That's it. It wasn't the same at all.
"Junebug," he said. "I didn't mean it that way. I wasn't saying that my losing you was the same thing as what happened to your family. You know I wasn't saying that."
I exhaled, wanting to be rid of the tension I felt rising within me. Why did I feel so on edge? "I know, Cade."
"Why did you join?" Cade asked, still not looking at me.
"The Navy?" I asked. "Not to follow you, if that's what you're thinking." I blurted it out. Why was I being such an asshole?
It wasn't even the truth. Cade might not have been the primary reason, but he was at the back of my mind. He'd always been in my thoughts. I couldn't really say I joined without ever thinking about the fact that Cade was a Marine, could I?
Cade let out a laugh, but it didn't sound happy. "Got it, June. That's not what I was thinking."
I tried to explain. "I meant, I wasn't stalking you."
"Understood." But he just sounded irritated now. And with good reason.
"I don't know why I joined, exactly," I said. "I wanted out. I went to undergrad, and then to medical school, and everything just kept following me. All the shit from my past, it trailed me wherever I went. Friends would ask about my family, that kind of thing. It got old, and I wanted something different. I wanted a new life."
"In the military," Cade said.
I shrugged, tracing my finger over the pattern on the bedspread, picking at the stitching that unraveled on a part of the embroidery. "Yeah, I mean, I could start over, travel, you know? Be someone new. And there was this guy..."
"Shit, June," Cade said. "I don't want to hear about some other fucking guy."
"Shut up," I said. "I don't mean it like that. I was in medical school, doing my rotations. We were a couple years into the war in Iraq, and I hadn't even thought about the military as an option. I was pulling ER duty, doing easy stuff for the docs, and we got this guy, an ex-Marine, double amputee. Tried to slit his wrists. Did a decent enough job of it too, lost a lot of blood, but his mom had shown up at his house for a surprise visit and found him. I was working at a civilian hospital, so I had never really seen any of the Marines come in, you know? We just happened to get him because we were the closest place."
"When he realized we'd saved him," I said. "You know what he said?"
Cade waited, silent, still not looking at me, but obviously listening.
"He said it didn't matter, because he was already dead."
"Jesus." Cade shook his head, a strangled noise in his throat. "Shit, June, if you wanted to deal with that kind of stuff, why didn't you just become a head wizard?"
"I haven't heard that used since I was with the Marines," I said, stifling a smile at his use of the term. "Seriously, can you picture me as a psychiatrist? I'm too fucked up for that shit. Plus, I'm a great surgeon. Or, well, I was. I wanted to do something good."
"Why did you quit?" he asked.
I wasn't sure if he was talking about the Navy or medicine. Either way, I didn't like being on the receiving end of all the questions. Cade was really good at avoiding talking about himself. "Why did you?" I asked.
"I didn't quit," he said.
"I can add, Cade," I said. "You joined out of high school, you've been out for a few years now. That's what, ten years, in the Marines? Why didn't you stay in?"
"Twelve years," he corrected.
"Why did you get out?" I asked the question, even though what I really wanted to ask was, why did you join the biker gang? I had a feeling that question was the one that was too personal to ask.
"It wasn't by choice," he said.
"What do you mean?"
"Leave it alone, June," he said.
"How long have I known you, Cade? I can't ask you questions?"
"You might not like the answers," he said. I had a feeling we weren't just talking about the Marines now.
"Tell me."
"Fine. You want to know? I got boarded out. I got twelve years in the Marines, made Gunnery Sergeant early, and got fucking boarded out."
"Oh," I said. He was medically retired from the Marines, so it wasn't by choice. I thought about his touchiness around the scars, the burns on his chest. He was physically okay, though, not permanently disabled, and that wasn't something that would get him medically boarded.
Which meant that the issue wasn't physical. "Oh."
"Yeah," he said. "Oh."
"Cade, I -" You can talk to me about it, I wanted to say. You can tell me what happened.
