Page 10 of Saved By the Rogue

He drew it into his lap, resting my elbow on his knee, as he gently peeled back the clingfilm he’d put into place over the tattoo the day before. His touch was gentle, careful, and I stole a glance at him as he examined his work.

"It’s looking good so far," he remarked, tracing his finger just below the site of the tattoo. "You’ll need to get some lotion on it, keep the skin from cracking..."

"Right," I breathed. I couldn’t exactly think straight right now, not with him this close to me. I knew I needed to pull myself together, but there was something about the way he was touching me, the soft, careful caress of his finger against my skin, that was making every inch of my body tingle. I wasn’t sure I had ever been this close to a grown man outside of my family before, let alone one who...

"You okay?" he murmured, glancing up to catch my gaze. He was still holding my wrist in his hand, his thumb grazing lightly across my skin. For a split second, I noticed his eyes flick down towards my mouth, and a jolt of electricity shot through me, from head to toe.

He seemed to sense it, too, and quickly pulled his hand away from me and got to his feet. I whipped my arm back into the bed, still able to feel the spot that he had been touching , as though it had burned itself into the memory of my body.

"Is this all you have?" he asked, grabbing my backpack and changing the subject. I shook my head.

"I have a few things back at the motel..."

"I’ll take you back and you can pick them up," he replied. "Don’t go by yourself. In fact, don’t leave this place without me. I’ll keep you safe."

The way he said it, I could tell there was more to this than what he had told me – whatever he saw in me, it was some reflection of what he had been through, as well, and he wasn’t going to let anything happen to me. I didn’t know how I had gotten so lucky as to find someone like him, to stumble into his tattoo shop and find the help I needed, but God, I was thanking everything good and holy for it.

He got to his feet and headed for the door without saying another word. All at once, I hoped that he would stay a little longer – I didn’t want to be alone right now. But he headed out without looking over his shoulder, pulling the door shut behind him, and I closed my eyes and laid my head back on the pillow.

I truly didn’t know if I could trust him yet. But right now, these guys were the best option I had. The Dark Dogs – some kind of gang? I had seen a few motorcycles parked outside the tattoo shop, maybe they were a biker gang or something...

God, what had my life come to? I was the city councilman’s daughter, on the run and relying on some random bikers to get me out of a marriage that made me sick just to think about. I couldn’t believe I had ended up in this mess, but I knew it was better than facing whatever my parents had in store for me.

I closed my eyes, and soon, sleep rose up to take me again, my body and mind exhausted from the stress of this new life.

Chapter Six – Jaxon

I let out a sigh as I stepped through the door to my apartment, the familiar smell of paint hanging in the air, and tossed my jacket onto the couch before I headed to the kitchen to make myself a coffee.

I had left Star asleep in the small room above the tattoo shop – I was just across the street, not far from her, but I still felt a little guilty about leaving her behind like that. I hoped she didn’t hate me for it. I got the feeling she was totally lost in this world, totally unsure of how to navigate this new life that had been laid in front of her, and I couldn’t say I blamed her. After all, she had come from one of the highest echelons of society, crashing down to land with us. It would be weird if she was anything other than totally shaken up by it.

I poured a strong coffee into my cup and took a long sip – caffeine was the only drug I allowed myself these days after I’d quit smoking the year before when I had noticed the nicotine staining the tips of my fingers. I hated being addicted to anything, after how far that shit had gone to ripping my life apart, but I figured that one more thing to take the edge off wasn’t going to be that much of a problem.

Placing the coffee on the sidetable, I headed through to my bedroom, which doubled for my art studio – in this tiny place, it wasn’t as though I had much room to work, and I would have been lying if I said it didn’t get to me sometimes. But the small stipend I received for my work with the Dogs wasn’t enough to afford somewhere bigger, and I didn’t want to go out and get myself a new job, not when this one meant the world to me, and gave me family I never had before.

I had a couple of easels set up, and I was working on landscape pieces of the street below, the tattoo shop opposite my window. I grimaced as I looked one of them over. I had thought it looked better last night, but here, in the cold light of day, it looked pretty amateur, some of the colors too bright for the gray outside.

