Skin

“Why didn’t you tell me about Cherry?” I asked, hoping to sound conversational as Juice and I lounged together on the couch late that night. He’d just gotten home, and it was well past eleven. I knew that they must have had a lot to talk about to make chapel last that long, but I found that, somehow, I wasn’t particularly interested in finding out what they’d discussed.

“What do you mean?” he looked genuinely perplexed by my random inquiry.

“You brought her here. She told me today. And yet, it was Jax that told me that she was here and that she was with Sack. I just want to know why you didn’t tell me when you obviously knew about it.”

Juice looked ashamed. His eyes dropped down and he stared at the coffee table, where his sock-clad feet were propped up. His lips pressed into a thin, harsh line. He had been caught in a lie. “I didn’t want you to know,” he replied finally.

“Why not?” I pressed. “It isn’t a big deal that she came here. She’s a nice girl. I feel like you had some motive for keeping it hidden. I don’t like secrets,” I added softly. I continued to watch him closely, waiting for any change in his expression.

“I wanted to know for sure that I wasn’t your second choice. I thought that if I told you, and you knew that he was with someone else, that if we got together it would just be because you couldn’t have him. You found out before we made it official anyways. I guess the whole thing was pointless.”

“Okay, first of all,” I began. My argumentative attitude successfully captured his attention and he looked back over at me with wide eyes. He seemed like he wasn’t entirely sure where I was going with this. “When have you ever known me to settle for second place? I’m competitive as shit, Juice. If I still wanted him, I wouldn’t think twice about fighting her. And second, why would I ever do that with you? I didn’t want to risk losing you by jumping into anything too fast. So I waited until I knew that both of us were ready.”

He blinked, and the wide-eyed, almost fearful look vanished. “But, isn’t that just what you did with Half-Sack?”

I snorted. “Did you honestly see that one working out anyways? I wasn’t afraid to blow it with him. It was okay to rush into it when we both knew that it was a rebound. But I’m terrified of losing you. Besides, I talked to Half-Sack while we were on lockdown. Everything is fine on that front.”

Silence settled between us then. It was thick and stifling. I knew that there was more that he wanted to say, but I was growing tired of having these sentimental conversations. There were more pressing matters at hand than the conscious thoughts I’d had that had led the two of us to this point.

I cleared my throat in preparation for the change of subject. “So what’s going on with the club? You said we would talk about it when you got home.”

“Right,” he seemed to snap out of whatever reverie he had been lost in. He shook his head to clear out the unrelated thoughts. “The, uh, Mayan attack. It’s a little worse than we thought. They’re teaming up with the Nordics to try and eradicate us so that they can have Charming.”

“What?!” I sputtered. The idea of two biker gangs teaming up seemed too ridiculous to be true. And yet, no matter how ludicrous the idea sounded, the reality was horrifying. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. I’d heard that somewhere, but I had no idea where. I’d never really thought it could apply to me, but yet here we were. “Juice, this is bad. How can you say it so nonchalantly?”

“We’re just going to have to make a deal,” he replied, still acting as if it were some small issue, like running out of beer when you were still sober enough to pick up more.

“With two separate groups of angry men who want you dead? Your arm isn’t bad enough, now you plan to walk right up to them and attempt to chat about it? You’re all going to get killed!” I pushed myself up off of the couch, unable to sit still any longer.

“Calm down,” Juice pleaded. He shifted so that he was sitting on the very edge of the sofa, looking fully prepared to reach out and catch me if I began pacing again. “This can’t be good for your heart. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“If you had kept this a secret, and I found out through someone else, you’d be a dead man.”

“How can I possibly know which things to tell you and which things to leave out? Someday, I’m going to forget to tell you something. And then you’re just going to kill me?” he asked with a grin.

I shook my head, taking a few steps back toward him. “No, it’s really a lot simpler than that. Just tell me everything. Always.”

Juice reached out for me, grabbing me by my hips and pulling me down into his lap. I couldn’t stop myself from laughing happily. “I might not be able to tell you everything,” he reminded me. “Some things are just too much.”

I kissed him, letting my lips linger on his for a few extra seconds. “Just remember that if Mom knows, I’ll find out. Make all of your judgements based on that.”

“So, tell you everything, then?” he reasoned, a coy smirk on his face.

I nodded slowly. Our faces were so close together that my nose brushed against his. His jaw twitched, his lips parting as he inhaled. I looked into his eyes and noticed that they were warm and tender. The emotion in them was the same as it had ever been when he’d looked at me. I could feel his adoration when I took the time to actually notice that it was there.

