Wild Ones (The Lane) (11 page)

It was hard sitting there, watching the two go at it, the sounds of gloves striking flesh dully, the boos and cheers from the crowd every time one got a decent hit on the other. If I closed my eyes, I was sure I would hear my ma’s voice, whispering her prayers while she clutched the old cross from Grandma O’Connell. It was the only time I ever saw her feign religion, but God must not have been too upset about that, since He always seemed to honor her prayers, letting Da stumble away from another fight, maybe not unscathed but still walking.

Christian, feeling the need to live up to his name, I guess, had always prayed too. Even when the light started to leave his eyes, when our da stopped minding where his fists landed and would swing on us with abandon. Christian prayed because Christian was always the good son. I never did. Not there. Not in those too hard, cold seats, with my legs swinging and my feet barely skimming the ground, surrounded by the bloodthirsty. I always thought God probably stayed away from those places. I knew I would have, had I had the choice.

This fight didn’t last very long, as far as fights go. The bigger guy couldn’t get a hit to connect, not with how fast the littler one was moving, bobbing and weaving at all the right places, causing his opponent’s jabs to slide off or skim him instead of doing any kind of real damage. It was almost beautiful, this brutal, cruel dance between rivals, graceful and savage, barbaric and delicate.

One minute the crowd was almost hushed, spellbound by the display, and the next, the little guy landed a solid hit with a crack that resounded through the gym, that laid his Goliath opponent out, and the entire gym erupted in a fit of cheers and hisses. People jumped up, shoving forward, pressing into our chairs from behind. The guys in our group exploded to their feet, shoving their chairs back almost as a single unit. I, slower than the others, rose to my own, though I knew better than to take my time. I could feel myself being pushed by the crowd behind us as they pressed forward, rushing the ring as though they were responding to a higher calling that was beckoning them there.

I had a hard time finding my balance. Cameron, noticing my predicament, pulled me up the rest of the way and shoved me in Luke’s direction. Luke caught me and pulled me into his chest face-first. This, I most definitely could not handle. This inhuman stampede the crowd was doing. There were too many parallels, too many memories of being a knobby-kneed kid who so often got lost in those crowds.

Before I could stop myself, I was burying myself as far into Luke as I could get, my arms wrapping around his waist underneath his jacket once more, where it felt safer. I felt his knees lock and his arms became a steel cage, trapping me in, keeping out the others, the ones pushing and jostling and backing into us. I clutched at him gratefully, listening to his rumbled reassurances, my insides rolling, my skin clammy and I hated that I was there, that I had agreed to come. And yet a part of me, a small part, was excited by the chaos. A part that wanted fights to break out in the crowd, as bloody as the one that had gone down in the ring.

My face still hidden, I barely heard Theo’s voice over the sounds of the madhouse around us.

“You guys can go. You made your appearance. Get her out before Johnson and Jimmy come along looking to collect.”

I felt rather than heard Luke’s response before he pulled away and grabbed my hand, yanking me through the sea of crazed bodies toward the doors, shoving when they wouldn’t move on their own. We got there without incident, and as Luke pulled open the steel doors and dragged me through them, I glanced back to see Cameron turning back toward the ring.

To his left a big fucker with a buzz cut and a contemplative look on his face stood still, unfazed by the loud, crazed crowd around him, making him stick out in the midst of it. He was watching us. Our eyes made contact for a moment, just a second in the space between moving bodies, and he smiled, inclining his head toward me. I made a face I wasn’t sure he even saw just as the doors shut behind us, blocking him and the rest of the madhouse from my view.

