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“Now,” he barks and I make my way towards him, with Gene close behind me.
The Riders froze in their advance but they’re still looking at me menacingly. I suppose I was saved by the bell this time. But this has only been postponed. There will be a reckoning.
I’m not expecting a visitor, let alone visitors, plural. But I don’t ask who it is. I just follow Smith and his buddy through the drab, stuffy halls to the visiting area.
I’m not afraid of facing down the two Riders, not in the slightest, but I don’t mind giving it a little more time before it happens. The fact that those Renegades were at their backs says something. And I’d just as soon know what that something is before I’m forced to deal with them.
Harper
When Hunter said Jax had been moved to a prison up north he didn’t actually mean very far in that direction. So now we’re standing in the nearly empty parking lot in front of a huge, imposing grey concrete building, with rows and rows of scary-looking, thorny barbed wire atop the walls and guards clutching machine guns in the glass towers rising up from all the corners.
The whole thing looks like a modern-day, bad parody on medieval castles, but those places were designed for people to hide inside from danger, while this place is meant to protect the rest of us from the people behind these thick walls. Vast, unbroken fields separate the prison from the rest of the world. They extend out, green and lush on three sides, and on the fourth they’re broken by a copse of pines.
“You ready?” Hunter asks.
I almost tell him I’m not. I almost climb back into my car and floor it out of here. But Jax doesn’t belong in this place. He belongs in that car with me, he belongs by my side and it’s been too long since I’ve seen him. Much, much too long. And if I just remember that, if that’s all I allow myself to think, then I know it was the right decision to come here today. The perfect decision. The only one I could’ve made.
“I guess,” I say and march towards a small, dark blue metal door to the side of a much larger gate of the same color. That’s where they bring in the buses of prisoners I suppose. The small door is for visitors, as the huge sign on it says.
Thoughts start circling in my mind like the start of a whirlpool, their speed slow at first, but as soon as we’re buzzed in and taken through the visiting procedure they start swirling faster and faster. By the time we’re sitting on tiny, round blue plastic chairs in a cavernous visiting room waiting for Jax, I’ve been sucked all the way to the bottom of my doubts, love, pain, regret, longing, and joy too. The room seems to be hermetically sealed, because I feel like I’m inside a vacuum, the noises of the other clumps of people in here, creating deafening noise, even though I can’t actually hear what any of them are saying.
Then a deafening siren-like sound accompanies the door opening and Jax walks in past a guard standing there. The whirlwind that is my mind starts pulsing.
He looks good. Even better than I remember.
He’s filled out some, his biceps bulging under the thin fabric of his white t-shirt and his thighs straining against the grey pants of the rest of his prison uniform. He had dark brown, wavy hair that I love running my fingers through, but he’s shaved it off now, and it makes his strong jaw and prominent brow stand out even more. He has a beautiful face, and I missed him so much I’m having trouble drawing a full breath.
I wonder if my name—my autograph, actually—which he begged me to tattoo onto his chest, just above his heart is still there. Or did he cover it? Erase it? Cut it out?
He did none of those things. I know it deep in my heart as he stops dead just inside the door, his eyes fixed on me with the intensity of a raging forest fire. His deep green eyes are the only eyes that really see me as I am, see deep into my soul and past the shell of my beauty and fixed on me to the exclusion of everything else.
The way he looks at me always makes me shiver, because it never fails to cause a gentle electrical current to run from my lips down to my toes, touching me in ways that nothing else can. It’s not gentle today, it’s almost painful in the pleasure it carries. If I ever thought that he left me because he didn’t love me—and I did think that in my darkest moments—I don’t anymore. But what difference does that make now?
He breaks out of his trance with a shrug and shakes his head as he walks up to us. Hunter is already on his feet and they greet each other by clasping their forearms—a handshake that should lead into a hug, but doesn’t.
I’m still just sitting, because I know my legs won’t support me if I try to stand.
Jax looks down at me. The raging hot flame that was his gaze before is now a slow moving river of fire, cooling, deepening and congealing into just a lot of sadness, getting caught behind the hard walls of his glass orb eyes.
He clears his throat. “Harper. It’s good to see you.”
Simple words that carry so much punch I gasp from the intensity of the emotion behind them.
“You too,” I say in a cracked, hoarse croak that is nothing like my normal, carrying voice. The words themselves only betray a fraction of what I actually mean by them.
He sits down opposite me at the small round table that matches the stupid little chairs. Now his thigh is pressed against the inside of my leg and I’ve completely lost the ability to breathe right.
“You’re starting your tour, right?” he asks me softly. “That’s why you’re up this way?”
I nod, the lump that suddenly appeared in my throat because he remembered preventing me from speaking.
I cough lightly to try and dislodge it. “Yes, my first gig is tomorrow night.”
“I know,” he says and the soft look in his eyes tells me he left something unsaid. Something like,I wish I was coming with you, just like we planned.
But he didn’t say it and now the caged fire in his eyes is growing dimmer and dimmer. His eyes are almost as dark and glassy as they were on the night he told me we were through. As dark as one of those overcast nights that no light can penetrate. A night that’s even darker now that the fire momentarily chased it away.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he says. “Either of you.”
