The next morning Sara woke up to the sound of someone making a mess of her kitchen, while the sketchy radio in her living room was set to a classic rock station playing AC/DC even though it was before 9 am. She was stiffer than she had been last night, and pulling anything over her head was asking for a world of hurt. Kozik's sweatshirt was still on the floor, and she managed to snag it with a toe and put it on.
It fell down to her knees when she stood up, which was an ordeal in itself. Her ribs had gone a dark purple.
She padded her way down the hall barefoot.
Kozik was standing in front of her stove in low-slung jeans. "You're out of eggs." He said over his shoulder with a smile.
"Never had any to begin with." Sara told him, walking over to kiss him.
Kozik had managed to find the last of her bacon and a bag of frozen hash browns. He seemed to be making a pretty good go of it too.
"How're the ribs?"
"Tender."
Sara grabbed the kettle from the stove and filled it with water before putting it back on the burner. His arm snaked around her waist, low to avoid the damage. It felt good, it felt like- like they were starting something. She wanted to smack herself the moment she thought it.
His thumb ran back and forth over her hip bone, and he kissed her temple. Herman had figured out last night that he wasn't there for a lay and leave pretty quickly. She came hurtling in and hit something in him. He just didn't know if she felt the same. She was all sorts of independent, and it was kinda scary to think of who the hell in Charming she could be related to. Herman had no idea how to broach that subject. If she was out on her own and not tightly wedged into the family web of SAMCRO, it meant she probably had some kinda issues with them.
The kettle had started to whistle, so Sara took it off the stove and set to making coffee, letting his hand linger on her hip. He was tall enough that she fit in under his arm easily, and the heat coming off his skin felt good on her sore muscles.
"There are a couple mugs in the cabinet up above my head, could you-"
"Yeah, I got em'."
His hand left her side and reached up with ease to grab two plain white coffee mugs and put them down on the counter in front of her. His phone went off from inside his pocket and he gave her the spatula before answering it and walking away from the stove.
Sara knew what the phone call meant.
"Brother, you're late. Get your ass up to Tacoma." was the greeting Happy gave him before he could even say a word.
"Yeah, yeah. alright. I'll be there in a day and a half, calm your tits." Kozik half-spat. He had wanted to hang around for the day, see where this thing with Sara Grace went.
Happy hung up on him.
She poured out two cups of coffee with one hand, while turning the burner off.
"Can you stay to eat?" Sara asked him without turning around.
"Yeah, just gotta get going right after." Kozik said apologetically, sliding his prepaid back into his front pocket. She turned from the stove and shrugged, handing him one of the coffees. Apparently she took it black.
"That's alright, I know how that shit goes. Can you get the plates?" She asked.
"What would you've done without me, huh?" Kozik asked in return with a smile as he retrieved them from the same cabinet as the mugs.
"Ate it outta the frypan." Sara said honestly with a grin, clambering into one the wooden chairs, one knee up to her chest, the other barely reaching the floor. She watched the way the muscles of his back moved under his skin, and took a sip of her coffee.
"Knew you were my kinda girl." He laughed, sliding half of the potatoes onto each plate and giving her most of the bacon. He figured the Sara deserved it more than he did. "Forks? Or you just gonna use your hands?"
"Bottom drawer, left of the fridge." She told him, rolling her eyes. The radio had started spitting out Poison, and she had to laugh.
"What's so funny?"
"I ain't heard this shit, in a long damn time." She told him, accepting the plate he was handing her. "How'd you find this radio station? That pile of junk hasn't worked for years."
Kozik shrugged, sitting down across from Sara Grace. "I'm good with my hands." He told her, wriggling his eyebrows.
Sara laughed, a deep belly laugh that must've hurt, her eyes shut, her head thrown back. She was so goddamn pretty, Kozik wanted to make her laugh like that again and again. Then he caught the lyrics of Poison's "Talk Dirty to Me" and he had to laugh himself.
She watched Kozik laugh, the light spark in his eyes, and felt something pull in her chest. Her hand came to rest on his cheek and she half-pulled him, half-leaned over the table to kiss him, taking as much of him as she could before he left. He warmed a part of her that gone cold when she left Charming, and her mind was screaming at her to consider the consequences always looming over her head. Fuck the consequences, Sara decided as she kissed him harder, lips moving confidently against his. She didn't want this to be a one night thing, like she had convinced herself when she had seen him at that gas station. She wanted him to come back to her, as stupid an expectation as that was.
His calloused hands were cradling her face, the rest of him half out of his chair to bridge the gap between where they were sitting.
A plate crashed to the floor as he pulled her closer. She came around the small table and crawled into his lap, kissing him again, with her hands twisted into his hair, knees locked on to his hips.
