by Addison Jane
A reminder that Wrench really was the guy I’d imagined he was.
“Okay,” I whispered.
His eyes shot open. “Okay?”
“You can stay… for a little while.”
He narrowed them pretty quickly, rolling his shoulders in agitation. “You hear nothing else I—”
“Or you can just go,” I said sharply, cutting him off.
He sighed deeply. “All right, all right. Baby steps, I get it.”
Baby steps.
Maybe he was right.
“Thanks for doing this,” I said with a heavy sigh as I took a seat.
Eric smiled across his desk at me. It wasn’t his usual happy smile, it was a sad but understanding smile. When I’d called him from my car after meeting with Peter, I’d barely been able to form the words I needed to explain what I wanted. He’d listened, and even questioned whether it was the right choice to make, but at this stage, I just couldn’t see an alternative. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if something happened to Harlyn or the brothers because of Peter’s vendetta against me, so I was taking them out of the equation. Starting with my baby girl.
“This isn’t the usual law I practice,” Eric started as he gathered together the papers on his desk. “I had to ask an associate to go over what I’d written up, but don’t worry, it’s all confidential.”
I nodded. Not that it mattered anyway, as soon as these papers were delivered, everyone would know.
Eric stood up with the papers in his hand and came around the desk, he sat in the chair beside me and turned his body toward mine. His wedding ring sparkled in the light and I couldn’t help but smile.
“How is Lisa?”
Eric looked up, surprised by my question. He cleared his throat before answering. “Lisa went missing about a year ago.”
I sat back in shock. “Oh my God! I’m so sorry, I had no idea.” I felt fucking horrible, and he clearly looked upset, the color draining from his face.
He nodded. “Yeah… she uh… she went out one night with friends, the last I heard they were having a good time. Then nothing. Called the police the next morning, they checked security tapes, showed her and her friends hanging out with a group of guys who were trying to give the girls drugs.” He shook his head. “They’d all declined, and there was footage of them leaving the bar but that was it. She just never made it home.”
His voice was croaky with emotion, and I reached out, laying my hand over his.
“I’m really sorry, Eric.”
He offered me a soft smile. “I’ve come to terms with it, but I just haven’t ever gotten around to taking my ring off. Guess I’m not ready to move on just yet, and it’s a good deterrent for a lot of women.”
Lisa and I hadn’t been close, but during the time when Peter and my relationship was fresh and the darkness hadn’t set in, she and Eric would often join us for dinner parties, or we’d see them at most social gatherings. She was a sweet girl, young, ambitious and bubbly. Being around her was easy and I enjoyed that, especially when I would feel out of place. It wasn’t long before they stopped visiting so often and for the most part, I wouldn’t have known if they were there anyway.
“Anyway, let’s just get through this,” he said, turning the attention off himself and switching himself into lawyer mode, no doubt one place where his emotions couldn’t come into play. I knew Wrench had a serious distaste for him, but I also understood why. When he was working, he was hard and straight forward. He believed in the law and had no problem laying it down or putting people away who didn’t follow it.
“Have a read through this and let me know what you think.” He handed me the papers and I took a deep breath as I scanned through the words, the bile in my throat rising more and more the further I read down the page. I felt tears brim my eyes as I got to the end and reached for the pen that Eric offered.
“You don’t have to do this you know. I’m sure whatever it is that you have going on…” He gave me a pointed look. Eric knew the truth, it was one of the reasons that I felt so comfortable with him because he never once judged me or treated me any different. “We could find another way to work through it.”
I shook my head, my hand quivering as I put pen to paper and signed my name.
Right there on the dotted line.
A tear fell from my eye, directly on the letter and I quickly dabbed at it before it could smear the ink so much that it was unreadable. I flipped through them all, signing all the copies and other papers as well before handing them straight back to Eric.
He inhaled deeply and looked at me with sad eyes. “I’ll have them delivered for you,” he said quietly.
