Читать книгу The Marked Men Series Books 1–6: Rule, Jet, Rome, Nash, Rowdy, Asa - Jay Crownover - Страница 42

CHAPTER 6

Jet

I was at loose ends, with time on my hands and restless because I still didn’t know exactly what I was going to do with this thing happening between me and Ayden.

She was at work, Cora was in a mood, and the guys were all scattered across town doing this or that. I found myself heading to Federal Heights, and to a familiar brick house that I normally avoided like the plague. I called first to make sure the old man was nowhere around and parked on the crowded street. I made enough money that I could move my mom somewhere nice, somewhere closer to downtown, somewhere safer and more upscale, but I wouldn’t do it until she left that asshole. She just refused to see the light. I jogged up the cracked cement steps and rang the doorbell, gritting my teeth when, instead of dinging, it gave off a little shock. If he couldn’t be bothered to fix something as simple as the doorbell, it made my head go crazy with all the other stuff he was bound to have neglected.

I pounded on the door with the edge of my fist and scowled at my mom when she pulled open the door. She was a slight woman, several inches smaller than me. Even under the premature lines on her face and beneath the crown of dull brown hair, it was easy to see that at one time she had been a beautiful woman. Now she just looked tired and worn. The smile she gave me was fragile and so fleeting I might have imagined it had she not embraced me with birdlike arms in a hug that felt like it was equal parts desperation and sorrow.

“Hey, Ma, it’s been a while.” I patted her awkwardly on the back and felt a shudder go through her. Everything about her made me want to take my dad out and use him for target practice. He had done this to her, stolen her vibrancy, made her into this walking shadow of a woman. The hatred I had for him was coiled inside me so tightly I knew it was going to be dangerous for everyone when it finally snapped. The flames of my anger were already starting to lick and curl up my spine.

“I thought you were on tour still.”

She ushered me into the drab house, and I tried not to shake my head at the scattered beer cans and ashtrays filled with cigarette butts littering every available surface. Not much had changed since I had left when I was just a kid, only now it looked worse. It was clear my dad was escalating on the worthless-piece-of-shit scale. I followed her into the kitchen and sat at the old dinner table. The wood groaned in protest as I stretched out my legs and took the beer she offered me from the fridge. I popped the top and took a long slug.

“I’ve been back awhile. Dad didn’t tell you?”

She shook her head, and I saw something that went beyond sadness shadow her searching gaze. “Why didn’t you call me yourself? I could have made dinner or something.”

I never told her when I was coming or going, because inevitably she would want to spend some kind of family time together, and that never went well. I barely tolerated my dad on a good day, and watching him demean her and order her around in the house she paid for was just too much.

“I’ve been busy working with some new bands, and I met a girl.” It was fudging the truth a little, considering I had known Ayden for more than a year, but after this morning I felt like I was finally getting let in, being introduced to the real her. I saw my mom’s eyes brighten at the mention of a girl and she reached out to pat my hand. I could see the blue veins running so close to the surface of her skin and again I wondered how she had allowed herself to become this delicate creature that a stiff wind could blow away forever.

“That’s wonderful! You need a nice girl to settle down with. You are too special and have too much to offer to be spreading it around all over town, like I know you and your friends like to do.”

I lifted an eyebrow and rolled the Pabst Blue Ribbon can between my palms. “How do you know what me and the guys like to do, Ma?”

“I was young once, Jet. I know the allure of a handsome young man in a band. All you boys were a handful when you were younger, and I can only imagine the kind of trouble you find yourselves in now that you are all grown and independent. Tell me about this girl. She must be something, if you couldn’t remember to mention to me that you’ve been back in town for a while.”

I could hear the accusation in her tone. She knew why I didn’t come around much, didn’t stay in touch .Yet she couldn’t stop herself from trying to hold me close. I took another swig of the beer and looked at her with a lopsided grin.

“She’s different—smart, ambitious, and driven. She’s different from what I’m used to. I like her, a lot actually.”

I saw my mom’s eyes get big, and for the first time in a long time, there was an emotion in them other than abject despair.

“Well, that’s good. You need someone who is as ambitious and as talented as you are.”

