Tex (Hell's Ankhor #5) - Aiden Bates Page 0,19

Tex and I were standing—it was like he had his own gravitational orbit, always pulling me closer. “Still getting used to crowds.”

“It’s a change, all right,” Blade said seriously. “A little different from San Quentin.”

His gaze was dark and intent. The anxiety came roaring back.

“Blade,” Tex said.

Blade glanced at him. Tex sighed, took his hat off, scrubbed his hand over his hair, and put his hat back on.

“I’ve got some work to do tomorrow afternoon,” Blade said, more to me than to Tex. “I’ll be in my office at the clubhouse most of the day. When you have a second, just drop in.”

“Right,” I said. “Will do.”

“Just a conversation,” Blade said. He patted me on the shoulder again, but I didn’t find it comforting. “Don’t look so upset. We’re still celebrating, right? You’re back.”

“Right,” I said again.

“Well—I’ll leave you to it.” Blade cast his eyes between me and Tex with an odd little furrow between his brow. “Come back inside pretty soon, though, yeah? It’s your party, after all.”

Blade slipped back into the noisy bar. I sighed and leaned against the porch railing, swirling the dregs of my beer in the bottle.

Tex laid his hand in the center of my back, right between my shoulder blades. The touch immediately soothed the nerves rioting in my chest.

“Don’t get all worked up over that,” he said. “It’ll be fine. Blade’s been a good president. If he says it’s just a conversation, that’s really all it’s gonna be.”

I didn’t doubt Blade’s competency as president. But Tex saying it made me realize: I’d have to walk into that office for the first time and see Blade at the desk instead of Ankh. And I didn’t know how I was supposed to handle that. It didn’t feel real, not yet. None of it did. I halfway felt like it was a bad dream, and I’d wake up back in my cell at San Quentin with another few years tacked onto my sentence.

“Jazz?” Tex prompted.

“I know.” I let my head drop down, dangling, and focused on the warm pressure of Tex’s hand on my back. “I didn’t think I’d be able to jump right into the club like nothing happened—I told you that. I’ve gotta pay my dues somehow.”

Tex hummed thoughtfully. “You finally sound like a grown-ass man.”

I laughed, surprised. When I looked up, Tex was smiling. My nerves eased, replaced by something warm, familiar, and comforting. “Only took me twenty-eight years.”

“Hey, that’s not so bad,” Tex said with a shrug. He nodded toward the door. “Let’s go back in. I’m sure there are more people that want to harass you.”

I nodded. Regardless of what the meeting tomorrow entailed, I was really fuckin’ glad to be home.

Jazz/Tex

Jazz

I rubbed at the crick in my neck. It’d been surreal to be back in my room at the clubhouse last night—nothing had changed at all in the three years I’d been gone, except the sheets on the bed. Some of the tension I hadn’t realized I was carrying had unwound at the sight. They really hadn’t repurposed my room in any way. It’d been waiting for my return.

Tex had said as much, when he’d dramatically flung open the door for me. “I put away some of your things, but no one’s really been in here except a handful of drunks who needed to crash,” he said. “I changed the sheets after those guys, don’t worry.”

The room was a little stuffy from disuse, and some of my clothes had been packed away in laundry bags, but other than that, it really was like no time had passed at all. And it made my heart clench to know that Tex has been the one tending to it—packing up my clothes, changing the sheets. Waiting for me.

It hadn’t taken long for me to settle into bed, but it took much longer for me to fall asleep. I was so used to the hard, thin mattresses of San Quentin that last night I’d felt like I was going to sink through the mattress like I was sliding into quicksand. But good God, the privacy. There were no cellmates snoring or trying to surreptitiously jerk off, no guards running nightly rounds, no fire alarms or late-night fighting.

And it was even better than the hotel room, because here, there were the familiar sounds of Tex snuffling and shifting in his sleep through the thin wall.

That’s what had lulled me to sleep in the end. The knowledge that Tex was just a few feet away. And