by Malcom, Anne
As soon as I inhaled the scent of Liam, of Jagger, mixed together like some kind of painfully beautiful aftershave, I knew I needed it on my body.
I regretted that now with that look. With what it told Liam.
But he didn’t say anything, he only looked for a beat longer then disappeared inside the bathroom.
The sound of running of water trickled out.
I stared at the ruined door, now providing no privacy between my bed—Liam’s bed—and the very highly trafficked hallway.
Claw walked past, he stopped when he spotted the damage to the door, and likely me standing in the middle of the room like some kind of tragic statue.
“Jagger’s decided to come for a visit,” he deduced, looking at the ruined hinges, with seemingly little interest or shock.
I nodded once, looking at the blood covering his white tee.
He grinned. “Have fun.” He winked and walked away.
I didn’t reply. Didn’t move. I should’ve done that. Taken off Liam’s tee. Run my fingers through my wet hair, to detangle it, since I likely looked like a total mess right now. But then again, I wasn’t the one covered in blood. Maybe I should’ve run for my life.
But I didn’t.
The door to the bathroom opened.
Liam stepped out.
I held my breath as he made his way over to me.
His hands were clean now. In a manner of speaking.
He stopped inches from me, though he didn’t touch me. I was thankful for that. Because his sheer presence was overwhelming. My chest constricted with his nearness, with the truth, staring me in the face with emerald eyes.
“Did someone get hurt?” I whispered.
“A lot of people got hurt,” he replied.
I clenched my jaw. “Anyone in the club?” Despite the fact I was still their prisoner, I didn’t bear ill will to anyone wearing a cut. In fact, the thought of more harm coming to the club filled me with unease.
The thought of something happening to Liam had me poised for a mental breakdown. I was failing to distance myself the way the story required.
But this was more than a story.
“No one in the club,” he replied.
I exhaled.
“Fernandez’s men?”
I didn’t expect him to answer, I was a civilian and a rat to boot.
But he nodded. “No one that can give us shit, but we still got to dig graves.”
My hands shook at the casual way he was speaking about death, about murder. That shouldn’t have affected me. I knew better than anyone how cheap life was in war. No, even in times of peace, life was cheap. In times of war life was worth nothing, death was worth only a little more, as markers in a scorebook that no one would be considered a victor in.
“Killing isn’t easy,” he said, as though he were reading my mind. Or at least my face. I feared my empty façade was no longer present.
“Killing is hard, even for monsters,” he continued.
I frowned at him. “That’s what you think you are? A monster?”
His stare burned into me. “Isn’t that what I am?”
I looked at his eyes, glassy, bloodshot, pupils not quite pinpricks, but close.
“You’re high,” I said instead of answering his question.
He blinked. It was a long, slow, absent blink. “Not quite.”
I gaped at him, first, he had been a stranger who looked like Liam. Then I thought I was getting to know the stranger, not liking him much, but knowing him. Thought I knew he was a version of Liam. But this was evidence that I didn’t know anything about this stranger. Or even anything about Liam.
“You said drugs were the instrument for the weak minded,” I accused. I didn’t even know where my judgment was coming from. I’d seen addicts, interviewed them, listened to their struggles with illness, and not once did I pass judgment. Everyone was trying to self-medicate to cure the disease called life.
His hands took hold of my shoulders. Tightly. “Look at me,” he whispered. “Really fuckin’ look at me. My mind seem strong to you?” His voice quivered as he spoke. His voice actually shook. His body didn’t. The strong, sculpted muscles stayed taut, he stood tall, he exuded physical strength. But the absent hopeless emptiness in his eyes, that quiver in his voice overpowered all of that physical strength.
Over my weeks here, I’d seen glimpses of weakness. Of pure, unobstructed sorrow. A pain so deep that even I couldn’t understand it.
Every glimpse was a pinprick. A thousand pinpricks into the exposed nerve that was my heart.
But he recovered from those lapses quickly. He shielded himself from showing any more than a glimpse. Which was a good thing too, because had I been presented with this, this shell of a man, this broken soul in a biker cut, I might’ve broken sooner. But he was breaking now, and I had no choice but to break too. To fracture all of my anger, my false hate I’d been harboring toward him.
My hand was shaking when I lifted it to his face to wipe away the single tear that had leaked out of his hollow eyes.
That single tear was equivalent to blood gushing out of a mortal wound.
“All my life has been about since I met you, it’s been about protecting you,” he said. Another warm tear trailed over my finger. “You are the most precious thing in the world to me. And you’re so fucking fragile.” He squeezed my shoulders harder, as if to make a point. “So fucking good. And this world is not fucking good. Even as a boy who knew shit, I knew that. And when the war turned me into a man, I knew it better. I got a chance...” he trailed off.
I knew what he was doing then. He was trying to explain how it happened. How it all came about, the lie that set us both on a course of destruction.
I waited, cupping his scarred and tear-stained face.
He sucked in a ragged breath. “The club’s in a war, Peaches,” he said finally, voice rougher than before. Whether he couldn’t find the words in his drug addled mind or he lost the courage to give me the explanation that fifteen years coming, I wasn’t sure.
