The notion, genuinely, hadn’t come to me. I mean, why wouldn’t they want to be with me? We spent all our time together, were pretty much glued at the hip.
The agony from his words was like a knife to the throat, and trust me, I’d know that. Aaron had pressed a knife to my throat and had cut me there, pricked me just enough to make me comply, but the terror that he’d kill me? I remembered that, and that was how I felt now.
A tremor worked through me as I stared at him, unable to comprehend those questions.
He was right.
Categorically correct.
Just because I wanted something, didn’t mean he had to give it to me. Ink knew what I wanted, and maybe because he was older, had been through some stuff, knew what I’d gone through, maybe he was just willing to deal—
Maybe none of them wanted this way of life.
Not everyone was like my dads. I knew that some of the brothers were totally against the way four men as powerful as they only had one woman. A woman they were faithful and loyal to as well.
Some days, I thought that pissed them off even more.
The MC world could be a cruel and harsh one, especially where love was concerned.
I got to my feet and staggered away from them, unable to look them in the eye as my whole world came crashing down.
In my ignorance, hell, in my arrogance, I’d never really even given them a say in the matter. Even when I’d thought it would never happen, that was me being negative. In my heart of hearts, I’d always thought I’d turn them to the notion, but what if I couldn’t?
What if we were destined just to be friends?
What if I had to see other women take them as their old men? Have their babies? What if I had to watch their children, children who weren’t born of me, grow?
My mind was a whirl of thoughts, and I genuinely, genuinely thought I was going insane.
I knew neither of them were virgins. Knew that, accepted it for what it was. I’d even have thought it odd if they were because sex was on tap at the clubhouse. I accepted that they’d had sex, but I pretended it hadn’t happened. Mostly because I couldn’t blame them or be angry over something when I was only their friend.
But it had never driven me crazy before, ever, because I knew it was with sweetbutts. They meant nothing to the men. Nothing. And that was why it had all been okay. Because there was no connection, it was only fucking.
If I had to see them fall for another woman?
A gasp escaped me and I toppled over, collapsing in on myself as my entire safety net came crashing down around me.
These were my guardians, my saviors. My sanity.
I needed them. Didn’t they know that?
But again, that was me. Me, me, me.
Fuck, I was so selfish.
So fucking selfish, that I—
“Hey, Ama! Stop it.” Saint.
His arms came around me, hauling me upright, pressing me into his chest. He curved his arms around me and pressed me into him until my whole front felt his touch. When Keys came up behind me, his chin coming to rest on my shoulder, a shaken sob escaped me. His hands curled around my belly, just under my breasts, and he held me close, so close that they both surrounded me until I was the peanut butter and jelly in a Keys and Saint sandwich.
I shuddered in their arms and whispered, “I’m so sorry. I just… I’m so selfish.”
Keys grunted. “You are. But so are we.”
That had me shaking my head. “No. That’s not fair. How are you selfish? You’re always with me. Always caring for me, watching out for me… God, I must be such a drag.”
Saint hissed at that, and his hand came up to cup my chin. He forced my head back and looked me straight in the eye. “Ama, shut up. This self-pity shit doesn’t suit you.”
My nostrils flared in outrage. “Saint! How can you even say that?”
“I say it because it’s true.” His jaw clenched. “Yeah, you’re selfish. Keys is selfish. I’m selfish. And sure as fuck, Ink will be too. Every fucker on this planet is selfish. It’s why we all waste water and use plastic bags even though we know some poor turtle somewhere is going to be eating it for supper. It’s why we give to charity instead of actually doing something to help. It’s—” He hesitated, sucking down a breath. “It’s because we’re human, babes. To be fucking human is to be selfish, and you know what? That’s okay.
“I might be called Saint, but I ain’t a saint. You know that as well as I do. I’m only called it because, with you, I have an infinite well of patience.” I shook my head at him, but he ignored me and continued, “Yeah, I do. For most of the shit you pull, but self-pity? No, I’m not gonna stand for it, baby doll.” He cupped my cheek and tilted my head to the side. “What you want isn’t ideal, but… if it means I get you, then I’ll take it.”