Chapter Eleven

We barely made it out of the gym’s parking lot before I launched myself at Luke, diving over the console and burying my hands in his hair as my lips crashed down on his. He struggled between responding with fervor—hot, openmouthed kisses that lit up my nerve endings—and maneuvering his truck into an adjacent vacant lot. I don’t remember him putting the truck in park, but one minute he had one arm wrapped around my waist and the next, both his strong calloused hands were on my cheeks, trapping my face between them, burning through layers of skin and tissue to sear the feel of them onto my brain. It was all a little
Bonnie and Clyde
, the two of us and the steering wheel digging into my back as I grinded against him. Something about the adrenaline, the anxiety still coursing through me, the lingering smell of sweat and Luke’s cologne spurred my frantic movements, movements he mirrored, yanking and pulling and borderline violent ourselves.

He dropped me off at my apartment not long after we finished, both of us still panting to try to catch our breaths, saying he’d get a hold of me soon. I watched long after his taillights disappeared from view, arms wrapped around my midsection, suddenly cold, before forcing myself to finally head inside to the silence that waited for me. Jax had been out, but he’d left a note telling me to call with all the details. I didn’t.

I didn’t see Luke Wednesday or Thursday and that was okay. Manageable. I was able to go about my days with an ease that slipped the more time that passed without me hearing from him. By Friday, however, I was little more than a ball of pent-up nervous energy, finding myself wishing desperately to see him. Even just to hear his voice. I was a little jonesing addict and I almost hated it, that weakness and consuming near-obsession, but yet, not as much as I should have. Not enough for someone who had spent so long perfectly content with one-night stands.

It was with that thought I found myself agreeing to a girls’ night out with Rosie when she called late Friday afternoon, something I spent a lot of time avoiding normally, having never been one for female companionship. Not when, from what I always gathered as a Girl Culture outsider, relationships between fellow girls were often fraught with passive aggression and needless, empty drama. I made exceptions occasionally. Sarah had been one. Rosie, sometimes. But for the most part, I stuck with Jax because it was simpler. More honest and outright.

Rosie, at first glance, looked exactly like the type of girl I would usually steer clear of. Damn near six foot with Jax’s clear blue eyes and curly blond hair, she could have easily been confused for a model. She was flawless at any given moment, even when she first woke up, something I’d learned firsthand when the three of us shared the apartment before she was promoted from bartender to King’s Kept Woman. The role suited her well, fit her like a second skin. Better than bartender had anyway.

What made Rosie tolerable despite her physical perfection, which made me almost uncomfortable, was her antisocial attitude and her tendency to say whatever she was thinking, no matter how awful. Rosie was pure entertainment, though I could only enjoy her in moderation, much like how I was supposed to enjoy booze. Luckily, in general she could only enjoy people in slight moderation, so our relationship had tentatively worked for the four years I’d known her. She wasn’t her brother, but she was someone to spend time with when I felt the need to be around estrogen, which, admittedly, wasn’t often.

She showed up to the apartment early, nose wrinkled as though she hadn’t once lived here too, in a skirt even shorter than mine and heels that easily put her over six foot two. Another great thing about Rose? She was generous with showing off her assets, which always translated into free drinks for both of us when we went out together.

Hey, I wasn’t above using my body, or hers, for a free drink.

“Well, bitch, you ready to do this?” she asked after touring her old stomping grounds, no doubt reminding herself, once again, how far she’d come from the tiny little room next to mine. It was something she liked to do often. “I have plans to get obliterated and forget my name.”

“Heard that wasn’t hard for you blondes.” I finished putting on my mascara, leaning close to the mirror in our tiny bathroom. “Apparently it’s a common problem amongst your people.”

“You’re so adorable. Every time I wonder why I bother associating with you, I remember it’s because you say the most adorable things. You’re like a monkey using a fork or reading Shakespeare. Just precious.”

I made a face at her in the mirror and she snickered as she fluffed her hair behind me. “There you go again. Just don’t start throwing your shit, please. This top is new and I don’t want poop on it.”

“I wish I knew why I hung out with you.” I threw the rest of my makeup back in the case, then flipped my head over to tease the underside of my hair. “You’re so damn unlikable. Plus you use the word
poop
in everyday conversation.”

