by Tara Lynn
But hell, even that was a dream far diminished from what I had once wanted. I loved football, but even if it didn’t work out, it could be a ticket out of here. I had ideas. I learned quick. My father had been a shitty crop duster, but I could fly the world.
Having Liza nearby made it all come rushing back.
The house sat roasting in the sun when I arrived. I parked and unbuckled my new stepsister.
“Let's get you up,” I said softly.
Liza muttered something that sounded like, “You get me up,” and then rolled over into my arms. I'd have been more flattered, but her tailbone was cutting straight into my palm.
“Jesus, girl,” I said, settling her in my grip. She was sound asleep though, and I couldn't bring myself to disturb that face.
I hoisted her out. She weighed nothing compared to what Coach Jacobs had me bench. Her heat burned into me, searing through even the Texas afternoon. I eased her car door shut and got us to the front door.
Luckily, it was unlocked. Loving was a safe town. The MC didn’t mess with you unless you got up in their business. I could take some pride in that, but it was meager now compared to the girl in my arms.
I shut the door behind us and carried Liza up stairs. She pressed against me with each step, chasing every other goddamn thought from my head. One of my palms cupped the small of a back, and for a moment it was like she was my girl again. It was a real shame when I had to deposit her gently on her bed.
Why couldn't we just be this close? I didn't need her as a conquest; she was beyond that. Just holding her gave me a peace beyond all the false ones I'd felt in the years we’d been apart. Maybe just being brother and sister was enough.
Then again, even the mention of her drunk at a frat party had made my vision burn red. And there’d been no mistaking that rush, curving her mouth to mine, holding her body tight to me.
Liza dozed, curled up away from me. The longer I stared, the more I wanted to join her from behind. I gazed around her room instead. I hadn't been inside since we moved in.
The same couple music posters hung on the wall, including a stenographed poster of some blues group which we had discovered together and which I still sometimes blasted parked somewhere out in the middle of the desert. The tackboard still sat over her desk, though the papers had grown from a sparse brushland fill to something like a tropical forest.
The February page of her calendar held a dozen red notes, most of them for AP tests. She'd be done with college before she even got there at this rate. Today's date was marked too – but with a wickedly drawn skull and crossbones.
I chuckled. Who had inspired that more: my dad, me or was it a Tull tag team? Either way, I couldn’t fault her. It still blew my mind her mother would so willingly accept another marriage after the hell her last one had put her through. Then again, my dad was too weak to lift his hand at a job - never mind anything else - so maybe she had learned a little.
I spun over in Liza’s chair. How much had she actually told her mom? The beatings, there was no hiding, but the rest? I’d heard enough to drive me red with rage. There had to be more, but she’d carry that to her grave.
We'd been lying in this very bed when she opened up to me. Her last stepfather was an arrogant, sociopath prick. That much had been clear very early into his career as Loving's police chief. I was a kid back then and I still knew right from wrong better than he did. The MC had struck the same deal with him as the last chief – paid him to look away from their traffic as long as none of it wound up in Loving.
If that deal had lasted, things would have turned out fine. Liza might have never gotten hurt. I might not have spent the last three years in the MC. Maybe I’d even be headed off to school with her now.
Things hadn’t worked out that way.
Her stepfather wanted a slice of the action. He made the entire sheriff’s department an arm of the MC. The Blood Brothers were happy enough to have support, but they made sure he knew his place. He wasn’t one of them.
Eventually, the money wasn’t enough. An ego like his had to find release somewhere. He found it in his wife. And then he found it in his stepdaughter.
Call the MC what you want, but you’d get more than your badge torn off you for doing the things he did to Liza.
“The pain is fine,” Liza murmured into the wall by her bed. I held her, stroked her hair. “It makes me forget about the other things he does.”
My head felt ready to erupt. What kind of guy would stand by while this happened to his girl? But twice I’d tried, and twice it had only made things worse.
“It’ll be ok,” she said. “He’ll get bored. He always does.”
She nestled back into my ribs. They hadn’t healed fully, but damned if I wasn’t going to give this girl every comfort she deserved.
“As long as I have you, I can take it,” she said, turning and tucking into me. “I know you’ll be waiting for me.”
“I’m here.” I held her. “I always will be.”
But my mind was far away.
Liza's back swelled and shrank under steady breaths. I cupper her shoulder. She was safe now. That counted for everything. If the only person left to protect her from was me – well, I’d just have to do what I’d done for years.
I went for the door. The hinges creaked as I opened it, no louder than before, but Liza flipped over on her bed and looked at me with wide blue eyes.
“Rett?” she said. “What happened?”