"Hap- is gonna- kill me." Kozik managed between kisses, threading a hand into her hair the other pulling her hips closer to his. Sara bent her head back and laughed.
"Happy Lowman?" She asked with a snort.
"Yeah." Kozik said, eyebrows furrowing in obvious confusion.
"Don't tell him you ditched him for pussy, or he'll skin you alive." Sara said, shaking her head with a grin.
He was startled by how casually she referred to herself as pussy. She caught the look on his face and pulled back on to her haunches.
"Don't call yourself that."
He even surprised himself with that one. Her eyebrows jumped about a mile into her hairline. His fingers ran back and forth over her bare thighs.
"Just don't." He told her, shaking his head slightly.
"Okay." Sara said.
Kozik's phone went off in his pocket again, and he dug for it awkwardly in between them. He groaned when he saw the incoming number flash across the screen. It was Lee.
"I have to get this." He said, apologetically.
She nodded, but didn't move, settling her weight a little further back, watching him answer. He had a solidly built, farm-boy-handsome face with ruddy cheeks from spending long days in the sun and wind. A true blue piece of Americana, like the color of the big skies she rode under when she had still been roving.
He got hung up on for the second time that day. This fucking run had been stressful, the only good part of his involvement was running into Sara Grace. He reached out his hands to cup her face and pulled her in with a sigh.
"C'mere."
She complied with a half smile and a raised right eyebrow.
"I gotta go," Kozik told her, fingers kneading the back of her neck lightly "but I wanna see you again, take you out somewhere. That sound good?" He asked, looking up at her with a shielded vulnerability in his eyes.
"Yeah. Sounds good." Sara said, biting her lip to keep herself from grinning like a lunatic. He kissed her then, and again at the door, and once more when he was on his bike about to take off. The minute the door was closed behind her, she giggled happily and ran her fingers over the slip of paper he'd left in her pocket.
Later, she sparked a joint to help ease the ache in her side. She took it easy, knowing a coughing fit would do more damage than she could handle at the moment. The smoke lofted lazily to the ceiling as she breathed out, slow and deep. Jax had always made fun of her for being a bit of pothead. Not like it meant much, coming from him, but he still used every occasion to point it out. Him and Ope had teased her mercilessly when they were younger.
Sara Grace had spent a lot of time trying to run from the club, trying to run from Charming. She missed her family, all of her family. Kozik had reminded her that at the deepest, most basic level, the club was filled with good people. People who would do anything for her. The fights, the bullshit, was just noise. She had been eighteen when she had left the first time, had told her father it was just for a few fights in L.A that Lumpy had set up for her, to get into the business. It wasn't a lie, but it wasn't the whole truth. That mess all came back to Michael Oswald and her own stupidity.
She took another inhale and puffed it out.
The trips out of Charming had grown and grown in length, until one day when she was twenty, she bought herself the shitty little house she was sitting in, and called it done. There was more to the world than small town California, and the more she kept going back the less of it she would see. At least, that was her reasoning back then. Now she was twenty four and it seemed less and less of an actual reason and more of an excuse. They were all excuses, the reasons she gave herself for staying away. The club was her family, always had been, always would be, and Michael Oswald had gone to college in who the fuck knows where, so that only left her bullshit idea of wanting to see the world. She hadn't been doing much of that lately. Between the fights and bartending, she spent most of her free time on her ass in her living room trying to recover.
Maybe it was time to go home.
Maybe she needed another hole in her head, a voice added from the back of her mind.
She would mull it over, Sara decided. She'd mull it over, and maybe even go home for Christmas. Pop's would like that, and Donna could always use the help. Her sister-in-law had been doing her best, but having a husband in jail when you had two young kids must've been hell.
She should've been there for Donna more.
She was a selfish brat.
Work that night was uneventful. The Watering Hole was busy, as per usual, but Sara Grace was far too gone in her own head to let anything register beyond a customer's call for another beer.
"You alright there?"
It was George, one of the few regulars that had stuck around when management had changed hands. The small town tavern had been remade into a sports bar a few years back, and the noise level had scared off most of the townies. It was now the haunt of the fishermen and outdoorsmen that came from the big cities to flounce around nature for a while before going back to their indoor plumbing and other luxuries.
"Yeah, George. Just thinking." Sara told him, leaning up against the bar and rubbing at her forehead.
"Talk?" The old man offered, taking a draw from his beer. She gave him a wry smile.
"Ain't I supposed to be the one giving council?"
"That part of the job description was gone the second they put those damn televisions in." George replied gruffly.
"Fine, old timer, give me your wisdom on my troubles." She teased, grabbing herself a beer from under the counter.
