Old Habit Part 1

“Not that one. I can promise you it’s shit.”

There was no parking in front of the club, but Jeb had asked Cara to drive around the block so he could get a look at it. Sorcha leaned her head against the glass, eying the lines in front of the building, already considering how this was a bad idea. Next to her in the driver’s seat, Cara scowled at Jeb in the rearview mirror. “Have you been here? How the hell would you know?”

“Trust me,” Jeb said. His voice was deadpan and familiar, and even without seeing his face she could imagine the look on it. “I’d know.”

Cara scoffed. “Whatever,” she said. “This is the only club around that doesn’t ask for an arm and a leg when they take your drink order.”

Sorcha plucked at her dress where it stopped two inches above her knees, her other hand curled into a fist against her cheek, elbow propped on the window. Jeb sat back in the seat. She could feel something radiating off of him—indignation? No, it was too sharp for that. Apprehension.

Earlier in the day, Sorcha had been doing inventory in the back room when they were closing and overheard Cara asking the question. “We’re going out on the town tonight,” she’d told Jeb. “You interested?”

“What,” he’d said. “Clubbing? You’re going clubbing? Aren’t you a little too country for that?”

“Fuck you,” Cara replied. “You coming or not?”

Sorcha looked toward the door in the silence that followed. It was true she and Cara had planned to go out that evening (Sorcha had agreed because Cara tended to make bad decisions when left unattended at clubs and bars), but she hadn’t entered Jeb into the equation at all. She tried to picture him there, on the other side of a bar in a club that wasn’t Urban Grind. Her stomach hallowed out and she grimaced. Despite the sour memories she held toward the place (not Jeb’s fault—well. Only a little his fault), having him anywhere else doing anything other than serving drinks and making out with her in the backroom on a five minute break seemed…wrong.

“Sure,” Jeb said finally. “Why not?”

Now, as Cara circled back around the block to snag the parking spot they’d seen, Sorcha was again having her doubts. Partially about agreeing to come out, partially about Jeb being here—this was truly a terrible idea—and partially about the dress she was wearing. White leather. A holdover from her Felicity Harbour days. The only one she’d kept, because one night when she’d worn it to work Jeb had told her it made her look like a diamond. When she’d come home to Milton, she’d crammed the dress in the back of the closet. Every few week’s she took it out, put it on, looked at herself in the mirror, and told herself that she was strong enough to survive this.

Sometimes she had her doubts.

As they walked around the block Sorcha kept expecting to feel some sort of tension release from Jeb. He walked behind her and Cara, hands in his pockets, head half ducked low. She thought being back in a city environment would relax him. When they’d started talking again after his arrival in Milton, he’d admitted to her that country life, while nice in some aspects, freaked him out.

“Why?” Sorcha had asked.

“It’s too quiet,” he’d said. “Too dark. Too many stars.”

“Too many stars?” Sorcha repeated. Both her eyebrows went up and she had to fight an urge to laugh. “How is too many stars a bad thing?”

His hands paused while he cleaned the coffee machine. “It’s like—with stars overhead and it being dark on the ground, it makes me feel like I’m wandering around in a giant bowl and sooner or later I’m going to slam into the sides and get a concussion.”

So coming to this city should have helped. But instead it was making him more anxious. She could feel it radiating off of him in sick, nauseating waves.

When they joined the line at the door there were only three or four people in front of them. Cara was rummaging through her purse for her cash. Behind her, Sorcha heard Jeb fumbling with his wallet. She glanced back at him, saw his hands shaking slightly as he pulled out bills. She bit her lip. “Cara.”

Cara looked back, her bills held out to the bouncer. “Yeah?”

Sorcha looked back at Jeb again. His wallet was gone and the bills were folded in his hand, which was no longer shaking. He met her gaze for a moment. She thought she’d find a challenge in his eyes, but it was nothing but blank.

“Nothing,” Sorcha said.