I grabbed one of the tubes of paint that I had cast aside on the windowsill and squeezed a generous amount onto the takeout container I had turned into a makeshift easel, picking up one of the brushes so I could make some changes to this particular piece. Painting was always what I did when I needed to get my mind off of something, what I always used to calm myself down when it felt as though the world was spinning out of control around me – in truth, I was sure that bringing this girl into my life was going to make things a whole lot harder, but, when I looked into her eyes, it was hard to care.

Tongue between my front teeth, I re-painted the street in the picture carefully, trying to capture the way the sunlight bounced off the puddles from the rainfall we’d had the week before. The bikes were lined up outside the store, a few of the Dogs stopping by to update Chuck on what was going on with the new systems we had put in place for moving our product around the city. A few of the other biker gangs had started getting too big for their damn boots and pushing into our territory, but a little dissuading, and they would soon remember their place in all of this.

As I worked, my eyes drifted up towards the room that I knew Star was sleeping in. Strange, to think she was so close, right there opposite me, almost within reach. She had seemed exhausted when I had gone in to check on her earlier, and, given everything she had been through, I couldn’t exactly say that I was surprised. It seemed a miracle she was even upright after everything that had happened, and I could tell from the way she looked at me that she was still wary about all of this, still wondering if she had done the right thing by trusting us.

Not that she had a whole lot in the way of choices right now. With Lombardi likely looking for her, not to mention her father on her tail to pull her back into her family duties, she’d have to be looking over her shoulder every chance she got. Here, with us, at least she would be able to rest for a while.

No, not with us. With me. I needed to remember that. Chuck had made that about as clear as he could, that he wasn’t doing all of this out of the goodness of his heart – he was doing it because I had agreed to step up and handle it, and if I fucked up, then it was going to be on me.

Even the thought of it was enough to set my teeth on edge. I didn’t do well being under this much pressure. I knew, all too vividly, what it did to me, and I could already feel those familiar cravings creeping in to the back of my mind.

I had been young when Chuck had pulled me off the streets, but that addiction felt as though it had been with me for years – I had started in high school, the same way everyone else did, drinking, smoking weed, nothing too serious.

But I wasn’t like everyone else. No, everyone else seemed to be able to stop at a certain point, but I would always be the last one awake at the party, the one who was doing everything to keep himself going – pouring out the last of everyone else’s drinks and downing them, picking up joint ends and smoking them up, anything, anything I could do in order to keep the high going.

My family didn’t give a shit. My mom was an alcoholic herself, and hardly paid attention to me at the best of times – she was just glad I was out of the house so she could drink herself into a stupor without having to worry about me. My dad left when I was a kid, and I had no idea what he was doing with himself, whether he was dead on the side of the road somewhere for shooting his smart mouth off at someone he shouldn’t have. It seemed like a blessing, at the time, a chance for me to just give myself over to the intensity of my need to get out of my mind, but looking back, fuck, I wished someone had been there to step in and tell me that I didn’t need to live my life like that.

It didn’t take long before I started seeking out the harder stuff, that stuff that would give me even more of a break from my stressed-out brain. Coke, pills, molly, anything I could get my hands on. Everyone else seemed to be doing it to just have a little fun, but me? I was doing it because being in my sober mind was more than I could handle. I didn’t know what the hell was wrong with me, why everyone else seemed so able to handle their shit when I felt as though I would fall apart at any moment, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I sank into that addiction like an old friend, like it had been there waiting for me the whole time, and I was happy to embrace it, once and for all.

By the time I was seventeen, I was smoking heroin, and from there, it got worse– snorting the shit, and then, someone’s big brother had taken me into a bathroom at a party and shown me how to shoot it up. I could still remember, all too well, the feeling that had spread through my body the moment that high first hit me, like everything else in the world drifted away – I was in this warm, golden bubble, and nothing could reach me. Not my drunk mom drooling on the couch, not the concerned glances of my classmates wondering how much I was going to put away before I finally stopped – nothing. None of it mattered. None of it came close to mattering when I felt as good as I did in that moment.

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