“Wait,” I whispered, wanting to – no, needing to – hear her response.
“That’s a long answer.” She was quiet so long after the question that I wasn’t sure she would continue, but then she did. “After the incident with the whores the night of the announcement I never saw him with another woman. That’s not to say he wasn’t with any, because I’m sure the guys would have openly given him more hell about having to wait for me if he wasn’t. He didn’t do it in front of me though. I think maybe you were right, and my dad reamed his ass for it the first time. It’s all speculation on my part though.” Jesus, I felt a stab in my chest at that. Had she really thought that I was seeing people, fucking women, behind her back? She thought I was just doing it discreetly? Fuck! How had I not known and set her straight on that from the start? She grew quiet again and I wondered what was going on that we couldn’t see. I really needed to see her.
“What happened?” I recognized VP’s voice as she spoke, and I anxiously awaited that answer myself. Maybe, we would finally find out what Marisol had done, exactly to send her running.
“Ah hell,” she sputtered out, sounding damn near tortured. “During that seven months before I took off, he and I were kind of thrown into close proximity a lot. Club parties, dinners at my house that my dad brought him to, and I don’t know... I guess it was all being engineered to wear me down, but we actually talked, joked, and got along most of the time. The crush I had on him was back, for sure, and hell, I even found myself ready to just be with him. I’d decided to enroll in WVU, and stay close to home and try.”
At least now I knew she’d been serious about that for a time anyway. It hadn’t been her plan to leave all along. My anxiety quelled a little with that thought, until she spoke again.
“Two weeks before I turned 18 my best friend, Marisol, called me. She was practically panting on the phone with excitement. She wanted to come over to the house to hang out, because she had some big news to share.”
Christ, the pain in my chest was substantial now. I had a feeling I knew what she was going to say, and it only made me wish I could go back in time and kill that bitch friend of her when we first confronted her after Jamie left.
“Like me, she had been a virgin at that point.” My heart stopped with those words. I had suspected maybe she was, but she’d been smokin’ hot. I couldn’t be sure that some sneaky bastard hadn’t talked her out of her pants at some point when her daddy was too busy paying attention to the club whores. Her voice drew me out of my thoughts before I could dwell on that though. “… about her latest crush deflowering her.” Damn, I’d missed something in there.
“She hadn’t really dated seriously, because she had plans to go away to college, and didn’t want to deal with feelings or long distance stuff.” Jamie paused a moment and I sat there with my heart in my throat, choking on the damn thing. “When she got to the house she came bouncing in with this huge grin plastered to her face.” Jamie launched into the part of the tale that eventually took seven years from all of us. This was the thing she believed that took my love from me. A heavy hand came down on my shoulder, and I realized for the first time that I was vibrating with the pent up tension I was holding in.
I listened to her telling her friend about Marisol’s betrayal. About how she thought I’d betrayed her. I had been wondering why she would just believe her friend telling her she’d seen me with someone else. This made sense though. Why would she question her best friend when she was supposedly coming clean to her? I could almost see Jamie’s thought process as she heard her friend callously tell her about how we’d supposedly fucked.
I didn’t even realize I’d growled out a low, painful sound until another hand clamped down on my other shoulder. They were holding me in place, keeping me from marching in there and setting the record straight.
“Just wait,” Ghost whispered.
“We know it’s not true. She’ll find out too,” Quick stated quietly. “Just, not like this.”
“Shit,” Tash’s voice spat out. “No wonder I had to convince you to be my friend when we first met.”
“Aw man, what the hell kind of bitch does that? Didn’t she know how you felt about him?”
“She knew.” Jamie told them. I wished in that moment that she would expound on exactly what she’d felt, because back then she hadn’t been too forthcoming, and I’d had my own doubts about our situation despite the fact that I was going to marry the girl. “I had just been discussing it with her the week before. I was sure I didn’t want to go away to college with her like we’d once planned. I told her I had already enrolled in WVU since it was close to Cedar Falls, because the idea of staying with Sweet had grown on me over time.”
“Ah, I think I see where this going,” another woman, whose voice I didn’t recognize, piped up. “Are you sure she wasn’t making it up?”
“Looking back, I should have seen what she was all about too, but at the time, I was too hurt.” There was a pause before continued. “She went on about how he’d gone down on her, fingered her, how sweetly he’d taken his time with making sure not to hurt her too bad when he took her cherry.”
“So, she told you all about her night of being deflowered by the guy she knew you loved?” A tiny little voice asked.