If there was one thing I knew about, it was about battling mental demons. But I stopped. Everything I could say would sound stupid, trite.
"Now you know," he said. "They wouldn't stay in because I'm too much of a fucking mental case." He looked at me, finally, and I could see the pain behind his eyes. "Are you happy? Now you know what a fuck up I am."
"You're not a screw up, Cade."
"Yeah," he said, his voice hard. "You're saying that now, because we fucked. Not because you believe that." He looked away, and I realized what it was, the look on his face. What I was always seeing flash across his face.
Shame.
And my heart broke for him.
"Oh, Cade," I said. No one thinks you're a fuck up, least of all me."
"Yeah?" he asked. "My father sure does."
"He's afraid of losing you."
Cade was silent for a moment, and I thought he might be considering what I was saying, thinking that maybe he wasn't the mess he thought he was. But then he spoke. "Do you know why I'm here, June?" he asked.
"I hope because you want to be here." My voice shook as I said it. Shit, maybe he really didn't want to be here. I picked at the stupid piece of thread on the bedspread, wanting to yank it out, unravel the whole thing.
"Not here with you," he said. "Here in West Bend."
"No." He was in some kind of trouble with his biker club, but I was afraid to ask what the specific brand of trouble was.
"The Marines were my whole life. I couldn't fucking deal with it when I got out. It was the only thing I knew, since high school. The discipline, the structure, the brotherhood - I was fucking lost without it. When I found the MC, it was someplace I fit, someplace with other vets. With people just as fucked up as I was. No one gave a shit that I'd spent the last twelve years being a killer."
I opened my mouth, started to say something, but Cade kept talking.
"In fact," he said. "I had certain skills that were useful in my new line of work. They gave me a family, a home, when the Marine Corps kicked me out of mine."
"So what happened?"
"The Inferno," he said. "My fucking club, the people I thought were my fucking family, they tried to kill me."
Shit. I had thought it was something big, but not that.
"They tried to kill me, kill Crunch," he said. "Would have fucking killed April and MacKenzie. After I did everything for those assholes."
"I'm so sorry, Cade," I said. What else could I say?
"Do you know what it's like to lose yourself, to lose everything you believe in?" Cade asked. "To lose who you are?"
I lost my family before I turned eighteen. "Yes," I said.
Cade looked at me for a long moment, and nodded. "You would be the one person who could understand that, June," he said. "The problem is, what did you do with your shit? You became a fucking doctor. Joined the Navy. I didn't exactly go the honorable route."
"What do you mean?" I asked. "You joined the Marines."
"And then I joined the MC, June."
"You had your reasons, I'm sure," I said. "It was a place that fit. It wasn't all bad, from the beginning, right? You couldn't have known."
"June," he said. "You need to stop. Stop defending me. It's not worth it. I'm not worth it."
"Don't say that," I said. "It's bullshit. And, besides, I'm not defending you. I can think for myself."
"Do you know what I did for the MC?" he asked.
I shrugged. Nothing good, I was sure. "Probably a whole bu
nch of criminal stuff. I'm not naive, Cade. Give me some credit. I just think that you feeling ashamed of what you've done is pointless. Just because you've fucked up in the past doesn't mean you're fucked up forever. There's always a way to right things." I listened to myself say the words, the person who believed people couldn't ever change.
Did I really believe that, or was I just naively hoping Cade could change?
"June." He brought his face up, looked at me, unblinking. "I was the enforcer for the MC."
"So what?" Enforcer. I had an inkling of what that meant.
"So," he said. "It's not just because I was good at throwing punches, June."
"It's because you were a sniper," I said. "So you killed people for the MC." I wasn't asking. I was listening to how it sounded, the statement coming out of my mouth.
"On occasion," he said. "Still think I'm not fucked up forever?"
I couldn't answer.
