by Hazel Parker
In any case, when she had revealed as much as she had to me at her office, it shocked me to see just how much we had in common. We both had a real fear about revealing our fullest selves to other people; mine was just to maintain an image of toughness and brutality as the sergeant-in-arms, while hers was self-motivating, a way to get to where she was career-wise. We’d especially had difficulty doing that with ourselves, let alone with other people.
Sharing that moment of vulnerability… I’d been scared. I was nervous that doing so would make me some kind of wimp. Certainly, in the Marines, if I had expressed such concern, I would’ve been laughed at, dismissed, and told to buck the fuck up.
But this wasn’t the Marines. This was the world I lived in now. This was Megan.
We shared more in common than just that too. We were both smarter than people gave us credit for—well, maybe I was smarter than people gave me credit for. But then, Megan had grown up with people constantly telling her she wasn’t good enough, so maybe it was more apt.
We both had tragedies in our past. Yes, maybe some people would have said that losing your friends in combat was a worse fate than a breakup. But I wasn’t in the business of comparing pain. Pain was pain, and all that Megan could look at was the pain she was experiencing.
In any case, though, these commonalities were bringing what could only be described as one of the most unlikely pairings together.
And I had to say, the more time that passed, the more I wasn’t just liking her—the more I was thinking about making a move on her and just seeing what might happen.
And then her arms slid away. I wasn’t necessarily disappointed by it—well, OK, maybe a little—but it was a reminder that she had come here not for sex or romance but to help me figure out which of her clients had informed the DMs to target her office. We had to figure that out before they got more aggressive, especially if they knew that she was riding with me.
I had made sure that no one was following us, and I was quite sure that I had eluded any stalkers. Unfortunately, a place like Sunset Boulevard had plenty of vantage points that would make it all but impossible for anyone to pick up that they were being watched; we just had to make sure that we kept things in line as needed.
I hurried in front of Megan once I got off the bike, holding the door for her. Inside, Trace was sipping on a drink with one of our newest prospects. The look on his face when he saw Megan was almost priceless.
“You’re back working with us?” he said.
“For now,” she said, but it was said with a bit of sarcasm, as if she knew she’d be around a little bit longer. “Burke here was nice enough to come and check out my office. Your rivals broke into my building and spray-painted your logo all over.”
“Fucking bastards,” Trace said. “Wait, BK? You told her your real name?”
I just shrugged with a smile. Trace recognized pretty quickly that I hadn’t been weak in giving it; it was a voluntary revelation that was meant to express emotional openness.
Still, it was a massive shock. I wasn’t even sure if all of the officers knew my full name. Trace hadn’t known the first couple of years he’d been around the club; I think it slipped to him accidentally once, but I’d told him once he became president.
“I have a list,” I said, pulling it out of my pocket. “Think her client may be working with the DMs.”
“Shit…” Trace said. “Do you need my help looking it over?”
“Ye—”
“No,” Megan said, interrupting me before I had the chance to finish what I was saying. “We’re good. Burke is like my bodyguard right now. More than that may attract unwanted attention.”
Trace stared at me, wondering what fucking magic I had worked to get her into this spot. As usual, I only shrugged—I wasn’t good enough with the spoken word to actually provide the full story or properly convey why I was suddenly in this spot.
“Alright, BK, you know to text me if you need anything,” he said. “Prospect, let’s call it a night.”
Prospect looked at Trace in confusion, looked at me, got a grin on his face, and then got snapped back to attention by Trace.
“Now, Prospect.”
The prospect didn’t make the mistake a second time, wiping down the bar in seemingly record time. As soon as he did, he hurried back around and out of the bar.
Admittedly, I was pleasantly surprised that Megan had asked for us to have the place to ourselves. Even after what had transpired at her office and on the bike ride, I had taken it for granted that she would want Trace there. Without Trace, she never would have even bothered to get our attention in the first place.
But now that it was done… I sure as hell wasn’t going to complain.
“Drink?” I offered.
To my surprise, she took it.
“Just one, though, no double,” she said.
“Sure?”
She smirked.
“Gin and tonic, please.”
I nodded as I quickly poured her a gin and tonic, taking care to make sure that I didn’t give her too much gin. I didn’t want to have her assign blame to me for a surprise morning headache—not with how well everything was going.
She went over to the couch and sat down, leaving space open for me to sit by her. When I handed her her drink, her fingers briefly brushed over mine, and it felt more like a gentle caress of fingers than an actual transition of a glass. And then, when I sat next to her, she was definitely close enough that our thighs were touching.
Megan had not yet done anything that would have been so overt as to be construed as flirtatious, but I was no dummy. Even if I had been largely avoiding this moment.
“OK, so,” Megan said as she gave me the list. “I just realized this list doesn’t yet include Sea Sailor Whiskey. I guess I just haven’t updated it yet, but it shouldn’t be a big deal. Their CEO, Jose, is very amicable—not someone I would envision being associated with the Mercs.”
I nodded in understanding as I scanned through the list of names. One by one, we went through, starting from the bottom and working our way to the top.
