Everybody Falls (36 page)

"I'm Stella," she said and held a hand out between us. "Are you Lacey?"

I stared at it, just stood and stared at her hand not having a clue of what to do, of how to move.

My feet did, though. I let them carry me to my car and back to my small place over the Bakery, so heart-blown I was completely numb.

Chapter 30

It had taken more than a few weeks, yet I thought I was finally getting to normal. Or, at least, my new kind of normal anyway.

I don't remember much of the first couple of weeks after being tossed out by Jack. Which is how I thought of the end of us. Him pushing me off his bed before hurling the hand-grenades of words that destroyed whatever had been my heart at the time.

His actions and words had been on an endless loop in my head, superseding all other words and thoughts. Thoughts that should've been about big things, like my business. Or even small things, like personal hygiene.

Sarge slept on small twin bed in the spare bedroom and tried to keep things going at the Bakery. For that, he'll always have my gratitude. But, the other stuff? The lectures, the trying to shove food down my throat with the claims of getting me back to 'normal'?

I still hate to think about it.

Those close to me were worried and made no bones about it.

I didn't eat. And sleep was a long, by-gone, memory.

Mostly I cried.

I cried a lot.

In fact, I don't think I'd be putting too fine a point on it to say that crying actually became my hobby.

Ricki came by. Ricki came by a lot to my way of thinking. Too much.

Once she'd sprayed my bed, emptying one of my perfume bottles one spritz at a time, telling me that she loved the smell of perfume in the morning. I think she was trying to sound like that actor in that war movie I hated which every guy I'd ever dated made me watch. She said the odor in the room reminded her of, and I quote, "An old rocker's ass crack."

Yeah, it made me cringe, too.

That wasn't half as bad as when she dragged me, fully clothed into the shower and screamed at me until the hot water was gone.

As I understand it, the audience downstairs had heard her words. It would've been hard not to since Ricki never cared much for other people's opinions. She doesn't her pull her punches when she talks to anyone, much less, screams.

It took my dear, darling grandpop to set me straight and even then the turnaround didn't come overnight.

"Oh, my sweet Baby Girl," he'd murmured at one point, holding me so tightly on Grandma Lilly's old sofa. "He's just not worth this. You're killing yourself with all this grief. You've got to let this go, Lace. Let him go, my darling."

And then he told me the stories, detailed stories about him and Lilly. The loving, the lying, the way they'd came together and parted again and again for so many years.

Just as I'd found my feet, my equilibrium, the flowers started arriving.

At first it was only a delivery every day, then it escalated. I'd declined them all, of course. Each and every one of them. Still, though, Louis from Auburn's Florist would make the effort. Louis told me that he'd taken the first few home to his girl but, when he was delivering three times a day, he'd just save them up and take them down to the senior center or Sutter-Auburn Hospital to brighten their day.

And every card with every bouquet held only four words.

'I'm so sorry, Lace.'

Yeah, well. I was, too. Except I was only regretting scraping his sorry ass off the asphalt.

I should've just let him be when he bit it.

Should've just called 9-1-1 and had them deal with his sorry shit.

I heard about him, about Jack, in overheard conversations. He was still practicing with the guys only now they'd moved the practices to mornings because he was so fucked up by afternoon that he could barely hold his guitar or find the keys on the electronic keyboard.

Ricki kept coming by to continue with 'Lacey Watch', but she tried to assure me that it was just to visit. Since she was still wound tightly to Turner, I knew different and kept myself to myself. She and Sarge had a lot to whisper about whenever she came into the Bakery. Every damn time she left, she hugged me just a little too long for me to even begin to consider it a casual visit.

The paparazzi had packed up and gone when I'd been in my crying stage, which was good. I'd had enough of them to last me a lifetime. Living under a microscope was awful, just as Jack had warned.

But, I didn't use that name in my head.

Every time I thought about him, every time my heart cried out for him, I tried to use the word 'asshole' instead of his name. I was hoping it would grab hold but it never did. Even when I woke myself, straight in the middle of a midnight orgasm, his name was on my lips coming up from a place where I used to have a heart.

That particular day, Ricks had come by to say 'hey' just as I was closing the store, making my way back to the kitchen to do the container thing on whatever magic Sarge had created in his alone time in the kitchen.

I didn't do that kind of stuff anymore.

You know, the creating magic thingie.

I baked and I decorated, because truthfully? The magic was gone for me.

We chit-chatted as I moved, storing and bagging the stuff for the Shelter before Ricki shifted to Sarge as she pulled one of her rag sheets from her purse.

"Can you believe it?" I heard her whisper as she leaned against him.

"Yeah, girl. It's real. I saw him Sunday and he's doing better. Even I've gotta admit, this is something," I heard my grandpop rumble. He'd taken the time when I was first starting to come back to life to let me know that Jack had quit the farm and gone back to So Cal.

"What?" I asked, curiosity overcoming my no-need-to-know attitude. It had been a couple of months and I already knew who they were talking about. Who they
always
talked about.

I saw his frosted blue eyes and her deep sea-green ones turn to me as I stood holding the swinging half-doors to the kitchen open.

"Jax. His new tattoo," Ricki said cautiously, shooting her eyes to Sarge as she spoke. Almost like she was looking for approval. Or for backup, I wasn't sure which.

She held the newspaper out to me which had a half-page picture of Jack, caught from the waistband of his jeans up, shirtless. There, and in the small inset picture, was a tattooed heart on his previously un-inked chest. A chest I'd always found amazing in its maleness, unblemished by the needle.

