WE WERE DRIVING THROUGH THE DESERT, Helen had her window down, her feet propped on the dash of my new economy sedan. Every once in a while, she’d shift, and the tiny bell on her ankle had a subtle jingle.
We’d been talking for the last two hours since we dropped off Luciana at her friend’s apartment to spend the rest of the day and night.
That kid was perceptive. The minute she saw me with her sister this morning, she let us both have it, but especially me.
“It’s really about time you guys got a clue.”
That was how she greeted us when she’d spotted us waiting for her in The Palisades parking lot. Side by side, not touching.
Helen barked a laugh. “What’s that supposed to mean, kid?”
She propped her hands on her hips. “You guys are so obviously in love. I could be blind and still see it. And where’s Theo been for the past few weeks while you were all sad and grumpy?”
I turned to Helen. “Were you sad and grumpy?”
She folded her arms. “I’m always grumpy.”
“No, you’re not.” I stared at her hard, trying to read her. “What about sad?”
She pushed my shoulder, but there was no force to it. She let me catch her hand and thread our fingers together.
“Shut up, Theo.”
I tugged her to my side and murmured into her hair, “Dog days are over, Tiger.”
Luc sighed, her hands clasped at her cheek. “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it!”
Helen’s sigh was filled with a lot more annoyance, but her fingers tightened around mine, letting me know she didn’t mean a second of it.
“Fine. Theo’s back,” Helen agreed.
Luc poked her finger at me. “And you’re not going anywhere again.”
I pressed our joined hands to my chest. “And I’m not going anywhere again.”
Now, we were driving. I’d told Helen to pack an overnight bag, and she did, without asking any questions. Pretty sure I was still riding high in her esteem because of my work attire. Setting up Daniel’s fall had also been a big part of it. I’d never desired to be any kind of hero, and by all accounts, I’d never lived like one, but when Helen smiled at me the way she had when I told her what I’d done, I got a little bit of a high. It made me think while I might not be a hero, I’d always work my ass off to be Helen’s champion if she kept giving me those smiles and that blanket of heat in my gut.
Three hours into the trip, we stopped for gas and snacks. Helen came out of the convenience store with gold Elvis sunglasses and a Twizzler hanging out of her mouth. When she got to me by the gas pump, she traced the Twizzler along my mouth, then quickly replaced it with her lips.
“We’re going to Vegas, aren’t we?” She pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head. “You’re showing me where you grew up?”
I tapped her nose. “Yep. I thought maybe you’d like to see the bright lights too.”
“I hate to tell you this, but I’m underage. No gambling.”
I cupped her butt and pulled her into me. “I hate to tell you this, but even if you were twenty-one, I’m broke. Sightseeing is free, baby.”
“You’re not going to try to marry me, are you?”
The thought didn’t freak me out, but it wasn’t on the agenda for this trip. “Not today.”
She bit her bottom lip, but she couldn’t hold back her grin. Then she reached into her bag and pulled out another pair of Elvis glasses. “Here. These are for kicking Daniel’s ass since I’m not allowed to say thank you.”
Laughing, I slid the sunglasses on my face, knowing then just as solidly as I’d known for weeks, or maybe since the first time I saw her, this woman was going to turn my life upside down, and I was going to love every second of it. Because I was in love with her, and when it came down to it, I couldn’t think of much I wouldn’t do for her.
“I need some red on my lips, baby. It’s been too long.” Hooking her around the waist, I pressed her against my car. Reaching up, she took my sunglasses off, then she ran her nose along mine and grazed her fingertips across my jaw and cheekbone and tipped her head back, inviting me in. I came readily, taking her mouth with mine in a slow, deep kiss. It wasn’t wild, but it was passionate. It wasn’t desperate, rather seeking. I asked, and she answered in soft sighs and the wet slide of her tongue.
“You’re mine, you know,” I murmured against her lips.
“Mmhmm. And you’re mine?”
“Yes. I’ve given you every reason to doubt that, but I’m telling you right here, I won’t again.”
She patted my cheek. “You better not. I bought you Elvis glasses, Theodore.”
I gave her butt a squeeze. “They’re officially a family heirloom. Now, get in the car.”
