I was taken aback by the greeting. Everyone had taken to treating me with care since I’d been back, like I was breakable. Fragile. Rosie was a slight exception, but even her concern cracked through. They meant well, I knew, but the best way to make someone feel weak was to treat them like they were about to fall apart.
It seemed Evie wasn’t going to do that. I opened the door and she strutted through it, her large fringed leather handbag swinging in the crook of her arm. I dutifully followed her back into Rosie’s living room. It looked like a hippy, a biker and a fashionista had vomited all over it. The whole room was an identity crisis, but like Rosie herself, it worked.
Evie sat herself down on the white sofa, pushing a furry throw pillow out of the way.
I stared at her.
She stared back at me.
“Can I get you something? The blood of an infant, bottled unicorn tears?” I asked uneasily.
She quirked a brow, obviously not finding me funny. Then she looked me up and down. “I get it,” she declared. “Why he picked you.”
I immediately knew who she was talking about and I stiffened.
She either didn’t notice or ignored it. “The fact you’re still up and about, wearing crop tops, shows you’ve got guts. You’re not hard on the eyes, either. Too skinny, though.”
I frowned at her. “I’m not sure where this conversation is going, but then again I was lost before we started.”
She eyed me. “I’m here to check on a girl who went through the hellest of hells and came out the other side. Not unscathed, I’m guessing, considering the boy I consider a son is full of fucking scars that will never heal.”
I flinched at the no-nonsense tone of her husky voice.
She didn’t miss that. “Yeah, I see you’ve caught them too. They’re hard to miss. Though I guess impossible to miss when you see them in the mirror.”
I didn’t think she required an answer, so I moved to sit down in the sofa. Only so long I could stay standing under the weight of her words.
“You clean?” she asked.
I gaped at her. “You really don’t do bullshit, do you?”
She shook her head. “This life, there is no bullshit. A lot of blood, bullets, and chaos, but no bullshit.”
“I dig that.” I eyed her. “I’m clean,” I said. “Though I’m more depraved now than I was when I was using.” I had no idea why I added that little personal gem. Maybe because I was tired of the bullshit myself.
“That’s called love. The most addictive and destructive substance out there. If used right, it can create.” She looked at me shrewdly. “In your case, recreate.” There was a pregnant pause. “If used wrong, it can flatten everything in your life and turn what remains into a gray wasteland.”
I raised my brow. “I don’t exactly understand what you’re trying to convince me of here. That I should run back to the needle?”
She lit her smoke. “There a promise of anything going right with that needle? Way I see it, the only thing it promises is a barren wasteland, right or wrong.” Her kohl-rimmed eyes narrowed on me. “What you’ve got with the kid, what he’s offering you? Sure, if it goes bad it might resemble the wasteland that addiction is. But you give it a chance, you give him a chance, you might just find an oasis.”
I chewed over her words as she puffed on her smoke, not bothered that I was silent. She arched her brow at me. “Though you decide that shit, you do it soon. Stop fuckin’ him around. He’ll follow you around like a lovesick puppy and feast on every scrap of hope you give him. Those men”—she nodded to the curb where Skid’s bike was visible—“they don’t love like normal men. Not in this life. They’ve chosen a life outside the lines of the coloring book called society. They live rough and hard. They love hard too. And mostly, it’s for life. Even if you two explode into a blaze of disaster, he’ll still hold the burning embers till the day the reaper takes him. I can see that in his eyes.”
Cue girly stomach flip. Not a time to mull over that while I was getting life lessons from the biker matriarch.
“I’ve known him since he was a prospect runnin’ from a street gang and used his good looks and smart mouth to guide him through the shit life threw at him. He’s a good man. And if you hurt him, I’ll run you over with my car and make it look like an accident,” she declared, like she was mentioning she might have me out for dinner one night. It wasn’t an empty threat; I’d heard plenty of those in my life. This was a promise. And despite the fact she was promising my murder, I liked it. I liked that for Lucky, that he had someone looking out for him. That he had a family. I liked that for Lily too. She lost the only family she had left when her mom died and was saddled with the junkie stripper fuckup for a best friend. Now she had a family that would kill for one another.