7:00 AM
"Waking up, half past five
Blood on pillow and one bruised eye
Drunk too much, you know what I'm like
But you should've seen the other guy"
The music of her alarm was loud and Jaide was awake but really all the green eyed brunette wanted was to lay in bed for another 30 minutes... It had been a late night again. She was coming up on a year sober and she kept hearing that siren call in her head. Not to mention that every time she closed her eyes... Two bodies moved against hers, three souls so entwined that she was fairly sure they were just an extension of the same person.
Every day it haunted her... The things that had come out of her mouth, drug fueled word vomit towards one of the few people in her life that genuinely loved her. The fact that she had intentionally taken pills and passed out and left her toddler by himself because she just... Couldn't deal with his crying anymore. She was missing Jax and Scarlet had been too busy for her. Her head hurt and he was fussing and if she just took an oxy or two maybe the headache would go. Maybe the loneliness would go away.
7:08 AM
Just one more snooze, but this time she grabbed a piece of gum and sat up, detangling her hair with her fingers as she chewed.
One… The waves of chocolate locks were a pain in the ass some times but she didn't dare cut them. Jax had always preferred long hair on his bitches and the last time she had cut it had been right after he went to jail.
Jaide found herself with a thumbnail tucked between her teeth and her wad of gum launched between her molars. She wasn't a nail biter but she often stuck her long nails in between her front teeth and fiddled. Oral fixation, she believed was the technical term for it. She had spent the last year hearing all of these words thrown around over and over that she was starting to actually understand them. The psychology of an addict was a fascinating puzzle.
Her coping mechanisms had been shoving stuff in her mouth that she could chew on or play with and getting as fit as possible. It was easy to give it up if every time you got that jones in your bones you dropped down and did fifty crunches or push ups. The once skinny girl had buffed out the tiniest bit over the last couple of years.
7:30 AM
The way to recovery was paved in routine, at least that's what the motto of the group home she had ended up in. These women were all women who had ruined their lives and were trying to be better people for it. Carrie Wu, a pretty little Asian-American thing who had come in around the same time Jaide did was getting ready to leave. During her time there she had really cleaned up her act and gotten herself a scholarship with a wonderfully written essay about the struggles of women who ended up on drugs as their only options to cope. Jaide had a book full of essays and inspiring things that she had heard throughout her journey so far.
Pasted on the very front page was a picture that reminded her why she was fighting so hard this time. It wasn't her first rehab stint, but this was the one that was going to stick this time. A teenage Jax, she couldn't remember when it had been taken, sitting on the couch playing video games, with Jaide under one arm with a controller in her hand and a joint in her mouth and a crimson haired beauty under his other arm also with a controller in her hand, and a visible bottle of some unidentifiable bottle of booze between her legs. Those were the good times, back before things had gotten so fucked up and they had gone on without her.
Not that she could ever blame Jax for pushing her out. She just wished that maybe he could have given her a shot. Had Scarlet told him every single detail? Every insult hurled, every secret aired out as loudly as possible in front of Kate, in earshot of the baby boy the three of them had raised together. Jaide knew that things had come out of her mouth that night that Kate hadn’t been privy too and that Scarlet had wanted no one to know about. Things that would have gotten people killed if word had gotten out.
Jaide grunted as she hit seventy-five on her push ups and called it quits. She didn't want to overwork herself... today was cleaning day at her dad's. Elias Verga was... well he was a man that was trying. And Jaide appreciated that despite their past. When the Jackson family had issued her sentence, the old man had stepped up and helped her pay for rehab. He had
8:00 AM
Nothing beat a hot shower and a quick fap session before getting on with her day. Dreams that would have made any girl well were the exact reason she had been up nearly three hours before her alarm had even gone off. As she got out of the communal shower area and dried off she popped another piece of gum.
Two.
