by Luna Maye
“I think I need some time alone. I’m sure you’re both happy to have your friend back, but right now, I’m not her. I’m just a woman with a raging headache and a gotcha pregnancy. So if you wouldn’t mind, I’d appreciate you leaving until they get their tests run and I’m discharged. I’ll decide then if I want to come with you or go my own way.”
Cal’s face looked like leaving the hospital room was the absolute last thing he wanted to do, but Mina forcibly pulled him back, shaking her head when he opened his mouth to speak.
“That’s alright, Shells. You deserve some time to yourself to think at the least. We’ll be waiting for you in the lobby when you decide.”
Shelli laid back heavily against the pillows with a heavy sigh, watching as her friends-turned-strangers filed out into the hallway to make arrangements for the journey home. But as Shelli drifted softly off to sleep, it occurred to her that she had no idea where home was anymore.
14
Cal
Cal collapsed heavily into a chair in the quiet lobby on the ground level of the hospital. His back ached from days spent sleeping in the firm, straight-backed chair at Shelli’s bedside. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, head in his hands and tried in vain to process the events of the last few days.
When Shelli was admitted into the hospital, the doctors were unsure what caused the continuation of her unconscious state and worked round the clock on testing to determine the extent of her injuries. Knowing now that she was pregnant made Cal think her body may have intentionally shut itself down to protect and preserve their child. Their child. That was probably the most stunning revelation of the day, even above Shelli’s apparent memory loss. A soft sound drew his attention to his right, where Mina lowered herself into the chair beside him, meeting his tortured gaze with a worried grimace of her own. Her eyes were red-rimmed and tired, with dark patches settling in under her lower lashes. She was a shadow of her normal, take charge self.
“She didn’t tell you?” His voice sounded gruff and raspy, as if he hadn’t used it in weeks. He cleared his throat as he waited for her response, twisting his hands through his hair.
“I didn’t know, Cal. She kept it a secret from everyone. Only Rita knew because she helped her get the pregnancy test. I do know she would have told us eventually, she couldn’t keep it from you forever and she wouldn’t have wanted to.”
Mina spoke the words with conviction, but Cal was less sure of Shelli’s intentions. She’d been almost hostile in the room, so scared and confused it was hard to align the person he remembered with the shell of a woman he’d encountered upstairs.
He scrubbed his hands over the ridges of his face, deciding it didn’t matter what choices she’d made about his role in their child’s life. He was going to be a father, a present, active and loving father. Whether she was ready for it or not, he would be part of her life from this day forward — he just wasn’t sure how.
“Where do we go from here, Mina? She doesn’t know us or about her home. She thinks she’s a twenty-five year-old Dallas real estate agent named Michelle, not Shelli, a thirty-seven year-old desert motorcycle club VP. How do we explain her life to her? Hell, she’s covered in scars. Won’t she have questions?”
Mina looked over at him thoughtfully, sitting patiently at his side, an unopened magazine resting on top of her pregnant belly. His outlook warmed a little as he pictured all of his coming opportunities to see Shelli’s beautiful curvy body thicken and round with his child. If only he could experience it with his sweet Shelli and not the spoiled girl from the hospital room calling him an old man.
“We’ll try to answer the most obvious questions first — show her around the compound, get her back into her normal routine and hope surrounding her with her own things triggers something.” Mina sat up, her hands flying back and forth as she laid out her master plan. The woman became almost a mad scientist when she had something on her mind.
“You leave the really hard questions to me to answer. It’s not going to be easy for her to relive those memories if and when they do come back. I know you love her, but you haven’t been around long enough to know the true extent of her scars, Cal, internal and external.” She looked at him earnestly, and Cal thought if a woman as brave and fierce as Mina was so concerned with the level of depravity Shelli had faced in the twelve years between her past and present, then he was incredibly unprepared for the journey ahead. He steeled himself, ready to humbly ask Mina for advice on how to proceed. She knew better than anyone, even Shelli herself in this case, what her best friend might need.
“That’s what you can do, Mina, but what should I do? I need to be close to her. I don’t want her to go through this pregnancy alone, but you should have seen her when she woke up. Her eyes were so wide and scared. When she flinched away from me, it nearly broke me.” The expression of terror on her face was not something he could ever ignore or shake. Maybe it was just an automatic response to waking up in a strange place, but Cal had a sinking suspicion it was more likely an echo of past events.
“I think you need to help her get back into her old routine, help her maintain a sense of normalcy and most importantly, be there when she breaks because she will break under the strain. We’ll find a local physician to check in on her and I keep a therapist on-call for any new girls who come into the club. Shelli is a strong woman but this is too much to carry alone, even for her.”
Cal nodded his head in understanding, those were all things he could do and do well, especially given his lighter schedule at the lodge. He would stick to Shelli like glue and be at her beck and call. Her bratty side had definitely come out when her old self took over, but he saw her reticence to accept him or even look at him as a welcome challenge. He knew Shelli was capable of being beautifully bold as well as sweet; he just had to help her connect with those parts of herself again.
