Twenty-Two
Jenny
“Do I care about you?” she echoed, caught off guard. She closed her journal and set it on the nightstand. “Where’d that come from?”
Colin was in a state of agitation she hadn’t seen before. He wasn’t worked up, per se, but his dark eyes were too big, glinting in a strange way. He seemed detached, somehow. Stuck in his head.
“Do you?” he pressed.
Jenny frowned. She had a feeling this was Candy’s fault. So many things were. “Do you want an honest answer? Or a flattering one?”
He made a face like he was insulted. But then anxiety tweaked his handsome features. “Honest.”
“You sure?”
“Just tell me.”
She sighed. “Colin, I don’t sleep with men I don’t care about. Does that answer your question?”
He didn’t answer, instead came to sit on the foot of her bed, feet braced apart, brow furrowed.
“Okay. You’re starting to freak me out. What’s wrong?”
He massaged the knuckles of one hand with the fingers of the other. Clean knuckles; he hadn’t been fighting. Large, knobby. Capable of devastation, if he chose to use them that way. He gathered his thoughts for a moment and said, “I think I’m afraid of your brother.”
She hadn’t been expecting that. She snorted. “Look, I know he gives you shit, but he really doesn’t care about my sex life.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Okay.” Jenny waited.
After a moment, he said, “He made a man wet himself tonight,” voice thick with disgust…and with doubt. “I didn’t realize it at first, but then I smelled it.”
This was going to take a while. Jenny shifted so she was sitting beside Colin, cross-legged on the mattress, studying the side of his face. “Well.” How to keep this from being insulting. Hmm. “He does run an outlaw biker club, babe. He does some scary stuff. Kinda comes with the territory.” Not to mention it was expected of him.
Colin shook his head. “No, I mean…” He sighed. “I made this kid piss himself once. A long time ago,” he added quickly, darting her a glance. “I was in middle school and I was…well, anyway, I was a shithead. But that’s all I was.” He turned his head, so he could see her face. “I was a shithead, and thought it’d be fun to scare this kid. And I did. And I laughed.” Shame marred his expression, a deep sadness.
Then he seemed to snap out of it. “But I knew what I was doing. And all I was doing was messing around. I didn’t want to hurt the guy. I wasn’t going to.”
Ah. It was becoming clear.
“It’s one thing to pretend you’re gonna hurt someone,” he said. “It’s a whole other to know you’re going to, if it comes to that.”
Jenny stared at him.
“Candy went out tonight ready to kill a man if he didn’t get the answers he wanted. And yeah, there’s a guy or two I’d like to put a bullet through. But just a scrawny kid…”
“You guys interrogated Pup,” she guessed, and he didn’t have a good enough poker face to keep from confirming it with a look. “Was it bad?”
“You know I can’t tell you anything about it.”
She smiled. He was starting to have more club-like responses to things. Which was good…except they needed refining. “Yeah, you can,” she said. “Do you think the guys follow that no-talking rule to the letter?”
He stared at her, asking silently.
“Well, they don’t.” She nudged him with her elbow. “Pup wet his pants. Okay. Embarrassing. But not lethal. Did it get worse than that?”
Colin glanced away with a disbelieving sound. “No.” A grudging admission.
A deep groove marred the side of his face, an unhappy bracket of stress curving around his downturned lips. Jenny felt a sudden impulse to touch it, and didn’t fight it, reached to trace the line with her fingertip. He jerked as if startled, and his eyes slid toward her, but he didn’t pull back. If anything, he seemed to lean into the pressure of her hand.
She grinned. She’d once watched a documentary about the North American mountain lion. Animals who resisted only managed to drag the big cat’s claws deeper into their skin. But the smart prey animals leaned into the pressure, and could sometimes find an escape route, once the claws released.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just thinking about mountain lions.”
“Come again?”
Jenny curled her hand around the back of his neck. The skin was warm, smooth, his throat a strong column of muscle against her thumb. “You’re right,” she said, resting her chin against his shoulder. “There is a difference between trying to scare someone for fun, and scaring him for real. Just like there’s a difference between hunting and poaching.”
His brows lifted, a cautious gleam stealing into his eyes.
“Your dad hunted gators. For fun?”
“It was his living.”
“Right. But there were people who poached gators for the thrill of it, weren’t there? Who wanted a trophy? Who were just being…”
He drew upright, suddenly, sitting stiff and straight on the edge of the mattress, so her hand slid down his back. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying…” She kept her voice even, gentle, “that in Candy’s world, violence done in the name of protecting the family or the club is honorable. And violence done for fun is what’s cruel.”
“Candy’s world.” His expression darkened, black brows tucking low. “Your world, you mean.”
“My world,” she confirmed.
“So the way you see it, I’m the asshole.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But that’s what you think.”
Jenny took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I think the world’s a helluva lot softer than it used to be a long time ago. And I think your average person off the street sees the club as something awful…when it’s really just something basic and masculine we lost along the way.”
He stared at her.
“Doing cruel things out of loyalty and love isn’t half as cruel as doing them just because,” Jenny said, the words clashing with her soft tone. “But that’s just what I think. You’re entitled to your own opinion.”
More staring.
A lot of staring.
Angry-faced, brain-cramped, adorable staring.
“Colin.”
He linked his hands together in his lap and stared at them.
Jenny bit her lip and tried not to smile. “I didn’t hurt your feelings, did I?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What for? For thinking I’m an asshole? Or for suggesting I’m not masculine?”
“I didn’t do either of those things.”
“Might as well have.”
She stifled a laugh and schooled her composure. “Colin, look at me.”
He did so, but with obvious reluctance.
“Everybody feels like you do right now during their prospect year. It’s normal. Maybe not fun, no. But normal. I wasn’t trying to suggest anything about you because there’s nothing to suggest. To be honest, I’d worry about you if you weren’t asking these kinds of questions.” And having an identity crisis, she added in her head. “The guys who think it’s fun are either wacko, or not seeing the bigger picture.”
He studied her a moment, eyes somber, but one corner of his mouth flicked upward in an uncertain smile. “Wacko?”
“Wacko. It’s a good thing you hated what happened tonight. I can promise you that Candy hated it too.”
He snorted, unconvinced.
“My brother might be a monster,” she said, “but he’s the right kind of monster. I’m grateful for that.”
Your brother is too, she thought. The question remained: what kind of monster are you?