The sports bar had kept the country-western theme, but had taken it into overdrive. There was a mechanical bull in one corner, the other was just a wall of television screens. The tables all had checkered gingham tablecloths, everything was meant to look like it came out of a barn, there was even fake hay hanging down from the exposed wooden rafters. Every now and then they'd play Waylon Jennings' Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys. Made every faux-farmer's boy and his brother think he could sing.
"Where'd you wanna start, girl?" George asked, steepling his fingers in front of his face with a look of mock authority.
"The beginning?" She said with a laugh. "Though that might take a while."
George shrugged his bent shoulders as if to say he had all the time in the world.
"I'll give you the short and sweet version." Sara decided with a nod and a swig of her beer.
"I was born and raised in Charming, California. My father was a mechanic, my mother a hairdresser. They got married when Ma got pregnant with my older brother, Harry. They fell apart six years later, got divorced. My old man served in Vietnam, saw some fucked up shit-" which was true, but wasn't the whole reason he and Ma fought like rabid dogs every time they saw each other. "- couldn't get past it. He and his best friend founded a motorcycle club. The town hated it. I grew up the scrawny white-trash daughter of a danger to the status quo." Her laughter was an odd mixture of sincere and sarcastic.
"Anyways, I fell in love with a rich douchebag's son, and I think that he loved me, at least a little. We could never get on the same page though, and we fought, a lot. It ended when he took my best friend to prom. So, I showed up with Harry's best friend, they got in a fight." And both of them were hauled off to jail.
She was giving George probably way more than he had asked for, but part of her just kept her mouth moving, even when her brain was barely keeping up. Again, she wasn't giving George the whole truth, just the parts that she could give out without risking her hide. Or her emotions. Truth was, somewhere along the line, she'd half fallen in love with Jax Teller. She hated it. Hated that she just seemed to bounce from man to man, desperate for attention.
"I graduated, booked it out of town, started boxing professionally. Then, I got older and smarter and realized I couldn't get only beaten up for a living. Moved here, started doing this."
"So what's eating you?"
Sara shrugged and drank more of her beer.
"I ran into a member of Pop's club last night, took him home. He wants to start something. I said yes."
Which was a dumb thing to do, but she still meant it.
That realization had sunk in during the afternoon. She didn't know shit about Kozik, and he was part of her father's pride and joy. Piney would have something to say, and Sara Grace was sure it wasn't going to be pretty. Opie would shit bricks, and Jackson- well she had no fucking clue what he'd do. But Kozik had latched onto something in her and was doing a pretty damn good job of staying there.
George grunted. "Why's this a problem?"
"He lives in Tacoma, Washington, for one. Two he's part of the club, which has its own repercussions. Three, it's been awhile since I've had anything besides a few nights and a goodbye."
The old guy was getting way too much information about her sex life than he needed to know, she thought with a wince.
"Sounds like you jumped into the deep end without lookin' kid."
"That just about sums it up." Sara agreed, polishing off her beer.
"That ain't all, though, is it?" He asked, running a hand over his greying mustache.
George was a smart old coot. His wife, Martha, always said that when she called looking for him.
"I'm thinking about going back to Charming. Pops is getting old, and my sister in law needs help with the kids."
"That's reasonable." George said with a nod, like he was leaving the rest for her to say herself.
"I ain't doing what I set out to do, and my family needs me. I've been a selfish brat for most of my life."
George raised an eyebrow at that one.
"What did you set out to do?"
"Be somebody, go somewhere. Prove I wasn't just another trailer park queen." Sara said a little defensively. "That's why I took up boxing. I was good at it, and it could take me out of Charming." It also proved to her father that she wasn't something that needed to be constantly looked after. It made him proud, the same kind of proud he was when Ope learned how to ride. "That sort of went down the drain."
"Says who?"
Sara's eyes widened and then narrowed at her friend. She opened her mouth to reply with "everybody" but George beat her to the punch.
"You're somebody to me, somebody to that boy you slept with. You sure as hell were somebody to that boy who got into a fight for you. Don't get me started on your family."
She crossed her arms and leaned her butt up against the back bar.
"So, you tell me, kid. What are the pros of going home?" He asked, taking a drink of his beer.
"My family."
"And the cons?"
"The shit I ran away from."- which really wasn't there anymore. It was the ghosts of the shit she was more worried about.
"How's the running away worked out so far?"
"Like shit." Sara Grace laughed, rubbing at her forehead.
A patron further down the bar slapped his hand down in irritation. Sara gave George a look, before attending to the other man. His arm was wrapped around his girlfriend's waist, as she purred and giggled at him, tapping his nose with one of her fingers.
"What can I get you two?" Sara asked, plastering on a smile.