As he and Mina sat discussing their game plan for the flight home after a trip to the cafeteria for some lunch, a nurse came wheeling Shelli down the hallway in a wheelchair, ready to take her out to where Victor sat waiting in the vehicle with Rita. Shelli looked so fragile, alone and vulnerable with an ill-fitting sweat suit obscuring most of her body and the giant bandage alongside one side of her head. His heart swelled in his chest as he shouldered his way past the nurse’s aides, bumping gently past anyone who moved into his path on his collision course for the door.
“Here, let me help.” He came closer slowly, sure to make his presence known to Shelli before he helped the attendants lock the brakes on the wheel chair. Cal gently pulled the blanket off her lap and looped it over one arm before he hooked his arms gently underneath her knees, lifting her gently and heading for the back seat of Rita’s SUV.
“I could have walked. My head is broken, not my legs.” Shelli held herself stiffly away from his body, leaning her torso distinctly away from his own, while being forced to hold around his neck with her arms for balance.
“I don’t mind, as long as you don’t mind me touching you. Is this okay?”
When she quietly gave her ascent and her muscles began to relax against him, he settled his chin on top of her hair softly to limit the jostling of her head as he walked before carefully depositing her in the seat and adjusting her seatbelt. She shuffled around restlessly but didn’t speak as he ran around and climbed into the back seat beside her.
Normally, Cal was a man of few words. Amongst his fellow woodsmen, crude grunts and gestures got him pretty far and when those failed, there was an unspoken agreement between the guides to resort only to monosyllabic replies. He had never spoken as many words in one sitting as he did on the flight home from Taos.
He described the compound, the town, painting pictures of the lodge, Shelli’s baking shop and her fellow Honeys’ businesses. Wracking his brain he described in detail every food she’d ever made, salivating over cakes, pies, barbecue and homemade bread. Despite his well-meaning ramblings about the compound’s extensive gardens, the state of the forests surroundin
g their valley and even more humorous accounts of his time guiding tourists on the river, Shelli remained completely unfazed. Nothing sparked even one iota of interest in her barren gaze as she sat still and silent next to him. Eventually, her eyes started to droop, and he caught her hiding a small yawn behind the back of her hand.
“Come here.” His order came out a bit more gruff than he’d planned, but despite her initial glaring gaze, she limply allowed him to pull her head into his lap and cover her with a spare jacket hanging over the side of his seat.
“Take yourself a nap, honey. We’ve got plenty of time for you to learn all you need to know and plenty of friends to teach it to you.”
She sighed and within a handful of seconds lay still, fast asleep.
15
Shelli
Shelli’s nose crinkled so hard, the nose job she’d promised herself when she landed a buyer for the sky-rise downtown on sixth would soon become more of a necessity than a reward. Her “house” — a two bedroom adobe hovel — lay front and center across the courtyard from the main building in Mina’s compound was definitely not somewhere she could ever picture herself living. It was clean and comfortable on the inside, but the décor was all wrong.
Her Dallas condo had been sleekly decorated in cold marble and stark modern art. Everything gleamed in the large picture windows looking out over the city. This home was all soft earth tones and pale pinks with a southwestern flair. Houseplants spilled out of large earthenware pots and heavy curtains block most of the windows. Eclectic pillows and throws filled almost every inch of the sofa in the living room, and the kitchen was packed to the brim with mixers, bowls, and chef’s knives. It almost looks like an artistic New Mexican granny with a Pinterest account laid it out, not someone with her sophisticated sense of style.
“Are you sure this is my place?” She didn’t even turn to address her shadow. The frustrating man was sticking to her like glue. He’d been nothing but supportive and kind in the face of her constant insults and petulant attitude as they made their journey home, but she kept pushing him. His dedication to her comfort and care couldn’t be genuine or sincere. He had to want something from her, and she felt like she wouldn’t get to the root of it until she pushed him just a step too far.
“I’ve never been here before, but yes, it’s yours. Look at these.” He points at the entry table to a series of framed photographs. Inching closer to him, but maintaining her distance, she looked down to the closest one he held in his hands. In it, she was perched on top of a sleek retro motorcycle in a thick leather outfit with Mina and a woman she met earlier on her way into the compound named Isabel on either side of her. They were pulling their helmets off, simultaneously letting down their hair.
Her body was covered in tattoos she had no memory of and as she ran her hands along them, she could feel the rough bumps and scars they concealed. She wondered how she received the scars. She knew Isabel was responsible for the tattoos and though they wouldn’t have been part of her realtor aesthetic, even she couldn’t deny the wild beauty of the twining vines.
Despite the unfamiliarity of the scene, Shelli found herself most drawn to the expression on her face. Her eyes were lit with a wild green light and her face looked simultaneously wizened with the weight of life and woefully naïve. She couldn’t reconcile this brazenly vulnerable woman with the status monger she’d once been, formed and fed by her elitist family.
She sighed softly, running her finger over the curves of her face, wondering about her relationship with the other women in the compound — it was a much easier connection to consider than the one she shared with the hulking mountain man currently invading her space with his cool calm and maddening warm, woodsy scent.
