Page 33 of Brash for It (Hellions Ride On #11)

Fifteen

Kristen

I keep distance, but not much not because I want it but because I’m not stupid.

Kellum’s not weaving. He’s a direct line focused on his target.

He goes the length of Brian’s driveway in three seconds and lands the bike roughly on the kickstand crooked in the drive like he doesn’t intend to be here long.

I park and climb out but I’m not fast enough.

The front door opens before he can knock. Brian is a classic narcissist, he heard the engine a block away and couldn’t resist the attention. He steps onto the porch with arms spread like he’s greeting guests. He doesn’t see me yet, his eyes are focused on Kellum.

“Kellum,” he mutters, pleased with himself. “To what do I?—”

Kellum hits him.

There’s no wind-up. No speech. Just a fist, as clean as a professional boxer, snapping Brian’s head sideways. The sound is a crack that makes my stomach flip. Brian stumbles backwards into the doorjamb, shock wiping his smirk clean for the first time in his life as blood trickles out of his mouth.

“I told you,” Kellum states, voice low, the kind of low that makes dogs sit down. “You disrespect her again, you feel it.”

He hits him again.

Brian tries to square up, but he’s never squared anything in his life that didn’t fit neatly into a portfolio. He swings, sloppy, cagey, and Kellum steps inside it like he’s been doing this since he learned to walk. Another punch. Another.

It’s not a fight. It’s a lesson. It lasts too long and not long enough, my breath hitching out in useless little sounds while my hands clench and unclench.

My brain tries to sort the two things at once.

The part that wants to cheer until my throat turns raw because someone finally, finally made the outside of Brian match the inside.

And the part that wants to scream because the man I love is about to break something we can’t afford to replace—his own freedom.

The thought takes root somewhere deep inside me. The feelings I have for Kellum that have creeped up in me slowly, delicately, and I want to protect them.

I want to protect him.

“Kellum!”

He doesn’t hear me over the rage inside him.

The punch thrown, his fist makes contact in Brian’s stomach this time, knuckles sinking into a button up suit shirt he didn’t bother to change out of.

Brian wheezes, folds, and Kellum lets him hit the porch before he grabs the front of his shirt and hauls him up like a rag doll.

“I told you,” he repeats, quiet enough to make the hair on my arms stand up. “You got one warning. Didn’t fuckin’ listen.

Brian spits something that was probably going to be a word and ends up a sound and I think a tooth flies out onto the ground.

He goes for Kellum’s face with an open hand because he doesn’t know how to do otherwise.

It skids off cheekbone and fury. Kellum’s fist answers and Brian’s nose goes—there’s a flash of red; I look away before I catalog it.

Kellum’s breathing hard now, chest heaving, the restraint I’ve seen him put on himself every day snapping like a belt you stretched too far.

In front of me the man I’ve known is gone and in it’s place is a dragon full of fire and breathing smoke like his tattoo.

“Kellum.” I’m at the bottom of the steps now, one foot on the plank, hands up like I’m approaching a wounded animal. “Kellum, stop. Baby, look at me.”

The word lands. His head jerks like a compass needle finding north. He keeps his fist wrapped in Brian’s shirt for one more breath. He turns his face toward me.

He sees me.

I see him see me.

And then the most terrifying thing happens, his eyes change. Not the color. The temperature. Fury drains just enough for fear to flood in.

Not fear of Brian.

Fear of me. Fear of what I’m seeing and what it will do to the picture I’ve been holding of him.

He lets go of Brian like the man burned him. Brian slides down the doorjamb and sits, ugly and human on his expensive porch, sucking air like he invented it. Kellum takes a step back, then another, still looking at me like he walked in on himself and didn’t like what he found.

“Kristen,” he whispers, like my name is the only thing he believes in.

I climb one more step and stop there. My heart is pounding so hard the world has a rhythm.

My hands are steady, which surprises me.

I look at Brian long enough to see that he’s breathing, that he needs medical attention but will probably be okay.

I also know that he will weaponize this in whatever rooms he thinks will listen.

Especially for the reconstructive surgery it’s going to take to put his nose back together.