The girl gave her a blindingly white grin. The bracelets on her wrist clacked as she pointed to her man. "He knows what I want." She said, snapping her gum, before turning to head towards the bathroom.
The guy was wearing a plaid western shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, hair carefully disheveled with product.
"A vodka and cranberry, and a Jack and Coke." He instructed, leaning his elbows up onto the bar. Sara gave him a nod and turned to fix the drinks, using the second shelf vodka and watered down cranberry juice filled with sugar. In her opinion, fruit and alcohol didn't belong together unless it was a forty and some orange juice. She held a certain nostalgic joy in brass monkeys.
"Can I see your tattoo?" The guy asked, craning his head over the bar to catch sight of the ink on her upper thigh. The bartender's uniform called for shorts, year round, and a tied off red checkered shirt that was small enough to strain even on members of the I.B.T.C.
Sara took a minute to finish his Jack and Coke before indulging him. She hiked the hem of her denim cut offs high enough for the whole design to show.
"Never seen one of em' on a woman before." He remarked curiously.
"Dad served in Vietnam." She explained, looking down at the glowering cartoon bulldog, smoking a cigar, helmet strapped on his head, USMC lettered over him in classic Sailor Jerry style. Well, classic Happy Lowman style.
"He agree with the 'Bring 'Em Home' part?" The guy asked, referring to the text that rested underneath it, his drink tilting dangerously towards spilling.
"Yeah, he does." Sara told him brusquely, as his girlfriend returned from the bathroom.
"What ya looking at, babe?" The woman asked with a false sense of cheeriness. Sara heard the accusation lurking underneath and kept back a snort of laughter.
"Girl's tattoo, I'm thinkin' of getting one." The guy told her, oblivious.
The girl got on her tiptoes to see over the bar and sneered.
"Not like that one, you're not."
"Why? It's got- got good line work. Or shading, or something." He hiccuped, before careening back around to face Sara. "Who did it?"
"He wouldn't work on you." She told him honestly, pulling the hem of her shorts down again. Happy would walk away from this idiot and not give a shit if he was asked to ink him.
"You're not getting a tattoo!" The girlfriend balked, forgetting her drink on the bar completely.
Sara took it as her cue to slowly back away and get back to where George sat, nursing his beer with an amused smile under his bristly mustache.
"I'd suggest you cut that boy off." George told her.
"Yeah, though I gotta feeling his girlfriend might be cuttin' something else off tonight." She replied, looking down the bar to where the couple was beginning to argue with increasing volume.
George laughed quietly, setting his now empty beer bottle down on the bar. He'd never been one for the big or loud. It had been more than a year until he had started talking to her. He spun around on his stool to check the clock. It was almost midnight, which meant Martha was probably going to call for him soon.
He clapped his gnarled hands together and held them open towards her in an understanding gesture.
"The missus's needs me, but I'm sure whatever you got cookin' will work itself out, kid. Just gotta have a little patience." George said, standing up and pulling his wallet out of his back pocket.
"Thanks, George." Sara Grace told him with a small smile. He passed a twenty into her hands and refused to accept any change when she offered.
"A pleasure as always, Sara." The old man told her with a wink. She watched him head out the door and dreaded the next hour until they closed. George was the only one of her customers she actually liked as a human being, the rest of them could rot.
The minutes ticked on, cut only by the call by the back table of deer hunters for two more pitchers of Bud Light that they guzzled down greedily. The couple at the bar had left twenty minutes after George, the woman looking stonily ahead while the man pleaded and begged for her to tell him what he did by one, the customers teetered out into the night.
When the doors finally closed, she threw on a pair of sweatpants and her leather jacket after counting up her tips and locking the bar's cash register.
"Night, Sara Grace." One of the waitresses called from where she was sweeping up in back.
"Night Nora. See ya' tomorrow." She told her with a wave, walking out into the dark with her hands stuffed into her pockets. Her fingers fumbled with Kozik's piece of paper, before she settled onto her bike and revved up the engine.
Sara Grace collapsed on to her bed with a wince. The ribs had been killing her the whole night, and would probably keep her from sleeping until she was absolutely exhausted. The painkillers she had in stock weren't enough to knock her ass out, and she kind of rued dumping her old Vicodin stash from the Reno incident.
She read over the slip of paper in the moonlight streaming through her bedroom window.
Would it be desperate to call? Did she wait a day? Or was it two? What the fuck was the protocol for meeting someone at a gas station and taking them home?
Her sheets still smelled like him, and his big, black sweatshirt sat folded over the foot of the bed frame.
It'd been her first time in almost a year, and fuck had it been good. The memory sent blood rushing to her cheeks, and a jolt down her spine. She was being ridiculous, but part of her couldn't help it.
She dialed Kozik's number.