“Can we try this again?” I whispered faintly. I was searching his brown eyes for any kind of hesitancy. He didn’t seem to need any further explanation; he knew what I was talking about.

As his lips touched mine longingly, his right hand wandered up to push my hair back. He secured the loose strands behind my ear, and his hand settled on the back of my neck, pulling my face even closer to his. I adjusted my position in his lap so that I was straddling him, but he seemed to decide that that wasn’t the way in which this was going to happen. He wrapped a strong arm around me, holding my weight as he flipped us around. He lay me down as gently as he could on the couch, fitting himself perfectly in between my legs.

Juice’s movements were careful and slow, his every touch was soft. He helped me out of my clothes with the care of someone dealing with a person who just wasn’t physically capable of doing it for themselves. I shivered beneath him as he kissed my exposed flesh. He took special care to kiss the scar on my chest, almost as if he were proving that he was no longer afraid of it.

There was no real foreplay, but for some reason it felt as if it would have been unnecessary. Once I’d managed to get his pants off, Juice gently pushed his way inside of me. My nails dug into his back at the intrusion, but it wasn’t unwelcome. I could hear our breathing patterns change. His movements were slow and calculated. I found myself looking into his eyes almost the entire time.

I could feel it building inside of me. I clutched onto him harder as I neared my climax. His movements sped up, and his hands pressed into my waist just a tiny bit harder. I gasped as I tumbled over the edge, and Juice bit down on his lower lip fiercely as he did the same. We both felt the need for this to be a quiet event, despite the fact that we were all alone in the house. I could feel him fill me, and for a moment all I could concentrate on was whether or not I’d remembered to take my birth control that morning.

Juice kissed me as he pulled out, and as he lay down next to me, he tucked me up against him and into the little spoon position. His face came to rest against the back of my neck. He kissed the spot where my neck met my shoulder as he grabbed the blanket that was draped over the backrest of the sofa and covered us.

I found myself staring out at the room around us. Our clothes were tossed onto the coffee table and the floor. And yet, there was an order to the way that they were distributed. They hadn’t been clawed off in a frenzy or passionately thrown to the ground in a trail on our way to the bedroom. But there had been passion all the same.

This was something that I had never experienced before. Sex had never been this emotional. It had always been an escape or a fun activity or, at times, a tool that I could use to get what I wanted. This had been different. This was something else entirely. This was something that made me feel incredibly aware of exactly what Juice felt for me.

I suppressed a shudder at the thought of it.

Hadn’t I broken up with Kip to save him from my own impending train wreck? And now, here I was, tying Juice down to the tracks myself. I knew that he loved me. I found that I was far more willing to let that go on than I was prepared to break his heart. I’d realized that the moment I’d agreed to be his girlfriend.

But maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. Maybe Mom was right, and we really were good for each other. Very few women could handle being with someone in an MC, and as I had told Juice before, I’d been raised for that very thing. I closed my eyes, choosing to believe, if only for a moment, that this was going to work out okay.

I rolled over as swiftly as I could so that I could look at him. He held me close to him, our bodies pressing together. I swallowed, though my mouth was suddenly terribly dry.

“Juice,” I murmured, placing a hand on his neck.

“Shh,” he hushed me, combing his fingers through my hair softly. “We don’t really need to talk about club stuff right now, do we? Can’t we just sleep?”

“I don’t want to talk about club stuff,” I said. I tried not to let myself turn this into an argument or bitter discussion.

“What is it, then?”

“I love you.”

There was a heavy, pressing silence all around us. I had no idea why I’d felt the sudden need to say the words. I wasn’t even entirely sure that I meant them. But somehow, it seemed as if he had needed to hear them. And for once I hadn’t wanted to be selfish and get my own way. It felt a bit strange knowing that I was actually capable of putting someone else’s needs before my own.

There was a ringing in my ears as the quiet continued. I had been so certain that he would say it back that I found I had no follow up.

Juice was watching me warily, almost as if he were waiting for me to start laughing and say that it was all a joke. “You do?” he asked, his voice breaking through the silence after what felt like minutes, but was almost certainly only seconds.

“Do I strike you as the type who says that phrase often?”

Relief washed over his features, smoothing the concerned lines in his brow. “I know it’s taken you five years to say it this once,” he said with a chuckle.

“Five years?” I repeated, feeling as if there was a mental block in my brain that was preventing me from understanding the seemingly arbitrary time frame.

“Well, yeah,” he continued. His tone made it seem that this should have been common knowledge. “It was the day I got my patch.”

