“I saw you,” she blurted, reaching behind her to brush away my hand but I tightened my grip on her. “I went to that place, that despicable warehouse of yours and I saw you,” she stressed her last word, driving the stake deep through the skin, slicing through the demented exterior of my resolve.
She wrenched my fingers from her neck and took a retreating step backward.
“I convinced myself that I owed you an apology, that, maybe I had misjudged you. But I was on point the other night—actually, I wasn’t,” she corrected herself, shaking her head. “I thought you were just this guy who ran in the wrong circles but you’re much worse. I’m sure people gravitate to you, people who crave the high you give with your dirty mouth and your filthy ways. I’m not one of those people,” she sneered, glancing toward the door. “Now, I believe I’ve made myself perfectly clear so if you would just see yourself out we could forget you ever walked into Dee’s diner and that our paths ever crossed.”
She swallowed, took a deep breath and her hands trembled as she turned around to walk into her tiny kitchen, dismissing me.
No one dismissed Jack Parrish. No one. Certainly not some pretty little blonde with a golden cunt and a smart mouth.
She thought she knew me? Thought ten minutes in my compound gave her insight into who I was—she had no fucking idea. I’d make her head spin with what the last thirty-eight years on this earth consisted of for Jack Parrish. Then and only then, could this bitch judge me.
I stalked into her kitchen and watched her throw dishes into her sink, her hands still shaking.
“You don’t know me,” I ground out, causing her to turn around startled.
“I thought I asked you to leave,” she whispered, taking a deep breath as she gripped the edge of the counter and stared at me.
“I grew up with a mother who fucking hated me. I spent my teenage years running around doing fucked up shit, just to get her attention. It didn’t matter if it was negative attention or that it made her hate me more, all I knew was she noticed me whenever I did the bad shit. I got high on it, kept doing it, all the while trying to keep her interested in me. And then she and my father died because all the bad shit caught up with me and landed me in trouble. On their way to bail my ass out they were killed in a car crash.”
She stared at me quietly and for some reason I looked into her eyes and kept going, introducing her to the real Jack Parrish, leaving myself bare for her judgements.
“I had responsibilities I needed to take care of…got my girl pregnant, married her, and she gave me my daughter and my son. The club, those men, they became my family, provided me a way to take care of my responsibilities, to give my family a good life. Connie was never about the club life,” I said, cocking my head and staring at her. “Like you, the ugliness blinded her and she was too jaded to see the brotherhood. Lost her and thought I lost a part of myself but realized I never truly would feel loss until I held my lifeless baby boy in my arms in the middle of the street with my little girl sobbing at the curb. I prayed to any fucking God that would listen to a no good bastard like me. I prayed for a miracle that would breathe life back into the two-year old that I had lost and had died on my watch.”
“You ever lose somebody, Reina?” I questioned, stepping toward her, high on that scared look that reappeared in her eyes. “Ever lose someone you created? Someone you loved more than anything? I doubt it, because a bitch like you wouldn’t survive it. It changes you. I was fucked from birth, but losing my son, fucked me harder. And that glimpse of the Satan’s Knight’s you saw tonight, that family you frowned upon, they pulled me out of the darkness before it consumed me and swallowed me whole. They are the reason I’m standing here in front of you because I would have taken purchase next to my son, right there in the cold earth for all of eternity, beside the boy I created,” I growled with a ragged breath. “So bitch, don’t look at me with those judgmental eyes because you wouldn’t survive all the shit I have.”
“You think you know me? You think you have me all figured out? You don’t know a goddamn thing. I know loss, maybe not as deeply as you. I never lost a child, never had one to lose, but I lost myself,” she cried, tears escaping from the corners of her eyes. “I survived,” she shouted through her tears. “I survived,” she repeated, this time the words a whisper. She wiped angrily at the tears that stained her cheeks but the words that came next were soft. “And I learned that surviving is worse than dying. It’s hell in its purest form.”
Her words twisted inside me and for the first time in thirteen years someone got it, someone got me. Her words were my truth.
I realized then, Reina, the woman I barely knew, knew me.
There were no words left to say. She had said them all.