But I don’t care about any of that. I stop looking at him because he’s not my problem.

Kellum is.

I take a breath that smells like copper and lawn chemicals. “You told him once,” I state, voice low. “You kept your promise. Lesson has been taught. Now we leave.”

Behind me, a thunderous sound rolls in. I sense them without looking, the Hellions.

Kellum’s shoulders rise and fall like ocean.

He nods once, slow, like he’s testing whether his neck still works.

He looks down at his hands and winces at something that isn’t pain.

Then he looks back at me and I watch him try to measure the distance between the man who installed a porch camera to keep me safe and the man who just did this.

“I scared you,” he whispers..

Honesty is how he functions.

Brash, brutal, and real.

I won’t give him less than what he gives me. “Yes,” I mutter, equally quiet, closing the space between us. “I’m still here. I’m gonna stay right here.”

Something in his face fractures and reorganizes—pain, relief, shame, all of it passing through like a hurricane filled with wind, thunder, lightning, rain, and tornadoes.

He nods again, like that hurts more than his knuckles, and steps away from Brian without offering a last word.

That might be the meanest thing he’s ever done—denying the man any more attention.

We walk to the SUV together. By then his brothers have come to a stop and climbed off their bikes.

Behind us, Brian finds his voice enough to spit, “Animal.”

Neither of us turns.

It’s Crunch who approaches us first as Red takes off landing his own licks in on Brian for calling his brother an animal.

“Paper trail,” I direct to Kellum, and it’s partly to remind myself who I am, partly to remind Kellum who we are. “We go home. We write everything down. We save the voicemails. We file a report first thing. We let Tripp and the brothers handle him now in case there’s blowback in the dumb places.”

Kellum swallows. “Yeah.”

“You got this, Kristen?” Crunch asks letting me guide the situation.

“Yes, I have him.” I look to Kellum. “I always have him.”

“Baby brother, take your ass home, clean up. We’ll handle this shit head. No blow back for you or Kristen. But clean up before mom gets wind of this shit. You know you’re the favorite.” Crunch shoves him playfully.

This makes me smile in the chaos.

I pause with my hand on the SUV door, then lean in and use the hem of my shirt to wipe Kellum’s cheekbone where Brian’s open palm left a bloody smear on him. “He doesn’t get to mark you or me, baby,” I whisper.

The cold air kisses the damp spot and he flinches just a little. His eyes close. He breathes out a sound that isn’t a laugh and isn’t pain. When he opens them again, he looks like my man—wrecked, wired, sorry, present, and intense.

A Hellion top to toe.

“Ride with me?” he requests, hoarse. “I don’t want to be alone.”

“Yes,” I nod, no pause. I shut the SUV door, toss the keys to Tommy Boy, and climb on behind him like my legs know what to do better than my brain does.

My hands find his waist. He leans back into them for a second like a man leaning into a dock to feel if it will hold.

Neither of us have a helmet but right now if this is how we die, we die together and I can say I would be dying happier than I’ve been in my entire life.

We leave Brian to his porch and the lesson he’s about to get from the Hellions. They will give him the story to his injuries. The road out of that neighborhood is too smooth, too manicured. When we hit the real street, the bumps feel like life.

Reality is rough, pretend is smooth. I’ll take the real any day over the presentation of something good.

I don’t talk. He doesn’t either. We ride without music, without the helmet tap I usually give at the bridge, without anything but the knowledge that we are outrunning the worst version of ourselves, not the law.

The air scrapes the anger off my skin like sandpaper—rough, necessary.

My cheek finds his the divot between his shoulder blades.

. He reaches back once, halfway through a light, and touches my knee, brief, proof I’m still with him.

At home, the camera blinks red. I wonder if it saw me run out of the house. I wonder if later I’ll watch the play back and recognize the moment it became clear as day. He rides out for me, I’m riding for him. We’re in this together.

The kitchen still smells like lemon and the house still holds the shape of us. We stand in the doorway like two people who are trying to find solid footing together again.

“I’m sorry,” he begins first, voice scraping. “I’m I know better. I just?—”

“You warned him,” I interrupt, because it’s true and because truth is what we are.

