She seemed to be shrinking into herself and this wasn’t the confident Jaz I knew. I gathered up her fingers and kissed them.
“I’ve been thinking.” She paused before she kept talking, “I’m tired of running. It’s wearing me down. I wanna settle down somewhere nice. Like here. With you.” She looked up at me through her lashes, her bare soul shining through.
For once she was telling me something real that I could work with. I relaxed as I stroked her fingers. “You can have that here, you know.” I opened the door to her. All she had to do was walk through it. “Tell me about your life, Jaz. If you didn’t know by now, I’m freaking out of my mind crazy about you.” I kissed her temple.
She closed her eyes for a minute. “Seriously, Ink? I’ve never told anyone,” she spoke into her wine glass.
I grasped her face and raised her chin. “I do want to know, baby. Come on, give it to me. I’m a biker, remember? We might have the name of Saints but we weren’t always,” I coaxed lightly as I stroked her arm. It felt good to touch her. To be with her like this. Anything else around us didn’t matter. Just me and Jaz right now.
“I’m an orphan. A street kid, you know.” She took a sip of her wine and placed it down on the coaster. “My parents were both tragically killed in a house fire and I wasn’t there. I came home to it and I didn’t have enough time to save them.” Her voice sounded wobbly as fat tears plopped onto the bar. She wiped them away.
I listened, feeling her gut-wrenching pain. Misery rang clear in every single syllable she spoke. It devastated me to hear how she started her life. I brushed back a tendril of her dark locks. The light from the inside of Wheelz made her hair shine. Now, the admiration I had for her increased tenfold. Her anchors in life had been swept away from her and she’d beaten the odds. I felt a fierce need to guard and protect her. I didn’t let go of her hand.
She sniffled as she continued her story, “I was 14 at the time. We’d gone to Disneyland two years earlier. I loved my parents. I really did.”
I handed her a napkin to wipe her face. My emotions were swirling and all kinds of thoughts were running amok in my head. “I’m sorry about your loss, Jaz. I am.” She was hurting and if I thought back, her melancholy ways made sense now.
“I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. I know I’ve done the wrong thing and I’ve cheated for a long time,” she confessed as she looked away from me momentarily in shame.
My anger subsided, but I wanted to hear more. I searched her face as she blotted at her eyes.
“I knew what would happen if I ended up in the system. I got picked up by this guy who played cards.” She sucked in a deep breath before she continued, “He was a street hustler named Hands and he taught me everything I know. He was like a father to me. He gave us street kids an allowance, provided we went out and hustled money for him.”
“Sounds like an opportunist to me. Did he treat you okay?” I was livid for her. She’d been stripped of her childhood. I took her hands in mine and rubbed them as I lodged my knee between her legs to get closer to her.
“He did the best he could and he wasn’t abusive. Other kids came and went, and we kept the lights on in his warehouse.” She shrugged as if it was the most natural thing in the world. “I was his best player, the cards came real natural to me. I had talent and I knew how to get large amounts of money. He taught me extra stuff, taking me into the casinos when I was old enough. That’s when I decided to leave and strike out. I started in Vegas and collected a lot of money there. I felt confident I could do it.”
My eyes widened as she told me more of the story. “This is insane. How long have you been running like this? You have enough money, right? Why are you still doing it?” I had so many questions for her.
“I don’t know. It’s been my way of life for so long. I like the adrenaline rush,” she explained as she swallowed down a little more wine.
All of this information hitting me was hard to digest. I was reeling. I saw some of the brothers looking at us with curiosity, but they could tell we were deep in conversation, so they didn’t come over.
“This is a chance to stop and make good on things,” she pleaded. “That’s why I asked you about helping with the Chinese guy. I can help now.” Her beautiful blue eyes were begging me.
Our thighs touching was both comforting and torturous for me. I remembered where her legs had been before. “I can relate a little. We all do some shitty things in life. I’m not judging you. I used to be a dealer here with the Rebel Saints, but we don’t do that now. A person I used to deal to came back to try and hurt me.” I stopped and threw my head back for a moment, blinking away the pain of the memory. It was still rough for me to talk about, but if Jaz was talking then so could I. “She put me in a coma and almost killed me in a fire.” I released a breath.
Jaz clutched my hand and clapped the other one over her mouth. “I?I didn’t know. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she said.
“Jaz, Jaz, stop. I’m perfectly fine. You couldn’t do anything about your parents. I can’t do anything about what went down for me either. We can only move forward I guess. I know it’s not that easy though.”
She looked stunned and speechless. “So where do we go from here?” she asked hesitantly with widened eyes.
“You don’t have to keep running. All you’re going to do is make more enemies and then what?” I said. “Stay here in Holbeck. Give things a go. You have money and we can see what’s going on with us.” I turned her tiny manicured fingers over in my hands as she stroked my thigh, making my heart thump loudly in my chest. Every fiber of me was called to attention by her. I wanted her without reservation, without rhyme or reason.
“I’ll think about it,” she said with a hint of fear in her eyes.
She still seemed to be running scared, but I wasn’t a man to give up. I planned to wear her down and let her know what it was like to feel safe. We would have to build trust slowly.
She came home with me after my shift. I wanted to hold her and let her know she wasn’t alone. Her life showed me that money couldn’t buy happiness.
We were standing in my bedroom and I patted the bed.
“I can sleep on the couch,” she offered.
I shook my head. She still didn’t get it. “If you need your space, I’ll sleep on the couch, not you.”
“I don’t want space from you,” she added quickly.