I found myself relieved that he didn’t give it to me.
Because I sensed once he gave me that explanation I would be forced out of this limbo I’d placed us both in. I’d have to make a decision. There would have to be a finality to it.
To us.
I wasn’t ready for the decision yet.
“I know the club’s in a war,” I said in response.
Something moved in his face, some kind of panic so visceral I thought there was an immediate threat.
His hands moved from his sides to clutch me by the neck as if someone were trying to rip me from him.
“This war is different,” he rasped. “This is one that could take you from me. Because of your involvement with me, you could get caught up in this. And you wouldn’t just die. You’d die in one of the ugliest ways possible, they’d...” He trailed off. More tears streamed down his face. “I couldn’t survive the knowledge of what they’d do to you. I couldn’t live through knowing what happened. And you’d have to suffer it.” His voice had that same edge of panic as his expression, as if intruders were about to break through the ruined door and make truth of his predictions.
“That’s not going to happen,” I said with a surety that I didn’t feel.
He either didn’t hear me or believe me.
“You’ve barely lived your life,” he said. “You’re young still. You have only lived a wrinkle of your life. There’s so much ahead of you. Once you leave me, once you leave all of this behind you, you’ll live that life the way you’re meant to. But you can’t leave it behind you, not right now, not while you’re in the middle of it. I don’t know how to get you out, I don’t know how to get you through. I know I have to get you through. Unscathed. Because that’s my greatest fear, harm coming to you. Coming to you because of me, because of the life I chose to take me away from you.”
“Stop,” I said, my voice firm even though my soul was breaking. “I’m here, Liam. I’m going to get throug
h. Nothing is going to happen to me. Nothing is going to happen to you either, I promise.”
His eyes cleared. “You can’t make promises like that.” He spoke a truth we both already knew too well.
“I can,” I whispered a lie we both needed.
I stepped away from him, his grip tightened for a millisecond before he let me go.
I moved around him, grabbing hold of the edges of his cut, feeling the worn and soft leather, a symbol of the hard life he was living.
I wanted to hate the cut. For what it took from me. For what it did to Liam. But I knew that it wasn’t the cut or the club that ruined him, it was another uniform, another symbol. If anything, it was the cut that saved him. Whatever of him was left to save.
He let me slip it off.
I hung it carefully on the back of a chair, staring at the grim reaper on the back for a moment. When I turned, I found emerald eyes, intense and focused like he was scared I’d fall right off the face of the earth if he moved his gaze.
I knew the feeling.
“Sit.” I pointed to the bed.
He obeyed.
“Boots.” I nodded my head downward to the muddy black motorcycle boots he always wore. I wondered how much of that was mud, and how much was blood.
Did it matter? Dirt and blood was all the same when it met the bottom of motorcycle boots.
Liam complied.
I bit my lip as I regarded him in his jeans and long-sleeved Henley.
A hunger that I’d pretended hadn’t been present and ever-growing was no longer easy to ignore.
Whatever had died between us—if anything ever had—the carnal way in which my body responded to his had only grown. I didn’t even know I was capable of feeling such an animalistic need. With the small number of men I’d had after him, I was only going through the motions. It was to see if a warm body might be able to chip some of the ice from my soul.
But this wasn’t a warm body. It was a soul as cold as my own.
It was Liam.
It was Jagger.
I didn’t know which man I was more attracted to.
It didn’t much matter.
I swallowed roughly.
Liam watched my throat. The veins in his neck stood out as if he were exerting some kind of great strength other than sitting on the bed.
“Don’t look at me like that, Peaches,” he begged.
Hunger ravaged his eyes. Pure carnal desire that shook me to the core.
But the pleading in his voice had me clutching onto reason and letting go of need.
“Lie down,” I said, my own voice little more than a rasp.
His eyes lingered on my body for a long and uncertain beat before he did as I asked.
He moved against the wall so I could lie beside him.
At first, my body was stiff, holding myself tight so I didn’t accidentally brush my skin against his. This was the closest I’d been to him voluntarily. I was in a bed with Liam, so close but also farther away than when we’d had an ocean between us. I ached to curl up to him, encase myself in his arms that had been second nature in another life.
But I couldn’t trust my instincts. Or I no longer had the right to act on them at least. I had belonged to a man named Liam and he had belonged to me. But in another world. Not in this one.
We lay there for a long while, side by side, not touching but somehow finding what little comfort we could in each other.
Darkness blanketed the room at some point, turning everything into shadows.
“I’m Jagger now,” he whispered against the darkness, speaking as though we were in the middle of a conversation, I wasn’t sure if it was the drugs or if it was us. “You know that. I’ve proved that to you.”
“No,” I said firmly as a response to the hopelessness in his tone. “You’ll always be Liam to me. Even if it’s only to me.”
I couldn’t decide whether I was lying or not. And sometime after trying to figure it out, impossibly, I fell asleep.
* * *
I expected him to be gone in the morning when sunlight and sleep heralded away the haze of drugs and whatever else had brought him here.
I wanted him to be gone in the morning, so I didn’t see him in the sunlight. So I didn’t wake up with him. Because even doing that once, I’d create a memory, and if there was one thing in the world that lasted forever, it was a memory. I knew that all too well.
