The Bad Boy and the Other Bad Boy

Chapter 10

JAX'S MOM

He hugged me when he saw me. 

I was surprised and also not surprised - but so glad he did. I had wanted to hug him, but didn't dare to  - somewhere deep inside me I knew that was the first step to crossing a line we couldn't come back from. 

Even so, I couldn't help but break a little as his arms wrapped around me, his body warm and solid against mine, my body starved of affection and contact. 

I breathed in and held on for a bit too long than was necessary, but he didn't seem to mind. 

He had taken me to my favourite cafe - he had remembered when I told him last time. It felt like his signals were getting clearer now - I wasn't just making it up in my head. 

We sipped on hot coffee and he told me about his life - how it had changed since the falling out, and how his son had changed. How he himself had changed since then.

I had changed too. 

I thought he really had changed as well - there was a hunger to him, a longing, or an eagerness. He was more assertive. He held my gaze until I looked away. 

And I looked away every time.

He asked about me, too. He wasn't just being polite - he wanted to know. He was interested. It was hard for me to answer him, hard for me to concentrate - his stare, oh. . .  

He looked at me like he knew what I wanted. Like he knew I knew what he wanted. 

It was so strange, doing this. All of it was so strange - this wasn't who I was. My idea of myself was changing right in front of me and I was doing nothing about it. 

Yet there was something so familiar, so solid in our conversation, even though we had never done this before. 

He was funny, too. He would crack a joke and smile slightly as I laughed, watching me. 

Sometimes we would just sit, and look at each other. It sounds like it was the most awkward thing ever, but it wasn't, far from it. I was reading him - wondering if he tousled his hair like that on purpose or just didn't care what it looked like. The smiley face sticker on one of his coat buttons - maybe from his little daughter. The laugh lines around his eyes. The way he held himself - leaned forward, toward me.

He was reading me too. I wondered what he saw - my hair, the few strands of grey through it, my top which didn't fit like it used to - I had lost weight these past few months and not in the good way - my Cobra tattoo peeking out from under my sleeve. 

I wondered if he could see the exhaustion on my face. 

I was running on fumes. 

I wondered if him and Jax were the only things that kept me alive sometimes, and then I hated myself for giving someone I didn't know that well so much worth to me. 

Maybe it was because Jax never came home anymore.

Maybe it was because Jax never came home anymore, that when he asked me if I wanted to go to his house - I said yes. 

 - - - 

ROCCO

No one in my family owned a motorbike. None of my parents' friends did either. 

A choking fear seized me by the throat. My blood roared in my ears. 

Images of my father arriving home for lunch, then a member of the Wolverines storming in to the house flashed in my mind. Or the Cobras. 

Or Dane, off his face, with a knife. 

I raised my hands up to my head, clutching my hair in my fists.