She looked at her watch as she threw on a black tank top that was covered in bleach spots with
jeans and covered up a
zip up hoodie over it. As she adjusted her hood s
10:00 AM
"I think I miss that unconditional trust, the thing we built our marriage on-" Jaide rolled her eyes at the drama on today's daily family drama re-run as she vacuumed her dad's living room. It didn't pay much, but it gave her enough to keep her on her feet, cleaning for her dad and a few older members on the Rez who couldn't get around as easily. Even though she was on the outs with the Regs, Kate had taught her a lot of important lessons about community and she tried her best to live by that example every day. It gave her something to do too. She hadn't done well when finishing school, and had literally grown up directly into the Regs. She had been running the streets with Jax pretty much their whole lives.
What came between her and Scarlet had been so effortless. Yeah, Jaide had taught her how to survive the new world that was a far cry from her safe little Catholic haven, but Scarlet had taught her a bigger lesson about really living after dealing with some really fucked up shit. Really she used Scarlet as a source of inspiration: The things that Scarlet's family and community had done to her had been nothing short of cult-like and shocking. They had been sitting around one night drinking... Jax was out late again, and the two women were loitering around in his bed drinking and smoking from his stash (sure, they'd replace it later when they had the energy to get out of bed and text or call anyone. Two gorgeous women laying around in nothing but panties and cut off tanks and he was off doing god-knows-what. That was the night that Scarlet finally opened up and told Jaide everything... every aching, creepy detail of the very reason she had left her room and decided to roll her dice as a street rat. She thanked Jaide over and over again for helping her get through this, and apologized for fucking Jax behind her back... Which frankly Jaide would have been surprised if Jax could have resisted fucking the ginger... And then she apologized further by shoving her face between Jaide's legs and proceeding to give her the type of orgasm that only Jax had managed to get out of her in the past, the Earth-shattering body-shaking kind.
"What do they teach you girls in Catholic school?" she fondly remembered asking breathlessly in between waves of pleasure.
"That dicks are the devil, sex is a sin. That if you're really quiet the nun in the stall next door will never suspect a thing," Scarlet's matter-of-fact way of saying it had the same effect as any smart ass thing that came out of her man's mouth: Jaide laughed harder than she had ever laughed, an almost evil sort-of hysterical giggle. The fact that they had corrupted her so thoroughly already was phenomenal.
A shiver crept down her back and she grabbed a piece of gum out of her purse, shoving it in her mouth and chewing out of habit. Her therapist had told her that she would never heal without overcoming her past, but she had no intention of letting go of the hope that some day she might get her family back. She was almost a year clean, and she was really working up the courage and things to say to try and at least prove she should be allowed in JJ's life.
11:15 AM
The phone was ringing and she was outside enjoying a fresh air break after cleaning a particularly disgusting oven. Whatever the old man had put in there had burnt and caked. Sometimes she swore he was making work just for the hell of it. Normally she wouldn't have bother answering, but her dad had asked her to at least check if the phone rang: he was waiting on a phone call about a couch he was trying to sell and he at least wanted her to take down a message and pass one on.
So Jaide found herself jogging inside all the way back to the kitchen. Sure, her dad had a cell, but that was for emergencies and business only. Of course she was an exception; it seemed to be part of his way of showing that she could count on him if he made himself available to her at all times. This old ass phone was probably older than she was, but it still had a functioning caller ID and an answering machine that worked 50% of the time.
She knew that number anywhere... Jax hadn't changed numbers in a long while, and she had etched those numbers into her brain until it became synonymous with his very identity. Her entire body froze and she stared at the ringing machine for almost a full 30 seconds paralyzed... Why was Jax calling her dad? Should she pick it up? What if it was an emergency?
Finally the brunette took the deepest breath she could manage and grabbed the phone, steadying a voice that otherwise would have been deeply affected by emotion, she answered: "Hey, Jax."
Those were the very first words she had ever said to them, the day they had been introduced to one another. To her, those were two powerful words that could shift her world and bring it down around her depending on his response. "My... dad's not here... C-can I take a message?" she tried to play it cool, sound like having him on the other end of the line wasn't stirring up the biggest conflict in her of her entire life.
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