I had never owned a business and so couldn’t say if MWM Solutions had an impressive client list or if it was just OK, but there were definitely some names I recognized—Warner Brothers Studio, Whole Foods, and In-n-Out, to name just a few. There were many others that I didn’t recognize, but the names were slowly becoming secondary for a very different reason.
Megan was becoming a lot more active in touching me. It wasn’t sexual yet, but it was getting harder and harder to call it anything other than heavy flirting. Her hand would go to my forearm, my shoulder, even my thigh.
It was starting to get extraordinarily intense. So intense, in fact, that it was beginning to feel like… like…
I cleared my throat and stood up for a second.
“Getting me a drink,” I said, using the space to catch myself.
It’s been over a decade, I thought to myself. What happened then… it’s not your fault. There was nothing you could have done. And yet you continue to blame yourself for it.
“Burke?” she said.
Wouldn’t you if someone died because you couldn’t protect them? Wouldn’t you feel like shit if the person you loved was killed and you were far away? Wouldn’t you hate it?
“Burke, are you OK?”
“No…”
I’m back in Iraq. I’m in a military compound, in a bunker. I’m sitting on a bed now, the old bed—well, if you could call it a goddamn bed—of my tour in Iraq.
I’m listening to some heavy metal music, Disturbed, I think, while I’m looking at a photo of my serious girlfriend at the time, Jess. I haven’t told her yet—I haven’t told anyone yet—but I’m going to propose to her when I get back. She is my high school sweetheart, my everything. I can’t imagine life without her, and so I’m going to make sure that I never do have to experience such a thing.
“Office Kyle.”
I think I hear someone mouthing something to me,
but I ignore it. I’m enjoying the music, enjoying the photo of my Jess, engrossed in the present. I do not want anything to disturb it.
And then the commanding officer, Lt. Bane, comes in and stands by my side. He is a normally very intense man, but on this particular day, he looks sorrowful. I take my headphones off and know immediately something is wrong by the way he is looking at me.
“Lt. Bane?”
“Son, come outside with me.”
I gulp. What happened? We didn’t have any missions today. Unless one of my comrades tripped on the base and drove a rock through their eye, nothing bad could have happened.
Feeling my stomach turn, I get off the bed, lower the photo onto the bed, and walk outside. Lt. Bane, noticeably, has cleared the area of anyone else.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“Burke,” he says, and now I feel really nervous. The lieutenant only uses first names when he’s speaking to people as friends, not in a military sense. “We just got word that your girlfriend, Jess Lloyd, was murdered back home. They’ve got him, but…”
I reel back when I hear that. That couldn’t possibly be real. Murdered? Jess didn’t have any enemies. Why… why would that…
“Burke…”
No. No. This is impossible! Jess lived in a safe community. She was far away from the chaos of it all! She was safe!
What the fuck! What the actual fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck!
“I’m sorry, Burke, but…”
I break down and sob in front of the lieutenant. If it looks weak, I don’t give a fuck. That was my baby, my girl, my love… she and I were going to have a family… she was going to be the one to pick me up when I landed in the USA…
“Burke,” Lt. Bane said. “I’m sorry.”
He hugs me, but it does little good. I do not feel like I’m in Iraq anymore. I feel like I have moved back to San Diego, where we lived. I feel like I’m staring at the face of her murderer, whom I don’t even know the name of. But I don’t need to. Instead, I imagine beating the shit out of him. I imagine killing him.
But it doesn’t bring her back. Jess is gone. She’s gone forever, and there is no getting her back no matter what.
Lt. Bane deserves a medal of some kind because he never leaves my side. Though he does eventually break the hug, he makes sure to guide me back to my bed where he sits me down. He sits by my side, an arm around my shoulder, trying to comfort me. But there is no comforting me through this.
“WHY?” I shout to the heavens.
If there is such a thing. I have a hard time believing in it myself if this could happen.
I start taking out my frustration, punching holes in the wall. Other officers run in, and all of my commanding officers try and get a hold of me. Even then, I was a load to take down. It takes about five officers in total to drag me to the ground.
“Burke,” Lt. Bane says when I have finally succumbed to the weight. “Rest. You need it.”
“Burke!”
I snapped back to the present. I was sitting on the couch. I looked down at Megan holding my hand. I was surprised and a little embarrassed to notice that I had tears streaming down my face. Jess… for so long, I just thought around you. I thought of the buildup to the moment and the aftermath, but I never thought of the actual tears I shed, the moment I found out you were killed, until now.
“Burke…”
“Sorry,” I said, but I knew that wasn’t enough. I was going to have to explain.
“What is happening?” she asked. “Is it because of what you went through during the war?”
“Yes,” I said.
I didn’t add anything else, but for once, it wasn’t because I wasn’t trying to hide from her. I was just trying to summon the courage and the strength to discuss that moment with her. It was dawning on me how, despite all the physical strength I had, despite the numerous gunfights I’d been in both on duty and as a Savage Saint, despite laying to rest many of my brothers and the founder of the club, I didn’t even have the strength to face my demons and my past.
Some man I was. Some man you can be if you confess to it. Let it out.
