Juice groaned and attempted to turn onto his side, only to find that he couldn't comfortably lay on the side he usually did thanks to his injured rib. He had found out now that he was no longer on IV pain medication at the hospital that the extensive road rash all along his torso and leg was much more painful, made worse by the fact that the infected area had practically needed to be sloughed off.
He had been sleeping for most of the day after he had come home from the hospital, doing his best to be diligent with his pain meds out of necessity and a desire to sleep in his own bed. However, now that he had stirred a little, he realized that there was a sound coming from the living room. Slightly lightheaded, he struggled to get to his feet and clambered over to the door, pulling it open and leaning onto the doorjamb for support.
"Who's there?" he called out, his voice slightly hoarse and tired from his hospital stay. His eyes flitted around, trying for the life of him to figure out where he could find something to get him out of this mess. A pistol. A kitchen knife. A hairpin. Something. "I'm warnin' you -"
"No, Juan Carlos Ortiz, I'm warning you," came a familiar voice that Juice was sure was straight out of his imagination. "You haul ass back to that bed and lay down!"
"Dee?" he asked in disbelief, his eyes settling on Denise putting Sofia down on the soft rug in the living room and setting down a duffel bag on the couch. She straightened up and stared at Juice for a moment, hesitating in whatever decision had brought her back here. "What are you -"
"Look, you're not doing good," Denise said, walking over and standing in front of him, glancing back every few seconds at Sofia playing on the ground with one of the stuffed animals she had carried in with her. "I'm - I'm gonna take care of you."
"You brought your stuff back," Juice said, gulping slightly when Denise took a hold of the crook of his arm and started leading him back towards the bedroom. There was a certain stiffness to her demeanor, but her concerns still shone through. He felt almost like a tingle ran through him at the contact of her hand on his skin, just like he'd felt with her hand on his cheek in the hospital on the night of the run. "Does this mean -"
"I don't know what it means," Denise said quietly, unable to make contact as she started adjusting his pillows behind him so he was sitting up slightly. "I just - I don't want to leave you hanging when you're like this."
She let out a breath and straightened up to walk away, but just as she reached the doorway, Juice stammered a few unintelligible syllables before managing to groggily mutter, "Thank you." She stopped before she could get out of the room and glanced back over her shoulder and gave him a lopsided grin.
"Don't mention it," she nodded before heading back out to the living room and sitting down on the floor near Sofia. A smile settled on Juice's face as he saw the most important people in his life back home, back where they belonged. He kept staring at them out in the living room, playing with Sofia's stuffed animals, falling asleep to the sight of them with a grin still tugging at his features.
Charles admittedly puffed his chest smugly when Althea Jarry rose to her feet whenever he entered a room. She was a lapdog. She bowed to whoever was in power at the time, and thanks to his connection to August Marks, Charles Kwan was a powerful man. Right now, however, what he needed from her was for her to go somewhere else - anywhere else - so he could have a moment alone with Gemma Teller.
"Sheriff," he said, nodding in acknowledgment, and a small smile crossed her face as though she was a dog that had just been thrown a bone by her master. "I have a favor to request. An urgent favor."
"Of course."
"I need you to run these names for me - through every source you have," Charles said, fishing a piece of paper out of the breast pocket of his coat and holding it out to her. Harvey Mulligan and Melissa Kearn. "Keep searching until you find something - you'll know what I need when you see it."
Charles was reasonably certain that his sister's college friends probably had nothing worse than a parking ticket on their records - perhaps a DUI or a restraining order somewhere in that Harvey character's past, but nothing that would pique Jarry's interest. So, as she left the room where Gemma was sitting silently, Charles felt reasonably sure that he'd given her a task that would keep her away for a short while, at least. Once the sheriff had departed, Gemma looked up from her day-old newspaper at Charles with a raised eyebrow.
"You got an appointment, sweetheart?"
"Do you want to go back to Charming?"
Gemma froze at the abrupt question, with small but harsh lines forming between her eyebrows as she doubted she'd heard properly.
"My sister asked for you," Charles said simply. "In return for..."
His voice trailed off. It would be suicide to admit the reasons why before he even had Gemma's agreement to be part of the plan. But he knew that his partnership with Marks was one that August could quickly decided to liquidate, and all that it implied. Charles had the Triads, the nightclubs that August Marks could easily buy out. At some point, he knew he would outgrow his usefulness, and Marks did not have patience for those who no longer served a purpose.
