My Jacket

Savannah

When I tell you I lose my mind from time to time, that I do not have a solid grip on my emotions and I’m impulsive, I doubt anyone knows how badly it sucks.

I was a little hot and loose with my reactions long before the crash, but it’s worse now.

Before, I was simply hotheaded.

Mental illness hurts.

Not just for the one suffering from it, but for those around the afflicted as well.

I think of it like if my mental illness was glass on a sandy beach.

My illness is like tiny slices of glass buried under the soft sandy beach at different depths and over the entire length of the sandy banks.

Then I, along with everyone that I came in contact with, walk that beach.

Even with the sand regularly cleaned, we will eventually get pricked by one of those sharp pieces—you can’t avoid it forever.

That night, not even my sleeping medication helped me. I was on edge and nothing seemed to work to pull me out of this funk.

I wanted to tell Damon I was sorry on instinct. I shouldn’t have spoken to him like that, even if what I said was the truth.

I felt guilty about how I went about it. I was already in a state, and hearing him add on to it just made it worse.

It’s not his fault his father was an asshole, it’s not Damon’s fault Lucien was set the way he was.

At two thirty in the morning, I tossed the blanket off and went into action. I pulled on some sleeping shorts, a T-shirt, and slipped on some sneakers.

I grabbed my phone and went out the window. I did a quick check on the status of my police escort and cut through the neighborhood.

An hour and a half later, I was outside the bar in biker country, walking through the black doors and into an ongoing party that seemed to be happening for no reason in particular.

Dane was the first one to spot me, running to my side with wide eyes and screaming over the music, asking what the hell I was doing here.

“Where’s Damon?” I yelled back. The music was so loud I couldn’t hear my own voice, but lucky for me, he heard everything loud and clear.

He took my hand and walked us through the crowd to the hallway, where we found Daxton pinned up with some girl on her knees.

I looked away, but he had to call me back like I was going to carry on a conversation while he got his dick sucked.

I waved and flipped him off.

A simple, “Hey Daxxy, I’m not watching that, fuck you,” relayed in those two hand gestures.

Dane brought me to a room before the stairs to Damon’s basement bedroom. He pushed his door open and pulled me in.

The music had faded and all I heard now was the thumping of the bass. His lights clicked on, and he looked at me with a sad expression.

“What’s wrong, Dansie?”

I took a step towards him while he sat at the foot of his bed with his head hung low. He looked stressed and depressed.

Like something harsh was weighing him down, but he didn’t have anyone to turn to. My time with the Henley brothers has been short-lived, but I can get a picture of who they are.

And Dane is the tag-along. The one who never does anything right, so he never gets a job or a position in his family.

If this was ~Four Brothers~, he would be the baby brother bleeding out in the snow, crying for Marky Mark to come save him.

I know what that fuck-up feeling is like.

I know the look.

I fill the space, sitting on the bed beside him.

His black hair looked a shade closer to dark brown, but his steel gray-green eyes held this warmth unlike all his brothers.

Dane is the youngest.

With his shaggy-like flip of hair and the way he turned his face to me, it was almost like I saw this nine-year-old little kid instead of the fifteen-year-old beside me.

“Penny for your thoughts?” I tried out the same smile I used on Morgan when he had something going on.

“You shouldn’t be friends with us. You need to go home and not come back.”

His words were heavy; I could see them tightening around his neck like a noose.

“Why do you say that?” I turned my body, crossing my legs on his bed and facing him head on.

His hands folded and locked on each other.

His downcast eyes on his blue and red racing carpet.

“We’re not your friends, Savannah.”

His jaw tensed, from the start of our little chat to now he looked like he had aged years from the mere weight of what he was feeling and the choice of his words.

He didn’t remind me of my baby brother anymore. Right now he reminded me of my own self.

My hand rested on his shoulder, and I leaned in, my forehead on his upper arm as I worked it into a side hug.

“I make a lot of bad decisions, sweetheart. It’s one of the things I do best. Being your friend might end up on that mile-long list…if it does, know I won’t regret it.”

I hug him a little tighter.

“Isn’t all bad decisions a regret?” he asked with this glitter of innocence.

“No, sweetheart. Not all. Some bad decisions make good things happen.”

“How long is your regret list?” His own head tilting to lay against me.

“As long as your dick.” I chuckled.

“Oh, that big? Damn,” he snickered and patted my hand.

We stayed that way for a moment longer before he pulled away.

“I need to see Damon. I gotta apologize.”

I fix his hair back into his styled fashion.

“You apologize? Why?”

He stood up, hanging an arm down for me to take and help me to my feet.

“I just told you I fuck things up all the time. Some people are just good at hiding it.”

I wink and open his door, taking the steps down and knocking on Damon’s door.