“Megan…” I began.
She squeezed my hand harder. I found myself looking at her, and I had never seen a woman look at me so intently since Jess had died. I felt myself melting under her gaze in the best way possible—whatever I was melting into was melting to mold with her. We were merging into one emotionally and spiritually. There could be no secrets because it wasn’t possible to keep any secrets.
“I’m terrified to tell you this,” I said. “Scared.”
“We’re all scared about the dark moments in our past,” she said. “But they’ve already happened, and the best way to overcome our fear of them is to confront them.”
I bit my lip as I sniffled. It was a really good thing none of the other club members were there. If any of them accidentally stumbled in, I think I would have bellowed for them to get the hell out so loudly they probably would have pissed their pants.
“OK,” I said, taking a deep breath.
I was still unsure, even now, of confessing to the full story.
“Burke, I want to know,” she said. “Not as a marketer. Not as a businesswoman or an analyst or whatever. But just as a human who cares for you and likes you.”
Say no more, I thought.
“You told me you had a boyfriend, Blake, in college who broke your heart,” I said. “I… I had a girlfriend from high school through my tour in Iraq. Jess. Jess was beautiful and sweet, and when I left for my tour, I was sure that I was going to come back and propose to her.”
I could already see Megan’s eyes watering. I think she knew where this was going. There wasn’t going to be a happy ending, even if she lacked the information for how the story went.
“While I was out, when I left, I was actually a very happy and playful guy. Seems crazy, yes, but it is true. I would play jokes; I would laugh frequently. I was very different than I am now. One day, I was on my bed, listening to music, and I found out from my commanding officer that she’d been murdered.”
Megan gasped. I bit my lip. I’d already relived that moment once tonight—I didn’t have a particularly strong desire to relive it twice.
“I went crazy. I bawled my eyes out. My CO and the others gave me a couple of days off. They said that I would be OK, but it killed me that I couldn’t go to the funeral. I had to finish my tour. That was… devastating.”
If it had remained at that, it would’ve been a terrible personal tragedy but nothing more.
Instead…
“Then, a few days later, I got to lead some of my men into battle. I should have confessed that I was in no shape to lead anyone, let alone some soldiers into combat, but I was too goddamn headstrong. I wanted to prove myself, even if it meant taking some insanely stupid risks. And so, when we got to the battleground, I wanted to lead the charge in, consequences be damned. I knew it was something of a bad decision, but I was bloodthirsty. I wanted to kill, and kill, and kill some more.”
I sighed. I wasn’t sure which was more painful: the fact that Jess had died or that I had taken that death and turned it into many more, but there wasn’t anything about it that felt good. There wasn’t anything about it that even felt neutral.
“Well, wouldn’t you know it, I led my men right into a goddamn fucking trap,” I said, shaking my head. “Half my men were slaughtered. It was one of the worst losses my unit suffered—and it was because of my emotions and my arrogance.”
So painful. Even now, it doesn’t get any better.
“It was so stupid that I got put up to a military tribunal to see if I should be dishonorably discharged,” I said. “But… by the grace of God or just some sympathetic men, they didn’t discharge me. They said I couldn’t receive any promotions for five years, but they largely acquitted me of anything bad. Even so, though, I couldn’t bring myself to face my men. I had let my emotions get the best of me. And so, within just a couple of months, I left the Marines.�
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I could feel my body wanting to sag into the couch and vanish. That was such a heavy story to tell, and while it was perhaps the first time I had told all of the parts of the story together in over a decade… whoever said people felt relief when they got something like that off their chest were just full of it. I just felt burdened to have carried such a story, and now Megan knew…
“I remain so closed off because of that,” I said. “Emotions kill. Feelings kill.”
“No,” Megan said, gently massaging my left hand. “Emotions uncontrolled do that. But emotions that are observed and that you’re aware of? They’re a part of being human, Burke. And I say this because I’m guilty of it myself. The fact that I never went on any dates since college should say it all. We both are people who have shut out the outside world and put up an image to avoid facing our problems. You adopted the stoic appearance of a soldier; I adopted the appearance of a driven businesswoman. We both became the most extreme versions of ourselves.”
I nodded. It all made sense. But trying to unravel it…
“So how do we get better?”
I locked eyes with Megan right after asking that, and I thought she had an answer. I thought she had something that she wanted to say.
But at that moment, our eyes were so closely locked together that it was like we were incapable of looking anywhere but at each other. And our two pained souls, though severely wounded by what had happened in the past, recognized a kin across from them. The space between our eyes gradually diminished as our souls finally confessed what it was we really wanted.
The reward of being connected without the pain of being hurt.
But that wasn’t possible. The greatest reward came with the greatest risk.
And with Megan, I was ready to take that risk.
I closed my eyes.
And I kissed her.
Chapter 12: Megan
Perhaps our kiss had been something of a long time coming.
Perhaps this moment had been all but inevitable, so long as one of us didn’t say or do something egregiously bad.
But in the moment just before the kiss, in the moment just before I closed my eyes and let him press his lips against me, I realized how nothing about this had felt inevitable.