Wild Ones (The Lane) Read Online Free Page B

that I would, we both knew that was a lie. I would forget as soon as I left. I always did. It felt like it took forever, but finally he graced me with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. They were still clouded with concern, but seeing the attempt warmed my insides regardless. I didn’t necessarily like worrying Jax, but I always seemed to and I’d come to a place where I just accepted that I probably always would.
    I hadn’t changed out of my dress, and when the chilly October air hit me, I was already dreaming of kicking off my heels once I got in the car. I stopped and savored that air for a minute, taking a deep breath and letting the smell of autumn, a mixture of burning leaves, stale beer and a faint whisper from winter fill my lungs.
    The stairs leading up to the main street were dark, but I’d walked them so many times in the four years I’d worked at Duke’s that I didn’t need a light to navigate them. I knew them as well as I knew the layout of our apartment, and maybe it was crazy but I felt like they knew me too. They knew the girl beyond Duke’s. The girl who came out there to escape just for a minute. The one who pulled her hair down and hiked her dress up a little farther before sitting down on them, letting their cold concrete bite into the backs of her thighs as she lit up a cigarette. The one who’d been pressed up against the bricks of the walls next to the dented steel door, a bouncer or bar back thrusting against her. The stairs had seen me, the real me, and they didn’t judge. They were impassive, just there to observe, no one to report back to. They’d seen me and they knew me, but in the end, I was insignificant to them, just another pair of panties and heels in the scheme of life.
    Though it was late, one o’clock by that point, the street was still packed, people lined up waiting to get into the bars despite closing time being just an hour away. It was always like that on Thursday, though I’d never been able to figure out what it was exactly that drew college kids from their dorm rooms on that particular night. I hoped to find out personally one day, however. Not that I was exactly interested in a higher education. I wasn’t. I didn’t care about majors or minors or being a part of the corporate world. I just wanted the satisfaction of saying I did it, that I had a college degree to go along with the G.E.D. I got a year or so after running in the middle of my senior year of high school.
    Instead of heading down the bar-lined street, aptly nicknamed Drunk’s Lane, I turned and made my way down the small alley between our building and the strip club next door. It opened up to the employee parking lot where I could see Jax’s Civic parked in the very back on an angle, away from all the other cars. The unhealthy obsession he had with that vehicle would have been amusing if it hadn’t been so annoying. There were days I seriously wondered if he wasn’t one step away from swearing off women and just fucking his car for the rest of his life. His fixation on it was that serious and I swore I’d seen him eyeing his tailpipe a half a second too long on more than one occasion.
    I didn’t park back there with the others. I never did, and not because I didn’t want to catch Jax in the act of finally making love to his car. I just preferred the public parking lot near the old bus stop two blocks away. The buses didn’t run anymore, but the crackheads who hung out under the shelter there didn’t seem to realize it. Or maybe they did. Maybe they just liked to pretend that one was coming to whisk them away from their demons.
    They were the reason I parked there, the crackheads, something that drove Jax absolutely batshit. He thought they were dangerous, and maybe they were, because desperate people usually were. I understood desperation though and so I understood them. I think they understood me as well. It was hard to tell between their shaking and rambling.
    Preach was standing a