Outside, on the sidewalk, under the moon and the parking lot lights, her mood softened. Chib's bike gleamed, the black and chrome lines clearly remembering the long line of noble steeds from which it had descended. It was a war horse and beside her, very near to her elbow, stood the warrior in engineer boots, denim, and leather. A trill ran down her spine and out each one of her ribs, her solar plexus trembling. It was a familiar feeling but long-forgotten until that moment.
"I want to ride," she said.
She could feel him hesitate beside her and she turned fully to him. "Please, I can't even remember the last time I was on a bike."
"Ah, lass," he looked at her for a long, contemplative moment.
Another long-forgotten but achingly familiar feeling surfaced in her and coated her skin with a moist sweat. She shook her head. "Yeah, not a good idea." She turned away quickly, frowning, and pointed to the small SUV. "My ride," she pointed at the bike, "your ride." Then she smiled and turned back to him. "Besides, we've got this very expensive bottle of scotch you're going to teach me how to drink. We need a table and chairs, right?" But all she could think of was a moonlit hilltop and the feel of a leather cut under her ass. She smiled at him, friendly and open and frowned at the places her mind was taking her.
"Your place?" he asked, quiet, relieved.
"Mmmm."
"Mine then."
"I'll follow you. Here give me the bottle. I still can't believe how much it cost." She reached for the paper bag and brushed his fingertips. He didn't relinquish his hold.
"Just wait, lassie, just wait. Here, let me walk you to your car." He stepped off the curb and, again, she fell into an easy step beside him. She moved her bag to her outside shoulder.
She fobbed the door unlocked and he opened it for her. Once inside, he handed her the bag with the bottle, nodded, and shut the door. She watched him make his way back to his bike and bit her upper lip, hard, as he swung one long leg over the seat, settled himself and rocked the heavy machine off its stand. The bike roared to life and she pulled out of the lot and turned onto the darkened street behind him. The wide suburban avenues of Charming, where she had grown up in a tract home, quickly gave way to small downtown one-way streets, hundred year old bungalows and post-war cottages fronted by towering elms and sycamores. It was late and many of the homes were unlit, dogs could be heard barking to one another in fenced backyards. She rolled down the window and let the cool autumn night air fill the car. It was a sensory overload. In front of her, she watched Chibs maneuver the bike, squinted her eyes and let her mind be filled with the rush of teenage years, the seductive lure of motorcycles and booted bad boys. The promise of adventure and the temptation of experimentation. It had been a long time since she felt that life was to be lived. She was existing. Enduring.
Chibs pulled up onto a wrecked square of lawn in front of a small cottage. She parked on the street in front, watching him through the passenger window. The tingle in her ribcage returned and she let her body react, her heart rate elevating, her mind opening and releasing restraint. She quickly wiped her sweating palms down the length of her thighs, keyed off the car, and climbed out with a swagger that remembered her wild teenaged years.
In the house, Chibs moved quickly, efficiently, and she was suddenly hit with the realization of how strange her being there, alone, with him, and a bottle of single-malt really and truly was. He was trying to put her at ease, make it normal, make it okay. It wasn't okay. She narrowed her eyes and breathed in deeply, holding the air in her lungs. Stale cigarette and reefer smoke, eggs and bacon, old wood, and laundry detergent. His house was small, sparsely furnished, but clean. He was neither a closeted decorator nor a slovenly bachelor. She suspected that his house might be more clean than hers right now. Domestic goddess was proving to be tiresome and endless. Days of monotonous cleaning and cooking and picking up strung together like an ugly pasta necklace. Cumbersome and inelegant and she was failing at it. She knew this. What had happened to her shiny precious life?
He pulled out a kitchen chair and with a sideways nod of his head, she sat. He retrieved three crystal tumblers and set them on the table with the bottle of whiskey. He disappeared into the living room and soft aching alternative music from his generation's decade began to haunt the corners of the house. She reached for the bottle and leveraged out the cork. She tipped it beneath her nose and inhaled the pungent peaty smell. She closed her eyes and wanted to be transported. She just didn't know where. Or with who.
She poured out two generous half-glassfuls. And Chibs returned to the kitchen laughing in surprise. "You really do want to get damaged."
"Well, yeah."
He sat down and took the bottle from her. "That's quite a bit of a drink there. We might not drink all that in a single sitting, ya know."
"Really?" He nodded. "Who is the other glass for?" she asked.
He sloshed a small bit of amber liquid into the glass and pushed it aside with the bottle. "For those who aren't here," he said absently. "This is strong and takes years to age. Meant for enjoying. Here." He lifted his glass, waited for her to hoist her own, then clinked his against hers, clinked the third glass and quietly said, "To the dead." He sipped long between nearly closed lips and swallowed. She watched the length of his throat. "Pull the whiskey into your mouth, lift your tongue and let it roll off each side and down against your bottom teeth. Breathe in the vapors of it. Taste it slowly. It's what we call hot. Then swallow."
She did as he instructed and her sinus cavity filled with the spicy tones of the alcohol. She swallowed and it burned in the most sensual of ways. She closed her eyes and smiled.
"Good, right?"
She nodded at him. And sipped again. "So you don't throw it back, like tequila?"
He mock-shuddered. "Gods, no. That would be alcohol abuse."