He wasn’t gone.
It became painfully apparent when I woke, not curled into the fetal position like had become the norm for all these years.
No, I awoke curled up in a position that my body remembered, one that I’d forced my mind to forget, one that was the reason I cried myself to sleep, falling apart and woke up trying to hold myself together, even in my dreams.
But someone else was holding me together.
At the same time as they were ripping me apart.
I didn’t try to rectify this situation as soon as it became apparent that I’d searched for Liam in my sleep and that he’d curled his arms around me, holding me tight to his chest.
I didn’t move.
Didn’t breathe.
I wanted to force myself back to sleep so I could stay here in oblivion.
But I was awake.
Liam, of course, with his new super badass man senses knew this immediately, since his arms tightened around me.
“What was your trauma?” he asked in a voice that signified he’d been awake a lot longer than I had, it wasn’t gravelly and choked with sleep like it had been that morning in the kitchen.
I sucked in a breath. It was the question I’d expected weeks ago. On the night that both of us itched for answers but didn’t have the strength to ask the questions. I wondered what gave Liam the strength. Maybe now he’d let some of his weaknesses go, he could find it. Or maybe he needed to feign strength after last night.
I didn’t have enough wherewithal to figure that out moments after waking. Nor did I have any self-preservation to deflect the question with one of my own.
Maybe that was his intention, maybe he hadn’t asked the question that night because he knew he couldn’t get answers unless my guard was down.
Or shattered.
“I dated after you,” I said, my voice still thick with sleep. “Not in the first four years. Not once. I didn’t even think about it. I didn’t even see men. Not live ones anyway. I only saw you.”
His arms tightened around me and I tried to tell myself to move from this position that was far too intimate for this story.
For this life.
But I didn’t move.
“If it were up to me, I don’t think I ever would’ve wanted to start with anyone else,” I continued. “Mostly because I didn’t imagine anyone else could give me what you gave me, and a little because I couldn’t survive anyone else taking away from me like you did. But it wasn’t up to me. Moreover, it was a decision I made because of my family. They worried. They meddled.” I rolled my eyes, making sure to keep them safely focused on the door with the ruined hinges instead of the man who ruined my heart. “You know them.” I paused, violently and brutally. “Well, you knew them,” I muttered.
Liam’s arms flexed around me in what I supposed was some kind of flinch.
“So to appease them, I dated,” I continued, forcing myself to pretend that after last night I still didn’t care about his pain. “Sporadically because of my job. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. It was almost kind of...nice. Empty. But nice not to be so fucking lonely all the time.” I shrugged, trying to shrug off the truth that right here, right now, imprisoned with the man I’d mourned, who’d let me mourn him, was the least alone I’d felt in a decade.
When I needed that loneliness, when it was vital to survival, it didn’t come.
“Nothing was serious,” I continued. “Nothing ever could be. Not just because of...” I trailed off. “My job didn’t exactly foster relationships,” I said, a half-truth to cover up the reality that went unspoken but unava
ilable. “Men tended to be threatened by me. My job. They don’t like women who don’t want to be protected from the horrors of the world, women that seek them out. It doesn’t bode well for their fragile masculinity. It was whatever.”
I did a weird shrug with Liam’s arms still around me.
“I didn’t need to be tied down,” I said to the door. “Marcus was no different than the rest. We were casual. He was nice.”
I paused, still focused on the door, sitting at an awkward angle, closed as much as it could be given the damage Liam had done to it. I hadn’t even bothered trying to close it last night. I wondered who did it. If Liam had gotten up at some point and done it or a passerby had taken it upon themselves to protect our privacy and my modesty. It was a laughable thought. These were men that fucked women in front of an entire party. They didn’t protect privacy or modesty.
I focused back on my story, on Marcus. It was almost easy to talk about it now, to think about it. Well, it would never be easy, but years of therapy had made it bearable at least. “He was nice,” I repeated. “Until he wasn’t. He got...intense.”
I chose not to give Liam the specifics because he’d made it apparent how fragile his temperament was these days and I could already feel the tangible change in the air and the way his body had stiffened even with the prelude to the event.
So no, telling Liam about the broken nose, fractured ribs and sprained wrist would do nobody any good. Though there was no good here anyway.
“I broke it off,” I said, not mentioning that me breaking it off consisted of threatening him with the gun my brother bought me, but I never used. I didn’t press charges, even though that went against everything I believed as a feminist. About punishing men who believed their right was to hurt and control women. Men made women fear breaking up with them because a heartbroken man could turn into a monster in a moment. Women shouldn’t have to take the fears of a man’s fragility, turning them into a punching bag.
But this was a world of ‘shouldn’t have tos.’ So women did.
And my reaction to having this kind of violence turned toward me was exactly the opposite of how I thought I’d react. I wasn’t sure if it was fear that stopped me from reporting him at first. It was emptiness. It was an exhaustion of carrying around all my inside trauma. Maybe there was a sick part of me that liked having the outside trauma to match. Whatever it was didn’t make sense. Damaged people rarely make sensible decisions when the world damages them even more.