“It’s because no one else really likes you. So you should probably be a little nicer to the ones who will actually been seen with you, Monkey Girl. Not to be confused with the ones who will gladly get between your legs. Remember, it doesn’t count if they won’t take you out to dinner first. Also,
poop
is an acceptable word. You probably don’t recognize that because you lack class.”

“Yeah.
Poop
is just the definition of class. Thank you for the lesson in sophistication. What would I do without you?”

“Other than be a slave to your uncouth behavior? The list is endless, dear.”

We went on like that during the short drive over to the Lane. In that, Rosie was so much like her brother, quick with a comeback, always ready to verbally spar. Unlike Jax, hers always had a hostile edge, as if she was actually pissed off at the world and ready for the first opportunity to lash out against someone stupid enough to make themselves a target. I often did, though never seriously. Not because I was scared of her, but because I had no desire to find out what size nine stilettos felt like going up my ass.

Yeah. She’d threatened that on more than one occasion to more than one person. I’d always kinda wanted to see it happen. For science’s sake.

“Okay, girlfriend. No more shenanigans,” she announced as she parked her tiny little sports car behind Duke’s and climbed out. “Public faces on. We’re two hot bitches with daddy issues and heaps of insecurity. That should get us to buzzed. After that we’ll rely on our good looks and charm.” She gave me a speculative look. “That means you’ll have to refrain from talking.”

“You’re a peach.” I eyed the bars around us. “But understood. Now what’s our plan of attack?”

“Sharkies.” She promptly started in that direction. “We’ll work our way down.” And I knew she’d planned this before she even called me. Rosie was a bit of a control freak. She liked to say she was just tenacious and it was a good thing. I said she was mostly a type A bitch. A characteristic that made her perfect for Joshua, who had the tendency of being a type A dick.

Bar crawling was always a favorite pastime of mine and being with Rosie made it a magical experience worthy of musicals. She drank to get drunk, much like me, who never understood the concept of social drinking, and we never went without a drink in our hand. The object was to never have to buy our own, and we rarely did. We danced like fools with any guy who asked us and with each other when no one did. By the time we made it to the Tap Room at the end of the street, we were well on our way to Rosie’s name-forgetting goal.

Compared to the other bars we’d been at, the Tap Room was more subdued, a little rundown and seedy, the people who frequented it there for one purpose, to get as drunk as possible as cheaply as possible. Unlike Duke’s, it actually had been a speakeasy during Prohibition, and while they didn’t build on that history, they embraced it, keeping a lot of the old elements from the past. The original planked bar was a leaning, sad thing in need of a coat of paint. The cracked, peeling booths, the color of old blood, threatened to snag your clothes if you sat down on them. The small dance floor was more scratches than wood, and there was an old jukebox in the corner instead of a DJ or any kind of live music. It was never really busy, most people preferring the nicer bars on the Lane, but I loved it. Next to Duke’s, the Tap Room was easily my favorite place. It had character and I appreciated character.

Fury was working behind the bar and he greeted us with loud “Bri-babys!” and “Rose-loves!” when we walked in, as if he’d spent half his life searching for us. In the years I’d known Fury, which was almost as long as I’d known Jax and Rosie, I never could figure out his exact role at the Tap Room. He was always there, and the owner, a friend of Joshua’s, a slimy little guy named Ted who probably still lived with his mother, gave him a lot of privileges, letting him come and go as he pleased and do whatever he wanted. Not to mention the apartment above our heads was his.

I had tried asking him a few times and he merely winked and gave me a secretive smile before saying, “I got my secrets, Bri-baby, and you got yours. Let’s keep ’em, yeah?” I pretty much gave up asking, though I still wondered occasionally.

We never had to find a guy to buy our drinks when we were at the Tap Room because Fury always provided them for us, another one of his mysterious privileges. Rosie and I usually stayed pretty close to the bar, talking to him between customers, talking to customers between drinks, and singing along, horribly loud and off-key, to every song that came on the jukebox. The Tap Room was our Cheers bar, everybody knew our names, even if they didn’t really. It might have been all the Long Islands and beers, but I was filled with a warmth that made my soul tingle, made me appreciate my life and the people in it.