I waited to hear if she would admit to that last thing. I didn’t know if she shook her head, nodded, or what, but I seemed to be missing an acknowledgment or denial when she started speaking again. “Did I mention she was horribly descriptive? But what clenched it for me was her description of his apartment. She’d never been there before, that I knew of, and she even described his bedroom and guest bedroom. That was where they apparently did the deed so that they wouldn’t stain anything in his room with her blood.” I was about to go off the rails. That girl had never been in my apartment. If I ever found out who told her those details I’d fuckin’ kill them.
Jamie laughed then, but it was more a forced choking sound that didn’t come out quite right. “The really sad thing was, I was kind of naïve about sex then. I mean, I was still a virgin, but I didn’t know a whole hell of lot about the mechanics involved either. My best girlfriend was a virgin too up until then, and Quickshot never spoke to me about sex. Not ever. I brought it up with him once, he turned beat red, and made me promise to never, ever again speak to him about such things.” The girls all laughed at that. “So, yeah, even though I’d accidentally seen a club whore or two with a cock in their mouth, I honestly had no clue men would return the favor, or that it would feel incredible when they did.” Ghost chuckled lightly behind me while Quick tried to stifle a groan. The girls in the loft all laughed about that, helping to break some of the tension.
“I think that’s cool considering the environment you grew up in,” one of the women mentioned.
“My mom kept me pretty sheltered from the club stuff until she died. I was 14 when she was in the accident, so, up until then I never went to the clubhouse.” That tidbit was news to me. When I’d seen her for the first time at 16, she seemed so at home there. “Not beyond the parking lot anyway,” she continued on. “Mom had told my dad that as long as they had club whores running around there her little girl wasn’t stepping foot inside to learn how to debase herself.” I smiled at the thought, and silently sent a thank you out to the spirit of the woman I’d never known for protecting a young Jamie from the harsh realities of club life.
“Smart cookie, your mom.” The redhead told her.
“Yeah she was. Man, if she could have come back to life and seen the way my dad paraded those same whores through her house after she died, I honestly think she would have killed him herself. Love of her life, or not.” A choked sound came from behind me and the hand that had been on my left shoulder this whole time disengaged to find a new home on Ghost’s as he ducked his own head in shame. I almost wished we’d left then because the next words out of Jamie’s mouth had to spear him through the heart.
“I don’t think I can ever forgive him for doing that.
I really don’t. He let those bitches into our home. Let them take up space in places that belonged to my mother, who hated them. He let them defile everything in our home that held her memory. First, it was the pictures. I managed to save one photo album, and I hid it at Marisol’s house.” I heard a hiccupped sob come from Jamie then, and it took everything inside me not to charge in there and demand to hold her. “I lost that too when…” She couldn’t finish her thought, but I knew. She lost it when Marisol lied about being with me. So, I would be to blame for her losing the last memories of her mother.
“So much…” she choked out. “The three of them took so much from me.”
I was on my feet and moving into the loft then. I wanted to defend myself, to comfort her, to yell at her for believing such horrible lies about me. Nothing came out of my mouth though as I listened to her tell her friends about how I definitely knew Marisol was her best friend. The dumb bitch that had allowed us up here finally ruined it all by clearing her throat and catching the attention of the five women seated around the loft.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t think…” Jesa started as I continued to just stand there in shock, unable to speak beyond all my own heartache in that moment.
Ghost finally managed to crack the emotional standoff. He held up the photo album. The one she’d just been talking about losing moments ago. “I forgot to give this to you earlier, since we were made to leave the bikes outside. Marisol’s mother brought it to me a few years ago when she cleaned out Mare’s room after she moved out.” The redhead stepped forward and took the book from Ghost when it became obvious Jamie wasn’t going to. “Jamie…” Ghost choked out her name, so full of emotion nothing came with it. She turned and walked away, down a hall I hadn’t noticed before. We finally heard the catch of a door latch and the snick of a lock settling into place. “FUCK!” Ghost shouted into the air causing the women to jump.
“Well, I hope you all enjoyed story time,” Tash snapped at us before pointing to Jesa. “You’re going with Keys and Legs to have a little discussion.” She turned her attention back to us, to me, and narrowed her eyes then. “The three of you are leaving.”
That’s exactly what we did. Not a single one of us said a word until we were back at the Aces High Clubhouse. Ghost immediately slammed his way in the door while Quickshot and I hung back in the parking lot.
“I wish I knew who told that bitch what my fucking apartment looked like,” I gritted out through my teeth. Quickshot gave me a funny look then. “What? Please, tell me it wasn’t you!” I was damn near hysterically shouting.
“Nah man, calm down. I saw her at your apartment once though.”