I wasn’t sure what it was going to end up being so I just stayed silent and finished the beer and got up to toss it in the trash. I crossed my arms over my chest and gave her a level, serious look as I decided to change the subject from my sex life.

“Ma, did you know the old man hit me up to send him back out on the road with some of my friends in a band?”

Instantly, the light that had filtered in her hazy gaze at my earlier good news died. It was replaced with the flat look of loneliness and the acknowledgment that she only existed to him as a doormat and place filler, while he went out and lived his life without her. She twisted her hands together and looked down at the table.

“You father is an old man now. Why would he want to go back out on the road with a bunch of young kids? What purpose would that serve?”

I raked my hands through my hair, and bit my tongue to keep from snapping at her that there was no purpose other than his indulgent, self-centered way of living. But that kind of attack never got me anywhere. I blew out a breath through my nose and clicked my tongue ring against the back of my front teeth.

“Mom, when has he ever done anything that served a purpose? He straight up told me that if I didn’t make it happen, he was going to come home and take it out on you. How can you just sit back and let him do that to you? How can you let him manipulate either of us like that?”

My rings rapped out a fast beat on the counter while I waited for her to answer me. For years, I had waited for her to see that I could take care of her and that she didn’t need to subject herself to his whims and his thoughtless behavior. I couldn’t stand that she just told me over and over that she loved him and that she wouldn’t let her family fall apart, even though I hadn’t willingly been in the same room with my father since I was a teenager.

She wouldn’t look at me and her voice was barely a whisper when she replied, “You just don’t understand how it is with us, Jet. You never did.”

I pushed off the counter and walked to where she was actually folding in on herself in front of me. I put a hand on her shoulder and squatted down so that she had no choice but to meet my searching gaze. “Ma, don’t you think the problem is that I understand it too well? You know you can do better than him, better than this. You always could.”

I saw her bottom lip tremble and that pulled at something under all the anger that lived in my chest. I hated that every time I tried to pull her out of this nightmare, I ended up hurting her. She should be thanking me, running as fast as she could away from this place, and yet she stayed rooted so firmly that no matter how hard I dug, I couldn’t get her out. The roots were planted too deep.

“If you can make him happy by sending him back out on the road, maybe you should. It’s not like he really asks that much from you.”

I abruptly stood from where I was kneeling beside her and felt a white hot blaze shoot down my neck. I wanted to shake her. I wanted to shove my fist through the closest wall. I wanted to storm out of that shabby kitchen in this awful house on the wrong side of the interstate and never look back. What I did instead was close my eyes, bend, and kiss her on the top of her head.

“We’ll see, Ma. I have to work with these guys. I don’t know that I want to ask them for that big of a favor. It was good to see you. Take care of yourself.”

I was going to go before I did something stupid, like scream at her, but she grabbed my forearm, her fingers digging into the melting clocks all over my skin. Her eyes were so sad when she looked up at me, that I literally felt a part of my heart die. “Bring your girl by. I would love to meet her.”

This was the last place on earth I wanted to bring Ayden, but I forced out something that had to resemble a grin. “Sure, Ma, maybe someday I can swing that.”

Ayden was the opposite of this woman I loved, in so many ways it almost hurt to think about it. She was so strong and so independent that she would never let another person dictate the direction her life or actions would take, or devalue her worth. I hated the idea that Ayden would see my broken-down mother and wonder why I hadn’t done more to help her or been able to stop this from happening to her in the first place. Those very questions picked me apart from the inside out every day. Looking at my mother now, I remembered every time she had chosen this life and that asshole over me, and it burned away some of the safeguards I had put into place to protect my heart from the inferno of the rage that lived inside me.

My phone picked that minute to ring, and Memphis May Fire came blasting out of my pocket. I told my mom I had to go and wasted no time in running down the front steps. I felt like I was not only running away from her, but also from every bad thing that had ever happened in that house. Nash’s tattooed head was staring back at me from the face of my phone, so when I poked at it to answer the call I didn’t bother to fake a cheery greeting.

“ ’Sup, dude?”

“Where are you?”