I tried to think back to that day. There had been a party at the clubhouse. I had barely been seventeen, but that hadn’t stopped me from sneaking more than my fair share of beer. The crow eaters that had been around at the time had been well aware of who I was, and they hadn’t thought that it would be wise to try and stop me. Other than that, I couldn’t remember much about it.

“What do you mean?” I pressed. He had successfully piqued my interest.

“You were passed out in the apartment,” he recalled. “Your mom was pissed off that everyone had let you get that drunk, so she tried to make you go sleep it off. I came in there a couple of hours later; most of the others had kind of fucked off and gone home by then. I forgot you were in there, and I…” he paused. He looked away, and somehow I knew that he was trying to find the most delicate way to phrase something. “I wasn’t alone,” he continued. “I saw you on the bed, and I felt this weird need to protect you. I sent the other girl on her way. When your mom came to take you home, I think I worried her a little bit. I was just sitting at the desk, reading one of the books that somebody else had left in there. I had no excuse, no reason to be there. I just couldn’t leave you all by yourself. And after you were gone I figured out why that was.”

I waited, holding the air in my lungs in anticipation. The one thing that I’d assured my mother hadn’t been said that very morning was the one thing that I was now dying to hear.

“I had a girlfriend when you were gone.”

I felt myself gawk at him, pulling my head back in disgust at the revolting change of subject. “What an odd thing to want to discuss when we’re in this position, naked, and I could cause serious harm to your favourite appendage.”

Juice laughed loudly, honest humour echoing in the sound. “Let me finish, would you? The whole time I was with her, I just kept thinking the same things. What do I do when Lex comes home? How do I explain this to her? How do I leave this other girl if Lex ever comes around and feels the same way about me?. And then I just had to give up. I only knew you for two years before you left. And I waited around like an asshole for four. And it was worth it.”

I felt the urge to make some kind of crack about how he sounded more like a girl than I did, but I held my tongue. There was no sense in ruining the moment. So, instead, I smiled at him. I could feel something clogging my throat, and I tried to clear it away. But the lump wouldn’t budge. I suddenly found myself holding back tears.

“I didn’t know,” I managed. “Why didn’t you ever tell me? Maybe I… I could’ve stayed.”

“You were seventeen,” he replied, sounding as if there was nothing more that needed to be said. Regardless of his intonation, he pressed on. “I knew that you wanted to leave. I didn’t want you to resent me, and I knew that if I asked you to stay that’s exactly what would have happened.”

I blinked a few times, trying to wrap my head around just how right he was. “I had to go,” I whispered, thinking back on how I’d felt as I had read my father’s manuscript all those years before. “But still, I might have come back sooner.”

“How about we just don’t worry about what might have been?”

“I don’t like the way that you sound logical. That’s not the Juice I fell for,” I teased.

“So what part of me did you fall for, exactly?” he seemed intrigued.

“Oh, you know, your rocking bod,” I lied, laughing to myself. “But really it was a combination of your sense of humour and how ridiculously sweet you are. And the way you took care of me without ever asking anything in return.”

He kissed me quickly, just a light peck to show affection. “That’s just what you do for the person you love.”

A chill rippled from the top of my head all the way down to my toes. I didn’t feel the need for him to say anything more. I settled in as close to him as I could possibly get. “Thank you.”

“For what?” he asked, his voice slightly amused.

“Even after all of that, you were my best friend. You never pushed me for more. So thank you.”

“Well,” Juice looked almost ready to laugh at my gratitude. “I think that you’re giving me a little bit too much credit here. When I first got my patch, I was terrified to piss Jax off. I think it bugged him a little bit that we were as good of friends as we were, so I wasn’t about to ask you for anything more. And when you came back, yeah, it sucked to watch you get cozy with Half-Sack. But I would have rather just been your friend than freaked you out over it. Plus, I didn’t want to piss you off or make you hate me for sticking my nose where it didn't belong.”

He kind of busted through the sombre, deep mood in the room. His muted snickering reminded me of the first thing that had ever attracted me to Juice. He still had the weirdest, yet best sense of humour out of anyone that I knew.

“Out of all the things that I’ve seen in relation to the club, you admitting that you liked me would probably scare me the least.”

“The Alexis that I know would have run at the word love if she didn’t feel the same.”

I kissed him, but unlike the last few we’d shared, this one was deep and meaningful. I pressed my fingers into his back again, as if it would create more skin-on-skin contact between us. I could feel him smiling as I came up for air.

“Does this mean you’re ready for round two?” he asked slyly.

I nodded my head, not feeling the need to speak as I crashed my lips against his once again.