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Chapter 85 House of Hell

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DON'T READ BEFORE OR DURING EATING

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Ava was freaking out. She shuddered. She was sure she stepped on roaches and mouse shit. The stench would not leave. It was burnt into her nostrils. She had been in friends' houses in similar neighborhoods, but they were neat and clean. Did Jax actually live like that?

She began wiping her feet on the dead brown grass trying to scrape the mouse crap off her shoes. Thank God Jax always insisted she wear real shoes and no sandals when they rode on his bike or some of the shit might have touched her skin.

The thought made her stomach turn. She had always had a temperamental stomach. She normally didn't eat breakfast, but Jeeves made her favorite blueberry pancakes with homemade blueberry syrup, so she'd eaten pancakes and bacon that morning. She looked down at her shoes. There were roach parts and mouse shit still smeared on her shoes. Her stomach convulsed and up came her breakfast. Oddly enough, it improved the appearance of the grass.

All she wanted to do was go home and decontaminate herself. There was a bright spot. This place was such a dump, it would take years to just get rid of all the disgusting vermin living there.

Her father was a son of a bitch. He knew that place was something out of a horror film and he knew exactly how repulsed she would be by it. His little plan to make her life hell by giving her a honeymoon with Jax hadn't worked so this was his next plan to make her life hell. Well, the joke was on him because she wasn't moving out.

It wouldn't do his reputation any good if he tried to force his daughter to live in a house that was unfit for human habitation. Weren't there laws about stuff something like that?

Ava may have been traumatized by the experience, but what Jax was going through was much worse. The house he'd been so proud to own had been trashed beyond anything he could have imagined.

For all of Ava's princess like behavior, he didn't blame her for getting the hell out of the house. Mice and roaches were everywhere. He forced himself to take a breath through his mouth trying to minimize the smell going through his nose. The stench was overwhelming.

He dreaded going to look at the rest of the house—especially the bathrooms. The hall bathroom toilet was filled with unflushed piss and shit. The bathtub was filled with brown water looking stuff that Jax didn't even want to know else was concealed in its depths. There could have been body parts dissolved in acid for all he knew. He didn't walk into the bathroom. The view and smell from the hall was bad enough.

When he reached the master bedroom, he found a big source of the stench. Two dead pitbulls were decomposing. They had been dead for quite awhile and they had been feasted on by mice, so it was impossible to tell how they died. Insects had taken over now gnawing at what was left. Jax had seen some bad shit in his life and this easily made the top ten.

He didn't want to go into the bedroom and look in the master bathroom. He'd seen enough. It wouldn't surprise him if there was a dead body in the damned place. The smell was bad enough.

Jax didn't bother to lock the door when he left. Homeless people wouldn't even want to squat there and there wasn't much worse that could get done to his once beloved house. The place was a dump. The people had trashed it.

Ava caught another pungent whiff of the inside of the house on Jax. She bent over and threw up again. Jax made sure he stayed outside the blast radius.

"You pregnant?" Jax asked. In his experience women threw up for only two reasons being pregnant or being drunk. He knew Ava wasn't drunk.

"No," Ava gasped. "The smell in that house."

"You picked a good time to leave," Jax said. "The smell got worse."

"It wasn't like that when you lived there, right?"

"Of course not," Jax said indignantly.

"That place was awful. It was wrecked."

"Yeah. I know it sounds ungrateful, but how do you feel about turning down your father's present?"

"I thought this was your dream house."

"Yeah, it was. Now, it's a nightmare. I was so proud to own my own house before I was even thirty. Those bastard buyers just trashed it."

Ava found herself actually hugging Jax and feeling sorry for him. It was a relief to know that he hated the house too. Better yet, he wanted to give back that damned house. It was times like these when Ava thought she might actually like Jax a little.

"I think my father would be just fine with us giving the house back," Ava said after they finished hugging. "No amount of money to fix that place up will ever erase that nightmare memory from my mind."

"Let's get the hell out of here."

"I want to go home and decontaminate myself," Ava said.

"I want to talk to Gemma and find out what she knows about what happened to my fucking house."

"Could you drop me off at home?" Ava asked.

"Sure. Don't worry," he said giving her a reassuring smile. "we won't live in a dump like that."

"Thanks," she said giving him a kiss on the cheek.

She could hardly wait to see the expression on her father's face when they gave him that dump of a house back.

"Let's wait until after dinner. Just thinking about that place will make me lose my appetite and the memory could make me throw up again. I don't really want to do that at the dinner table."

"Good thinking," Jax said.

They got on his bike and roared off.