I slid into the car and rested my head on the back of the driver’s seat. “I went to visit my mom. The old man has been on my case about setting him up with Artifice and I thought maybe for once I could just shut it down, but no. As usual, I just don’t understand, and she’s just going to let him run around on her and run her over. It fucking sucks.”

Nash knew my history with my folks better than the other guys. When I left as a teenager, he had been having his own issues at home with his mom and her richer-than-God new husband. Luckily, for both of us, Nash’s uncle Phil had been bound and determined to keep us out of jail and in school. He scooped us both up and, with a mixture of tough love and simple badassness, made us act right. No one went against Uncle Phil, and to this day he was our go-to grown-up when we couldn’t get our act together on our own.

“One of these days you’re just going to have to give up the ghost, Jet. It doesn’t make any sense to keep trying to pull her away from him if she’s dug in that deep.”

“I know, but she’s my mom and I can’t seem to stop.”

He muttered a swear word and I heard him talking to someone else. “We’re all going bowling. You should meet us at Lucky Strike on Sixteenth.”

“Why bowling?”

“Because football is over and Rule is pacing the apartment like a caged tiger. It’s driving me nuts. Rowdy will be there in twenty, plus they have beer. What else are we going to do on a Sunday?”

I really wasn’t in the mood, but hanging out by myself was sure to be a recipe for disaster in my current mood. “Did you call Cora and see if she wants to go? She’s been acting a little off the last couple days.”

“No answer. I left her a couple messages, though.”

I frowned because she had been home when I left, moping around the kitchen about something. The shop was closed on Sundays, so I knew she didn’t have to work, and it wasn’t like her to blow off a call from any of the guys.

“Let me swing by the house and see what’s going on with her, and then I’ll hit you back.”

“Sure thing. By the way, that was a real shit thing to pull last night at the show. Ayden is a down chick; you’re lucky she didn’t hang you up by your balls afterward.”

“I know. I apologized. We’re working on trying to figure something out.”

“Good, because if Rule doesn’t break you in half for messing with her, I will.”

I didn’t need him to warn me twice. She wasn’t a groupie, a stranger who no one cared if I blew off and forgot about from one heartbeat to the next. She was a girl that was woven into the fabric of our lives, into the pattern of our unit, and if I hurt her on purpose they wouldn’t let it go lightly. The ironic thing was that she was more than capable of taking care of herself and that the threats from the guys were completely unnecessary.

I shoved the phone in the console and cranked Morbid Angel on the radio as I ran back across town to check on Cora. The screaming lyrics and insane bass made some of the anger still floating around under the surface burn out. I could hate my dad all I wanted, I could beg my mom to leave until I was blue in the face, but things were never going to change and it just couldn’t be my cross to bear forever. I had built my life trying to live beyond the legacy my dad had left me. Now I was starting to see it was well past time to start living it based on the legacy I was making for myself.

I parked on the street with every intention of just running in real quickly to see what the little blond fireball was up to. As I was climbing out of the car, the front door to the house slammed open and a guy I didn’t recognize came flying down the front steps, with Cora hot on his heels. I felt my jaw drop open when I noticed she was waving a Taser around and screaming obscenities at the top of her lungs. I went to move, to run after the guy, but before either of us could get to him, he threw a leg over a motorcycle that was parked at the curb and took off like a bat out of hell. I tried to look at the license plate, but Cora threw her tiny frame at my chest so hard that I fell back a step and almost toppled over.

“What the hell?”

She was shaking a little and I took the Taser out of her hand just in case she accidentally stunned me.

“I don’t know. Someone knocked on the door and I just thought it was a neighbor or a solicitor. I mean, come on, this is Denver, not Brooklyn; that crap isn’t supposed to happen here. As soon as the door was open, he shoved me back and started coming into the house. I ran to the kitchen, because I still have all the stuff I bought for protection when Shaw lived here and was worried about her ex. He came after me and kept asking where it was.”

I shook my head in confusion because she was talking a mile a minute. “Where what was?”

“I don’t know. Just it. He freaked when he saw the Taser and I think he heard your car pull up. He took off.”