“Tomorrow. Have them delivered tomorrow,” I urged. I’d promised Harlyn I’d have dinner with her at the club tonight and I didn’t want to have to break that.
“Okay, no problem,” he agreed. “Is there anything I can do to help? Is this all because of Peter?”
I chewed my lip, I could feel the weight of what I’d just done crushing in on my chest.
No, I couldn’t break down now.
I grabbed hold of the arms of the chair and forced myself to my feet, my body wobbling slightly as I tried to hold myself up. Looking for the window and heading straight for it, needing light to surround me so I could breathe while I tried to fight it.
“Annabelle… Hey, it’s okay. Just breathe,” Eric soothed, his hand on my back, rubbing in soft circles.
It wasn’t okay. I didn’t want to fucking hear that it was going to be okay. I recoiled away from him but he kept following me. I didn’t want to be touched. I fought to keep my head straight. He was just trying to help, trying to calm me down, but what he didn’t realize was that it was only making things worse.
I placed my hands on the window sill. My legs felt like they might give way from under me at any moment, so I pushed down hard, holding my body up. I threw back my head as tears streamed down my cheeks, allowing my body to bathe in the sunlight that coursed through the window. The shadows couldn’t get me here, they couldn’t reach me in the light.
Eric’s hand stilled on my back and suddenly a chill filled me.
“Looks like you have someone waiting for you outside,” he said, a sharpness to his voice.
I slowly lowered my gaze, trying to focus on my breathing as I used one hand to swipe away the tears. He was right, there was someone waiting for me, and he looked fucking pissed off as he leaned against his bike, his arms folded across his chest and his legs crossed at the ankle.
Wrench.
Something clicked in my brain, and suddenly I needed to get to him.
He was comfort.
He knew what I needed.
“Get Wrench,” I rasped. “Please.” I looked over at Eric, his brow furrowed and I could see the apprehension. It wasn’t a secret that Eric’s firm and the Brothers by Blood weren’t exactly friends. Like I said, Eric was firm in his beliefs about the law, and the brothers, well, they like to put their own twist on it.
Unable to hold myself up any longer, I dropped to my knees.
Eric stepped back, clenching his teeth. “All right, I’ll get him. But only because I hate seeing you like this.” He dashed out of the room, and I twisted my body, pressing my back against the wall beside the window and curling my arms around my knees. The room was starting to shrink and I was finding it harder and harder to inhale a deep breath. I wanted to escape, but I knew I couldn’t. I knew there would be no point because I wouldn’t make it very far.
I’d fought so long, struggling to work through this shit on my own and get better on my own, but I wasn’t at home and I didn’t have the things I needed to help me. He was here, though, and I just needed him. I needed to feel him in the room, then I’d be safe from the shadows.
“She’s in here,” I heard Eric say with an obvious tightness to his voice.
“Swear to fucking God, if you’ve done anything to her…”
Wrench appeared in the doorway and took one look at me curled up
on the floor and his face softened. He turned back to look out the door. “Stay out here. Don’t fucking come inside.”
“That’s my office.”
“Don’t give a fuck,” Wrench snapped before slamming the door closed.
I jumped, and he cringed. “Sorry, sugar pop,” he said quietly as he moved toward me. The closer he got, the easier I could breathe, sucking long deep breaths into my lungs.
He took a seat on the floor and then said two words that soaked into my body and allowed my muscles to relax finally. “I’m here.”
Not ‘you’ll be okay.’
Not ‘you need to calm down.”
Just… I’m here.
We sat in silence, the sounds of birds chirping in the trees outside the only noise between us. Wrench simply watched me as over time I slowly began to unwind my body and stretch myself out. He didn’t push or encourage me to do anything or even touch me.
He knew.
I looked up at the clock that hung over the doorway.
An hour. That’s how long it had taken. My body ached, my muscles crying out to be stretched into a different position. But Wrench stayed the same, his knees bent, his hands hanging over them casually.
Just watching me.