"Yeah," he said. "I thought so." He exhaled, his eyes down, looking like he was deflating as he sat there. My heart ached for him, for the pain he carried. I wanted to tell him I couldn't answer because I was the one who was permanently fucked up. How could I judge him, when I was just as bad? It's not like I hadn't ever killed anyone.
"Cade," I said. I couldn't take it, watching him hurt like that. I crawled over to him from where I sat, moved across from him, put my fingers under his chin and tilted his head up. He shook his head away, and I took his face in my palms, made him look at me. "You're not fucked up."
"Don't, June," he said. "You don't know all of it. Not everything."
"What else is there?"
He took my wrists, pulled my hands off his face. "June. There's something..." His voice started to crack. "Shit, I can't even say it."
"What is it?" I pulled back, already tense. What could be that awful that he was so ashamed?
"June," he said. "Hell, I don't even know how to say it. Your sister- the ranch hand, it's all my fault, what happened."
"What are you talking about?"
"I knew about the two of them. I caught them together once, in the barn. I threw him out, sent her home. I should have done more, but I didn't. And it was my fault. If I would have kicked his ass, told someone..."
"This is your big secret? The thing you're so ashamed to admit?"
"June, I don't even know what to say..."
"Cade," I said, taking his head in my hands again, "I knew about them too. That night? I knew my sister was going out to party with him. She snuck out of the house."
"You knew about it," he repeated slowly.
"Yes," I said. "Have you been beating yourself up over this for all these years?"
He didn't say anything.
"Oh my God, Cade," I said. "We were kids. We didn't know any better." I leaned forward, kissed him lightly on the lips. He didn't push me away. So I kissed him again, gently, and his lips parted. Then he kissed me back. Wordlessly, I climbed on his lap, sat on his crossed legs, wrapped my legs around his back, held his head to my chest. I breathed in, feeling my heart rate settle and come down low as I held him tight against me. I kissed his forehead, breathed him in.
And felt warmth spread throughout my body, in response to the smell of him.
How wrong was it that I was thinking about how much I wanted him inside me? Cade was sitting here, feeling ashamed and horrible, and all I wanted to do was ride him.
As if he could read my thoughts, Cade looked up. "Come here," he said, his hand at the base of my neck, pulling my hair, pulling me into him. He kissed me, roughly, and I felt my nipples harden to his touch, need washing over me.
It wasn't slow and gentle, not like the way he'd made love to me this morning. This time, there was no time for foreplay; it was all I could do to rip myself away from him in order to grab a condom. I didn't want to talk anymore, and I didn't want to think about who Cade was or what he might be a part of. Hell, I didn't want to contemplate those questions myself.
I guided him inside me, rocking against him, my movements intense from the very beginning. There was no build-up, no gentle rhythm. We were both consumed with need, too caught up in the moment to worry about anything else.
But when we did explode together, not more than minutes later, just before I came, I thought, he's going to make me fall for him - and then he's going to leave.
I woke with a start, fear gripping my chest like a vise, and it took me a moment to even register what had woken me. Beside me, Cade was thrashing in the bed, talking to himself.
"No, no, no," he yelled, followed by a string of something that was unintelligible. From her bed on the floor in the room, Bailey whined.
"Cade," I said. Then, louder again. "Cade!" He flailed wildly, and I had to move back to avoid being hit.
He jerked awake, gasping for air, looking at me.
"Are you ok?" I asked.
He didn't say anything, didn't acknowledge me. I wasn't even sure if he heard me, and I wasn't quite sure whether he was awake or still asleep. He leaned forward, his head in his hands, his breath more and more shallow, choking.
Panic attack.
I definitely recognized those.
I slid close to him, put my hand on his back. "Just breathe," I said. "Breathe."
I kept my hand there, still, until his breathing began to slow, then got a cool washcloth from the bathroom and dabbed it on his forehead.
"Here," I whispered, taking off his tee-shirt. "You're soaked."
"June," he said. "I'm sorry."
"It was a panic attack," I said. You have nothing to feel sorry for. "I get them too."