My throat worked as I stared into his eyes. “That’s not what I want. I don’t want you to resent me.”
“I won’t. I don’t. I think I’ve known for a long time this was where the end of the road would be. Maybe that’s why I didn’t claim you on your eighteenth birthday.” He blew out a breath. “When you came down those stairs for your party in those short shorts and that little tee? I swear to fuck, I almost went caveman on you, hauled you over my shoulder, and took you back upstairs. I’ve been waiting on you to grow up for a long time, and I ain’t about to miss out on shit just because you’re a little kinky.”
My cheeks grew pink at that. “I’m perfectly normal.”
“Nothing’s normal about you, Ama,” Keys grumbled, but before I could stiffen with hurt and outrage, he soothed both by muttering, “Ain’t nothing normal about me either. That’s why we fit. Like two pieces of a goddamn puzzle.”
“Why do you sound so sad about that?” I whispered, turning my head to the side so I could rest my cheek against his.
“Because I want you all to myself. I want something simple, and I’m like Saint, knew that was never going to happen, so I never did anything about it.”
Brow puckering as I tried to reason what the hell was going on here, I asked, “I’m confused. You’re going to do this, but for me? You don’t want to. In fact, you hate the very idea of it, but for me, you’re all in?”
“Pretty much.”
“Yeah.”
Their answers didn’t soothe me. Sure, I was getting what I wanted, but fuck, I’d never thought about what they needed either. How horrible was I? God.
“No.” I shook my head. “Maybe we should just be friends. If this is your idea of hell, I’m not going to live with you both in moods and resenting me because you don’t want what I want—“
“Ama,” Saint snapped. “Shut up.” And like that, he kissed me. He kissed me, and he kissed me, and he kissed me.
It went on for a lifetime, until I was drowning in him, until I was existing for him, until I was breathing his air and he was breathing mine. At my back, I felt the hard-on digging into my ass, but I ignored it because, at that moment, I was one-hundred-percent Saint’s.
He fucked my mouth with his tongue, sure, but he also made love to it. Every part of me was enticed and incited by his loving kiss, and I knew I couldn’t spend the rest of my life without experiencing this. I just couldn’t.
He was it for me.
But so was Ink.
And Keys.
I was made for them, and they were made for me, but if they couldn’t deal with what I needed, I didn’t blame them. Even if it broke my heart.
Saint broke our kiss, and his lips were red and raw, swollen, as he bit off, “You’re thinking.”
“Of course, I am,” I rasped, my voice hoarse and husky from what I’d just experienced.
“Then he wasn’t doing it right,” Keys grumbled, and he stepped back, just so he could twirl me around and claim my mouth.
I wasn’t sure if this was some kind of Hunger Games where kissing was concerned, but consider me won over.
Jesus.
Had they both been kissing other women like this a
ll this time? Had they been treating other bitches to what should have always been mine?
He kissed me like I was dying, like he was dying. Like this was our last day on Earth and we’d run out of time.
It made my heart pound, my body throb, and between my legs, I was wet. So wet that my hips rocked into him as want and need ricocheted inside me and I didn’t know where to put them.
Didn’t know how to respond when my body wanted something that I didn’t know how to ask for.
A whimper escaped me, one that sounded as hungry as I felt. It encompassed every emotion inside me. Made me recognize just what the two of them had done to me.
There was no denying they wanted me just as much as I wanted them. But the idea of living like I wanted? Like my parents? That was the idea that turned them off. I understood, I did, but it didn’t stop me from craving it.
Maybe I was greedy, but I didn’t think of it that way.
I was eighteen, and for someone as fucked up in the head as me, I considered these three guys to be my normality. I knew who I was around them. Knew what I wanted to be. Yeah, I’d laid the foundations of my world on them, and maybe I shouldn’t have done that, maybe that wasn’t what feminists wanted from me, but I had no fucks left to give.
