”
“Kissed who?” Jax asks.
“Wren. In the bar. I fucked up, I’m sorry. I’ve had too much to drink and I didn’t… I didn’t think. I just acted on an impulse and… I fucked up.”
Jax looks to me, trying to understand. The look on my face must confirm it because his body goes rigid. He nods his head, his mouth pinched together in a thin line. His nostrils flare as he breathes in and out angrily. Then he punches Haskins. He throws his right fist straight into his friend’s face and I jump, gasping and taking a step back.
I don’t cry out, though. I don’t run to intervene the way girls always do in the movies, begging the guys to stop fighting and foolishly thinking it has something to do with them. I know that this isn’t about me. What Haskins did has everything to do with him, not me. And what Jax is doing now—it’s because his friend betrayed him. So I stand silently by and watch them work it out, my heart aching for both of them. For a friendship fractured and bleeding.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Jax asks him, shaking his head and his hand. He’s only hit him once, but it landed on Haskins’s cheekbone and it had to hurt. I can see the dark shine of blood etched across Haskins’s face where Jax has cut his cheek open with his fist.
Haskins breathes roughly. “I don’t know. I told you, I don’t know.”
“That’s not an answer! I deserve an answer! She deserves an answer!”
“I don’t have one.”
Jax shifts on his feet, his eyes wild, but he doesn’t make a move toward him. Instead he shakes his head again, this time in disgust, and he turns his back on the other man.
I turn with him and his hand falls with surprising gentleness on the small of my back, leading me to the car without a word.
As we drive away, leaving his friend shaded in the red glow of the taillights, I think to myself that I finally heard Haskins speak tonight.
And I wish he’d kept his damn mouth shut.
Chapter Thirty-Two
“Jax, your hand is bleeding.”
“I know.”
I wring my own hands, pulling on my fingers roughly. Nervously.
“Maybe we should pull over.”
“My hand is fine.”
My leg is twitching. The world is racing by us as his engine growls.
“You’re angry. You shouldn’t be driving angry.”
“It’s better than staying back there and beating his ass.”
A lamppost whizzes by, illuminating the car sharply. I wince. I can’t contain it.
“Jax, you’re scaring me.”
He looks at me with a frown. “Babe, you don’t have to be scared of me. I hit Haskins, yeah, but I’d never—”
“Look at the road!” I shout, panicked.
His head jerks forward and he immediately hits the brakes, slowing us down. “Fuck, Wren, I’m so sorry! I forgot. Fuck!”
He pulls over to the side of the road and throws the car into park. He leaves the engine running as he leans back against the seat, his uninjured hand covering his eyes.
“I can’t believe I was doing that to you,” he whispers. “I’m so fucking sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I reply weakly, my breath trapped in my screaming lungs.
“I wasn’t thinking. I just wanted to get away from there because I wanted to… I wanted to keep hitting him.”
“I’m glad you stopped.”
“Was it…What exactly did he do?”
“It was just one kiss, Jax,” I answer calmly. “It was so fast, so short. It was barely anything. I pushed him away the second it happened and he felt like shit afterwards.” I lower my head to look at my hands in the dark. The skin is red and angry from my wringing. “We both did.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Wren.”
I laugh unhappily. “You don’t even know why it happened.”
“Why’d it happen?”
“I don’t know.”
It’s Jax’s turn to laugh, but he doesn’t sound like he feels it any more than I did. “No one knows, huh?”
“We were just talking, he showed me his magic tricks, and he said he’s bad with women—”
“Really fucking bad,” Jax growls.
I sigh. “I was just talking to him. I don’t even think I was giving him mixed signals. I didn’t intend to. I was being nice to him, talking to him. That’s all. I—I don’t think he meant to do it. He was drunk. It just happened. He apologize
d immediately.”
“Did you slap him?”
“No.”
“You should have slapped him.”
“Then we’d both feel guilty for hitting him.”
He looks at me sharply. “I don’t feel bad.”
“Not even a little?”
He sits up in his seat, putting the car into drive and cautiously pulling us back onto the road. “Not even a little.”
I wash his hand in the sink in the bathroom back at the hotel and check out the size of the cut across his knuckles. It’s not bad. Each one is scraped, but not deeply. Not wide. The bleeding stops almost immediately and Jax insists he’ll just leave it to scab over. He doesn’t want to bandage it and that’s okay because I don’t have any bandages.
“Thank you,” he says quietly.
I look up from his hand to find him watching me gently dab it dry after cleaning it. His focus is trained on my fingers, on the white towel blotted with red, and his face is carefully blank.
“You’re welcome. I can’t do much but clean it.”
“Not for my hand.”
“What for, then?”
His eyes drag to my face, sluggish and tired. “For being someone I can trust.”
I feel light with relief over a worry I wasn’t aware I was carrying. “You’re welcome. I’m glad you trust me.”
“Not for one second did I wonder if you’d done or said something to make him think it was okay to kiss you. The idea of it… it doesn’t make sense. You may as well tell me the sky is red for all I’d understand it.”
“I didn’t, I swear to you.”
“You don’t have to because I know. I don’t wonder, I don’t think—I know. Because I know you.”
“And I know you,” I tell him, holding his eye. “And I know you regret hitting him.”
He grimaces faintly. “Maybe. Not really. I regret that he put himself in a position where I wanted to hit him.”
“Can you still be friends with him?”
“Not today.”
“But someday?”
He sighs, taking back his hand and heading out to the bedroom. “Someday, yeah. Probably.”
“You’re gonna try, right?”
He turns to me, confusion in his eyes. “Why do you care so much?”