“We should call the cops.” I patted her back because I could feel her quivering. Cora was a tough chick, and not very much rattled her, but having a stranger force his way into her home had to have been terrifying. She puffed out a little breath against my chest where she was tucked and she thunked a fist on my ribs.

“No.”

“What? Why the hell not?”

“Because they can’t do anything. He didn’t take anything and never got a chance to put his hands on me. They’ll come poke around and tell us tough shit. I’m an idiot for opening the door anyway. I know better than that.”

I set her away from me with a sharp frown. “You could have been seriously hurt.”

She waved a hand in front of me. “No, I couldn’t have been. He was after something, not after me. It just spooked me, is all. What are you doing here, anyway? I thought you went to play nice with Ayd.”

I didn’t like it one bit. Everything inside me said call the police, that one girl I cared about had already been put through the ringer by a loose cannon. I wasn’t about to let it happen again. I picked her up in a full body hug that had her squealing and laughing at the same time. “You need to be careful, Cora. We wouldn’t know what to do without you.”

She scoffed. “You really think I’m about to let you guys roam around this city unsupervised? The female population of Denver would never survive it. We have to be sure to tell Ayd to be careful. I don’t know what would have happened if she had been home and not me.”

I liked that thought even less. I don’t know how all the fury and fire that I barely kept banked would stay contained if something happened to Ayden. If I let it go, not only would I go up in flames but there was a chance I would end up burning anyone close to me to dust as well.

“I don’t like this, Cora. I want both of you to be safe.” She hooked her arm through mine.

“It’ll be fine, Jet. Seriously, he probably just had the wrong house, or was looking for money for drugs or something. No place is perfect and we can take care of ourselves. You never answered me”—her crazy eyes narrowed at me—“did you fix things with Ayden?”

I sighed and let her drag me into the house. “Sort of. I apologized for being an asshat last night and told her I couldn’t fight this thing between us anymore. I don’t know what that looks like to her but I can take it day by day for now.”

“She was okay with that?”

“I guess, Honestly, I think that’s the only way she’s okay with it. She’s a hard chick to pin down.”

“Don’t be stupid, Jet. You have a lot to offer anyone. The cool thing is Ayden isn’t the type to take it all. She can provide for herself, and be happy just taking what she wants from you. It’s up to you to make her see just how much you’re willing to give and how much better she is off with the entire package. Make her want to be pinned down and not just in the sexy, fun way.”

I just looked at her in silence. This little pixie ran us all ragged and at times I think she had our lives figured out far better than we did.

“I’ll keep that in mind.” She tapped me on the chin with her finger.

“Good.”

“The guys all went bowling. Do you want to go? Nash was worried you weren’t answering your phone, so I decided to come and check on you.”

She scrunched up her nose and ran a hand over her spiky blond hair. “No. I think I’ve had enough excitement for one day. Plus, I had a pretty good sulk going before the breaking-and-entering portion of the day. I think I’d like to finish it.”

I felt my eyebrows dip sharply down. Cora wasn’t a sulky person. She was cheerful and honest to a fault. “Why are you sulking around? That isn’t like you.”

She sighed and flopped down heavily on the couch. “Watching Rule take such good care of Shaw is kind of hard for me. I never thought he was going to fall in love, never thought anyone would be able to get him to see past himself, but she did, and they are just so perfect together. I thought guys like him—guys like you—were hopeless. Now I’m wondering if I’m the one who is hopeless. I mean, you’re amazing, Ayden is amazing. So, whatever you guys work up is bound to be amazing and I just feel like I’m missing something.”

We were friends and I cared a lot about her. There were plenty of mirrors in the house, so I knew that she knew she was hot enough to make men stupid. I didn’t really understand it, but all I could figure out was that she was alone because she wanted to be alone.

“Cora, come on now. You can find a guy in, like, a second flat. Half the guys in the band have you on their laminated list.”

She rolled her expressive eyes at me. “I want something real, Jet. Something that is life changing and dramatic, something that makes me forget anyone else ever existed. I just can’t see that happening and it makes me sad.”

“I think you’re maybe reaching for something that doesn’t exist.”