A hard four raps and I hear him yell, “I’m busy!” Then a squeak of couch springs.

“So should I come back in three minutes when you’re done?” I tease him from behind the door.

Dane, standing on the top step, smiles like I’m getting on to Damon for him.

“Who the fuck is it?” He tries out a deeper voice than he naturally has.

“Ginny Granger.” My own smirk rolling up the corners of my lips.

I can hear him shuffling around.

The door creaks open just enough for him to get his face out from behind it.

Shirtless, with a pair of baby blue briefs on. His forehead and chin glistening with sweat. He stunk of sex and some kind of strawberry scent I didn’t want to know about.

He looked surprised but pissed.

“Sorry to interrupt your play time.” I flicked my eyes to where the couch sits in his room.

“Why are you here?” His face barely moves as the void expression linked on his face.

“Oh, you know, I was in the neighborhood.”

I flipped the hair off my shoulders and shrugged my shoulders.

“Since I’m here, I wanted to tell you I’m sorry.” My hands twisted the bottom hem of my ~Bob’s Burgers~ sleeping shorts.

His emotionless expression slipped for half a second.

“You’re what?” He hung out of the door closer to me.

Lifting my eyes to meet his starless skies, I take a breath and let it out.

“I’m sorry for talking to you on the phone the way I did. I shouldn’t have done that, you didn’t deserve it. I was in my own thing and you called at the worst time. It got directed at you.

“I am sorry, Damon. Friends don’t do that. I…I may be super pissed at Luci and have some stuff about how you handled it, but that doesn’t mean I should have said the things I did or the way I went about it. I’m sorry.”

His lips parted and he nodded, his hand was heading to his face but he caught it right before it made contact.

He looked lost at what to do, his eyes had softened but he had this ~stuck~ look on his face that couldn’t be cleaned away.

“Now, with that in mind, I’m still pissed. I just know what I said was shitty. I do need my jacket. So hand it over and I’ll let you get back to playing with your toys.”

I shifted uncomfortably. I wasn’t jealous or envious, but I didn’t want to be here around him and this strawberry scent any longer.

It felt wrong.

“I have it.” Lucien Henley’s voice came down from the top of the stairs like rain to spoil a picnic.

I could hear Damon’s butthole seal shut as if he was waiting for his dad to ram a pole up his ass.

He was wound so tight I think his spine might snap from the force he held himself in his place.

“Good morning, Luci.” My eyes stayed locked on Damon’s.

“Good night, Angel. See you at school in a few hours.” I twirled my fingers in a simple wave of goodbye and trotted up the steps to stand toe-to-toe with the biker king.

“My jacket?” I guarded myself.

Dane couldn’t meet my eyes and what I could see of his crestfallen face made me want to reach out and hold him against me.

He looks so pitiful. Damon went back to that void of feelings when I walked off, but Luci looked pleased.

Like he had front row tickets to his favorite band with the way he held himself up so proudly.

“This way, girl.” He clicked his tongue and wagged his head to the side.

I followed him down the hallway, Daxton gone from his position against the wall.

The music was cut down and the whole bar looked at us as we walked back into the main room. All eyes fell to me and crawled over my skin like those bugs in the mummy.

Somewhere deep inside my messed-up brain I thought this wasn’t a good sign.

Just a hunch.

Dead center of the room he stopped, turning back to me with this overly assholeish grin, like he had checkmated my ass and was just fixing to tell me.

I heard a shuffle behind me and saw Darrian blocking Damon into the hallway. Doctor Dickhead’s back was facing me and the look on Damon’s face was something worse than no emotion at all.

Dane and Daxton lost in the crowd.

My hardened stare took the helm, aimed at the asshole in front of me.

“Wow, they call me dramatic.” I fold my arms at my chest and lean into my hip.

Lucien Henley’s grin stretched over his what could be a handsome face, if only he wasn’t such a shitty person.

“You disrespect me, then come crawling in here begging for my son’s forgiveness,” he bellows over the crowd.

“Oh, okay.” I snap my eyes and straighten my spine, my shoulders broadening out.

“First of all, I don’t crawl. Bad knee.”

I tuck my hair behind my ears.

“Secondly, I don’t beg. Thrice”—I hold my pinky, ring and middle finger up, curling my first finger and thumb in a circle—“I apologized to Damon because he deserved an apology.

“If you’re making a big deal out of what I said while I lost my temper so you can get one on me, you’re shit out of luck. I don’t owe you a damn thing. “

King Lucien gave off this dry laugh and the animosity grew.

“Just what I expected from a Madis.” He sneered, the crowd around us yelled out a few words to encourage their king.

Agreeing with him like he was actually right.

I stepped in closer, my chest brushing his.

I was literally toe-to-toe now and held no desire to back down, no will to back off.