When Keys pulled back, his teeth tugged on my bottom lip before he murmured, “You’ve always been mine, Ama. Just as much as you’ve been theirs.”
“I think we need to show her that.”
My eyes were dazed when I turned and watched Saint twisting the ‘Open’ sign on the door to ‘Closed.’ I didn’t stop him, didn’t even utter a word. Just turned back to Keys and asked him, “Is this what you want?”
He blew out a breath. “The one thing I know is that I want you. That if you need me in your life, I need you just as badly in mine. Maybe it isn’t ideal for me. Maybe I want you to myself. But… I know you, babe. I know how you work. I know that we each represent something different to you, and even when I was thirteen, I knew that.
“I didn’t like it. I hated it. I wanted to be your world, but after what happened? I just wanted you to find your balance. Back then, I wasn’t even jealous of Ink because hell, to me, he was ancient, and I thought he would be to you. But, I know he means something to you that I don’t. And maybe, yeah, that makes me jealous, but I know I’m something to you that he isn’t as well. Just like it is with Saint—” He bit off his own words and shook his head. “I’m fucking this up.”
“No, you’re not. You’re making perfect sense,” I rasped. “To me, I love you so much that I don’t even know how I contain it. It isn’t more or less than what I feel for Saint or Ink. You each are…” I closed my eyes and pressed my face into his throat.
“What, love? What are we?”
“I can’t say it. I sound so pathetic,” I whispered, almost ashamed of how my brain worked.
“Nothing you could do or say is pathetic,” Saint murmured huskily, and he was there again, but this time at my back where he’d been at my front before. “Tell us.”
“If I had to wake up to a world without you three? I couldn’t do it. I’d rather die.”
The stunned silence that came from my revelation had me burning up from mortification.
Then, Saint ground out, “You know what I hate?”
“W-What?” I inquired, startled, because I hadn’t expected him to say that.
“I hate the fact that I know you’re speaking the complete and utter truth. I hate the fact that you mean every word you said, and it terrifies me because this ain’t a fairy tale, baby girl. This is life. And our life? It’s mean and nasty, and you could lose us to a prison cell or you could lose us to a bullet wound. I don’t want to think of you hurting yourself because we’re—”
“Wait a minute. These kinds of thoughts don’t come out of nowhere,” Keys interrupted, and he cupped the back of my neck and forced me to stare up at him. “Tell me, Ama, fucking tell me you’ve never tried nothing like this before,” he pleaded, and in his eyes, there was a kind of terror I’d never come across before.
A terror that was for me.
Not for himself.
For me.
Seeing that, knowing he truly worried for me, gave me the courage I needed to be truthful, vulnerable.
I licked my lips. “Some nights, I feel like I’m going crazy. I-I feel like if I see him again… I want to rip out my eyes.” My mouth wobbled. “I looked. Ink told me to look away, and I did, but I opened my eyes. Just a second too soon. I saw him. His head all blown out, his eyes vacant and dead. I saw his crotch, saw the piss ballooning on his trousers.
“Mostly, I remember how much it stank and how I hurt. He never gave me water, never fed me. I-I had to pee myself, and he kept my eyes covered all the time unless he ripped off the blindfold to hurl nasty things at me. But even though I remember all that, when I dream of him, he looks like he did dead. He comes to me every night. Every night,” I cried. “I get no peace, no rest. He’s there. Always. Every time I close my eyes.”
Keys pressed his forehead to mine. “If I could take that from you, I would.”
“You do,” I breathed. “I always know the next morning, when I find you, you’re there and you’ll keep me safe. Not just me, but my sanity. You’ll tease me and poke fun at my hair if I have bedhead. You make me feel real, Keys.” I reached up and cupped his face. “Nothing makes sense without you. Any of you.
