We own nothing. This is a Texas to Ireland co-write. It has been written in nap times, late nights, and early mornings. its so much fun but a ton of work so if you like it please do review! In the meantime? Thank you, for all of the follows and favorites and a single review! :) Enjoy!-The Team
When Julie shows up at his door, it's like a ghost he'd buried to the bottom of his heart pops up at exactly the wrong time. He lets her in because she looks so torn between doing what she feels is right and what her southern upbringing tells her. He feels something other than unbearable sorrow for the first time weeks. He feels chagrined.
Julie has always been surprising and unexpected. She'd made him feel hopeful once. She comes in and distracts him with her adventures and plays with the boys. Once she settles down, she'll be great mother someday.
It feels odd and wrong to think of Julie at all with Tara gone, but if he puts his mind elsewhere even for a moment, the pain lifts.
They put the boys to bed and the silence hangs.
"What now?" she asks.
"More beer."
"Sure."
He brings her another Corona, and she's sitting in the floor restacking Thomas' little toys. Jax keeps stepping on them and while they aren't as bad as Abel's LEGOS, those fuckers hurt. "So, Pix what's the deal? You only run to or from something when you're either intrigued or terrified by it."
"Who says I'm running at all?" She cracks her beer, and her neat manicure catches his eye along with a paper cut on her middle finger.
He swigs his beer to fight a smirk he knows will make her angry. "You're drinkin' with me, Darlin.'"
"Convenience." She shrugs.
"Or history repeating itself."
Gone is the wide eyed girl he loved. The look he gets is a woman who's fully in control. "You can always hit the eject button."
"Nah, not yet." He smirks but they both know it's false.
She flips her beer cap like a quarter. "So what's my deal? I was in Seattle and those kids drew me in and I had to tell their stories. That's the thing Tim will never understand... stories, fictional or otherwise, I have to tell them because it fills up a part of me that Dillon doesn't touch.
"Dillon's like this bubble and when I leave it, I want nothing more than to go back into it because it's some kinda backwoods, dirt roads, always the same perfection but then after a while I feel held down by it. Not Tim- it holds his heart and everything that matters to him."
"Not everything, you're here." He replies knowingly. He lights a cigarette and inhales, The stinging in his lungs grounds him.
She stands and paces, and he remembers the girl he started falling for on his Mom's back porch. "Exactly! The wanderer in me connected to those kids and their desires and now, now I have their stories, their lives knocking around in my head with no way to get them out. I've done everything by the book. And it's not working!'
"Then stop. I write for my boys, the things I love and hate. I write the things that matter to me. Write like you're telling someone you love everything you saw. Lose the need to be perfect, Jules, and you'll find it."
She looks shocked, not that he writes, but that he had an answer for her. "You think?"
There's a wrongness and inconvenience in his sudden revelation that he's still very much attracted to her. "I know, if you put half of the passion I just saw on your face in the book, you'll be fine."
"I'm so sorry, I'm still rambling."
"Don't be, there's always so much going on in you, Julie. The joy that follows you is a nice change, I ain't felt the kinda hope you have in ages. You're confused as shit, but you got hope."
She collapses on the couch peering down, at him on the floor. "Where'd your hope go, Jax? Thought you were gonna change things?"
"So did I. Sometimes, I think the hope died the second my old man's bike hit the concrete of the highway." He stacks one of the stupid cups to distract himself.
"Other times?" she pushes.
He shrugs. "Other times the hope was Tara's. It wasn't ever mine. I never thought there was anything wrong with who I was til she pointed out there's something broken in all this. She was right, always was."
He looks up at Julie. "Used to piss me the fuck off too. She saw through it all, this isn't brotherhood, its bloodshed and waste and hatred and hell if I know how to fix it. Sometimes I wanna take my boys and run." He confesses his deepest held secret to the grain of the wooden coffee rather than Julie's face.
"Do it."
He'd been afraid she'd say that.
"Can't. Tara wanted to and I just, outta loyalty to my Dad, I had to fix the club and it killed her. I gotta make that loss mean something, Ope's too. It's gotta matter, if it's pointless it'll eat me alive." He sniffs back sudden and unbidden tears. He hates this grief. It cripples him.
"And burn away everything you love." Julie adds prophetically.
He nods in agreement "Bout the size of it, Darlin.'"
They talk well into the night and get sloppy drunk and fall asleep on the couch and love seat.
He wakes to the smell of pancakes and scrambled eggs and the sound of Don Williams' "Lord I Hope This Day Is Good."
He wanders into the kitchen and for the first time, it's not the place he found Tara. It's the place Julie's teaching Abel to two-step to a song he's pretty damn sure Tim put on Julie's IPod. There's no blood on the floor, instead it's Julie's purple-painted toes and bare feet dancing across the linoleum. For the first time in weeks, he hears Abel's beautiful high-pitched giggle. The crippling grief lifts for a moment, just for a single breath.
He leans on a kitchen chair and kisses Thomas. "The eggs are burning, Pix."
"Shit!"
He kisses the top of Abel's bubble-gum-and-little-boy-sweat scented head. "Little pitchers, Darlin. Mornin', Monster Boy."
"I'm dancin.'"
"I see that. Julie spins real good, make her do it." Jax grins at the dirty look she shoots him.