#

The only clubs Sorcha had been to were Zulu’s and Urban Grind. Of the two of them, Zulu’s served to a higher class clientele, but Urban Grind’s vibe was more welcoming. This club Cara had chosen had neither high classed clientele or a welcoming vibe. It was loud—too loud—and the floor was sticky and unpleasant. The crowd around the bar was three people deep.

“I’m getting a drink,” Cara shouted at them above the music. Already Sorcha had seen people waving at her from the crowd—her friends already here. She left Sorcha and Jeb standing by the corridor leading to the entrance.

Sorcha folded her arms and stepped closer to Jeb to avoid being knocked into by a group of very large men. Jeb was eying the crowd with narrowed, judgmental eyes, his gaze flicking from the bar, silently judging its contents, to the crowd, silently judging their dancing, the lack of floorspace, the lack of dancers like Sarah or any of the other girls who’d been on the payroll. “Verdict?” Sorcha asked.

“God,” Jeb said. His face was still blank, save for his judging eyes. “You don’t really have to ask, do you?”

“No,” Sorcha admitted. There was sweat beading on the back of her neck. She swiped at it. “Do you want a drink?”

“Nah,” Jeb said. “I don’t think I could get one that someone hasn’t spit in first.” The statement was funny but his facial expression invited anything but humor. This had been, Sorcha knew, a terrible idea. “I’ll buy you one though,” he said.

“So it’s okay for me to drink something someone else has spit in.”

The upward tilt at the corner of his mouth told her he hadn’t realized what he’d said even as he’d said it. “No,” he said. He eyed Cara coming away from the bar with her drink. “But I doubt Cara will notice the difference.”

“Jeeze, you two are still standing here?” Cara said. She had to raise her voice—the bass gave a sudden and brutal thump, jarring Sorcha’s teeth in her head. “Come on, come dance.”

“Jeb?” Sorcha asked, even as Cara started tugging her away.

“I’m fine,” he said. “I’ll grab a table.”

“Who shoved a stick up his ass?” Cara asked, pulling Sorcha into the moving crowd. “For someone who agreed to come he looks like he got strong armed into it.”

Sorcha ran through answers in her head. She’d told Cara enough about Jeb to know that he’d been occasionally involved in “things”. She’d been purposefully vague in her wording, saying nothing to indicate he’d been a gangster. It was a word she still had trouble associating with him. She’d never seen him do anything she could have classified as illegal. He’d always kept her away from that as much as he could. The times he hadn’t she could count on one hand, but they’d been doozies. That girl cornering them on the monorail platform and then attempting to break into Sorcha’s apartment. Another time where he’d put on a suit that made him look older, dangerous, and more like his brother than she thought he’d care to hear about. And then the last time, when it hadn’t involved illegal activities at all. Just a fist fight in the back room with his best friend.

The memory, dark and stale, reared ugly in her head. “I’m going home,” she’d told him. “And I’m gonna ask Jeb to come with me for a while, meet my family, and—“ the bottle hitting the wall by her head fractured the memory into pieces before she could get to the worst of it. She’d never had anyone look at her with such loathing before. She still didn’t know how she hadn’t known, even then, exactly why, even before Kate had sent her the picture later.

Cara was still waiting for her answer. “Places like this,” Sorcha said, “have bad memories for him,” she said. For her, too, now that she thought of it.

Cara rolled his eyes. “I swear to God,” she said, and downed the rest of her drink. She set it down on a nearby, unoccupied table. “He’s so fucking temperamental. If he was going to be a stick in the mud he shouldn’t have come.”

She didn’t have an answer for this. If she’d been forced to give one, she would have said he’d only come for her sake.

The people around them were too drunk to make dancing an enjoyable activity. She received more elbows to the back than she’d ever gotten at Urban Grind. More hands on her ass, too. The sixth time it happened, she whirled around and shoved her finger in the guy’s face. “Listen,” she snapped. “You touch me again and I’ll break your goddamned hand, okay?”

He backed off at the look on her face. When Sorcha turned back around Cara was laughing at her. “God damn,” she said. “I know you’re no stranger to telling people to fuck off, but I swear to God living in that place changed you. I love it.”