“When I was sixteen, I almost did something stupid. I admit it. I was going to… I just needed a break. Just needed to sleep without him being there. I almost did something that particular night, but I couldn’t. The next day, you and Saint began teaching me how to shoot a gun.”
He stiffened. “I remember that. You looked like you’d been crying.”
“Fuck, I remember too,” Saint rasped. “Jesus, Ama. Jesus.”
I shuddered. “It was bad. I had so much going on at school, so many things to do, and even drawing wasn’t helping. I mean, you haven’t even seen what I draw when I’m in my room, alone. It’s messed up, I’m messed up. I know that, but you make me normal, and I love what I am around you.”
“We love who you are around us too,” Keys murmurs softly, pressing a gentle kiss to my lips. “We love you even if you are fucked up.”
A soft giggle escaped me. “I’m allowed to say that. Not you.”
He winked at me and pressed another kiss to the corner of my mouth. “Perks of being a… what? Am I your boyfriend now?” He mocked, “Girlfriend, it’s your solemn duty to tell me when you want to rip your eyes out because those bombshells are too beautiful to destroy.”
I sucked down a breath as I stared up at him, loving him for doing what he always did—making me feel like Amaryllis. Not the victim, not a woman who couldn’t get over something bad that had happened to her.
To him, I was Ama.
To Saint and Ink, I was too.
That was why I was addicted to them. Why they were my drug and poison of choice. I’d kill for them, die for them, but more importantly, I’d live for them, and that was the greatest gift I had to give them.
And they didn’t even know it.
19
Keys
This woman had the power to decimate me.
And she didn’t even fucking know it.
I swear, she could look into my eyes, and I’d see those gorgeous gray crystals staring back at me, but I saw the terror burrowed within. I saw the past and the present uneasily coalescing.
The torment in her eyes could tear me apart, but only Ama had the power to build me back together again.
I shuddered as I pressed my forehead to hers. “Do you know how much I need you? How badly I need you to be okay?”
She licked her lips. “I think I do. It’s why I never do anything. I know you l-love me.”
“No stuttering required,” I told her on a sigh. “I do. I love you, Ama. I have since I was a kid and didn’t really know what love was. Well, aside from the way my dad used to look at my mom.” I swallo
wed thickly. “I’d go insane if anything… if you did anything, Ama.”
She scowled. “I’m not going to. I was in a different place back then, but that’s in the past. Not my present. And even if you don’t want to be with me in that way, I’m not going to do anything either. I-I’m stronger now. I can do things, but you have to be a part of my life. Even if it’s only texting me a few days a week…”
I reached up and pressed a finger to her lips. “Shut up.”
“Charmer.”
“None of that crap,” I grumbled, ignoring her. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere. If you haven’t realized that by now, then there’s no hope for you. I would have gone to Rhode Island for you, baby girl.”
Her eyes widened. “You would have?”
I nodded, but then I pulled back and looked around the tattoo parlor. “But I get the feeling this is where you intended on being all along, am I right?”
She hitched a shoulder, nibbling at her lip until she muttered, “I knew if I had that validation, if the acceptance came through, that my dads would let me. They’d feel bad about what happened and would want me here rather than me having to fight for it.”
“Manipulative little mare,” I grumbled, but my lips twitched.
“I had to,” she defended. “You know what they’re like. They’d say it was too dangerous for me to be here otherwise. At least this way, they think they’ve done something proactive and it gets me where I want to be.”
“That tattoo, babe, it was phenomenal.”
She beamed at me. “You really think so?”
“I fucking know so.” Nervously, I asked, “Would you do one for me? My ma?”
Her lips parted. “Seriously? You’d want me to?”
“Hell yeah.” I reached up and rubbed my thumb along the line of her jaw—did I have the right to do that?
I wasn’t sure.
I felt like she wanted something I couldn’t give, but I also didn’t have a choice.
I wasn’t a man who appreciated being backed into a corner. All my life, I’d had to do things other people’s way.
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