Thrash (23 page)

29

“Is it safe for me to come back to the club yet?” I asked Rage over the phone.

I hadn’t heard from Thrash in a couple of days, and it was getting boring just staying holed up in the apartment. Emma was busy with work, so she hadn’t been by, and I was getting a little stir-crazy.

“Yeah, it doesn’t look like anyone has been keeping tabs on you, Nora. Come to the club today. Work on the mural. Keep Layla company. She has been pretty needy lately.”

Rage sounded exhausted and I wondered what exactly he meant by needy. I worried for Layla. Her body kept swinging between glee and misery, and she wasn’t getting much sleep to help her endure the roller coaster ride.

I glanced around the room. There was a paint-spattered tarp on the floor, protecting the bland carpet. I personally felt the place would be improved with a few strategic splatters, but that wasn’t my decision to make. I certainly wasn’t paying the rent here.

So I had been careful. At least I had taken care of the furniture. My clothes were covered in paint.

I didn’t care. I just grabbed my purse and headed out for the bus stop. I was hoping I would be less noticeable if I used public transit. It was still early enough for me to walk from the stop to the clubhouse.

I had made it to the main foyer of the building when a sharp voice cut through my rush.

“Nora Jean Bonnet.
What on earth
do you think you are doing?” She might as well have thrown a bucket of ice over my head. The chill was cutting into my skin.

I’d know that voice anywhere. I turned to see my mother standing there.

Some rich girls had lovely parents. Mine were not lovely.

“Mother,” I said, my face rigid.

“How can you live here? For spite, I suspect. I have been trying to contact you
for weeks
. I had to hire a private detective. I should have known…” She gestured to the house in disgust. It was actually a pretty nice place for city living. An actual house, it had been divided into several spacious apartments.

I shrugged at her, edging for the door.

“Come here,” she commanded me, brushing her fingers together impatiently. “Do you even know how long I have been waiting for you to come down?”

“Perhaps you should have knocked,” I suggested darkly.

“Oh no, dear. I will not have a door slammed in my face.”

I added it to my list of things to try.

She knew what I was thinking, too. “Try it, dear. I will have you and whoever that bit of black ass you call a boyfriend evicted.” She meant every nasty word, too. My mother only veiled her mean streak when it suited her.

I stood there, frozen in place and completely furious, and ground out, “Go back home, Mother. Father wouldn’t want you here.”

Her lip curled. “Your father wouldn’t want
either
of us here.” She glared at me. “Get in the car.” The woman would have made an excellent dictator. As it was, she and my father deserved one another, if for differing reasons.

I rolled my eyes and pressed my lips together.

She hated it when I did that. Maybe that was why she kept pushing into my personal business. “Your poor father. He would be horrified to see this place. And that man. You dawdle with them dear. You don’t
move in
.”

She meant bad boys. She meant men who weren’t born on “our level.” But she had also been a Southern debutante, and for the first time I realized she might be referring to the fact that Thrash was black.

I couldn’t even process how I felt about it all.

I just put my hands up in the air and started walking.

I called out, “Go home, Mother.”

She was stalking after me, as though she could drive me to do as she said. “Certainly, dear. When you
get in the car
.”

When I walked out, I just about died of embarrassment. She had actually had her driver park on the walk, blocking traffic and annoying all of Thrash’s neighbors.

I knew better than to react. Whining would just egg her on. Arguing with her was like trying to put out a fire with more fire.

So I tried something I had never tried before. I just said no.

“No, Mother. I need to go. I have a job.”

The look she gave me could have skinned a cat. She had tried to love me in her way, I supposed, but she only knew one way to live. Everything was black and white with her. And honestly, from what I knew of her social circle now, as an adult, I realized that while my mother was powerful and useful in her way, she was also considered a liability.

She only saw right and wrong in terms of her own needs. And that limited her.

For the first time in my life, I realized that my mother was not only frustrating. She was deeply, deeply flawed. I had always had a hard time understanding the difference between what a mother was supposed to be and what my own mother was. She hadn’t needed to be maternal. She had just needed to make an effort to understand me for who I was.

Instead, she had tried to hack, slash, and surgically remove any aspect of my personality that didn’t suit her vision of me. And she had never stopped.

I had been a kid. I’d had a hard time knowing what to do. I hadn’t known how to stand up to her because I’d never seen anyone successfully stand up to her. I had rarely dared to defy her, because she was vindictive. If she felt slighted, it didn’t matter why the person had done what they did. She would make them
suffer
for inconveniencing her.

I didn’t understand where her viciousness came from. I wasn’t even sure if she fully understood it. I just knew it was real, and it was dangerous, and in spite of that, I was tired of putting up with it.

I’d left home to get away from her and my father. I hadn’t taken a dime of their money from that moment on, because I had wanted to do it right.

And even that wasn’t good enough.

She grabbed my arm before I could walk away. “Do you have any idea what this has been doing to me?” she spit at me. “To your father? We are now the couple with a run-away daughter.”

I rubbed my temples. All of our confusion and fighting, and she was still fixated about what other people thought.

“They don’t matter, Mother,” I said wearily.

“You have
no idea
what matters, you foolish girl. You are
blind
. There is no such thing as merit. There are those who have power, and those who obey it.”

Maybe I was just getting old, but I thought I heard a faint note of panic in her voice when she said that.

Whatever she felt under all that anger, I couldn’t fix it for her.