“You know, for a grown-ass man, you are one childish son of a bitch.”

The crowd stopped murmuring.

“I haven’t the tiniest iota of why you are so hostile to my family name. I don’t. But I do know I’m sick of you acting like I took a dump on your birthday cake.”

His steel eyes felt like traps, but I wasn’t going to back down.

“This bitch thinks she can say and do whatever she wants,” someone yelled out.

“Because she’s a Madis,” another said from the back.

The crowd roared in reply, all agreeing like they all had some kind of insight into who I am just by my last name.

“I don’t do or say whatever I want. And it has nothing to do with my last name!” I yelled over the crowd, back at them.

King Lucien lets that grin come back.

His hand going into his back pocket.

“If I did or said whatever I wanted, you would be the first to know.”

I looked him in the eyes and blocked the rest out.

“If I said whatever I wanted the second you rode in on your high horse and expected my submission to whatever you said. Whatever you did. I would have gone round for round with you.

“Instead, while I laid ass out, I showed you respect. I kept showing you respect, which you repaid by being the man you are.”

I spoke low, I didn’t need his club to hear me. This was between Luci and I.

“Even now, you need your whole kingdom to boost your alrighty over-inflated ego.”

His grin never dropped, but I knew my words cut. I saw the hardening in his eyes.

“Instead of coming to me, man to goddess, you chose this.” I pointed around the room.

“I gave you respect. Again and again, I showed you that courtesy. When you showed none of it back.

“When you talked about my Uncle, who is a good man. When you bad-mouthed Percy. Who is worth a hundred of you.

“When you talked about the crash and tried to rile me up. When you spoke out about my mother. R-I-P, by the way.

“Still I showed you respect. Not because you earned it—you didn’t. Or because you deserved it. You don’t.”

I looked him in the eyes. My stomach was sinking but I couldn’t get a grip on it.

I needed my jacket.

“Can we just get this over with?”

I shook my head and rubbed my thumb and middle finger across my forehead.

This was too much, him and this back and forth. It was getting old and I was tired of it.

“Your Majesty?” I added, loudly, for the crowd to hear.

I thought maybe that would soften him up to just give me my jacket and let me go.

I wanted my bed.

I wanted my room.

I wanted darkness in the form of blissful sleep and not the sharp broken parts of my mind or the endless rabbit holes I kept jumping feet first into.

“This way.” Luci shook a set of keys, pointing to a back room to the side of the bar.

I followed behind him, watching him act so smugly about his next move.

~Why didn’t he say anything back to the things I said?~

~Why didn’t he try and choke me again?~

~Why did he make such a show out of that back there?~

His key went in and he clicked the lock back into place. His heavy hand on the dark brass door knob, the push of the door scuffed the floor. He stepped in, his torso twisted to turn back to me.

“Come, girl,” he snapped.

The lights off, blackness seeped from around him. The steel gray-green color in his eyes like the only two sad lights in the room.

“I don’t think so. I am not walking into a dark, locked room with you.”

I shook my head and stalled my steps.

He laughed. “I’m married. Besides, I never dip my cock in the same hole my sons have.”

I rolled my eyes.

~He really couldn’t say he wasn’t a rapist?~

Damon’s dick hadn’t entered me at all, but that’s between us.

We are the only ones that know that truth, thanks to Damon’s little show last time.

“Be warned. If you touch me I’ll rip your dick off.”

I watched him cautiously, walking in and feeling this chill sweep over my arms and legs.

It was like being outside and the wind touching me with its chilly tentacles.

The door shut, the light switched on.

I took it all in, the side shed-like room that held outside tools.

Shovels hanging on a wall, garden tools, tree trimmers, rakes, pothole diggers, potted plants, fresh flowers in the bottom half of a shelf.

Black potting soil, a mulcher, and what seemed like a million packs of seeds.

“So is this where I die?” I spoke to myself mostly, but King Lucien heard it.

He chuckled to himself as he moved around the room to the mulcher.

He took a medium cardboard box from under a silver tray at the back of it and kicked it across the cold cement with the tip of his foot.

It slid over and landed perfectly at my feet.

My heart dropped out of my ass and shattered to pieces on the gray floor.

I didn’t look down right away, choosing to look at Lucien Henley instead.

“Why?” I managed to get out before my voice could break.

His lips turned up into a sinister grin, curling across his face in nothing but sheer pride and malice.

Such hatred dripped from his pores that I could smell it eating away at his rotten soul.

I never really believed that Lucien was the devil, I could see some things that might link him, but here and now…

The ~thing~ in front of me had to at least be from the depths of hell.

His eyes fixed on the unblinking tears and the balled fists at my side. The waver in my chin and the tremble in my bottom lip.

