Tru nodded, like she’d known she’d be walking into this. “This world is so different, Jessa. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. But I think you’re grasping so hard for the old ways that you don’t see that these new ways aren’t so different. But it’s easy to run and hide and rebel when you’ve got a place to land.” Tru paused. “The thing is, you do have a place. It’s here, with us. Maybe we can’t change the world, but we can stick together. Do what’s right. Try to have a life.”
“Mathias doesn’t even know if he wants to stay here,” I blurted out, but it was obvious that I hadn’t told her anything she hadn’t already known.
“Everyone has to make their own choices,” Tru said. “We don’t keep people against their will, unless they’re a threat to the club. And I don’t think you are.”
Tru had grown up in the MC. She told me she’d run for years, and she’d come back for one single reason—the man she couldn’t get out of her mind.
She’d given up the outside for love. “And we’re not all that different inside Defiance than out.”
But for the outside world, Defiance was putting on a show. The fact that women actually did things here was a trade secret. And women still didn’t have a vote on major MC issues. When I pointed that out, she was quick to say, “That couldn’t work.”
“For our protection, right?” I asked semi-sarcastically.
“It’s more the guys’ hang-ups than yours. Women around here respect that.”
“Some women.”
Tru was watching me carefully. “Don’t, Jessa.”
“Don’t what?”
“Sit there and judge us. I can’t imagine you had that much of a say in your family, or with Charlie, right?”
I wanted to say it was different, except at that moment I could neither explain nor discern how. “You’ve been good to me. I don’t want to judge. I want to understand.”
“Sometimes, things can’t be explained or understood up here.” She tapped the side of her head. “Sometimes things just need to be felt.” Her hand moved to cover her heart. “I feel Defiance. And Caspar. And that makes everything else, including the despair of the Chaos, fall away.”
“You’re all prepared to go to war for me.”
She gave me a small smile. “You just made the inevitable happen sooner. You can’t make a decision about staying here—or about Mathias—out of guilt.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I drew a line for you
Jessa
I’d been singing when Mathias finally came to see me again, the next afternoon. I’d refused Tru and Amiee’s offer to go to the diner—or anywhere else—because I didn’t want to bear the weight of Defiance’s disapproval yet again. I didn’t want to hear anyone tell me that I should’ve spilled my secrets earlier. Now, I’d let everything out, and my leverage was gone.
I was strangely okay with that. Maybe I always would’ve been here.
I finished the song before I took the headphones off. Mathias had stood, watching me, his eyes in a faraway place. Bishop was with him, but the man was doing his usual fading into the background while he translated, which meant Mathias was about to have a serious conversation with me. I focused only on Mathias and asked him, “Is everything okay?”
He shrugged as he sat down across from me on the bed, mirroring my cross-legged seated position. Then he reached for my hands and I let him. And then he turned my wrists over to expose the scars I’d never hidden and he studied them, the way he had when he’d been preparing to tattoo me.
“Pre-Chaos, I’d have been taken right to the plastic surgeon,” I said dryly. “Since there are no more newspapers, there’s no worry they’ll be spotted.”
He tilted his head and mouthed something and I didn’t need to understand all of it. He wanted to know about my suicide attempt. In the past, I would’ve done anything to avoid going back to that dark place, but now, I wanted it off my chest. The past was an anchor and talking about it was the key to freeing myself.
“I tried to kill myself more than once, but this one, the one that left these scars, that was the most serious,” I admitted bluntly, relieved not to have to couch the words. “I was trapped. The doctors didn’t understand. They kept saying, ‘You feel trapped,’ but that’s something so different. I was trapped, really and truly. There was no way out of my world. And I wanted out so badly. I’d grown up in that fishbowl. There was no escape. I couldn’t do anything, because there was always someone willing to take a picture of it and sell it. Even my own classmates. The ones who pretended to be my friends.”
I gulped a deep breath. “The Chaos took all that away, but it took away any chance of freedom I had. And Charlie pretended he understood, after I cut my wrists. He was so nice to me.”
He’s a politician—they’re never nice, Jessa. You knew that. Lied to yourself because it was easier.
“Fuck you, Mathias,” I said, mainly because he was so damned right. “He seemed different. He was concerned when I told him what our fathers were doing and now suddenly, I find out he’s no different than the rest of them? Well that’s bullshit—he told me he’d go with me and we’d find someone to listen to us, someone to make it better.”
Mathias shook his head, looked at me like I was the most naive person he knew. You know this world’s different. There’s no more hiding. No more couching. You do what needs to be done.
“You agree with him?”
I agree with doing what it takes to survive. Just like you’re doing.
“I want to do more than survive. But that might be all there is in this world now.”
Bullshit. You don’t believe that. I know you don’t.
“I don’t know what to believe. I’ve tried, Mathias. I tried to do what they wanted but it didn’t work.”
So what do you want? What do you want to be?
I stared into his obsidian eyes—endless, they seemed. “Whoever I’m supposed to be. Whoever I want to be.”
There’s a big difference between living and living free. You finally realize that.
“Yes.”
Mathias smiled and I always wanted to be the one who made him smile. It didn’t happen often but when it did, it was real. And it made me alive inside, for maybe the first time ever. It’s not me, Jessa. It’s the freedom.
“That’s not true.”
You’ll see that it is.
He was using my own freedom to push me away and maybe I should listen. Take my freedom, throw off every ball and chain I’ve ever had.
But the man in front of me was my wings. And I finally had something—someone—worth fighting for. Mathias only saw Jessa the good girl. He had no idea what he was up against.
Mathias was right—I’d never lived for me. But that didn’t mean I didn’t want him for him.
As odd as it sounded, post-Chaos, I had opportunities I wouldn’t have before. The world was open to me. But my parents, and Charlie’s and the Secret Service, they were all specters in the background. They would come for me at some point.
And if they didn’t? Would that make me feel better or worse?
I refused to think about them again. They’d been in the way of my decisions for the last time. But I had to be able to do things for myself. And not because Mathias wouldn’t take care of me, but because he would. I knew that. But I needed to know I was with him because I wanted to be, not because I was scared.
I’d always been on the outside. Here, I could be free. And that’s exactly what Mathias was worried about, that I loved the freedom, not him.