She looked around. “Oh my god, we're in my room? Why are you in my room?”
“Cause your legs stop working under the influence of a surprisingly little amount of red wine.”
“What did we do?”
“Do? Nothing. We barely just got here.”
She propped up and patted down her dress. She stopped at her thighs.
“Oh.” Her voice dipped down. “Well, thanks. Sorry for being a problem.”
“No problem. Family's gotta look out for each other right?”
I flashed her a wink and walked out, closing the door behind.
“Hey,” her voice eked out through the cracked door. “I’m sorry…about the church, too. I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“Nothing wrong with being crooked once in a while.”
I shut the door, went back to my room and pattered the wood at my desk, trying to plan out the next week. It didn’t come easy.
Because try as I might, I couldn’t focus on anything but Liza hearing that nothing had happened between us.
And sounding disappointed about it.
CHAPTER NINE
Eliza
The wedding was horrible enough, but I had three AP tests the Saturday after. How I managed to even fill in all the bubbles, I didn’t know. A constant timeline ran through my head of where I'd been the week before.
How many legislative bodies were in the Russian government? came right as the ceremony had ended.
3x+5y = 10, solve for x, came right as I was hiding in the chapel.
What is the largest organ in the body?
That was probably when Rett was driving me home.
After I made out with him.
In the church where our parents just got married.
He'd been kind enough to disappear the entire week. Even if he was doing the most heinous things for the MC, I was grateful he was out of sight.
But gratitude sat on a slippery slope. My mind would be thinking of the exact words to express my thanks. Maybe no words, maybe just a smile or a hug. Before I knew, I’d be dreaming of him cupping my face and kissing me back into my bedroom and shutting the door behind.
This time he wouldn't just be sitting by my side in a chair.
God, why did he have to be nice? Rett wore MC colors. He was off committing crime. He was a womanizing jock who couldn’t even spare me a glance in the hallways before.
Solve for x.
Life wasn’t an equation though. The closer I got, the more it seemed like a wrapper. The more I saw Everett lurking inside
that muscular hull: that hot, protective guy who foolish fifteen-year-old me thought she'd spend the rest of her life with.
Up until he left me high and dry when I needed him the most.
I sat watching TV on the couch, trying to bring my numb brain back to life. My sketchpad lay open, and I tried to get it to go into a dreamworld. The only fantasies that came, though, were about Everett. So I turned it to the darker stuff, tried reminding myself why I could not go down the path my body wanted. I reminded myself what had happened last time I trusted him.
I tried to hide my stepfather's abuse for as long as I could bear. I like to think I kept him off me even for as long as I could. I was smart enough to catch him watching me a little bit too long, and I started to sneak around him, staying out of sight.
Then one night, I couldn't.
My mom was weak. My stepfather was the police chief. I only had one place to turn.
Rett.
I begged him to run with me. He knew how to drive. I had distant family out in Louisiana. We could go beg for refuge. It was stupid, and it might not even be enough, but it was the only option I had left.
Instead, Everett confronted my stepfather. Now, it would be an unfair fight – Rett would clobber that ruddy, thick old monster, but then, it was unfair the other way. Rett got a busted rib and a black eye. I felt every inch of his pain as if it had happened to me – though not as much as when my stepfather's attention turned on me for invoking Rett.
I cried on Rett's shoulder that night. He stroked my hair and told me he'd fix it. I begged him not to do anything more.
He listened, and then he turned around and went to the police. The freaking police – already corrupt, and all under my stepfather's rule. Rett had thought he could reach something deep in them.
They listened to him, and then they rode him far out of town and told him to fuck off or next time he wouldn't be able to walk back. I didn't see all this happen, but I know it did, because my stepfather told me that night as he nearly choked me to death in my own bed.
My stepfather was a demon, a force beyond comprehension or control. Now twice, Rett had stirred him up when I asked him not to. I unleashed on Rett the next day, said things that couldn't be taken back.
It wasn't right, but it wasn't nearly as bad as what Rett did in turn.
He abandoned me.
He didn't talk to me at all that weekend. When I saw him in school the next week, he wouldn't even hold eye contact.
“Rett?” I said, whispering by his locker. “Where were you? I called you so many times.”
His eyes lay firmly on the floor. He held the door open a moment, then shut it and walked away without another word.
Whenever he saw me after he ducked his head and moved past me without words. I felt dirty, and I started avoiding him. The one person I could trust, I’d lost. In the midst of my misery, he added a whole new level.
I didn't even know Maria well then. I slipped into a dark pit that I probably had no right climbing out of.
