Aubrey was normally a creature of habit. It suited her upbringing. Less could go wrong when you understood the schedule, organized it thoroughly, and executed it perfectly. In a lot of ways, I admired that about her.
In high school, she stood her ground when friends pushed her to do something she didn’t want to. She’d never wavered, never did anything outside of her comfort zone.
I realized her routine was unshakeable because it protected her and her mother. Frank didn’t allow for mistakes. Had Aubrey deviated from her normal schedule, the inevitable most likely would have happened sooner.
Now, her day-to-day centered around her friends, her studies, and her health. I could count on her to show up to a tutoring session, completely prepared with her homework done. I knew she’d unfailingly be available to Jay, Vick, Katie, or fucking Roman if they needed her.
And running. Running was her thing. It kept her healthy and grounded.
I used that to my advantage when I called her. When she stepped out, didn’t look at me, and went right into a jog, I figured it was for the best.
We never talked much when we ran.
I never pushed her on it because, for some reason, it felt like our bodies synced up in the silence of a jog.
Today was no different.
She needed the exercise to burn off the anger toward me, and I just fucking needed her at that point.
The night before had been like taking a burning stake to my libido all on my own. Why I couldn’t take her in Roman’s place still made me livid with myself. The whole fucking point of us sleeping together was to shake each other from our systems. I’d led with that, wanted that. I just wasn’t sure I still believed that.
Because I couldn’t follow through with it.
When she told me that Roman had given us permission, I wanted to break her phone, tell her she could never text him again, and go find him to bust his face up like I should have done before in the hall. It didn’t matter that he probably wasn’t trying to goad me.
Didn’t he know that she was mine? Whether she actually was or wasn’t.
We owned one another. Our souls were burned together, welded and molded by so much molten emotion that no one—not him, not Jay, not even fucking Frank—could split us up. I knew, because I had tried to split that bond myself.
So lost in my own thoughts, I didn’t realize how much our bodies moved together until I found myself in a full-out run behind her to just keep up.
I heard her wheezing ahead of me and knew something was off. She was pushing herself too hard, like she was trying to escape.
Aubrey was a creature of habit. She didn’t veer off that course for anything or anyone.
Or so I’d thought.
I miscalculated.
I forgot to factor in her temper or how quickly she swerved when something provoked her well-built fortress of walls.
I grabbed her elbow and yanked her back.
“Whitfield, slow the fuck down or you’ll end up …”
I didn’t have to say ‘sick’ because she puked all over the goddamn place.
I crossed my arms over my chest and let her dry heave. The smell of alcohol was more than potent. “You drink enough last night?”
“Please, be quiet,” she said with her hands on her knees.
I scowled at her. She made me crazy. “We both know drinking that much never ends well.”
The second I said it, I realized what I’d insinuated.
Her eyes snapped up to mine, “Really, Jax?” Her tone was hard and accusing.
It didn’t matter. The green-eyed stare that she’d hid pummeled me so hard, I almost took a step back. Eyes the color of a forest, so deep and so penetrating, I got lost in them and wondered how I’d ever find my way out.
Scanning the street, I broke eye contact with her. “No one has made us yet.” I saw her body tense and immediately had to restrain the fucked up need I had to shield her from anything and everything. “Can you walk or do you want me to call a driver?”
She scoffed but straightened. When I saw her wobble, I started walking toward the road while I pulled out my phone.
“What are you doing?” she said from behind me.
I waved her off and stared down the street. “I need you to pick me up.” I looked at the street name and rattled off our location.
When I ended the call and turned to her, a blush had crept into her cheeks and her nostrils flared a little as she said, “I don’t need a driver.”
“You need food, toothpaste, and a bed, Whitfield.”
“I need nothing of the sort.”
I just chuckled when the SUV pulled up and opened the door for her.
She glared the whole way to the house.
As I opened the door and she hesitated, I smiled a little to myself. Aubrey was weighing the situation. Her mind worked a lot like mine, she calculated more than she consciously knew. Our night had ended with me wanting to fuck her on my own terms.
I still did.