“You see Rule and Shaw. It exists.”

I couldn’t really argue that point with her, but I didn’t know what else to say. I believed in love. I just didn’t trust it and what the end result could be if two people weren’t ultimately right for each other. Every great song was sung from a place of love. I knew love was strong enough to change people. My mom held on to her love for my dad, like it was a raft in the center of the ocean of horror that was her life. It was just my experience that love never changed anyone for the better, with Rule being the exception to the norm. He always did his own thing anyway, so it wasn’t like he was going to even love someone within the conventions of how it normally worked.

“Well, if some guy does come along, that’s an awful lot of pressure to be putting on him.”

“I know, so I’m destined to be alone and grumpy for the rest of my life. Not to mention sexually frustrated.”

“Stop being ridiculous and shake this crap off. Go put on some shoes and come bowling with us. It’ll be fun.”

She grumbled until I eventually got tired of it, and just picked her up and hauled her to her room. She argued the entire way, but after I pointed out that I was wearing pants that were bound to make it impossible to throw a heavy ball down the lane without ripping in half, she begrudgingly put on some Chucks and followed me out the door. I refused to ride in her little circus car, so we hopped in the Challenger and roared down to the sprawling blocks of the Sixteenth Street mall where every tourist and degenerate in town hung out. I normally avoided this part of the city. It brought back too many memories of skipping school and sneaking booze from Phil with Rule and Nash. However, after a spectacularly nasty day, I didn’t mind the noise and hustle as much.

The bowling alley was lit in blue and had velour couches scattered all over the place. Personally, I thought it looked more like a strip club than a bowling alley. The guys had beer and it looked like they were having a great time giving each other shit as they rotated turns. The pink bowling ball looked like a tiny toy in Rowdy’s beefy hands, and when he tossed it down the alley it bounced hard enough that it went right into the gutter. Cora laughed and gave him a high five, while Rule and Nash offered up a round of ridiculous-looking golf claps.

There was a group of teenage girls a few lanes down openly gawking, and I thought they were going to need the paramedics called when Nash winked at them when he got up to take his turn. I sat next to Cora on one of the benches and ducked just in time to avoid getting knocked upside the head by the flat of Rule’s palm. I scowled at him, but his glacial gaze made it clear he wasn’t playing around.

“You ever pull a stunt like you did last night again and I will use your intestines to string your Les Paul.”

I swallowed, because from most people that was an idle threat, but not coming from him. I nodded.

“I know, dude, I know. I tried to make it right. We’re good, she doesn’t hate me.”

Those cold eyes regarded me seriously and he must have decided whatever he saw was sincere, because some of the tension left his body.

“Good, because if she hates you, then Shaw has to hate you, and by default that means I have to kick your ass all over town and I would hate to have to do that.”

I snorted and took a pint of beer that Rowdy handed me. “You wouldn’t hate that at all.”

He shrugged and nodded at Cora who was having some kind of argument with Nash over exchanging her Chucks for bowling shoes.

“What’s up with her?”

I felt my mouth pull down at the corners and my eyes sharpen just a fraction. Rowdy sat down on the low lounge table and all three of us bent our heads together so that they could hear me when I lowered my voice.

“Bad stuff going down at the homestead, guys. When I got there, she was chasing some guy out the door. She said he shoved his way in and was demanding to know where ‘it’ was. She has no clue what he was looking for, but she was pretty shaken up. He took off on some souped-up bike way too fast for me to do anything about it. After everything that went down with Shaw, I don’t like it one bit.”

Rowdy whistled and Rule growled like a wild animal. “Did you call the cops?”

I sat back and laced my fingers behind my head. “Cora wouldn’t let me. You know her, she thinks this is the Wild West still and things like that just don’t happen here like they do in Brooklyn. She seems to think it’s a onetime event and that the guy was just a meth head or something looking for money. That bike was cherry and there was no way he just picked out our house at random. We’re way too far away from downtown for a junkie just looking to score some cash.”

“This isn’t cool.” Rule sounded a little unhinged and I couldn’t blame him. He had gone a little off the rails when Shaw had been attacked and we were all now just starting to settle down from it all.