“I want to go home,” I whispered finally.
He nodded and pushed off the floor, climbing to his feet. Then he came toward me and held out his hand. I took it, and he pulled me to my feet. “Let’s go find that bath.”
I nodded. “Yes, please.”
I sat on the sofa in her living room, waiting for her to get dressed. We hadn’t exchanged any words since we’d arrived back to her house. I ran her a bath, I sat in the bathroom with her while she allowed her body to relax and gain some kind of brain function back again.
I noticed last time she had this kind of episode—while it was much worse then—that it took her the rest of the day to feel somewhat normal again. She’d been on edge, sudden movements spooked her, she wanted to have simple conversations and just relax her body. I guess it helped her mind to regenerate from what seemed almost like a trauma.
So I was waiting… waiting until she was ready to talk. Because frankly, I was done, and I had questions that needed fucking answers.
Seeing her car outside Eric Deanwell’s office building almost made me crash my bike into a line of traffic. I’d been over there checking out one of the girls from X-Rated, where she lived, and what she was up to given that today was her day off. Everything seemed fine, and I found her at home babysitting two younger siblings while her mom picked up an extra shift at the hospital. I was heading across town to check on another when I spotted Sugar’s car.
To say I was fucking pissed, would be an understatement. Not only was I ready to rip Deanwell a new asshole, but I was minutes away from calling fucking Optimus and letting him deal with it. I didn’t know whether I could hold my temper without tearing shit to pieces.
Yet, what I found, definitely wasn’t what I expected.
“You didn’t call, Op,” Sugar stated quietly as she stepped into the living room, drying her wet hair with a fluffy blue towel. Her movements were slow, but I could see in her eyes that she was alert. I knew I shouldn’t push it, but I was struggling to find any fucking reason in the world for her to be in that office. That combined with her strange behavior over the past month or more, and I was beginning to get pretty damn concerned with what the hell was going on.
Was she working with him?
Was he forcing her to give him information on the club?
What in God’s fucking name was the connection?
“No, I didn’t call him,” I answered, before adding. “Not yet anyway.”
She cringed but nodded as she walked over to the small laundry area and tossed the towel on the washing machine. “Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me just yet. Because if I don’t get some answers soon, I’m gonna call him over and there ain’t no way he’s gonna let you out of his sight ever again.” I laid it down thick. I knew that if Op knew right now what had happened, he would hit the fucking roof. And if I had to, I would fucking tell him. Even it if meant putting my own ass in the shit, just to protect the club.
“I get it,” she said quietly as she took a seat on the other end of the sofa. She hung her head, but this didn’t seem like it was out of exhaustion, the look on her face was rather one of shame, embarrassment, and guilt.
“Please,” I begged softly. “I need to fucking know what the hell I’m dealing with here… it’s been going on for too long now. We both know you’re hiding something, and we both know how much better you’ll feel when yo—”
“I’m bipolar.”
The words fell from her mouth in a rush, like she forced them out in the moment before she could convince herself not to. Her eyes stared straight ahead, staring into nothing, emotionless.
“Bipolar?” I questioned, unsure if I’d heard her correctly. I knew the term, had a basic idea of what it was but wasn’t really sure why it was important. “What are you trying to say?”
She stared at me like I’d grown two heads. “I have Bipolar Affective Disorder. It affects my emotions, gives me extreme highs and sometimes debilitating lows.”
“The panic attacks…” I said, my brain catching on to what she was telling me.
She nodded slowly, pulling her knees to her chest and continuing to avoid my eyes. “It started when I was a teenager. I’d have weeks where I felt like I was invincible finding it hard to sit still and focus at school. I was defiant and a little crazy. I just wanted to go out, have fun, do stupid things and screw the consequences.”
I could tell even as she explained her emotions and her actions, that she was playing them over and over in her mind like she was watching an old movie of herself.