My soul felt like it was burning to ashes, my heart ripped from my chest yet again.

“Get. Out.” His lips parted just enough to pronounce the words like he cut them from his mouth with a surgical scalpel.

My eyes closed, the sting of unshed tears like salt in an open wound.

The hot stain of what he had done sliced down my cheeks and dropped from my jaw like not even my own tears wanted to be here with me.

Not for this.

Opening my eyes, I saw the remains of shredded black leather that once was my favorite thing in the world.

My safety blanket.

My dad’s leather jacket.

The tattered pieces not even big enough to be made into a rag.

Bending down, I ran my hand through it.

I couldn’t feel that connection to my father’s stories anymore.

I couldn’t feel my mother rolling her eyes, shaking her head when dad told us about him being a ~bad boy~.

I couldn’t feel Morgan leaning back on the doorframe in our family home, his hands in his blond hair, slicking it back with my blue and yellow wide-tooth comb, acting like he was dad on his motorcycle.

The laughter. The smiles.

The warmth of being back ~home~.

My home.

Not Uncle Jonah’s.

Not some makeshift village I had concocted.

~My house.~

Standing up, I didn’t spare him a second look. Tears had started falling like the first sprinkle in hurricane season.

Right before I grabbed the door, my hand went to the potting claw.

“I wish I was more like you.”

My voice shook, but my hand didn’t.

“I wish I could hurt others with no remorse. I wish I could do whatever I wanted, say whatever I felt. All because I was a Henley.”

I turned back around, that one step with the potting claw in my firm grasp.

Lucien watched me like ~a~ I would go on the attack.

“But lucky for you I’m a Madis. I have a conscience. I know what it’s like to lose a father.”

I looked at the box and back at him.

“I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.”

I took my step back and dropped the potting claw back down. My fingers twisted the lock, the door opened, I walked out.

I pushed the people out of my way. Making my way outside to feel the cold burn of the night’s air hit me.

To work as a reminder of what I’ve lost.

I didn’t make it to the end of biker country before Damon had his bike in my way.

His tall frame blocking my easy escape with the shame of weakness slick on my cheeks.

I stared at him head-on.

His face half lit up from the overhead streetlight casting a pale blue ~tent~ tint to his already dark features.

He reached out for me, but I backed up.

“It’s just a jacket, Savannah.”

He said it, but the tone he used showed he knew it wasn’t.

“I don’t know how someone who’s lost a parent can be so inconsiderate.”

I sucked in a loud breath. My words hit Damon in the face worse than any slap ever could. I saw it in his eyes and the break in his parted lips.

“You don’t get to tell me ~it was only a jacket~. You don’t get to tell me ANYTHING.”

I forced anger into my broken and shaking voice. My jawline and chin dripped with more forsaken tears.

“My dad.” My voice broke and my chest rose into an ugly sob before I could shut it down.

Damon moved to take me in his arms, but I shoved him back and stood away from him.

“It was his jacket. When he was the same age. When he went to the same school.”

We had turned where I was closer to home ~then~ than the bar now.

“He would make my mom so annoyed when he would tell us how he had his leather and his bike, how he—”

I wiped ~face~ my face and shook my head.

“Morgan.” That stubborn sob crashed back over me and before I could fight any harder Damon had me in ~arms~ his arms.

I sobbed on his bare chest and cried harder than I wanted to ever let him see.

A moment too long, but I found my strength and shoved him away.

“He took the last piece of ~my home~ from me.”

I looked at Damon, the emotionless mask gone.

I saw the pain that matched a fraction of my own as he looked me over.

“Goodbye, Damon.”

I slapped the shake of more sobs away and cleaned my face with the crook of my elbow.

Turning away from my Angel and leaving him on the sidewalk.

My path stopped by Damon’s hand latching on to my wrist then by the flash of blue and red lights coming to a screeching stop in front of us.

Jagger’s cop face on full blast.

“Did he hurt you?” He takes my hand away from Damon, looking at him like he was nothing but gunk on the bottom of his shoe.

“No. He didn’t.”

My tears dried up.

“Don’t lie to me, Savannah. You’ve been doing a lot of that lately. Did he hurt you?”

He never looked at me.

His body placed between Damon’s and mine like a shield.

“No.”

“You don’t cry. I’ve known you since you were knee high to a grasshopper. I’ve seen you with bones sticking out and not a dew drop in sight. Don’t fucking lie to me.”

Damon eyeballed him back.

This show of manly dominance was too much for the night.

“He didn’t hurt me! We just broke up! Thank you for making this worse for me than what it already was. Get your Samoan ass back in the damn cop car and escort me!”

I hit the hood and took off in the direction of home.

I make bad decisions all the time.

It’s one of the things I’m best at.

Like lying when the truth was wetting my cheeks for the world to see.