Page 14 of Crow
“You’re on.” I held my bottle out, and she clinked her own against it before raising it to her lips. Five flash mobs later, she was grinning and telling me to pay up, even though we had never set stakes to our wager.
“Double or nothing,” I countered, and her eyes lit up with interest. “In the next five minutes, she’s going to eavesdrop on him and his friends and get offended.”
“Hah! You’re making this too easy, handsome. It's obviously going to be him trying to protect her by pushing her away on purpose.”
“We shall see,” I hummed, but when it turned out she was right, I couldn’t find it in myself to be too upset.
I had lost count of how many beers I’d had when I realized Jade hadn’t spoken for a while. I looked down at her, momentarily surprised at how close she was. When had she moved to lean against my side? I frowned, trying to remember, then shrugged it off. I was about to ask if she was okay when she sighed slightly, curling in on herself, and I realized she was asleep.
Not for the first time, I noticed how tiny she was. She looked especially small without the heels and exaggerated stripper makeup, her hair up out of her face and showing off her delicate features, and none of her bravado making her appear to take up more room than she did. I was struck by the sudden knowledge that if I felt like it, I could easily crush her… which summoned a rush of protectiveness when I realized I was not the only person in Mascid who could do so if they wished.
I drained the last of my beer, deciding that this would be my last one, and let her sleep. She had looked tired when I had run into her, and if my suspicion was right and she was hurt, then sleep would only help. She curled against my side, and I noticed the edge of a bruise peeking out from where her shirt had ridden up around her waist. Protective fury roared in my chest. I was certain that had she not been sleeping so peacefully against me, I would go out and hunt down whoever had dared to hurt her. As it was, I didn’t want to disturb her. Without really registering it, I started singing softly under my breath, the song that my mother used to sing to me when I was little to help me sleep. Jade sighed again and I froze, but she didn’t wake up. She leaned further into me, nuzzling slightly, and my chest felt tight but also warm. I stroked her hair back from her face, noting that it smelled of apples, and continued singing.
***
I didn’t remember falling asleep, only that a noise had woken me. I opened my eyes to see that the TV screen was nothing but static and that it was still dark outside. Something felt wrong, and it took a moment for my sleep-slow brain to realize it was the absence of Jade’s weight against my side.
Before panic could set in and wake me fully, she was leaning over me. Her long hair brushed against my face, and the scent of apples grew stronger.
“Shh,” she said softly, her small hand pressing me back onto the couch. “Go back to sleep, it’s okay.”
“Mmrph?” I mumbled, eyelids already drooping shut again. She chuckled quietly, and it made me smile. It was such a nice sound. I tried to tell her so, but I wasn’t sure I had said it properly. Something soft pressed against my cheek, and Jade started to say something else, but I was asleep again before I could hear what it was.
When I woke fully, it was daylight, and I was alone in the house. I knew it, even before I sat up and saw that Jade’s shoes weren’t on the floor from where she had kicked them off halfway through the second movie. There was, however, a blanket draped over me and a scrap of paper on my coffee table that hadn’t been there the night before. I picked it up, smiling when I saw the number scrawled on it. Then I remembered Jeannie, her picture hidden away in a kitchen drawer. I screwed the paper into a little ball and threw it in the trash as I retrieved the photo and returned it to its proper place on the coffee table.
Chapter Eight
Jade
It took Crow a couple of days to text, to the point where I was worried he wouldn’t. Then my phone chimed with a message from an unfamiliar number that just saidDrinks?I grinned, hugging my phone to my chest, and saved the number underHandsome.
It quickly became a routine. After a shift at Tease, I would text Crow, if there wasn’t already a text waiting from him, and go over to his house for drinks. Sometimes I would skip out of work early, or even run into him wandering the streets on my way to my shift and just blow it off altogether to go with him. He never told me what he was doing, but I was used to that. It didn’t bother me much. I told Ray the reason I was staying out later was that I was picking up extra shifts, or staying late at the bar to drink with the other girls. Part of me was convinced he wouldn’t even notice I was gone. He was still spending most of his time planning revenge on the Rebels with the rest of the Freeways.
I still didn’t know much about the plan, only that it was going to be big. I didn’t understand why they couldn’t just run them over, or shoot them, and be done with it, but Ray said it wasn’t that simple. That he wanted to destroy the Rebels after everything they’d done. Sometimes when I looked at Crow’s motorcycle, I got nervous. He was so secretive, and I knew he wasn’t one of the Freeways, which meant there was the chance he was one of the Rebels. But I’d always run into him on Freeway turf, and he never wore club colors, and he lived on the border between the two motorcycle club territories. There was every chance that he was just a weekend warrior, enamored with the lifestyle but not married to it.
Or maybe he was looking to become a Freeway prospect. I wasn’t sure if that idea made me happy or not. On the one hand Crow wouldn’t be the enemy, and on the other the image of him and Ray in the same room made me feel very uncomfortable.
Then I remembered the other bikers he had been with the first night I met him, and my stomach plummeted. Either that was a motorcycle club, or a group of weekend warriors that wanted to be a club. Which meant there was a large possibility that he was a Rebel.
But he would have mentioned it by now if he was a Rebel. The clubs were bikers’ entire lives; the Freeways never fucking shut up about being part of a club. There’s no way he could have gone this long without talking about his club, so he was probably just a weekend warrior, and that group at Tease had been a group of wannabes.
Yeah. I nodded firmly to myself, decision made. He was just a weekend warrior.
“Jade!” Jess’s annoyed voice brought me back to the present. “Are you even listenin’ to me?”
“Of course,” I told her, then paused. “But, just in case I wasn’t, what were we talking about?”
“Seriously?”
“I’m sorry, Jess! I was—”
“Distracted, I know. You’re always distracted these days,” she interrupted me, rolling her blue eyes. I smiled sheepishly.
“But you still love me anyways?” I asked, batting my eyelashes at her until she cracked a smile.
“I suppose.” She sighed, taking another gulp of some pink iced coffee monstrosity with no actual coffee in it, topped with a hellish amount of whipped cream. It gave me a toothache just looking at it. I took a sip of my own drink; a caramel latte because I wasn’t a sugar-addicted crazy person.
“So…” I said cautiously, not wanting to annoy her again. “What did you want to talk about again…?”
