Carmen Jenner - Welcome to Sugartown

Elijah follows us all the way to Sugartown. He never once tries to overtake, or to force us to pull over by cutting us off. He drives straight past his motel and follows us down Holly’s street all the way to her driveway where he disappears as the automatic roller door slides down behind Holly’s Peugeot, separating us from the rest of the world.

“You head on up to my room.” Holly gives me a fragile smile. “I’ll sort him out.”

“Thanks,” I say, and wipe at my tears before opening the car door and standing on shaky legs.

Holly’s house is newer than mine and built in a much nicer neighbourhood. It also has a garage adjoining the house and, as I climb the stairs, I’m thankful I don’t have to walk outside and right past him. I’m not sure I’m strong enough to keep running from him tonight. I don’t know what that says about me, but it’s the god’s honest truth. I’m afraid I’d melt into a puddle the minute he placed his hands on me, so I hurry up the stairs and duck into Holly’s bedroom where I gently slide the window overlooking the front lawn open.

Thankfully, Elijah had the sense to wait for one of us to come to him and hasn’t tried banging down the front door to get to me, but he’s certainly not quiet when he says, “Where the hell is she, Holly?”

“You can’t be here.”

“I’m not leaving until I see she’s okay.”

“What the hell makes you think she’d be okay after something like that?”

“She told you?”

“Yeah, dumb-arse, she told me. She tells me everything. Including the fact that she was about to cash in her V-card tonight for your sorry arse.”

He sighs and squats down on the driveway, lacing his hands behind his head. “I gotta see her. You gotta let me talk to her.”

“No. You’re lucky I’m not calling Bob, you shithead.” She sighs and grasps the collar of his jacket, yanking his face back to hers. “You have to go home and let her deal with everything she’s seen tonight. If she wants to talk to you after she’s had time to absorb it all, then Ana will come to you. Until then, you back the fuck off and leave her the hell alone.”

“Yeah, okay,” he mutters, but I wonder whether he’s really absorbing anything she just said. He runs a hand over his face, hangs his head and stares at the pebbled drive. He looks so lost standing there, like a little boy. I lean forward in the darkness and, for a minute, I swear he sees me because he stiffens and then lets his head fall back with a shaky exhalation.

“Holly,” he says as she’s walking away, “how’s her head?”

“Her head is fine, Elijah. It’s probably feeling clearer than it has in weeks.” She backs up towards the house and says, “It’s her heart that’s been broken into itty bitty little pieces.”

For an entire week Ana has avoided me. She’s disappeared every time I set foot inside the diner, so every time I’d be left with her very scary, tiny best friend breathing down my neck until I walked right back out that door. She hasn’t answered any of my calls or texts, though I’ve been blowing up her phone for days. I’m convinced she isn’t going to talk to me, ever again.

When I’d set foot inside the garage Monday after the accident, Bob had bailed me up against the wall and hit me square in the face for driving like a fool. Apparently, Ana had given him the same version of the story as I’d given the nurses at the hospital. I don’t know why she was protecting me but I knew if Bob ever found out what had really happened on that back road, I’d be a dead man.

Bob had lived the life; he’d escaped with his balls and his family intact. Unlike Ana, he’d known about my affiliation when I first came to work for him. He knew why I’d been sent to prison, he knew about the events that led to my release, and he also knew I was running as fast and as far away from that life as possible. If he knew I’d let that shit come within a foot of his daughter, of his family, he’d waste no time handing me over to the Angels, and I wouldn’t blame him.

After it became apparent Ana wouldn’t see me, Bob had pulled me aside to pump me for more info regarding our wild Saturday night. I’d fed him some bullshit about being a stupid insensitive male and he’d laughed it off, and said if I didn’t try to pull his daughter out of the bitch-fit mood she’d been in since she dumped my sorry arse he’d dock my pay. I’m not fucking kidding. The bastard would do it, too.

That’s how I wound up here at ten am on a Saturday, watching Sammy’s Little Rugby League team dominate their competition. I would have been barracking from the sidelines but his sister doesn’t know I’m here yet, and I don’t want to frighten her off before I get the chance to speak to her.

