I kept vigil over Dixon that whole night and the next morning, jumping at any noise, flinching at the sound of my father’s voice.
But he’d forgotten all about it.
That was probably the worst part about the addiction and abuse. Not necessarily the hunger and the beatings in and of themselves. It was that the drugs could shake the memoriesright out of their heads of all the awful fucking shit they did to me. But I carried it with me. I couldn’t forget, no matter how much I wanted to. They’d go on and act like nothing happened. Even when looking at my bruised and bloodied face. It was so fucked.
It wasn’t long after that when I got serious about saving money, about getting my brother out of there.
I even started slowly packing up our stuff and hiding it in the woods so my parents wouldn’t see the packed luggage.
In my mind, I guess I thought they’d fight harder to keep Dixon around. But that was me looking through my own parental lenses. I couldn’t imagine just leaving him. They couldn’t be bothered even to report him missing.
I couldn’t help but wonder how long it took before they even knew we were gone gone.
I made sure Dixon never missed school, so there was no reason for any of the officials to come knocking, looking for him.
That was the kind of shit that was going through my head as I cleaned up the storage room so we could sit and relax after a hell of a night… and a day that wasn’t shaping up any better.
But the second Noa lowered down onto my lap, it was like those thoughts became too slippery to stick anymore.
All there was anymore was her.
Her soft hair under my fingertips. Her pretty eyes looking up at me, getting heavier by the second. Before finally sliding closed.
There was a strange feeling in my chest then, something light, yet somehow weighted. Meaningful.
Noa’s body went slack with sleep, her lips parting ever so slightly.
The urge to lean down and gently press mine there was nearly overwhelming.
That was new.
Kissing was always simply a precursor to something more, not something to do just for the sake of it.
Hell, maybe I should have been catching some sleep too. Clearly, I was tired as fuck if I was thinking about soft-kissing a woman I barely knew.
Well, that wasn’t right, was it?
Were there other women out there that I knew better physically? Yes. But I already knew Noa better, in a more significant way, than any other woman before.
Even more telling, she knew more about me than I’d ever shared. Not just with a woman… but with anyone. There was shit I’d told her that I hadn’t even told my brother, who’d shared that life with me, just seeing it through a very different lens.
Maybe an argument could be made for all the adrenaline amplifying feelings of connection.
I had a feeling that it was more than that, something more meaningful.
I hadn’t been holding all that shit in for decades just to spill it because of a pesky car chase or shooting. If that was the case, I’d have confessed that shit to one of the other club brothers by now.
It wasn’t about the situation.
It was about the person.
I wouldn’t pretend to know what that meant. If it even meant anything at all.
All I did know was that it felt good to share it. Especially on the same day that made me circle back to my old life in a way I’d been avoiding for years.
So when the urge to keep running my fingers across her scalp and through her hair while she slept, I just went with it. I figured it would help her insomniac self stay asleep even in a foreign space. And at the same time, it was oddly comforting to me.
Even when, at some point, a voice grew closer—familiar, loud.