The heart was in the shape, which held the marks, of the lace that Grandma Lilly had commissioned to have done when she'd taken her inheritance and began the store.

The lace echoing our label for the Bakery.

My name in symbol.

Right over his stupid, asshole of an ass-hat, heart.

"He checked himself back into rehab, Lace," Sarge growled. "He's trying, Baby Girl."

I looked at that picture for a long time. A long, damn, time.

"Wonder how Stella likes it?" I asked aloud as my eyes stayed glued to the paper.

"Stella Nixon?" Ricki shot back. "Isn't she the one that had been dealing him the drugs?"

"The one that Boots turned in, you mean," Sarge retorted with a snort. "Heard her ass was in jail after Boots called when he caught her sneaking around Jax a couple of months back."

"Good," I said finally, handing the paper back to Ricki with a snap. "How're we coming with the cake-pops?"

Two weeks later, I received four, front-row tickets with a backstage pass for the guys' concert that was scheduled as the finale for the Sacramento Music Festival over Memorial Day weekend. It was something that happened in Old Town Sac every year, the streets teaming with people and the air filled with every type of music you could imagine. And it was always fun.

But, I wasn't going to make it this year.

If I was truthful, I didn't even play the iPod in the store anymore. Music had kind of lost its appeal, and I know you can figure out why.

I ended up giving my mom two of the tickets with a promise that she wouldn't come around me again. She didn't really get it until I waved the paperwork regarding my restraining order in her face. She backed her ass up really quick then, I can tell you.

Sarge had said that she'd gotten busted again and was probably on her way to jail anyway for carrying a firearm and other things that she'd chosen to do which broke her parole.

The other two tickets and the backstage pass I sold on an auction website and made quite a lot of money. I donated the money to Sutter-Auburn Hospice. Miss Ida had been so good to Edie and I felt like the money, which was Jack's money anyway, should go to them.

But, I've got to tell you, I cried really hard when the auction was done.

And, then cried again, when I purchased my own ticket and found myself in the cheap seats, in the nose bleed section, of Sleep Town's auditorium for the concert. Mine was almost the only seat available in the huge space.

*.*.*.*.*

"How's she doing, Ricks?" Turner asked with a grumble. His girl was still spread over him, his cock still hard and embedded deeply within her. They'd already done it once, yet his body was still hungry for her.

She raised her head from his massive chest so she could catch his eyes in the dimly lit room of Sarge's spare bedroom where Turner stayed, her crazy hair bobbing as she moved.

"Not good. She was getting good, but now? Not so much," she said, her perfect mouth puckered and drawn. "According to Beth, she got a Fed Ex envelope and then had to go upstairs. Going upstairs isn't a good thing for Lace."

Turner processed what his girl was saying and not saying.

Jax was getting better at that place just outside of Citrus Heights, except every visit, fuck, every fucking phone call even, was filled with questions about Lacey. Turner didn't know what had happened between them but knew it had ended in disaster. A Hiroshima kind of disaster.

He'd only seen Lace once since the break-up. The formerly pretty girl looked liked shit when he'd seen her. She'd lost a lot of weight and, though she'd been thin before, she'd been padded in all the right places. When he'd seen her this last time? Shit. Skin and bones, her eyes sunken, red-rimmed and listless as fuck.

Nothing like the Lacey he'd met at the farm.

Which had made him feel sorry, so fucking sorry, for leaving Jax those prescript pills to help him make it through the night after Mrs. Edie passed. Except, how was he to know that Jax was sneaking in the booze along with them?

"You think she's still loving him, Rick?" he asked slowly, his hands unconsciously caressing the girl atop his chest. A girl he could've have dreamed of having his whole life, yet never even noticed until he'd caught her fine ass as she fainted at the sight of him in Mrs. Edie's kitchen.

"Oh, fuck, yeah," Ricki breathed. "She's killing herself with unrequited love is what Sarge says."

"And, yet, he's getting better because of her love," Turner replied. "He's determined, baby."

"Screwy, right?" Ricki said, burrowing into his neck, a place she knew he loved.

"Not as screwy as us, you beautiful thing," he breathed, turning on the mattress to get his golden girl beneath him. "God, Ricki. You're sexy."

"And, you're just plain ol' sex on a stick, Turner. Yeah, baby, right there," she moaned as her redheaded man, once again, began to thrust into her, all thoughts of Jax, Lace and their bullshit lost in the cadence of his moving within her.

Chapter 31

I was hurting, but at least this time I recognized it, which the therapist Sarge had recommended (actually, the word should be 'forced') me to see, had told me was a good thing.

The car park was packed and I was probably going to have to hike at least a mile to enter the stadium. Truthfully? I was lucky that I even made it because my heart had told me to go back home about every hundred yards as I drove there.

Drove to the stadium where
he
was.

The man formally known as Jack.

A man that used to hold a place in my heart. Back when I had one, anyway.

I exited my car after notating my parking row and space on my portion of the ticket. And, as I made my way through the crowds of people, I kept hearing his name as a soft whisper that hung overhead in the still, night air.

'Jax Wynter'
.

I gave over my ticket and had my purse searched before I was allowed inside to climb the steep concrete stairs to my seat. It was a very, long-assed climb.

With every footfall, I called myself all different kinds of names, the meaning in each was clear.

Fool.

The air in the stadium was tense, gleeful, anticipatory even through the fifteen minute set of the opening band.

"…and, now all you bastards and bitches, the act you've all been waiting for!
ReGroup
!" the loudspeakers boomed.

I heard the crowd go crazy, yelling, whistling and squealing.

Squealers
, I thought slowly.