His words pierced my chest like a hot knife through butter. No resistance, no hesitation. Just metal cut straight through muscle, skin, and bone straight to the heart of me.
“Pathetic?” I echoed, undone by his cruelty. “You’re seriously calling me pathetic right now?”
This wasn’t him.
This wasn’t us.
In the years since I’d been a girl, we’d only grown closer. His best friend was gone, missing for so long he was presumed dead. So I’d become his best friend.
Not in the way of his brothers in the MC, but in the way two people move through life having each other’s backs, tethered together by memories both good and bad.
He was there, holding a bouquet of wild flowers at my high school graduation.
He was there when I dropped out of university because I hated the structure of classes, and he was the one who got me the job at the bar with Eugene.
He was there when I was sick or sad, bored or lonely. He went with me on road trips down the coast and into the acrid warmth of the interior, on a two-week trip to Portugal with the Booths, and a ten-day journey just the two of us to Morocco and Egypt.
He was, in a very real way, my everything.
I couldn’t remember a time he’d condescended to me, let alone insulted me.
Yet here he was, calling me pathetic.
I blinked slowly, trying to bank the burn at the back of my eyes that always proceeded a flood of tears. “Pathetic?” I asked again on a choked whisper. “You think I’m pathetic for loving you when you’re the best man I know? You think it’s pathetic to want a man like the one who has taken care of me, loved me and protected me since I was five years old? Okay, Jonathon,” I said, just to watch him flinch, just because the slow softening of his mouth and eyes over the course of my speech wasn’t good enough. “Okay. Then consider me pathetic.”
I tried to wrench out of his hold, but even though his whole demeanor had warmed and tenderized, his body was still an immovable force against mine.
“Stop,” Nova snapped, forcing his hips tighter against mine. “You think this is ’bout you? You’re fuckin’ wrong. This is ’bout you wastin’ your life pinin’ for a man who’s never gonna give you a second look ’cause it’s not his right to catch your eye, and it sure as fuck isn’t in him to take care of a girl like you.”
I didn’t hear the words. My mind was still so focused on the wound gaping open in my chest, even now after he had pulled out the dagger. I felt drained and draining still, unable to plug the hole.
“Whatever,” I sighed, my voice so defeated I didn’t recognize it. “Let me go, and I promise, this pathetic girl will let you go too.”
And I meant it.
I hated it so much, I felt the injustice of it roll through me on a wave of nausea.
But I meant it.
I’d been fine loving him unreciprocated, but I refused to love someone who adamantly castigated me for my feelings.
“We’re gonna be fine,” Nova said, an edge to his voice that could’ve been fear. “We’re gonna be just fine, you move on from this stupid crush. You’re still my girl. You’ll always be my Flower Child.”
My eyes were unseeing as I stared at his chin, absently noticing the slight cleft there covered in thick black stubble.
“If only we could all have our cake and eat it too,” I whispered.
If I’d been looking, I might have noticed the intensity of those brown eyes under slashing, furrowed brows. I might have noticed the way the lotus flower tattoo over his throat bobbed with his rough swallow.
But that’s the thing about mourning; it isolates you from the nuanced colours of the world and strips it to straight black and white.
I saw nothing but the face of the man who had refused my love.
So when he let me go with a gusty sigh that blew his yeasty breath over my face before he moved to the side, I just left.
I left without saying one more word, and though Nova might’ve had more to say, he didn’t speak it either.
LILA
Two years later.
* * *
Jake didn’t like Eugene’s.
Which was crazy, because Eugene’s Bar was my second home, and more than that, it was straight up, unfiltered cool.
It was too well-maintained to be a true dive bar, but the curated selection of neon signs, framed and signed band posters, and biker paraphernalia lining the walls was chosen by a badass through and through. You felt, when walking through the doors, that you’d entered the kind of place frequented by Hunter S. Thompson and the Rat Pack, Patsy Cline, and Allen Ginsberg.
It had ambiance and atmosphere so thick in the air it intoxicated even the straightest of laced patrons who entered. Eugene’s had a reputation for being a biker bar, a good place to grab a fancy cocktail made by the proprietor’s ungainly large hands, and the best bar to discover new bands over the weekends.