“What the fuck? Like hell you did! I never let her into my apartment. I didn’t fuckin’ like the girl. She was always trying to convince Jamie I was no good, all the while giving me winks and smiles behind Jamie’s back.”
“We got drunk at The Hawk’s Nest, and came back to your place. I couldn’t stay in the guest room, because that fuck-face prospect, Manic, was in there fucking some chick. Remember?”
“Manic needed a place to stay for a couple nights, I remember giving him a key, but not him fucking anyone in there. So?” As soon as the words left my mouth it hit me. “You’re fuckin’ kiddin’ me?”
“Nah, I saw her when she did the walk of shame in the morning. I blasted Manic about using the bedroom. He joked with me later that it’s a good thing he did her in there instead of the couch, because she bled all over the sheets.”
“Fuck my life. So, Marisol told the truth about losing it at my place. She just conveniently substituted me for Manic in her story when she told Jamie. No wonder Jamie said it was so damn convincing.” I threw my helmet across the lot and let out a primal fucking scream I didn’t know I had in me anymore.
“I want to kill that cunt!” I finally shouted into the wind when I got myself back under control a little.
“I know man. You and me both. She better be glad we’re here and not back in Cedar Falls right now.”
“Keeping her from college wasn’t enough. Nothing will ever make up for what she fucking caused. Jamie was with me. She was working on getting right with Ghost. Then, this cunt comes along and cuts open those wounds again, widens them, and leaves them to fester for seven fuckin’ years? How do any of us come back from that?”
“I don’t know, man. This whole situation is fucked. I feel for Jamie and what she went through, what she believed happened. But I’m still so angry with her too. Hurt by her, because she didn’t just walk away from the people she thought hurt her. She left me. I’ve loved that girl like a sister all my life. This shit kills me, especially since I’m so conflicted. I can’t imagine how it is for you, and for Ghost. Although, I have no sympathy for that fucker. He laid the groundwork for all this shit to happen with the way he behaved after his wife died.”
“He only ever talked about her to me once. That day he asked if I’d claim Jamie. I could tell he loved her, but I thought maybe he was one of the dirt bags that loved her when it was convenient, and forgot she existed when she was out of sight.”
“Nah, man. Ghost loved that woman something fierce. She gave up a fancy, rich life for him too. He treated her like the queen she was and Jamie like a damn princess. When she died, he did too. I think the thing with the whores was his anger spilling over. He was so mad at his wife for dying, so he did the only thing he could think of to piss off her spirit.”
“The whores?” I questioned. He nodded. “But what about Jamie?”
“He wasn’t thinking about Jamie in his grief, at all, man. Hell, I even talked to my old man about it back then. First time I ever thought seriously about not becoming an Aces High member. Why do you think you got tapped to take my dad’s place, and not me? I couldn’t be Ghost’s right hand man and not feel like I was betraying Jamie.”
“Thanks,” I muttered, feeling even more like shit than before.
“It was okay for you. You didn’t know about the before. You were there seeing the fallout and thinking it was the norm, man. I had a lifetime worth of memories on my conscience.” We were quiet for a while before he spoke again. “Can I ask you something?”
“Why the hell not?”
“What have you been waiting for all this time?”
“What do you mean?”
“I know you hook up with girls, at least in the last couple years anyway, but why haven’t you moved on and picked an old lady yet? Alice or Becca would be all over that. Hell, I was under the impression that Becca was going to get tapped before you headed down here to help out man.” He was talking about the only two women I’d ever bothered hooking up with more than once. He’d even noticed it took me years to get to the point where I could stomach the random hook ups without feeling like I was betraying Jamie, even though she’d left me. Although, I was pretty sure he didn’t understand the reasoning went that deep.
“There’s only one woman who could have held that spot, man. She left. No need to try that shit again.” I sighed deeply then. “Becca did talk to me about it before I left to head out to South Carolina and Florida on those back to back runs. I told her when I got back I would announce shit, because I was just tired of having no one. The minute I stepped away from her though, she was forgettable. There was this sick feeling that bubbled up in my stomach at the thought of claiming her and it wouldn’t go away.” I shook my head. “I knew I couldn’t settle. I couldn’t go through with it no matter how tired I was of hookups. So, I stayed gone on runs, texted her I was done, and ended up here in Georgia.”
“Damn,” was his only response.
“Damn, indeed.”
JoJo
S.H.E. Series – Book 2
Available 4-18-2019!
I just want a place to call my own, friends I fit in with, and the job I love to remain mine. The only problem with getting what I want happens to be that I wasn’t born equipped with a penis. Men don’t want me working on their cars or bikes simply because I have breasts instead. Never mind t
hat I’m the best damn mechanic in a 200-mile radius.
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