Tex (Hell's Ankhor #5) - Aiden Bates Page 0,24

mark, and then scrubbed at it with his thumbnail. Jazz is the only person I’d let handle my hat like that. I knew I could get a little weird about it, but it was special to me, because it’d been with me for nearly a decade now.

“This old thing’s getting beat up,” Jazz said, turning it over in his hands. “Wasn’t it black when I gave it to you?”

The Stetson, once an inky black, had over time faded in the sun to a deep gray. I’d never had a reason to replace it—it’d only gotten better with age, in my opinion, wearing to a perfect fit, and the brim was still sturdy. And I definitely couldn’t give it up after Jazz had gotten locked up. Every morning, when I put it on before I walked out of my bedroom, I remembered the night Jazz had given it to me.

It had been the night of my twenty-first birthday. Jazz was younger than me—just by a few months, though when we were younger I never let him forget it—but somehow he’d managed to wrangle a bottle of rotgut whiskey. We’d only been in Elkin Lake a few months, and the Hell’s Ankhor guys wouldn’t let us drink on the Ballast premises. There was still going to be a party at the clubhouse, but before it began, Jazz had pulled me into his bedroom and presented me with the bottle.

“You made it,” he’d said, amber eyes glittering mischievously. “Twenty-one. A real man.”

“Fuck off,” I’d socked him on the shoulder lightly. “You wouldn’t know a real man if he slapped you on the ass.”

“That’s what you think,” Jazz had said with a dangerous grin on his face. “All right, take your birthday shot, and then I’ll give you your real present.”

Of course Jazz had picked up the worst bottle of whiskey he could find just to watch my face contort into a grimace of misery when I took the shot. It’d made him cackle like a madman. Then, as I was coughing and blinking away tears from the ethanol burn, Jazz had rifled through his closet, cursing to himself, before he emerged triumphantly with the hat in hand.

“Sorry it’s not wrapped,” he’s said. “Did you know a huge gift bag costs, like, nine dollars?”

“A Stetson?” I’d turned the hat over in my hands, a little stunned. “Jazz. You don’t have this kind of money.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Jazz had said, waving me off, and I’d remembered suddenly the extra shifts he’d been picking up at Ankhor Works, the late nights checking IDs at the front door of Ballast. “Maybe you don’t miss the ranch, but I know you miss Texas.”

He’d been right. So right I hadn’t been sure how to say it—I’d just been surprised, and happy, and shocked yet again by the depth with which Jazz knew me. So I’d just pulled the hat on and ran my fingers along the brim. “How’s it look?”

Jazz had nodded seriously, watching me, his teeth set thoughtfully into his lower lip. That detail stood out in my memory. He’d done that sometimes—still did—he sometimes worked his lower lip so thoroughly between his teeth it came out pink and swollen.

“Looks good, cowboy,” he’d said after a beat. “Let’s go celebrate.”

And now, Jazz was leaning against the gray sedan I was about to work on, drawing his lower lip between his teeth in that same unreadable way. “That is the one I gave you, right?”

I blinked back into reality. “Yeah, yeah,” I said quickly. “The same one. There’s nothing wrong with it—why would I get a new one?”

Jazz rolled his eyes. “Because it’s been almost a decade?”

“That’s a stretch,” I grumbled, even though it wasn’t. “Come on, let’s get this done so Mav can take a break.”

I worked on the sedan while Jazz worked on the SUV. It was so easy to fall back into these routines. Despite everything that’d changed over the years, the easy back and forth of working on engines was the same, and we’d spent so much time in Ankhor Works doing exactly this that it was muscle memory.

As we worked, I couldn’t help but wonder… what other habits would come back once Jazz settled back into life on the outside?

I wanted him to succeed, and mostly I thought he would—but I couldn’t help but worry that it was too much, too fast. That he’d fall back into his old patterns of behavior, letting other people take the lead instead of making decisions for