Chapter Five
(Chloe)
When I laid down on the pillow, Jax’s scent hit me hard. He’d given me a lot to think about. Now breathing in his scent was a powerful aphrodisiac. It overloaded my senses and made me giddy at the same time. My hand slipped into the sweatpants I was wearing and when I touched herself, I found I was wet. My fingers worked their magic and soon my breathing began to change and my mind kept imagining it was Jax’s fingers working me up into a lather. I bit my lips to stop myself from screaming out his name as I neared my own completion. Flicking my clit one last time, I had to turn my head into his pillow to keep from screaming his name out loud.
It took me a few minutes to come down from my high and for my heart to stop pounding in my chest. Briefly, I felt ashamed of my feelings for Jax. I knew I couldn’t help it but I secretly prayed he felt the same about me, even if it was a pipe dream. I’d been half in love with him since I was a child. Finally, I closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep.
The next morning, I opened the bedroom door and tiptoed out to the living room.
“Morning.” He groaned when he saw me as he sat up and stretched out the kinks in his back from sleeping on the couch.
“Morning,” I said shyly. I didn’t want to admit it but I slept really good last night. Maybe it was the fact that Jax was in the other room and wouldn’t let anything happen to me but I’d finally gotten a good night’s sleep.
“So what are your plans for the day?” Jax asked.
“I have to think about going home. My mom will be worried sick about me.”
He nodded. “Is she working today?”
Glancing over at the clock, I saw it was barely seven a.m. “She’ll just be getting to work about now.”
“I can swing by there and tell her where you are, if you like.”
“Why would you do that?” I asked. “Roy will be at work soon and it will be safe for me to go home.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think you should go back there.”
“Why not?”
“Because Roy Harris wants to hurt you and if you walk into that house and there’s no one there to protect you, he will hurt you,” he told me brutally.
I gasped. The same thoughts had been running through my head but I was too chicken to say them out loud. Groaning, I sat down on the sofa next to him. He put his arm around my shoulder and just held me. His warmth soaked into my skin.
“I can’t go home can I?” I asked him quietly.
Jax pulled me closer and didn’t say anything, he just held me.
I turned my head into his chest and the tears began running down my face. They soaked his t-shirt but Jax didn’t say a word. Finally, a few minutes later the tears stopped. “What am I supposed to do now? I can’t stay here and I can’t go home.”
“You can stay here for a little while,” Jax assured me. “We’ll figure it out as we go along. I’ll let your mom know that you’re safe but I won’t tell her where you are, just in case Roy comes looking for you.”
“Then what?” I asked without a clue as to what the answer might be.
“I want you to stay here while I’m gone. I’ll swing by your house and pick you up some things and get the lay of the land.”
I lifted fearful eyes to Jax. I didn’t want to ask but I had to. “What if my mom doesn’t believe what happened? What if she thinks I’m lying about what he did to me?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know baby girl, I don’t know but we’ll figure it out. I won’t let that bastard hurt you again.”
I snuggled into his chest again, and knew deep in my heart that Jax would always be there for me.
A few minutes later, he got up and went into the bedroom. When he came back out, he was dressed for the day. Kneeling down in front of me, he put his big hands on my knees. Looking me in the eyes he said, “I want you to be safe here today. No one knows you’re here and that’s for the best. For now anyway. No one should come by here but if they do, I want you to hide. Don’t think about it, just hide.” Grabbing my hand, he pulled me into his bedroom. Hauling me over to the closet, he pushed his clothes over to one side to reveal a small doorway there. Pushing the door to one side, he showed me a hiding place. “It’s not very big but there’s enough room for a person to hide in here.”
“Why is this place here?” I asked.
“You know how an MC works. Sometimes, it’s better to avoid trouble rather than go looking for it. If Roy or anyone else comes here while I’m gone, I want you to get in here and wait for me to come back. You come in here and hide.” He glared at me for a moment then asked, “Got it?”
I nodded. “I got it. But as soon as you get back, we need to talk. I’m not sure I can live like this.”
A few minutes later, Jax left the apartment and I made sure the door was locked but it was too quiet. The silence about drove me nuts as the morning passed slowly. I watched a little TV but the programs sucked and I was worried about what my mother had to say. I wondered about what Jax had found waiting for him at my mom’s house or if Roy had even been home.
Finally, I could hear the church bells ringing in town and I knew it was noon. I got up, walked over to the bay window and looked outside. The rain from last night was gone and the sun was shining. The streets of the town were washed clean while the air was hot and humid.
My troubled mind wouldn’t rest. I hated not knowing what was going on and I wouldn’t admit it to anyone not even myself but I wanted Jax to come home and be here with me.
Finally, I heard a key in the door. I thought about going to the bedroom just in case it wasn’t Jax. I got as far as just inside the bedroom when I peeked out and saw him walking through the doorway.
Letting out a sigh of relief, I joined him in the kitchen. “Well?” I demanded. “How did it go?”
Jax shrugged. “It went.”
“What does that mean?” I frowned. “What did my mom say?”
He turned to stare at me for a moment. “Your mom knows your safe. She doesn’t know where you are but she knows you’re safe.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Jax sighed heavily. “Apparently, your mom got home just minutes after you left yesterday. Roy was drinking and tried to tell her that you kicked him in the balls when he wouldn’t give you the money he had. He got mad when she didn’t believe him and he hit her. She got away from him and called the cops and they came to arrest him. When they hauled him off, he called off the wedding.” He shrugged. “They’ve been together a long time and she’s kind of lost right now. I told her she could do better than him, but I don’t know if she believed me or not. She said it might be best if you didn’t come back for a while.”