“Then the lows started to hit me. I’d refuse to leave the house, not wanting to acknowledge that there was a world outside. I felt hopeless and empty. My parents didn’t help at all, they only wanted a perfect daughter. One that they could show off and use as competition against their friends…” She shook her head, her voice a soft whisper that I strained to hear even in the complete silence of the room. “But what they got was me. If I wasn’t wreaking havoc and embarrassing them, I was refusing to eat and sitting in my room contemplating giving up on life.”
I wanted to reach over and pull her into my arms, feeling the broken energy surrounding her. I wanted her to know that I was here, but I knew by now that I didn’t have to say the words. She felt comfort around me, even if we were sitting in silence, she felt at ease, and that was all I wanted her to know as she bared her soul to me.
“They thought I was crazy. People looked at me like I was a freak, some kind of sideshow act. In the world I grew up in, it was something that was always buried away with the skeletons in the closet. But everyone had already noticed, so there was no hiding that something was wrong with me.” Her fingers were playing with a loose thread on her sweat pants, tugging at it, twisting it in her fingers. “They finally diagnosed me when I was around seventeen. But as far as my parents were concerned, I’d already tainted their reputation too much. I was broken, and they wanted to quietly pass me on to someone else to deal with.”
I finally reached out and took her hand, threading her fingers through mine. She finally looked over and met my eyes, I could see the pain reflecting back at me. This was hard for her, she was baring her soul, and like every person in her life who knew about her disorder, she was expecting me to run.
I wasn’t running.
“You’re not bipolar,” I told her softly.
She looked at me with a frown. “Yes, I am, I’ve been living with it for over ten years.”
I squeezed her hand. “You are not bipolar… you have bipolar disorder. It doesn’t define who you are, it’s just a part of who you are.”
Her eyes started to well, and she squeezed my hand back. I could tell how much those few words meant to her like no one had ever taken the time to explain it that way
before. She grew up in a world where secrets and problems were hidden away from society, and you plastered on this mask of perfection. She was looked at like she was an outsider, and she was made to feel shame and disgust toward this part of her personality that she could never change.
And I wanted to punch every single one of those people in the face.
Who were they to say that that part of her was not welcome?
Family should be accepting of the people they cared about, loving them as a whole despite their flaws. We all had them. The club was full of men and women alike, who all had pieces of themselves missing or things that they struggled with daily, but as a family, we supported those people. We never looked down on them because of their problems.
“That’s not where it ended,” she whispered, her body tensing up.
I held her hand in mine, preparing myself for anything she could lay on me. I knew though in my heart it would never change how I felt about her.
“I’m married,” she said, her body curling in on itself and a tremor running through her. My mouth went dry, it opened and closed, but I was unable to find any words. She took in a harsh breath, and her fingernails dug into the arm of the sofa as she continued, “His name is Peter Davenport, we’ve been married for over six years.”
The math wasn’t hard to figure out, but I was still shocked. “You were married before you met Optimus?”
“During,” she answered, turning to look me in the eye. “We got married the day I left pregnant with Harlyn. Op never knew, and finding out about Harlyn and Op’s decision to send me away to protect me was my saving grace and when he offered, I jumped on it.”
I grabbed my cap and twisted it so it was on backward, scrubbing at my short hair first before placing it down. “I don’t fucking understand. Who is this guy, and why’d you need to hide from him?”
She gestured to the sofa. “Sit down…please.”
I clenched my jaw but did as she asked, turning my body to face her as she took a seat at the opposite end. “Peter was a man my parents had chosen for me to marry. Like a lot of rich and uptight families, it was all about connections and growing wealth, and who was who over real feelings and emotions.” She shook her head almost as if she was disappointed with herself. “The time he came around and starting courting me I was feeling out of place in that world already, like I wanted to run but had nowhere to go. When I met him he was sweet, almost understanding of my… illness, and started making promises that I thought were genuine. Like maybe he was the one who would give me an escape.” Tears welled in her eyes as she stared at me, the emotion in her voice a mix of frustration and shame.