"I tried to kill your sister, Charlie," Gemma said, pursing her lips and raising an eyebrow. "And you want to hand me over to her? Unprotected?"
"She's too soft -"
"Apparently you don't know your baby sister very well," Gemma said matter-of-factly. Charles cleared his throat, struggling to reconstruct his argument. His every assumption, of course, had relied upon his sister's ability to forgive. He had known her for her entire life, but she had become a very different person in the past two years - it left him with a sick feeling in his stomach to think that perhaps her ability to seek vengeance was even stronger. He couldn't believe that.
"Would it be worse than the life you have here?" Charles asked Gemma, taking a few steps closer to the woman who was now on her feet to face him. "In a cage, waiting for the day Marks decides what to do with you?"
Gemma's eyes narrowed in appraisal, piecing together what all of this meant until an enlightened expression crossed her face. Her lips parted slightly and she gave a light gasp. "You wanna take Marks down too, don't you?"
"If I send you to my sister, I'll send you with something to deliver - something that will help her and your son," Charles said quietly, looking off into the distance despite the fact that the room was windowless, entirely boxed in without any distance to look into. "It should be good enough to buy your way back into the margins of their good graces."
"Doubtful," Gemma pointed out. "I killed my son's wife and tried to kill his best friend in front of his little boy. Some wounds don't heal."
"Apparently," Charles said, raising his eyebrows. For the first time, Gemma saw a shadow of a smile dancing at the corners of his lips. "You don't know my baby sister very well."
He cleared his throat and tucked the almost-smile back to resume his normal, emotionless expression, nodding towards the door and starting to walk away. He had made it halfway out the door when Gemma called his name out once, prompting him to pause and look back over his shoulder at her.
"This is pretty brave of you, Charlie," Gemma said. He paused, looking momentarily dumbfounded before clearing his throat and shaking his head.
"Between my sister and I," he said, his voice thick with a strange emotion that Gemma hadn't ever heard from him, let alone considered him capable of, "I'm not the brave one."
"Don't be such a ninny, Juice -"
"That shit hurts!"
Denise had realized that she was the only one here to change the bandages on his back, and though she'd tried to give him his pain meds beforehand to make it more tolerable, the instant she'd started pulling off the old gauze from the road rash, he'd reached out for the plastic cup of water by his bed and tried to grab it, only succeeding in knocking it off of his nightstand.
"You make a racket, then Fifi's gonna wake up, and I'm gonna let her change these," Denise said in a sing-song voice, feigning amusement to get herself through the process. "Just - try to stay still -"
"Ouch, Jesus Christ!"
"Nope, just me."
Juice let out a strangled groan when Denise began removing the gauze from a particularly raw spot, and out of reflex, his arm swung backward, reaching out for Denise's hand and giving it a squeeze. She gently dropped the roll of gauze and froze in place, drawing her hand slowly out of Juice's.
"I'm sorry," Denise said hesitantly, clearing her throat awkwardly. "I - I wasn't trying to hurt you -"
"I wasn't trying to hurt you either," Juice replied before he was able to stop himself. Denise cleared her throat again and resumed taking care of his bandages, not saying another word until she had finished. When Juice felt that she had stopped, he drew in a deep breath so that he was laying gently on his back, then sat up slightly to watch Denise finish putting away the supplies. "Are we really gonna do this? What are we supposed to be?"
"I don't know," Denise shrugged honestly, still putting things back into the wound care kit and standing with her back to Juice, whose eyes she could feel boring a hole into the back of her head. "I just need time -"
"I don't think we have time," Juice interrupted, growing slightly agitated so that Denise couldn't help but turn to look at him in concern. "Shit like this, it could happen any time. It could be worse. If we're gonna do this, if we're gonna be a family, it's gotta be now because we don't know -"
"Don't do this to me," Denise said, shaking her head slowly and running her hands through her hair in frustration. "Don't use that against me, Juice. You know that I never wanted things to be like this. I'm just trying to do the right thing -"
"I'm sick of you always doin' the right thing!" Juice said, finally feeling his temper snap in response to being in this situation with the woman he loved. "I want you here. I want you and Sofia here at home more'n anything, but I don't want you to stick around here because you feel like you have to. If you don't wanna be here with me, then you can go back to Nero's. You can go wherever makes you happy."
I can't be happy anywhere, Denise was dying to say. Her words hung back, unspoken, like hounds chomping at the bit that could be seen gnashing their teeth and struggling behind her eyes. How was she supposed to choose between not seeing him anymore, or looking at him every day and seeing what he'd done replaying over and over again. She breathed heavily until, practically out of nowhere, a piece of advice that Nero had given her while she sat up late one night in his living room came flooding back into her mind.
