Fifteen
Jenny
No glass of wine, no pill, no soak in a hot tub could relax her the way Colin had. For the first time in years, not one worry crowded her mind; not one ugly memory chased across her skin. She was completely, blissfully exhausted, even though sleep lay elusive, just out of reach.
She rolled to the left, collided with Colin’s solid shape beside her, and cuddled up against his shoulder. His arm lifted immediately, going behind her shoulders when she picked up her head and gave him room to reach around her. It was a big, heavy arm. She felt comforted, safe within its grasp.
Funny, though. Nothing they’d done had been about comfort.
He heaved a deep, contented sigh, ribcage inflating, pushing against her. His voice sounded full of sleep, and masculine pride. “You’re not in a coma yet?”
“I’m not much of a sleeper.” She reached across him, teasing at the pronounced ridges of his abdominals, higher, up toward his chest –
Her hand stilled as a thought struck. “Your tattoo.”
“What about it?”
“I wanna see it.”
He groaned. “Haven’t you ever seen a tattoo before?” But he flipped back the covers obediently.
Jenny sat up and pushed her hair behind her ears as she leaned over him, very aware of his eyes tracking her movements, lingering on her breasts. She felt her cheeks warm, but made no move to cover herself. They were way past the point of shame now; let him look.
The tattoo was small, dark, clean-edged, and appeared new. Old ink had a way of fading to green, but this was deep black. It was a knife. A jagged-edged, sharp-pointed Bowie knife, simply drawn and unshaded.
An image of his brother filled her mind, unbidden. Not allowed to know all the dirty details of the club, she nevertheless knew that Mercy had made a name for himself through his lack of said emotion. They called him an extractor, and she knew he was capable with blades.
Sitting back, her eyes went to Colin’s face. His expression was open and soft with fatigue, and it stilled the sudden chill that had come up inside her at the thought of his brother. “A knife?”
He gave her a tired, lopsided smile. “You want the story, huh?”
“Well, I think half the fun of tats is telling their stories, isn’t it?” She gave him back a smile of her own, for encouragement.
He rolled his eyes, but like any good Southern boy, launched into the tale with relish. “My old man – the one who raised me, anyway” – a shadow flickered across his face, there and gone again as he refocused – “was having a bad hunting year, back when I was about fifteen.” He squinted in thought, looking back through his memories. “Yeah. Fifteen. Pretty sure. Anyway, he was starting to get kinda desperate, which made him do shit that wasn’t always smart or safe when we were out checking the bait lines.”
“Bait lines?”
“You put a chicken carcass on a big-ass shark hook, and dangle it up above the water, anchor it off on a tree. The gator jumps up and gets it” – he clapped his hands together in an imitation of jaws snapping – “and then he’s caught. He sulks underwater, tries to back in under the bank, if he can. We gotta go around and pull ‘em up.”
“Well that sounds fun.”
“Oh, don’t worry. It’s not.” He grinned. “Well, not mostly… Anyway, we were out in the boat, and we finally came up on a bait that’d been taken…”
He painted her a vivid portrait of a thrashing gator, of his damp hands slippery on the stock of the rifle, and the Ruger plunging down into the murky water. Unarmed, with a gator on the line trying to go into a death roll beside the boat, Colin had snatched up his father’s knife…and rammed it down into the top of the beast’s head, straight into his brain.
“You killed it with a knife,” she said, finding it hard to believe…but unable to call him a liar. There was too much detail to the story, the light in his eyes too bright to have been faked.
He nodded. “With a knife.” He lifted his left arm and fingered a long, thin scar that ran from wrist to elbow, just a slight ribbon of paler skin she hadn’t noticed before. “That’s how I got that.”
“You knifed yourself?”
“Scraped it on the side of the boat. When we got home, Dad made me soak it in alcohol.” He shuddered. “You get laid open out there in gator territory, there’s no telling what kinda infection you’re gonna get.”
She shuddered too. “Ouch.”
“So the tattoo,” he said, bringing it back to her original question. “I got that right after I prospected. So I wouldn’t forget where I came from.”
His expression shifted, became more thoughtful, troubled. “From what I can tell, you leave behind whoever you were before when you patch in.”
She couldn’t help but regard him in a new light. As a lover, yes, but she was seeing his resistance as less of an affront to the club, and more as the genuine emotional reaction that it was. He was afraid of losing himself here; and maybe that was scary because he wasn’t entirely sure who he was, or what he’d be losing that slippery sense of self to.
“Colin.”
His eyes came to her face, automatically, as quick as his name left her lips.
“The club doesn’t take your identity. It’s just the prospecting year that feels like it. Once you patch, they’re gonna want you – the real you, and what you can bring to the table that’s special.”
“Special?” He snorted.
“Well, something about you has to be special, doesn’t it?” she teased, grinning…and then gasping in mock fright as he snagged her wrist and pulled her down across him. She landed on his chest, her face above his.
His eyes looked very dark in the lamp, hard to read when his face was serious, as it was now. “Okay, so you know the tat story. What about that scar you’ve got? The one on your stomach?”
She tensed, and felt his arms go around her in immediate response. Did she tell him? Was it any worse than anything else she’d already revealed?
“C-section?” he guessed. “You don’t have a kid, do you?”
Well, the truth wasn’t as dire as his imagination, apparently.
Jenny shook her head and swore his arms relaxed a fraction. “No, no kids. Riley was very drunk one night. He didn’t want children, and he got the idea in his head that it might be…a good idea to…prevent me from being capable…”
“Jesus Christ.” Colin jackknifed up to a sitting position, clamping tight to her and taking her with him. Sitting in his lap, encircled by strong arms, she stared down into his face and saw the hot flashes of anger, fear, revulsion, sympathy. A whole kaleidoscope of emotion that brought the sting of tears to her eyes. “Did he…? And Candy let him live? Jesus…”
“No, no, it’s fine.” She put her hands on his hard, smooth shoulders. “He didn’t get farther than cutting me. And not deep. Just a flesh wound.” She attempted a smile and knew it wobbled.
Anger tightened his jaw, brought out the tendons in his neck. He glanced away from her, nostrils flaring. So much like Candy, when he was trying to get his significant temper under control.
“Colin.”
“You probably shouldn’t have told me that.”
“Why not?” she asked, against her better judgement.
“’Cause now I’m gonna have to kill him.”