“Wait a minute, what do you mean you haven’t been here?” She stepped back, looking at Cal with an accusing eye. The formidable man suddenly looked incredibly nervous and unsure. It was almost laughable as his shoulders hunched, and he instinctively made himself just a smidgen smaller under the icy glaze of her patented glare.
He wasn’t the first man to melt under the strength of her ire, and he definitely wouldn’t be the last. She smiled a little at that, feeling satisfied she hadn’t totally lost herself in this memory madness — some things never change. But her smug satisfaction was not going to distract her from the more important information to be procured from the shifting sasquatch in her foyer.
“Ohmygod. You were a one-night stand, weren’t you? And now what?” She advanced on him quickly, her anger quickly spreading as her blood pressure rose, and her head started to ache all over again. As she pulled closer into his space, she noticed a heavy duffle bag lying close behind his feet. Oh no. That better not be his.
“What the hell is that? You don’t think you’re staying here with me?! Just because you have…” She couldn’t get the rest out. In the blink of an eye, her doting, kindly shadow turned feral. He rotated her with a twist of her hips, pressing her back into the firm, unfinished oak of her front door, his hands spanning her waist, the tips of his fingers grating harshly against her hips bones. She fought the urge to pull back in fear, having been around Cal plenty by now and listened to his ramblings about local wildlife and bakery desserts enough to know he wouldn’t hurt a fly, but the fear that pushed its way up her throat was tied to something buried much deeper than her currently addled brain could pull into the light.
“I’ve never been here before because I fucked you on a prep table in the commercial kitchen at the lodge after you begged me, begged ME to give you what you needed. You can be rude and bratty and confused all you want but you cannot escape me, my attention, my affection. It’s yours now, it’s always been yours and it will always be yours.” He leaned in, his breath blowing hotly in her ear, his breathing elevated and erratic. “But, for now, I can recognize your need for space, for room to make your own assessments about me, about this club, and I’ll grant you that.” He pulled back a bit, identifying the shadows of fear around the edges of her irises then took a full step back, softening when she let out a shaky breath and relaxed once again.
His eyes were full of care and attention as he spoke. What had she done to deserve the warmth in this man’s eyes? What connection had they shared to pull him to her even now? She wished with all her heart she could remember him, even a little. That she could allow herself to huddle close into his warmth and believe that in spite of everything she was facing, it would all be okay because she had a masculine force of nature at her back. But her previous relationships with family, friends and lovers had all led her to cling tightly to one untenable truth — the more she wanted a man to stay, the more he was apt to leave and take a piece of her with him in the process.
She steeled her spine and when Cal seemingly noticed he wasn’t going to get anywhere with her current attitude, he sighed quietly, kissing her lightly on her uninjured temple and giving her a rough, reassuring rub between her shoulder blades as he passed by her toward the back of the house. She heard his bag bounce down lightly on the bed before quiet footsteps sounded coming back down the hall as she stood, still taking in everything from the foyer.
“I’ve got to go over the Victor’s for a bit to help him with a project.” Cal looked at her a bit, unsurely, as if she was a cracked glass bound to break if he exerted just the wrong pressure at the just right point. She hated that her mixed signals and confusing urges had done this to him. She could tell he was a take-charge sort of man and once she’d probably relished in that particular part of him. Right now though, she just felt raw and ripped, pieces of her former self and her unknown present life not matching up in the slightest, rubbing her aching head just the wrong way. And despite it all, she held herself together, ever the professional bluffer as she coolly nodded back at the father of her unborn child.
“That’s just across the way, right? I should be fine. Lord knows, there’s enough women around here that I shouldn’t get lonely.”
Cal headed toward the door slowly and despite her reassurance
he looked uncomfortable leaving her for even a short while. She felt the urge to push him away, to make another rude remark about his age or say something mean about his homeless appearance and ratty duffle bag, just to force him out the door. But she bit her lip, trying not to let it show on her face how much she needed to be alone, to process things in quiet without anyone hovering over her shoulder.
“Okay then. I should only be an hour or two and I’ll bring supper with me, so don’t try to do anything in the kitchen. Maybe just settle in and take a nap, your bedroom is down at the end of the hall.”
She resisted acknowledging the weirdness of having to be told the location of her bedroom by a stranger who’d never been in her house. Moving further into the room, she put her back to the door and told Cal goodbye, keeping her head facing the kitchen and denying her urge to watch him leave.
She wandered the house like a wayward ghost after he left. Snooping in cabinets she should already know the contents of and smelling candles she’d recently burned. In the kitchen, she opened the pantry, not really hungry, just looking to see what she kept stocked and she happened upon a bottle of wine.
It was the same winery and vintage she’d always preferred and the familiar sight of the label nearly brought her to tears. It was the first sign that this strange new “Shelli” creature was really her. She cradled the sealed bottle to her chest and wandered down the hall into her room. She breezed past the full bookshelves, photo frames and knickknacks, instead heading straight for the bed and burrowing deeply into the covers, still cradling the wine like a small child in her arms.