"I've known the guy. Known him for a long time," Nero said, handing Denise a steaming mug of black coffee. "It ain't no excuse for what he did, but you make him strong. Once he felt like he was losing you, all that was gone."
Denise exhaled and shook her head, but didn't react. There were times where she really didn't know how to handle Nero's constant need to give advice, and always in this cryptic, almost mystic sort of way. It was something she never had growing up - not from her father, not from her grandfather, or from Charles.
"You'll never be able to say there's nothin' left," Nero pressed on. "Because you have a daughter. There'll always be somethin'. You and this guy have a daughter you both love - she's this beautiful, perfect little person, and half of that perfect little person who has your whole heart is Juice. I can't tell you whether or not you should be with him, but a little piece of you still has to have love for him."
"I want to forgive him," Denise said, shaking her head and not looking up from the laptop screen that cast a slightly bluish glow over her face. "I - I do. But I just... I want him to prove I should. I want him to show me -"
"If there's one thing I'm sure about, chinita," Nero said, raising his eyebrows slightly. "It's that forgiveness with a price tag ain't really forgiveness."
Was that what she was doing? Putting a price tag on the forgiveness she kept dangling in front of her husband by coming back here? Denise had never meant it that way. Never. She inhaled, taking in a deep shuddering breath as she looked over her husband. He was tired. He was in pain - he should've been resting, and all he was thinking about was her. This, Denise realized, wasn't the kind of person she wanted to be. She had wanted so much to show all of them that she wasn't just a poor little rich girl who was spoiled and used to having her own way, but she was just proving everyone right.
Forgiveness, Nero had reminded her time and time again, was a choice - and it was a choice she had to make for her own sake, for her own peace of mind, even if for no other reason.
She stepped forward and sat at the foot of bed, leaning over and slowly brushing her lips across Juice's cheek, lingering there for a brief moment before pulling back and looking at him with a determined expression as she reached out and clasped her hand onto one of his.
"I belong here. With my family," she said, nodding and finally allowing a small smile to poke through. "I don't know how we're gonna do this but... I want to be here."
And then, despite the fact that moving was still physically painful, Juice practically lurched forward and wrapped his arms around his wife, embracing her as tightly as he could manage to while she froze up slightly in surprise from the quickness of his movements. It took her a few moments to realize what was happening and reciprocate, careful to avoid pressing on the bandages she had just changed.
"Careful," she chuckled weakly, sniffing and realizing that she had warm, salty tears running down her cheeks at this point. "I worked hard on those bandages."
"Thank you, baby," he said, and Denise felt another wave of tears when she realized that he was crying too - this was his fault, she thought humorously to herself. She had never been one to cry before Juice had come around. "I promise you, everythin' is gonna be different now -"
"No, it won't," Denise said, her quiet laughter muffled as her face was still buried in his shoulder. "We're gonna keep pissing each other off and screwing up, and then we're gonna apologize, and we're gonna do this. We're gonna try to fix it every time," she promised, nodding and holding him close, just missing the feeling of being close to him again.
"You're the only person I wanna have pissin' me off for the rest of my life," Juice chuckled, finally pulling back and resting his forehead against Denise's, finally really smiling. "You're everythin' I've got, you and Sofia. And if you need to do - whatever you gotta do, then - then I can deal, okay?"
Denise found that breathing was becoming a slightly more difficult task. A part of her was afraid. Not afraid - scared shitless. But another part, the bigger and braver part that always seemed to win out for better or for worse, knew that the answer to all of this was simple.
"Okay."
Juice's grin widened before he leaned forward and gently, chastely pressed his lips to hers. It wasn't going to be smooth sailing, both of them knew, but the ship was no longer sinking and the wind was back in their sails.
A/N's
Well, it took almost 10 chapters for it to happen, but Juice and Denise are finally back to a semi-good place! I'm going to have a couple of nice, mostly light-hearted chapters before we jump back into things. We have some new events to set the stage for, and anyone who ships Jax/Wendy will have a few events to keep them happy too, at least for a while.
I know I've kept you guys waiting a good while for Juice and Denise to finally make up, so I hope the update was to all of your liking. As you've probably all realized, this story is going to run quite a bit longer than "On the Rocks", and there's still plenty of story left to tell. So, buckle up and prepare for a fun ride! Until the next update, cheers!