When I sidle up beside her I cup my hands over my mouth and shout out to my little mate anyway. “GO SAMMY!”

Several parents give me dirty looks and I feel like flipping them off, but I know that won’t help my case with Ana so I ignore them and wave at the awkward six-year-old who’s waving madly at me from the middle of the field.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Ana mutters. “He’ll be distracted now that you’re here.”

“Can I talk to you?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Come on, baby girl, you gonna shut me out forever?”

“Maybe.” She looks at me with so much hatred that my heart hurts. Then she drops her voice to a whisper, “It depends how long it takes me to get rid of the image of you slaughtering a man inches from my face.”

I glance around. No one was close enough to hear that, they’re all focused on the game, but I’m not taking any more chances out here in the open. I grab her elbow and cart her off to the brick building housing the public toilets. Even from the outside they smell like shit, and there’s graffiti everywhere and a couple of condom wrappers littering the ground. I press her against the wall. “What the fuck is going on with you, Ana?”

“What’s going on with me? I had a gun held to my head last week. I had a guy trying to rape me because I was caught in the wrong place with the wrong person, and you wanna know what the fuck is wrong with me? What the fuck is wrong with you, Elijah? Or should I say Ethan?”

I feel myself frown at the mention of the name. I hate the sound of it on her tongue, like it belongs to another man. In a very real way, it does.

“Oh, you didn’t think I heard that part, did you?”

“Ethan Carr is my birth name, I changed it when I got out to help me disappear. It’s awfully fucking hard to pretend you don’t exist when you’re still carting around ID with your family name on it.”

“I don’t understand why you’d have to disappear in the first place? Why were you sent to prison? And why did those men think you were a rat?”

“You wanna know what got me sent away?”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t mind knowing the reason why I was almost killed last week.”

“Before Kick and I could patch in we had to make it through our initiation. Some DA had information that the club needed. We had to go and rough her up for the info—”

She narrows her eyes. “Rough her up?”

“Assault, Ana.”

“You beat a woman because your club told you to?”

“We were supposed to. None of it sat right with me, or Kick, but we had people waiting outside to make sure we’d go through with it. Once we entered the house we were supposed to tie her up and make her talk, then the boys would come in and take care of the rest. But we tripped some kind of alarm. She was sleeping with a cop who drew on us. I bought Kick some time to get away.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what the brothers do for one another. He had three priors, I had one. He was my best friend. Stupidly, at the time, I thought it made more sense to protect him than to protect myself. So I got three years in a cell for breaking and entering and battering a police officer and Kick walked free.

“While I was on the inside, the club came to see me. They said once I got out, I’d be patched in. They asked me to do things to some of the other prisoners, small acts of retaliation. I never got caught, was never even suspected, then one day a riot broke out because I made the wrong hit.”

“The wrong hit?”

“I attacked the wrong guy. During the riot I was trying to save my own arse and managed to save a prison guard in the process. My time inside was almost up and I would have headed straight back into the waiting arms of the club, but the judge who’d sentenced me somehow caught wind of my heroic feat—” I make air quotes with my hands to let her know how ridiculous that is, because the truth of what happened with that prison guard was so much uglier than that. “—and he set my release six months early for good behaviour, no affiliation with the club and I had to disappear off the grid, change my name and remain in regular scheduled contact with my parole officer.

“The club had several deals go south. Their other contact on the inside had to be the rat, but with the timing of my release and my disappearance, the weight of the club’s deals blowing up in their face fell on me. I knew better than to rat on the club. You rat, you die. My dad had instilled that in me from birth.”

“So we were almost killed because of a misunderstanding?” A line forms between her brows. She’s so fucking cute when she’s mad, and I laugh a little at the stupidity of that thought because Ana brings new meaning to the words hell hath no fury. “Oh, you find this funny, do you?”

She shoves at my chest with her arms and I gently catch her cast in my hand before it can do me serious damage.

“No. I don’t find any of this shit funny. Nothing about being away from you is funny.” I trace my fingers over the plaster cast and then down over her hand. “How’s the arm?”