“I did.” He looks down at his hands again like they betrayed him. “I saw your face and that’s not okay warning or not.”

“I’m not scared of you,” I reassure, and I mean it enough that it surprises me.

“What you saw isn’t my fear of you. There is nothing in you that will ever hurt me Kellum.

I know that. I’m scared of losing you. To prison.

To a judge who doesn’t care why. To a version of you that thinks we beat back a problem with fists without consideration for the consequences. ”

He nods. “Consequences aren’t really something I think about unless I’m dishing them out.”

“I know.” I move close, because distance helps no one right now.

I take his hands because someone should.

They’re warm, rough, trembling in the way rage leaves a body—late, sheepish.

“Tomorrow morning, I’m gonna go for the protective order.

If Brian doesn’t get the message from you and the Hellions, then he gets it the legal way.

His contact with me is done. His connection to me is gone. We cover all our bases.”

“Early,” he instructs.

I glance at the sink because a dish towel exists and towels are for wiping. He catches the look and huffs a breath that’s almost a laugh. “I’m fine,” he explains. “It’s not bad. Looks worse than it is.”

“That’s the opposite caption for Brian’s whole life, looks good and it’s ugly underneath,” I mutter, and he almost smiles until he doesn’t, because the night isn’t funny and we both know it.

“Kristen,” he says after a long minute where the fridge hums and a car goes by and we pretend to be people who could climb back into easy, “you can tell me you hated that. You can tell me you hated me. You can tell me anything.”

I think of the porch. My name in his mouth. The way his eyes changed temperature. The way he dropped Brian the second he realized I was present.

“I hated some of it,” I share honestly. “And the part I didn’t hate scares me more.”

He nods, acceptance and misery in one motion. “I know my world isn’t what you’re used to.”

“I’m still here. And I’m not going anywhere.”

“I know,” it sounds like a prayer he didn’t think he knew how to say.

We eat cereal because we don’t have the energy for more We sit on the floor because chairs feel political.

We don’t turn on music because noise feels like a lie.

After two bowls, the adrenaline finishes wringing itself out of our bodies and leaves us heavy.

He leans his head back against the cabinet and closes his eyes.

I lean mine on his shoulder and leave it there.

When we finally crawl to bed, he doesn’t reach for me like a fix. He reaches like a man asking permission to rest with the person he almost lost to his worst habit. I give it because I want to be close to him. I want him to feel me, know that I’m not going anywhere.

In the dark, I listen to the AC breathe and his chest rise and fall.

The phone on the nightstand glows with two new voicemails I don’t open.

Tomorrow we’ll take them to a building with fluorescent lights and a clerk who’s seen everything.

We’ll be people who fill out forms. We’ll make our story a line in a system that works as often as it fails and we’ll call it protection anyway because it’s the tool we have that falls in line with the law.

Loving an outlaw biker isn’t easy but I’ll do my part to keep him out of jail as best I can. Even if it means telling a stranger the harassment my ex is giving me no matter how much it embarrasses me.

Before sleep finds me, I reach up and touch the place on my neck where his mouth left proof that I am loved in a language my skin understands. My fingers drift to his cheekbone where Brian’s hand tried and failed to leave any kind of mark that matters. He shifts, murmurs, and goes still again.

He punched my past directly in the face.

I’m not going to romanticize that even though I want to.

I’m also not going to lie about the part of me that felt seen when he did it.

I’m not going to deny the way he was out of control scared me.

I will hold both truths in the same palm and call it us.

Protect each other. Don’t destroy ourselves in the process.

Learn the difference between fury and defense, between justice and a story we don’t want to tell about ourselves later.

When morning comes, it will smell like coffee and paper and ink.

I will put on a top that doesn’t show my hickey because we don’t need to make the sheriff’s office a side show.

He will wear a clean tee and tuck his temper under.

We will walk in together. We will write it down. We will do the next thing.

Tonight, I sleep with my ear over his heartbeat and listen to the sounds of having something hold me that puts me first even when it hurts.

I turn my face into his shoulder and finally, finally, the best day finds its way back, not as a na?ve glow, but as a stubborn ember that refuses to go out.