Brütal • Mötley Crüe •

Thirty • May I Have Your Hand?

Warnings: Vulgar Language, Drug & Alcohol Use, Violence & Gang Affiliations, Mentions of Past Murders & Child Abuse

May 29th, 1983
11:59PM

The amount of time it took Nikki to completely sober up should've broken some kind of record.

A thick fog had been slowly blanketing his brain with each little white line and can of Budweiser he'd consumed throughout the day, and all at once it seemed to lift. It was jarring how quickly he came to, but even so, the dopey, substance-ridden organ still couldn't quite compute what Halston—Harlow?—had said.

"That's your name?" he asked stupidly, his hands falling from her shoulders. The bones ached as he spread his fingers, telling him just how hard he'd been gripping onto her. He would have to apologize for that later.

"Yes," she said quietly, her teeth refusing to cease their incessant chattering. She cradled each of her elbows in an opposite palm, willing the shakes to subside as she flicked her eyes toward the couch. "Sit down. We need to talk."

Those four words would strike the fear of God into any reasonable man, and he nodded because there was nothing else he could do. He was sure he'd hear those four words many more times in his life, but this one wasn't due to any fault of his own. He would not be the one in the hot seat tonight, which comforted him slightly.

He ran through the last fifteen minutes in his mind, trying to get his bearings, and an unsettling question came to him.

"How do you know her real name?" Nikki abruptly turned to Fred, who was now reclaiming his spot on the furthest side of the couch.

The welts on the burly man's neck were angry and raised, the switchblade's knick finally drying over, and he rubbed at it as you would a sore muscle. He could breathe a little better now—now that his windpipe wasn't actively being crushed—but his face was still that alarming shade of purple and his heart was pounding in his ears as if the little drummer boy had taken residence in his skull.

Admittedly, Fred had expected the day to be a wild one—a rock festival with hundreds of thousands of people in attendance couldn't be anything but wild—but he hadn't expected to look death in the face. Twice.

But amongst the chaos and fear came a deep feeling of comfort he didn't think he'd ever find. The girl he'd thought about for years—beaten himself up over for years, more like—was alive and well and currently limping toward him. She wasn't dead as he'd been told, and the brush of her knee against his as she sat proved it. She was here—in corporeal form instead of the version of her that lived in his head—and that made the two near death experiences way more than worth it.

"Just sit down, Nikki," Halston repeated, and Nikki could hear in her voice that she was exhausted. That peculiar kind of exhausted he'd seen after they fled the Rainbow, before she slept for a solid twelve hours. "I'll tell you everything."

And just what does everything entail? Nikki wondered.

Would he finally be trusted with all the dark secrets of her past? Here? Now? When his legs were cooked noodles and his tongue as fat and round as Fred's sickeningly oversized biceps? Was she really handing him the key to the vault when his bran was half gone? Was it deliberate?

And why the fuck was Fred—a man they'd only met that morning—included in the conversation?

"What happened to your foot?" Nikki's finger jerked to the golf ball sized lump sprouting from Halston's ankle bone.