It wasn’t going to be today though. We needed better ground to start on, as much as I hated to admit it. I worked through my fucking rage from the night before and chalked it up to the fact that I wanted her to respect our history just like I did.
Our history wouldn’t allow me to just take her wherever.
I wouldn’t fuck her on another man’s bed for the first time in years out of respect for our history. In return, for the future, history would go the fuck to bed and we’d get closure when this was all said and done.
I worked it all out. Or so I thought.
She didn’t know my theory or that I looked to form a better base between us, and that made her jumpy. I could see the goosebumps on her skin when she passed me in the foyer. Her breath hitched when I looked at her lips.
I loved her like this.
I wanted her guessing, needing, and hopefully at some point, begging.
“There’s toothpaste in the …”
“I know where Jay keeps his toothpaste.”
“You know where he keeps other things too?” My tone shouldn’t have been accusing. I knew their relationship was platonic.
“You’re such a child, even when you know there isn’t a reason for it.” With that, she disappeared down the hall.
My apology was the Advil and water I put on the granite counter when she turned the corner into the foyer that opened to the kitchen. “I’m toasting some bread for you.”
She leaned on the counter and slid the Advil to the edge with one delicate hand. Over the edge it went into the other and then right into her mouth. She eyed the water and then mumbled, “You know where Jay’s liquor cabinet is?”
I raised my eyebrows.
She sighed. “You know as well as I do a shot the day after cures a hangover.”
I turned toward the liquor cabinet so she wouldn’t see my jaw pop. “What’s your poison?”
“He should still have Macallan in there,” she murmured close enough that I knew she was looking over my shoulder.
I blamed our history again as I felt my stomach get yanked to my throat. I grabbed the bottle and spun around to crowd her fast enough so she didn’t back away. “This is a big drink for a small girl.”
She stepped into my chest, reached those light as a feather fingers to the bottle to unscrew it, and then chugged.
Her bright green eyes bored into mine as she took her time with each gulp. Her pouted lips hugged the rim and her throat craned back. The gulps were small but each one was there to taunt me and with her gaze on me, she did a good fucking job.
“Enough,” I snatched it from her.
She smirked and her pink tongue slid out slowly to wipe the whiskey from her upper lip. “I know how much liquor I can handle, Jax.”
“I know how much liquor you should be handling.”
“Really? And how much is that?”
“None. At. All.”
She scoffed and turned to grab the bread out of the toaster. As she buttered it, she mumbled, “You don’t make the rules for me.”
I leaned on the counter and crossed my arms. “Peaches, you follow rules before there are ever any rules that have been made.”
The butter knife shook a little in her hand. She kept her head down and said, “I wanted to fuck you in my fuck-buddy’s apartment and then proceeded to spend the night drinking the liquor my homicidal father used to drink. You would be surprised with my lack of rules, L.P.”
My jaw tightened at her swearing but I let it go. “Macallan was his drink of choice?”
The butter knife flew into the sink and emerald eyes sent beams of pain my way. “What? You want to ask him about it next time you visit? I’m surprised you’ve never discussed with him the alcohol he used to get so drunk on. God, the way it just sits on your tongue and in the air like stagnant filth …”
When she took a breath in, I heard the shakiness. I heard the pain.
The problem with me being so close to her was I remembered every fucking feeling I’d tried to bury. I remembered and felt the war she waged in herself because it was the same war inside me.
We hated to love each other. It meant we had to dredge up the memories and the past. We had to be reminded of our demons because we triggered them in each other. It made us the enemy for one another and we fought like hell to tell ourselves we couldn’t love that enemy. And we ended up hating ourselves for doing just that.
I couldn’t blame that on history. That shit was solely on me.
Ignoring the boundaries I wanted to set, I took her face in my hands.
“Your eyes are the exact same color as his.”
She squeezed them shut like what I said physically pained her.
“And the difference in them is fucking staggering.”
They shot open, curious.
I continued. “His eyes are empty, dead. Your eyes burn with the fire of life, baby. They’re wild, sometimes, like a caged animal when you want to break free of some shit standard you’ve set for yourself.”
“Jax …” she whispered like she wanted me to stop.
I just shook my head and kept going. “They sizzle when I touch you, like I’m heating you up. I get lost in every damn feeling you hold in them.”