The drive had started easy, but as we drew closer and closer to my hometown, my chest filled like a balloon with dread. As if she sensed it, Helen laid her hand on my leg, stroking up and down every once in a while, but mostly leaving it in place. And that was something. That was a lot. We grew up the same. There was no one there to offer us comfort when we needed it. But here she was, offering it to me as easy as breathing.
I put my hand on top of hers when I didn’t need it on the wheel. She never tried to take it back once I made it obvious I wanted and needed it there.
When I’d decided to bring her here, I didn’t have a plan in place. Not where to take her first, or how to explain myself when I’d spent years hiding and denying the truth. But once I passed the city limits, I knew where I wanted to go first.
Helen stiffened and tried to take her hand back when I parked in the lot of a strip club that had never once seen better days. All its days had resembled the pits of hell.
“Why are we here, Theo? What…?”
“This is where my mom worked when Andrew Whitlock walked in, bought a private lap dance, paid her a little extra, and knocked her up with me.”
Helen yanked her hand away and hugged herself with her arms. “Wha—? How could you have not told me this?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t been back to this city since my father took me out of here when I was sixteen. Even before that, I tried not to think about my mom.” I stared at the gritty, run-down stucco building that housed a den of iniquity. It wasn’t anything like Savage Beauties, but every time I picked up Helen there, this was what I saw.
“So, am I like your mom? Is that what you’re saying?”
Startled, I twisted to face her. “Fuck no, I don’t think that. I’m showing you this hellhole to explain my hang ups about your job and why I reacted the way I did. It wasn’t you. It’s never been because of you.”
“I should have told you,” she interjected, “about the times I stripped. I should have told you, but I didn’t want you looking at me the way you did when you found out. And I knew you would.”
My exhale was heavy. I studied her folded arms, wanting the closeness we had on the drive here back.
“Not for the reasons you thought, but yeah, I did exactly what you feared.”
I looked out the windshield again. Something inside me popped, like a rusty lock springing open, and I wanted to tell her everything.
“She was sick. My pops—her dad—told me she had never been mentally well. This place, the things she had to do while she worked here…it only got worse. When I was little, before Pops knew I existed, she’d bring me to work with her. Some of my first memories are of hiding in the dressing room and sleeping in piles of clothes. I can still feel the sequins digging into my skin.” I scoffed, rubbing my arm at the phantom fabric digging into my flesh. “I have no doubt I saw things a little kid should never see, but I thank all that is holy my mind chose to protect me from those memories. The things I do remember are bad enough.”
I pounded my fist on the steering wheel. My chest was tight, throat clogged. I thought I’d come here, show Helen around, open up to her, and not feel it. But it was all hitting me. Every scary night. The sounds, the smells, the desperation for my mom to be safe and happy when she never, ever was. I’d pushed it down and pushed it down, but it was always there. And sitting here with my girl, the one who’d broke the dam with a bat in her hand, a smile on her ruby lips, I was feeling it all.
Helen brushed her fingers through the hair at my nape and murmured my name, but she didn’t try to interrupt. She let me give her what I needed to.
“I should hate her. I do hate her. But she was my mom, you know?” I had to stop, suck in a breath, push out the long forgotten rush of pain that came along with having Shannon O’Reilly as a mother. “She was my mom, and she was sick, and she never had a fucking chance. My pops did what he could when she was younger, but he didn’t know jack about mental health, and she was good at masking. And then it was just too late. Too much bad had happened. This place, the despair in the walls, she soaked it up. It broke her body, then her fragile mind. She contracted hep C somewhere along the line. Probably a slew of other things too, I don’t know. It’s a blur because I was a kid. Ten years old, and I was helping my mom out of bed because she was too out of it to do it herself.”
“Theo…” Helen pushed to her knees on her seat and leaned across the console to shove her face in my throat and wrap me in her arms. “I hear you.”
Letting go of the wheel, I held the warm, solid, powerful girl in my arms who would never end up like my mom, who gave up fighting long before her fragmented mind and illness claimed her. Helen would come out of that world clean, not because of anything I did or didn’t do, but because she was a warrior. She would fight until the end.
Fisting the back of her hair, I brought my mouth to her ear, and whispered fiercely, “You’re not like that.”
Her lips moved against my throat. “I know I’m not. I know, Theodore. You don’t know how relieved I am that you know too.”