Irritable exhaustion pulled at Sorcha’s shoulders. “Yep,” she said. She didn’t fail to notice how much she sounded like Jeb. “I’m gonna go sit down.”

Cara’s expression shifted. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah,” Sorcha said. “Have fun, be safe. I might be back.” She got away from the crowd, shoving past elbows and arms. She looked around for Jeb, and for a moment she got confused when she couldn’t find his white-bleached head in the crowd. But then she remembered that this was now, and how different things were.

She found him at the back of the room, elbows planted on the table, one hand half covering his face. He was watching the room, but now his expression was worse than blank. He hadn’t seen her yet, and Sorcha knew when he did his expression would change. She wanted to see this honesty on his face, the bleak yearning. Being here hurt him—in this place so close and yet, not close at all, to everything he’d had. He moved his hand away from his mouth, and both hands went up to clasp around the back of his neck, and he let his head drop towards the table. She saw him inhale deeply, and let it out in a long, silent whoosh.

She moved toward him finally, and put her hand on his shoulder. His muscles tensed under her fingers. “Jeb?” she said quietly.

He didn’t respond immediately. His head was still ducked. The bass ricocheted through her feet and up her spine. Finally he said, almost too quietly to hear, “I wanna go home.”

Home, Sorcha knew, was not the apartment above Blackstone Coffee. Home for Jeb was a two day drive away down to the coast, in a club that wasn’t his anymore, and with two people he would probably never see again.

Her feelings were always mixed. She never knew how it made her feel. The voice in her head told her that she would forever be inadequate, that he was only here because she was a fair runner up prize, that the person he really wanted was dead in the ground. Her back teeth clenched. He’d told her when otherwise, when they’d started talking again. That she’d never been second, that the way he cared about her was different than the way he’d cared about him but that it didn’t make it any less. Her brain forever grappled with the concept, and on some rare days it made sense and could accept it, and on others she opened the closet, looked at the white dress and swore to burn it to char because she couldn’t do this.

He was hurting, and she wanted to make it stop because deep down, under her anger burning blackly, she did still care. She cared about him so deeply that she’d turned down date after date that Cara had tried to set her up on, and the one date she had agreed to go on she’d still canceled, and showed up at his door in the middle of the night and ranted her anger at him until it had all burned away to charcoal, only to rear up again when she’d least wanted it. Like now. Because she cared.

So let yourself care, Sorcha told herself. She took one of his hands off the back of his neck and squeezed it. “Come on,” she said. “Go wait outside. I’ll be right there.”

She went back to find Cara in the crowd. She’d found her friends and looked as though she were having enough of a good time to make up for both Jeb and Sorcha’s lack of enthusiasm. “Cara,” Sorcha yelled over the music. She tapped her cousin’s shoulder.

Cara spun around in a tipsy circle. “Sorcha!” She yelled, throwing one arm in the air. “You came back. Dance with us!”

“No,” Sorcha yelled back. “Sorry, Jeb and I are leaving. We’re going home. Don’t worry,” she said, before Cara could say anything. “We’ll take a cab.”

“Suit yourself,” Cara yelled back, and turned back to her friends.

When Sorcha got outside she hadn’t realized how overheated she’d gotten until the night air hit her skin. She inhaled greedily and swept her hair off her neck. Looking around, she saw Jeb leaning against the side of the building, waiting for her. Even though it was far from the truth, this felt like the first time they’d been alone together in ages. Sorcha swallowed.

Jeb took one of his hands out of his pockets and looked at it. “Funny,” he said. “I haven’t wanted a cigarette in ages.”

“Old habits,” Sorcha said. She took her cell phone out of her purse and called a cab. 

#

Author's note: This was written for #showusyourshorts as an epilogue of sorts and a character study for a novel that's currently on submission. There's nothing too scandalous in part 1 except for a bunch of swearing (because it's me), but there will be Situations in part two. Just as an fyi. Both parts will be rated for the whole.)