She laughed and something fell away from her, inside of her body, released its stranglehold, and dissipated. She sat back and crossed her legs prettily and leaned one elbow on the table, her hand at the back of her head, the feline shape of her body curling around itself. She watched him through slitted eyes. He was in shirtsleeves now, the cut gone. She let her hot gaze drift across the broad shoulders, down the tattooed arms, the beautiful square tipped fingers. Back up to his face and his eyes were fast on hers, warm and curious. She blushed. She was beginning to realize that she had never really paid attention to him. Not as a man, not as a husband, son, or father. Only as one of the SAMCRO brothers, only as, and at this her heart skipped, Jax's most trusted ally now. But lately, just lately, she had begun to see him, to be aware of his presence. A casual form of friendship had begun to build between them and before tonight she would have said it was familial, sibling in nature. She looked away.
The music and the whiskey, the warmth of the room, the forbidden adventure were all heating her from the inside out. She allowed this. She wanted to burn everything to ash.
"You like music?"
"I do. Time in my life it was everything. Ya know?"
"Yeah, I remember those years. I wonder why I've stopped listening to it." She did remember how important music was when she was young. The soundtrack to her life. She couldn't remember the last time she had been charmed by a song, a lyric, a voice. She sang a lot of children's rhyming ditties and Jax didn't care one way or the other about music or musicians. He never had. She shook her head and caught his gaze again. Questioning.
"You've lost weight," she observed.
He leaned back in his chair, rocking it on its back legs, a hand on his stomach. "Yep."
She cocked an eyebrow at him.
"Feckin' bleeding ulcers. Can't keep anything solid down."
"What? Filip!"
He one shoulder shrugged.
"You shouldn't be drinking. Have you seen a doctor?"
"I'm seeing one now."
She was confused as a frisson of jealousy whipped through her. "You're seeing a doctor now?"
He nodded. "Actually, right now." He winked at her and poured out another half glass full of whiskey for both of them.
She hadn't noticed that she had finished the first serving but she lifted the glass now and drank deeply. Her head felt foggy, the edges as soft as cotton, and it was exactly what she had been craving earlier in the evening. A soft obliteration. She reached out a hand and grasped his wrist. He stilled beneath her fingers.
"I am the doctor."
"Aye."
"You should come in to the hospital and get a full work up."
He turned his hand under hers and her fingers ghosted his wrist. Searching out the steady pulse. She pressed lightly down between his tendon and the sharp bone, felt the vein raise itself, and her blood recognized the life force.
"Should do a lot of things, I suppose," he said quietly, his eyes on her fingers. "Will you be the sawbones who works me up?"
Something in the evening was spiraling out of her control. The whiskey was acting faster than any tequila she had ever drunk. She was becoming drunk. But this man was part of that intoxication. She squinted at him, the shape of him coming into sharp focus. Had she ever noticed how masculine he was? How expressive his eyes? How the scar on his left cheek nearly reached his ear. She leaned toward him and lifted her hand from his wrist to trace the scar with her finger. He closed his eyes.
She stood suddenly, upending the chair and he opened his eyes, a deliberate slowness to his movements. He was so in control of his body, his reactions, she marveled at the sense of calm he exuded.
"Um, where's the bathroom?"
He smiled and nodded, standing, "Just there." He pointed and bent to right the chair as she made her way to the door he had indicated.
In the bathroom, she flicked on the light and looked into the mirror above the sink. "What the hell are you doing?" she asked herself silently. "What in the hell is wrong with you?" She had to look away from her own eyes.
She brought her hands to her face and she could smell him on her flesh.
When she returned, he was in the living room, on the sofa. The bottle and their glasses on the crowded coffee table. She noticed that the glass for those absent had been left behind. "Good," she thought to herself. And then she laughed.
"You're in a better mood than I found you in."
"I am, Filip. I am. I told you I needed to get drunk."
"You told me you wanted to get drunk. Needing is something else, innit?"
She sat on the sofa, both of them bookends to a heavy dangerous space between them filled with unwritten novels of an illicit, betraying nature that would surely end in bloody vengeance and oceans of tears.
"My life," she said softly. "What the hell has happened to my life?"
"I don't know. What's happened to it?" He leaned forward and fished a pack of cigarettes out of the sea of paper and magazines on the table. He offered the pack to her and she shook her head no. He tapped one out, and leaned back against the sofa to retrieve a lighter from his front jeans pocket.
She watched this hungrily. His movements were full of dark grace and a feral maleness she hadn't been attracted to in years. Since Jax was a teenager. She licked at her upper lip. He dragged deeply on the smoke, settling again against the arm of the couch. The whiskey glass in one hand, balanced on his thigh. She sipped at her own drink, still watching him, and then she reached over and with a practiced move took the cigarette from between his fingers and brought it to her lips. She filled her lungs with the smoke then handed it back to him, his palm hot over her knuckles. The heat traveled up her arm and burrowed into her chest.
"Filip?" she whispered.
"Right here, Tara."
"I need," she paused, hesitated, could feel how very close she was on the edge of something, "I need to know who I can trust."
He nodded, handing her the cigarette again. "We all need that."
"I don't know who I can trust. Not anymore." The room had become dangerous, she felt dangerous within it. Her heart was beating very, very fast and the cigarette smoke seemed to be lifting her bodily from where she was sitting. Her belly was full of whiskey and her head was narrowing the world. Her hands were shaking in their need to reach, to stroke, to touch.
"You can trust me, Tara," he said this quietly but with conviction and fortitude, and gaping wide open honesty.
She could only nod in gratitude and press the heels of both her hands beneath her eyes to keep from betraying herself entirely.