He wrapped his arms around me, slid into bed behind me, his skin warm against mine. "The nightmares don't happen every night," he said.
"It's okay, Cade." I closed my eyes. "You're safe."
Before I drifted off to sleep, I thought, It's my heart that's in danger.
Axe
Safe.
I lay there, holding June, not daring to move, listening to her breathing get deeper as she fell asleep in my arms. I wanted to avoid having to talk about what had just happened. I didn't need to play twenty questions with her about this shit.
The fucking nightmares, the panic attacks...they were old hat for me now. I'd had them for years, and it wasn't like June could do anything about them. Right after I'd gotten out, I talked to someone at the VA, made it through a couple sessions before I decided dredging up my past was about the most useless shit ever.
I didn't want to relieve that shit with June.
She was in that convoy - the explosion. She'll understand.
I squelched that fucking voice in my head. I'm sure June didn't think I knew, but I'd looked her up. I knew about what had happened, how she was in Afghanistan, attached to one of the medical battalions who'd gone out on an easy humanitarian mission. Teaching doctors from a local Afghani hospital. As soon as I started reading the article about her, I knew she would have loved that, volunteered for it. One of the vehicles in their convoy had hit an IED and the convoy had taken fire - a whole fucking group of doctors. June had dragged her wounded corpsman out of the line of fire, but he'd died anyway. The article had called her "the hero surgeon."
If anyone would understand this shit, it would be June. She'd said she had panic attacks. I knew from experience that was probably the tip of the iceberg. But June, she dealt with things differently. Fuck, she channeled her shit into opening a bed and breakfast. Her big act of rebellion was quitting her job as a surgeon.
I channeled all my shit into becoming better at being a murderer. There was a big difference between us.
All the bullshit, the nightmares, the waking up in cold sweats...it was just easier to not talk about it. I'd learned that much. All the shit I'd seen - there was just too much of it to put into words anymore. It had become part of me, part of my soul. Killing for the club just confirmed what I already knew about myself - that I was too far gone to do anything else.
I wasn't always like this, though. The Marines do a prett
y good job of putting you through the ringer before you become a sniper - psych evaluations and all that bullshit. They have to be sure you're not a fucking psychopath before giving you a weapon and asking you to act like one. Most of the guys I knew were just like me - good guys, guys with families, guys from ranches or small towns who knew their way around rifles.
And after what happened with June's family, the secret I had kept, I told myself that doing this was the only way. It was my path to redemption. I was part of something bigger than myself, something noble.
So I deployed, five times in as many years. Volunteered for missions. I was shit hot, and it felt good to be good at something. But I was a sniper during the first five years of the war, when shit was bad. I pictured myself lying in a field, shooting targets from a half a mile away. Sometimes it was like that. But mostly, it wasn't. It was protecting a squad on foot in Baghdad or in Ramadi, taking out targets in buildings. It was always business, never personal. I never felt bad about any of the targets I killed - they were always armed, always the enemy.
The guys I was protecting, the ones I lost...those were the ones I felt bad about. Those were the deaths I couldn't get out of my head. Those were the guys I would feel responsible for failing, until the day I died.
And those were the scenes that replayed in my mind, over and over like a video stuck on a loop. Those were the images that haunted me during the day, popping up when I least expected it, when I caught a whiff of something in the air, or heard the sound of a car backfiring. Those were the nightmares that stole my sleep.
At night, I would close my eyes, and see it in my mind's eye...the flash of light, clouds of dust and debris kicked up around me, the billowing dust cloud that colored the air. I'd hear the explosion, followed by a moment of dead silence, and then the ringing in my ears. I'd feel the shockwave from the blast wash over me before I was thrown to the ground.
Every night, the same thing. And in my dreams, I'd see the men I failed to save.
Saving Axe (Motorcycle Club Romance, Cowboy, Military) (Inferno Motorcycle Club) Page 15