I was stunned by the news. “Oh god, what have I done?” I asked as I stumbled over to the sofa and sat down.
Jax came over and sat down next to me. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” he insisted. “Roy was the one who almost raped you. He did the wrong thing here, not you. Your mom will see that eventually. Right now, she’s not thinking rationally. But she knows you, hell she raised you. She knows you would never do anything with that bastard.”
“What if she doesn’t though?” I had to ask. “What if she takes him back and he does this to her?”
He looked me in the eyes and shrugged. “Then I kill him.”
I shuddered at the cold glare in his eyes.
Jax slapped my knee. “Are you hungry? I bought us some real food. Come on let’s eat.” He acted like he hadn’t just said he would kill Roy. Like it’d been a natural solution to the problem.
We went back out to the kitchen and began unloading the bags of groceries.
To Jax, cold cuts and chips were real food. I just shook my head as I began making some sandwiches. After we ate and I cleared the table, we went back to the living room and sat on the sofa.
Jax turned on the TV and we watched a movie for a while.
“Feeling better?” he asked.
“I’m doing okay.” Although it was a little after one in the afternoon, I felt tired. “What else did you do today?” I asked.
“Club business,” he muttered.
“Was it dangerous?”
Jax shrugged. “No more than usual, I guess.”
I hesitated but I had to know. “How long is Roy in jail? Do you think he’ll be looking for me when he gets out?”
He just stared at me for a moment then nodded. “Yeah baby, I think he’ll look for you when he gets out and word on the street is he got out this morning.”
“How do you know that?” I gasped.
“I did some asking around.” Jax shrugged. “They didn’t know who I was, only that someone was asking. “
“And your brothers?” I asked. “How long are we going to be able to hide who I am and who my father was? No matter how well you cover my tracks now, they’ll find out who I am.”
Jax didn’t say anything, he just pulled me down to lie next to him. We watched TV for a while then we both fell asleep on the couch.
When I opened my eyes a little while later to my surprise, the coffee table was stacked high with an imposing tower of books. Jax was sitting on the floor beside the sofa reading one of the books. I sat there watching him without moving and for a few minutes, I could see the younger guy I’d fallen for all those years ago.
I knew it was wrong but I couldn’t explain the connection I felt for him. Now I knew it couldn’t go anywhere, so I just gathered as much of him as I could get to store away in my memories for later on, when he was no longer in my life.
I knew in my heart that Jax worshiped Bruno and his club. I’d always known that in his youth, he’d gotten into trouble. It had been wild child side of him that always excited me.
God, I had waited a long time to get on the back of that bike of his. I’d see him ride into the diner parking lot and I imagined riding off into the sunset with him. They seemed like impossible dreams back then and now, I knew why. I closed my eyes so the tears of my heartache wouldn’t betray me. Finally, I fell asleep again.
I woke at some interminable time later and sat up suddenly with one of those where-am-I moments. Darkness had fallen and the air had chilled. I must have slept for several hours, as the living room was now dark. I could hear Jax in the kitchen so I got up and joined him. He was reading something on his phone and eating a sandwich. I made myself one and sat down beside him.
He put his phone down and smiled at me. “Finally, awake I see.”
His smile made me pause, dammit he was just so gorgeous. I nodded as I swallowed my bite of food. “Sorry about that. I totally flaked out today.”
“No worries, you needed the rest.”
We rounded off the night with an episode of X Files and a couple of beers. Afterward, we fell asleep on the sofa.
It was entirely dark now, besides the glow of the television on the wall opposite. I had opened my eyes to see Jax’s television turned on to X Files and I switched the television off.
Jax’s body stirred beside me. I heard his voice – mumbling softly under his breath as he slept. Like someone trapped in a terrible dream.
What the hell is he dreaming about?
A minute later, his body jolted from underneath me. We could hear the noise from the street below and it was annoying. Jax scrambled around the coffee table beside the sofa for a pen and paper and scribbled away furiously on the paper.
I peered at the paper, confused. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing. Just scribbling,” he muttered.
“Scribbling what?”
“My mind’s just on work that’s all,” he whispered.
Suddenly, Jax’s phone vibrated and he started to type a message to somebody, quickly. His eyes widened. He finally met my eyes. “It’s…uh…just a work problem.” He plugged in a cell-phone cable and set it on the coffee table.
Curious to know what he was up to, I squinted at his phone.
Jax shook his head and shrugged, put the television remote aside and laid down to sleep. “It’ll be ok Chloe. Promise,” he muttered as he closed his eyes.
I finally got up and retired to Jax’s bedroom. With as much sleep as I’d gotten that day, I wasn’t tired so I went to the window overlooking the town and gazed outside.
There wasn’t much happening out there. The streets were pretty quiet. Then the stillness was shattered by the roar of a bike as it pulled up in front of Jax’s building.
Jax came in and over to the window. Peeking out, he saw the biker sitting there watching his apartment. He growled.
The man didn’t get off his bike. He just sat there.
As the light wasn’t turned on he couldn’t see us watching him, but the fact he was out there at all pissed Jax off greatly.
I went over to the bed and laid down. I didn’t know who or what the man was doing down there but I didn’t think it was good.
The night went on that way. I would nod off and then jerk back to consciousness. Every time I woke up, I could see Jax sitting there staring down to the street. I knew he was waiting and watching for something to happen but I didn’t know what that something was.
The final time I woke, I saw the pink light of the morning through the bedroom window, as it was just starting to spread.