Promising Young Women | Sons of Anarchy Fanfiction | Jax Teller x OC

Chapter Three: What Is and What Should Never Be

Two Weeks Later

Jax kept his eyes trained on the long road ahead. He'd let Nero drive, mainly because he'd only managed to get about four hours of sleep last night, and he didn't particularly feel like being roadkill on the side of the road today. Sleep had been elusive for weeks now - ever since that day Unser showed up on T-M's lot and told them Dani Walker had been found dead on the floor of her apartment.

All Juice had needed was about ten minutes to find one of the answers they were looking for. Security camera footage from the night before was clear as day, despite the fact that it had been at about two in the morning. Tig, walking more than a little unsteadily, with his arm around Dani, who looked so tiny and innocent compared to the crazed, leather-covered biker beside her, both of them getting into a white T-M truck and driving out of the parking lot, with Tig behind the wheel.

The fact that they hadn't gotten into a fiery car wreck had to be a miracle.

But the moment Jax had seen that security footage was the moment his heart started its long descent into the pit of his stomach, and it had never resurfaced. At this point, he figured he'd never see it again.

What they still hadn't worked out, though, was what in the fuck had happened in between that lost hour in the timeline. If Tig and Dani had left the clubhouse at around two, it was likely she'd been killed closer to three, and not later in that two-hour window between three and five that the medical examiner estimated. So, if she'd been killed around three, what had happened between two and three o'clock that morning?

Dani had lived on the north side of town in one of those fancy new apartment complexes, so they would've had about a 15-minute drive. But that still didn't answer the question, and that still left at least 45 minutes unaccounted for.

Some of the club members hypothesized that Tig and Dani might've hooked up again in the truck, as a sort of "thank you" for driving her home and just because that was the sort of thing they tended to do when they were together. Tig, the blacked-out son of a bitch he'd been that night, was no help - he had no idea what he'd done and hadn't done, and all he remembered of that night was just flickers and flashes.

In the end, the club did what they had to do, the only way they knew how.

And since then, sleep had been just as fleeting and non-existent as the answers Jax desperately needed.

"So," Nero called out in that rough, street-heavy accent of his. "Wendy told me she's a little worried about you, primo."

Jax turned his head with a sly smirk. "Oh, she did? You two been talkin' about me behind my back... whispering into each other's ears and shit?"

And if they were talking about him behind his back, that was fine because that meant they were talking.

His step-dad rolled his eyes right up to the ceiling of his vintage Impala. "Don't get it twisted, Jax. She's worried about you - like, legitimately concerned, and she wanted to make sure I knew."

"Oh, so you can sit me down and knock some sense into me?"

"Nah," Nero just batted a hand his way and kept his eyes right on the road. "I think she just wanted to keep me in the loop. But here's the thing, primo, you gotta sleep. You gotta eat. You gotta take care of yourself before you can take care of anybody else, you feel me?"

Jax shifted uncomfortably in the passenger seat as this deja vu settled in the air around them. That didn't sound all that different from what Jax had said to him just a few months ago, when Nero was knee-deep in a bottle and wallowing in his grief and his shock.