“I am not going to have this argument with you, Mother. Get out of my way.” I wasn’t nasty about it, but I walked around the corner of the street to the parking lot and threw my bag into the truck.

I had intended to take the bus, but I wasn’t going to let her harass me at the stop.

I backed out quickly and stepped on the accelerator. When I glanced back at her in the rear-view mirror, I saw her coughing and livid on the side of the road.

A smile twitched my lips, spreading and growing the farther I drove.

I knew she would make me pay for it later, but I had known that all my life. I was tired of being scared of her. I was just… living anyway. And stress or no stress, I was doing it my way.

***

Dreading returning to the apartment
, I stayed at the clubhouse well into the early hours. It wasn’t as though I didn’t have a good reason. I had been pouring myself into the mural this past week, sketching out the design and collecting my supplies.

I had to check everything, make sure I had the right types of acrylic, that both the base and top coats would not only stay on the wall for years, but that they would allow me to continue to add names over time.

I had struggled with the brushes. I was used to smaller canvases, and had been baffled with which brushes would work best in this situation. I still needed the small ones for detail work.

I really should have paid more attention in class. I had been mooning over Van Gogh at the time. Although I had never enjoyed abstract art, I had a deep love of impressionism. I wasn’t very good at creating impressionistic work, but it inspired me.

I had been fresh out of my parents’ house at the time. A dreamy, silly girl who had no idea how quickly the bills were going to come up, and how much food and supplies really cost.

I had learned so much…

Even now, I was learning. I had been going to the library a lot to google what I needed to do Fire and Steel’s mural right. Luckily, a few dregs of that lost class time were still floating around in my brain.

As soon as I finished the sketch, I would be ready to add the paint.

The sketching was an essential part of the process, and I had to make sure I got it all right. I could still change things at this stage, but I was just about ready to set it all on stone.

I pushed the pencil behind my ear and backed away to get a better look at the whole. I was tired. I knew it was time to step away and take a break. The mural would still be here in the morning, but I was afraid to leave. It had been hard to work since Thrash had gone on his undercover mission because of course I couldn’t be seen at the clubhouse.

I had been forced to hide the truck in the garage so that if Bones had anyone watching Fire and Steel, they wouldn’t realize that someone had driven his truck back to their enemies’ lot.

Having escaped my mother and checked to make sure she wasn’t following me, I had stayed inside the clubhouse ever since.

It had been a long day.

I straightened my supplies up a little in an effort to wind down, then decided to slip into the bar and grab a glass of something.

I was no good at mixing drinks, but sometimes a mix wasn’t what was needed.

Sneaking behind the bar gave me a little thrill – for a half a second. Then I gasped in shock.

There, parked behind the counter, sat Layla. The confident, steady woman I admired so much had bags under her eyes. Her face was both blotchy and drawn.

She jumped a little when she saw me.

I eyed the spoon in her hand, the tub of frozen yogurt already half finished.

“Munchies?” I suggested, taking a seat next to her.

She nodded, then sniffled.

“What is it?”

She looked so miserable. “It’s frozen yogurt,” she whimpered, her voice cracking as the pity turned to humor.

“What?” I wanted to help but I was confused.

She held the tub up half-heartedly. “It’s frozen yogurt. I wanted ice cream. But they say frozen yogurt is healthier for mom and baby.”

“It’s not bad?” I offered.

“But I want ice cream. Ugh…” She shook her head, crunched into Cheetos and scooped some up. Her nose started turning pink again the moment it was in her mouth though. “And Cheetos. I want Cheetos!”

“Awww!” I reached over and hugged her, and backed off. She seemed to crave the hug and reject it, too, as if she needed the comfort but her body couldn’t stand to be touched. “I don’t know what to do about the frozen yogurt, but I actually know where there might be some Cheetos.”

I hurried back to my bags. I had always been a salty snacker, and while I didn’t have Cheetos, I did have cheddar puffs, which were basically the same thing, if a little fluffier.

I brought them back and showed her my pregnancy offering. “Will these help?”

Her puffy face split into a smile. It crumbled again pretty quickly, but crunching her spoon into the cheddar puffs seemed to help her contain it. She kept stabbing at them, until one popped out and rolled across the floor.

She stared after it. “You know, it’s not really the food,” she said after a few minutes.

I nodded. I’d figured as much.

“I don’t know… It just really hit me lately, watching you and Thrash. You’re both taking such a risk. I know what Rage has to do. He’s President of the MC. And I know what that means. I really do.”

I believed her. Ordinarily, she had her head on her shoulders. Tonight, she had more than baby-noms. She was having a hormone crash, and those weren’t easy on the best of days.

Pregnant, with the stresses of getting ready to be a parent, her body changing and unpredictable, her joints loosening and her hair falling out and all the other odd little ‘joys’ of making and carrying a tiny human body around for nine months – what with all that, hormones probably really sucked.

And Layla had a lot to worry about besides. “I don’t know. I don’t regret being with him, but what am I going to do if something happened to Cullen? The thought that our child might grow up without his father. I’ve heard of it. I lost my own family. But that was later. For him to never know his father…” She was still assuming she was carrying a boy. “It’s just really awful tonight.” She started wiping her face furiously, and I had to take her yogurt from her. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m crying. This is the life. I know it. But damn it,” she fussed. “This is how I feel and I am hungry. And I’m scared. And I know this is all just hormones, but I can’t help it.”