One guy, a clean-cut, sandy-haired, slightly chiseled thing, took a particular interest in us as we stood talking and drinking and singing. Rosie, ever the charmer, asked him a few questions and immediately dismissed him, clearly coming to the conclusion that Joshua was still the better hand. While I normally would have dismissed him as well—because, really, what use did I have for the nice ones?—the amount of booze in my system made me more receptive to his advances.

And advance he did. With his navy polo and sensible shoes, he might have looked like an off-duty investment banker—and I wasn’t too far off in that assumption, considering he was majoring in accounting, he’d said—but he wasn’t afraid to get close to the wild side. Boys like that usually aren’t. Oh, they want to settle down with nice little Stepford wives in the end, but they want girls like me notching up their bedposts in the meantime. Unpredictable girls with wild hair and eye makeup a little too dark and lips a little too red. We were the stories they told their buddies on golf outings while their little ladies were at home keeping house. We were the ones they remembered while they made their perfect 2.5 children. Every good boy wants to have at least one bad girl in their past, to pull out her memory when their lives become boring and predictable.

He told me his name was Mark, or maybe he said Matt, they were all the same, and he kept touching me. It was casual at first, little brushes against my hand, the tender spot inside my elbow, but soon he grew more confident, possibly realizing that I wasn’t going to shoot him down. His touches grew more deliberate until we were standing close, almost flush, his hand resting lightly on the curve of my hip. I was all but ignoring Rosie, not that she seemed to mind, all my attention on Future Wall Street Mark and his roaming, friendly hands and kind eyes. I was leaning closer, laughing at something he was saying—what, I wasn’t sure, laughing just felt like a good idea—when suddenly he was gone, ripped away from where my hand had wound up on his forearm playfully.

In his place stood Luke.

Of course.

“You tryin’ to get this boy killed, sugar?” he snarled, shaking Mark by the back of his collar where he was gripping him.

I stood there gaping, trying to wrap my head around the idea that Luke Turner was standing in the same spot Wall Street Mark had been only seconds ago, and trying to decide if I really would have let Mark do anything with me, for his sake, when his terrified expression snapped me out of it.

“What the hell, Turner! What are you doing here?”

“Watching you get felt up, apparently.” He shook Mark again, then released him, shoving him away with one quick movement.

I gave Mark an apologetic glance before turning back to Luke, the alcohol swimming in my stomach releasing the rage that was always lurking in me.

“You are un-fucking-believable.” I jabbed him in the chest with the hand not holding my drink. “Who the fuck do you think you are, exactly?”

“Um, how about the guy you’re fucking?”

“I, uh...she didn’t say she had a boyfriend,” Mark piped up, a squeak to his voice.

I tried to not roll my eyes and failed miserably. If that was what he sounded like in the heat of this moment, God only knows what he would have sounded like in the heat of any other moment. No. I wouldn’t have let him do anything. Not sounding like that. Like a mouse.

“Boy, you have two seconds to get the fuck away from her and forget she said anything,” Luke snapped, not even bothering to turn and look at him. “Whatever she did or didn’t tell you, it don’t matter. Because you never met her. Got it?”

I scowled at him when he nodded his head quickly and scampered off. Like a mouse. Fucking banker boys and their sensible shoes and dreams of vanilla sex with girls too wild for them to handle.

“Was that really necessary?” I asked, turning back to Luke with a black look. “Seriously, Turner. What a dick move.”

“Oh? And what the fuck move did you pull? Other than a whore one?”

A hush fell over the entire bar that made me realize we had drawn the attention of every person in there. I wasn’t the only one who noticed. Behind me, Rosie started to clap, chuckling appreciatively. “Oh, this is fabulous! No, really. You guys were right. Much better than TV.”

Luke and I both turned to glare at her. Anyone else would have withered under our dual stares, just going by how many flinched away from my own, but not Rosie. She merely clapped harder.