She steps fully onto the porch, crossing her arms tightly over her chest. “All that might be true, but it doesn’t give you the right to just insert yourself into my life because you feel like it. You don’t get to play protector with me.”
Again, her words hit. Smashing into something raw that leaves me feeling disposable. “You think that’s what this is?”
She shrugs like she can’t see any other option. “What else would it be?”
I clench my jaw, grinding my molars against one another. “I can’t watch you struggle. Just don’t have it in me.”
Isla blinks, surprised. “Shade, I?—”
“Don’t. I get it. You want nothing to do with the club anymore You want to deal with this by yourself. I respect it. Hell, it’s the reason I’m out here in the middle of the night, so we wouldn’t have this very discussion. But you need to accept you’re out here in a house that barely locks, with two assholes in your family who have already messed with you, and who we think sprayed that fucking slur on our house.”
Her face shifts as she glances across at our property. “What slur?”
“The giant red one painted on our window the day you disappeared the moment you saw me and Catfish.”
Her face drains of color. “I just saw Catfish and…I didn’t see it. I’m sorry someone did that.”
“Whatever. Am I supposed to just let you handle that alone?” I shake my head. “Not on my fucking watch.”
Isla blows out a breath. “I think you need to let me.” Her voice is barely a whisper.
“Why?”
“Because I’m trying. Trying to…live a normal life. To fix things. To fix myself. To not…rely on bikers anymore.”
My brows pull together as I hear the pain in her words. I know what it feels like to run away from who you once were. And I know the kind of pain that sits beneath the skin, beneath the decision, beneath the noise. It never heals.
“That’s it, isn’t it? That’s the part you didn’t want to say. You don’t want to be around the club.”
Isla looks away and shivers. I grab the jacket I was wearing when I started work and put it over her shoulders. She doesn’t fight me.
“I just…I can’t be around bikers. Not like before. It does something to me that I can’t control. Makes me feel like I’m slipping.”
I step back to give her a bit more space, even though my every instinct is to step forward. “You think we’re all the same. You thinkI’mthe same.”
“I don’t know what to think.” The words are whispered, intimate between us in the dark of the night.
I try to swallow back the sting working its way up my chest.
It hurts more than I can admit. Not because she’s wrong. But because she’s lumped me in with every shitty man who used her, ignored her, and treated her like something disposable.
“You don’t need to like me. You don’t even need to talk to me. But don’t put me in the same column as the men who hurt you.”
Her eyes snap up, immediately defensive. “I didn’t. I?—”
“You did.” I hold her gaze. “I get why. I really do. But I’m not one of them. Jackal’s not one of them.”
“You don’t know what it is to build the armor to live in that world, offering your body in the hope someone will want your heart too. Then, being overlooked by everyone. Not being good enough for any of them. You wouldn’t understand.” Tears dance on her lower lashes, and it breaks my fucking heart.
Because I know what it feels like to go unloved, to then have to build armor to protect the pieces of you that are raw and vulnerable.
I think about the day my dad whipped me for being queer, the day my mom looked away in disgust. “I understand that better than you think. But I know what it looks like when someone’s been through hell and has tried to escape. And I can’t let you stand out here, one bad night away from danger, pretending you don’t need backup.”
She tugs my jacket tighter around her shoulders. “I just don’t want to be known as a club girl again.”
And there it is. The wound beneath the wound.
My chest tightens, swallowing the hard knot. “No one’s asking you to be. Our help isn’t dependent on you being one.”
