Guardian Angels ✔

34 - Stay With Me

"Are there other things you lied about?" Juice asked after a long silence. His voice sounded flat, almost distant. It felt like his emotions were about to bury him again and he desperately tried to block them. 

"I twisted around a lot of things, Juice. You really want a list?"

"Yeah. I do." He didn't look at her, he had bent back his head and stared at the ceiling, as if the white planes could ease his mind. 

"Fine. I'm twenty-eight, not twenty. My father didn't die in a car crash, he was at the World Trace Center when the building was hit. Everything else I told you about my past is true; my mother couldn't deal with the loss of her husband, became a drunk and hanged herself. Kip and I came to live with my uncle, where we started to work at his garage. I never finished school, when I was twenty-one I signed up for the army." She paused. He had turned his head back to her, although his face was blank. But it wouldn't take long before that would change, she knew. "Mila pretends to be my girl to keep the Croweaters away. Now and then we've kissed in the clubhouse, but that was only to keep up appearances. In fact, I'm single for over six years." She bit the ring in her lip, gathering the courage to unravel the last lie. Her shoulders tensed. "And the last thing I wasn't honest about, was the fact that I was stabbed by the Russians."

Juice narrowed his eyes. "What do you mean?"

"Come on, Juice, it isn't that hard to fill in the rest?"

He stared at her for a few seconds.

Rolling her eyes, she answered: "I couldn't fight in the ring, since I had to take off my shirt and everyone would have seen the chest binder I was wearing. So I told all of you that I was stabbed."

"You faked it?" His eyes almost popped out of their sockets.

"No, I stabbed myself."

Juice jumped up from the couch. "You did what?  Are you out of your fucking mind?!"

"Kinda, according to my last psych evaluation." She lifted the corner of her mouth. 

"You think this is funny?" he blew up at her. "Man, you're fucking crazy, huh? Stabbing yourself!" He shook his head furiously. "You could have killed yourself, damn it, your brother was killed that way!"

"I knew what I was doing," she answered coldly. "There was no other way."

"Of course there was! You could have..." With a grim face he trailed off.

"Well?" she insisted with raised eyebrows. "What would have been your genius solution?"

"I don't know," he muttered. "Not now. I can barely think anyway at the moment. But we could have came up with something. Together." His voice trembled as he added the last word.

"Together?" she repeated, shaking her head. "We just smoked one joint. We had one good talk. Or friendship might have grown fast, but not that fast."

"And it clearly wasn't as strong as I thought," Juice grunted, turning his head away.

Alex swallowed a sigh. She didn't know what to answer. 

"What do you want now?" she asked after a while. "You want me to stay? Leave? You wanna fuck off that chaos in your head? I can pick up a Croweater from the clubhouse?"

Juice stared at her. "A Croweater? I thought... that you had feelings for me."

She shrugged. "I do, but I'm not a whore who's going to cheer you up that way. Can't have sex anytime soon anyway, it still hurts like hell. I'm not going to pretend I like the thought that you are screwing another girl, but I'll get over it. If you need a fuck, you should have one. I've seen you bang someone right in front of me before and I survived that too."