“I can’t do this.” She started to back out of the kitchen.
“Can’t do what?”
“This!” She motioned between us. “You and I aren’t meant to be anywhere near each other. We can’t be friends, and we can’t work through whatever is between us. No one is supposed to go through what we did and then be able to live in sync with each other, especially when you add my father, the arsonist, to the mix.”
“Isn’t that what specifically makes it so we can live in sync? We’re the only ones who know what it’s like to go through that trauma and survive.”
Her shoulders slumped, her little mouth turning down just enough so that her bottom lip jutted out even more. She stared out the kitchen window as if hoping to find some spark of hope there.
She wouldn’t.
“How can you honestly think that what we have is healthy or right?”
“I don’t think us being together is any of those things, Peaches.”
Her eyes snapped to me.
“It’s just inevitable.”
She straightened. “Help me to understand, Jax. If I can understand, I can move forward. I can shake this thing we have or accept it. Or something.”
“No.” Maybe she wanted me to sugarcoat something but that had never worked before with us. I wouldn’t lie to her and tell her we could be healthy and perfect now.
We were a fucking mess, and I wouldn’t be able to fix it with the shit I was doing. I knew that, and I had a pretty damn good feeling she knew it too.
Her jaw set. And before I could steel myself, she closed the distance between us, placed her hand on my chest, and slid it up to my neck. Her finger went to my pulse point as she stared up into my eyes. Every emotion I saw in her swirled and collided.
I glanced at her parted lips as she stretched onto her tiptoes to be closer to me. My hands moved to her hips to pull her closer and she came so naturally that I couldn’t see past the fact that her small body seemed to mold perfectly to mine.
“Why not?” she whispered, her breath on my lips and I could swear I tasted her. Her desperation, her heartache, her desire to be over this hurdle so she could be with me. I had it all there, mesmerizing me.
“Because this is one thing I need to do for you, Peaches. You don’t control it and you don’t meddle in it. I want you out of it until it’s done.”
She recoiled from me faster than a rattlesnake that had bitten someone. Our connection broke and so did the damn spell she had just cast on me. “So, this is an elaborate plan of some kind?”
I looked down at my hands, still in the air from holding her hips, and clenched them. I stalked toward her as she backed up toward the entrance of the house. “So, you’re using your body to fucking bait me now?”
“Are you calling me bait?” she practically spit.
I stopped directly in front of her in the foyer of Jay’s home, her hand on the front door, ready to leave. I let her look up at me to make sure she understood who was calling the shots. “I’m calling it like I see it. You wanted me vulnerable.”
“Well guess what, Jax? I’m always vulnerable in this situation because you don’t tell me anything about your visits with my father. I talked to him years ago, you know that?”
I knew but I didn’t say anything.
“Of course, you knew.” She shut her eyes for a second like she couldn’t bear the conversation. “I asked him what you visited him for. And you know what he did? He laughed. He laughed so hard, I almost hung up right then. But I asked again, hoping he’d tell me. Can you believe that? I saw hope in the person I hate most in this world because the person I loved the most had left me with no hope at all.”
She waited a beat for me to say something.
I didn’t. I couldn’t. I wanted to console her but knew it wouldn’t matter. She would take no consolation except the truth of my visits, and I couldn’t give her that.
She sighed. “He didn’t tell me anything. He just told me to never ask again and if I did, he’d ignore me. I wrote a few letters, all asking the same question again and again. He didn’t answer. When I’d call him, he wouldn’t take my calls. When I tried to visit him, he wouldn’t come to see me. I find it hard to believe that he’d pull out all those stops unless you were behind it.”
I wanted to scream at her for trying any of those things. I knew they’d happened. Frank was candid about her trying to get answers. This wasn’t her fight though.
It was mine. And I meant to keep it that way. “Let it go, Peaches.”
“You don’t get it, L.P.” She shook her head as she opened Jay’s front door. “I’ve tried to forget. If we could forget everything …” She looked down and sighed. “I’ve tried to let it go. To let it go means I have to let you go too. And for some reason, I just can’t seem to do that.”
She walked out and slammed the door.