The abuse went back to just the physical, but it was worse than ever. Teachers noticed when I started coming in with angry bruises on my face. Maybe they were building up the courage to do something, but ultimately I had to wait the weeks until my stepfather decided he had plans too big for this town. The MC choppers were a regular sight at my home by then, but the happiest day of my life came when he packed his bags and left on the back of one forever.
I still lay awake at nights, terrified to hear a car door slam and see him walking up our driveway. It took years before I stopped jumping.
Rett was long lost in a new life by then. He had made varsity and spent all his time with his football buddies. The next year he came back, cocky and cocked, and suddenly girls at school were talking about how good he was in bed.
Then one horrible day in junior year, he strutted into school with the most defiling thing I could ever imagine: a prospect jacket from the Blood Brothers MC.
If only he wore that around me more, it'd serve as a reminder.
When I tried imagining though, I saw him in just the jacket and nothing else.
Oh, god, I couldn't stop picturing it now.
I rubbed my eyes as if that was the problem and not my imagination. The TV fluttered on, something cartoony with dumb jokes, but about the level my mind was at right now.
The front door clicked behind me. I flipped around, heart pounding. My mom and her husband were out at some old person's potluck. The only person that it could possibly be stood facing me.
Rett looked tired. His eyes drooped and he stood leaning against the doorway, but even in exhaustion, he looked tall and lean and powerful. He could probably pick me up without breaking a sweat.
He wore jeans, a white shirt, and over it, the black leather cut from the Brothers in Blood, thick and plain in front with just a red teardrop on the right breast.
I felt nothing at the sight of it. All I could pay attention to was Rett’s chest moving laboriously underneath.
“Where were you?” I said without thinking.
“Out of town.”
“Are you ok?”
His eyes finally found mine and sharpened. “Just peachy.”
He headed for the fridge, swaying. The hairs on my back rose. He didn’t look physically hurt. Was he just hungover? He grabbed a beer, came around and dropped on the sofa off to my side. I watched from the edge of my vision as he squinted at the TV.
“It's been a long time since I watched cartoons,” he said eventually, sipping at his beer. “Kids get it so easy.”
“It's animation,” I said. “It's not just for kids. Besides, being an adult seems to suit you just fine.”
“Does it?” he said. “Maybe cause I’ve been one for awhile.”
I couldn’t help myself. “Is that what you were doing?” I said. “Out being an adult for your MC buddies?”
“I wasn’t with the MC.” He patted his jacket. “I just wear this whenever I ride. Think it looks rather good on me.”
My eyes snapped to his thick chest heaving just past my grasp. His eyes tracked mine and I snapped back to the TV. “So where did you disappear to?”
“Oh all sorts of places. Motels. One night in the MC clubhouse. A couple in a tent out in the desert.”
“Not on club business?”
“Nope.”
“Then doing what?”
“Not being here.”
I turned to him. His eyes were firm on me, a challenge almost. “Not being here?” I said. “Why would you not need to be here?”
Rett just looked on. The TV noises dimmed as awareness dawned in me. I knew what he’d say even as his lips moved.
“To stay away from you.”
“I didn’t ask you to do that.”
He leaned in, a wave of leather and oil wafting onto me. “You didn’t have to. We were winding too close. Maybe you didn’t even realize. I just wanted to protect you from making a mistake.”
My heart pounded in my chest, equal parts anger and annoyance. “I’m not an idiot.”
“You’re human. Same as me. I wanted to help us both out.”
His voice had such a deep hue, that it dragged on me. “My hero.”
“I never said I was.”
But that just made me flare hotter. “I didn’t need you to stay away! I know how to handle myself.”
Rett straightened. “I’m not going to wait till mistakes are made. I see something that needs doing, I do it.”
And suddenly, I wasn’t sitting on this couch facing him. I was three years back aching for him to talk to me, to tell me why we couldn’t even face each other anymore. The words that should have come out long ago bubbled to my mouth: “So it’s just like before, huh? Abandoning me to protect me?”
His face crossed with rage, and then like thunder cracking, it vanished. He looked down. “That ain’t the same.”
“You abandoned me.” The words hung in the air. “I needed you, and then you went away. You want to be honest? Admit th
at.”
“You told me to stay away.” His voice had no core to it.
“Oh my god, don’t lie. I wanted you to stay away from anyone else. You know I didn’t mean me. I needed you, Rett. I had no one but you.”
There was a long pause. “You had your mother.”
“Oh yeah, and you suddenly decided I was better off in her feeble hands?”
His brow was crossed, but he didn’t look up. “You’re right, Liza. It’s the same as now. I went away to protect you from me.”