“I was protecting myself.” I flung my hand out in the direction of the club. “From sliding back into this. It doesn’t make sense, right? But logic doesn’t touch the fear leftover from when I was that little kid hiding in the dressing room. That’s on me. All that’s my baggage.”
She dragged her mouth along the taut tendons in my neck. “I promise you, I understand now. I get it completely.”
“I was an idiot to think I didn’t still carry that.”
She pressed a soft kiss to the corner of my jaw. “Wishful thinking. I understand that too.”
The door of the club opened, and a couple guys in suits that stretched across their massive frames strode out. They pointed to my car, and I hadn’t gotten so soft, I didn’t recognize the potential for trouble when I saw it. I pushed Helen back to her seat and tore out of the parking lot before they could get close to us.
“They didn’t look like upstanding gentlemen,” Helen said.
“Nope. Not if they work at a place like that.”
I drove to another part of town that was even worse. I used to think the cracks in the sidewalks and road were places where the fire from hell had broken through. That wasn’t whimsy either. People who lived here didn’t go outside after dark unless they were gang affiliated and packing. Daytime was iffy at best too. And if truth was to be told, being inside was only halfway safer.
I pointed to the gutted, blackened remains of a building. “That was my pops’s garage before the bank reclaimed it. He’d owned it since he was in his twenties, but never really got his head above water in all that time. Probably because he was terrible at business, but also because he had break-ins at least once a year and had to replace half his tools each time.”
“Were you close to him?”
I shook my head. “Not really. He wasn’t that kind of man.” I pulled into the parking lot of my old apartment building. “I lived here with him and my mom from the time I was five until I moved in with Andrew.”
I tried to keep to facts, but these facts were what made me. I’d always have the imprints of sequins in my skin, a tinge of despair in my blood, the shadow of violence and poverty following me. If I wanted to stop fighting and start living—and I sure as hell did—I had to accept that. I was made here, but this wasn’t the end of me. It was barely the beginning.
The apartment was yellow stucco, cracked and crumbling—it was pretty much the neighborhood aesthetic—with an outside staircase that was rusted, and from memory, piss filled. Two stories tall, it looked slumped and haggard, as though it was as tired of existing in this violent place as much as the residents.
“Is your pops still here?”
“No.” I took her hand and rolled it against my cheek. “He died right before I started college.”
Her fingers tensed. “So, when you came into Savage Wheelz…?”
“Mmm. Deacon got it into his head that weed would help me work through my grief. He didn’t really get that you don’t grieve for a man like my pops because he never allowed anyone to love him. He was just there, taciturn and detached. He taught me about engines, how to change oil and rotate tires, but everything else…I don’t think I even knew him. He was more like that random roommate you find on Craigslist than a grandpa.”
“Is your mom still here?” she asked carefully.
“Nope. She’s probably dead, but I don’t know. She took off when I was ten, left me here with Pops. After a year, I stopped expecting her to come back.” I inhaled deep, one final taste of this poisoned air. “I’m never coming back here again.”
“You didn’t have to bring me here.”
“I haven’t been here since I moved away, but I wanted to see it one last time. This is a needed reminder, Tiger. I don’t have to live like Andrew Whitlock. I don’t want to. But I don’t want to live like this either.”
“There’s an in-between.”
I looked at her, finding her peering back at me in the softest, most open way she ever had. She was watchful, taking me in, but also the surroundings. Helen got what it meant to come from a place like this. No matter how deep our conversation was, we both knew not to forget where we were, to stay on edge and ready to roll. This was one of the many reasons she was the only person I could have shared this with.
We weren’t exactly the same, my girl and me. We were more like warped reflections in the same mirror. When she said she understood me, she meant it on a bone-deep level. Once I got my head out of my ass, I understood her the same way.
Holding her gaze, I pressed my lips to her palm. “I get that now. I’m finding it.”
“Can I come along?”
“Baby, there’s no way I’m taking another step without you beside me.”
I drove away from my old home for the final time and didn’t look back. I’d never forget where I came from, but that was just it: where I came from wasn’t where I was going. There was nothing there for me, and there never had been.
“To the lights?” Helen asked. “Are we going to see the lights?”
“Yeah, baby. That’s where we’re going.”
What I didn’t say was I’d already seen the light, and she was a red-lipped, bat-carrying, badass beauty.
