Wild Wind: A Chaos Novella (Chaos #6.6)(11)

“Yup,” Jag answered.

Hound stared right at him.

Jag took another pull from his beer.

Hound spoke again.

“Right then, if you’re good, why am I here when I could be at home in a house where my kid is asleep, and my wife is pretty much always in the mood to fall on my dick?”

Jag flinched and reminded him, “Dude, you’re talking about my mom.”

“Yeah,” Hound agreed.

Even if it was totally gross, Jag couldn’t stop his chuckle.

“Jagger,” Hound said in a warning tone.

“Okay, there’s this girl,” Jag started.

Hound didn’t move, didn’t say a word.

He also didn’t take his gaze from Jagger’s.

He was there. He was interested. He was listening.

He was all Jagger’s in that moment.

Something about that made Jag feel great.

At the same time it totally fucked him up.

“I’ve known her for ten years,” he continued. “And the only things I know about her are, she has a dad and a brother, good taste in music, she dresses great, runs a store, her mom is dead, and today was the day I learned her first name.”

“Sounds to me like you’re takin’ things slow.”

Jag chuckled again before he handed that shit right back.

“You’d know all about slow, brother.”

Hound nodded his head once. “Yup, you don’t push a woman when important shit is at stake. Like her heart. Her emotions. Her loyalties. Her sons. And your brothers.”

Jag was no longer chuckling.

“Why’re you not pushin’ this woman?” Hound went on.

“Timing’s never been right,” Jag lied.

“Cut the shit.” Hound knew he was lying.

Jag sighed.

Then he gave it to him.

“We’re completely connected and we’re totally not.”

Hound’s brows drifted up. “Why’s that?”

Jag looked down at his bottle.

Then he looked at Hound.

“The first time I saw her, she was at her mother’s funeral, and I was sitting on Dad’s grave.”

Hound said nothing, just held Jag’s eyes.

“That’s how we’re connected, Hound,” Jagger pointed out.

“That’s an important connection, Jag. Now explain to me how you never knew her name until today.”

“We’d connect, it was always brief, and then we’d miss connections that were meant not to be brief.”

“This is the girl across the way.”

Jag straightened from the bar.

Christ.

Hound always had his finger on the pulse of his boys.

So it shouldn’t surprise Jag that, even over a decade since that note was passed, he remembered.

It still surprised him.

“Hound—” Jag began.

“And you dicked around for all this time, not learnin’ her name?”

“I don’t have what she has,” Jagger told him.

“What’s that?”

“Any time in with my dead dad.”

Hound got quiet.

“She needs me, Hound. She’s always needed me. And I’m an imposter,” Jagger told him.

That made Hound straighten from his hunch over the bar.

“You are the fuck not,” he returned.

“Today, she told me she’s got troubles. All this way down the line from her mom passing, she’s got trouble in her family. And she’s pissed at me because I wasn’t there when she needed me, and her family fell apart. I got nothing for her. I didn’t keep our family together. Mom did. You did. Dutch did. I…”

He trailed off because he didn’t know where he was going with that.

“You don’t have to have the answers, Jag. You just gotta be there to be a sounding board as she finds them. Or stand strong for her if she doesn’t.”

Jag took another drag from his beer.

But he didn’t say anything.

“Now, the thing she’s gonna help you with is figuring out why your ass was on Black’s grave and you don’t think you lost what she lost.”

Okay.

No.

They were not going there.

Jag didn’t share that.

He rolled his head on his neck and he felt three things pop.

And Hound heard them.

“You stretchin’?”

This was a thing.

Jag could get wound up.

He worked out, with the brothers in their weight room, at the boxing gym Hound got them working in years ago, and he started doing that young.

Or Hound got both him and Dutch into doing that young.

It was smart and not just as a way to teach a couple of kids how to stay fit.

It worked out other shit too.

But Jag could get tense, and when he got tense, he got tight.

Sometimes it would manifest in some not insignificant pain in his neck and shoulders, also his upper back.

So he could go at a bag, a sparring partner, jump rope or hit the streets and run.

But Hound always made sure he was all over doing a good stretch after.

“It’s all connected, bud,” Hound would say. “You can’t just focus on your neck and shoulders, your hammies, big shit like that. You gotta work the tension outta your hips and abs, triceps, lats, delts, calves. You gotta get loose or anything could pop off.”