by Anne Malcom
But sleeping in those arms was one hundred times better than my Tempur-Pedic pillow that took three months to pick out. In his sleep, his body was still hard, but it was relaxed, almost bordering on vulnerable. But not quite. The way he clutched me to him seemed like he was expecting someone to try and wrench me away while he slumbered, and he was ready to wake up and fight whoever tried.
I toyed with the idea of ignoring the not-so-gentle knock at my door, curl into Gage—who was still asleep, if his relaxed breaths were anything to go by—and pretend the sun wasn’t up, that it would be as simple as staying in bed, naked and safe in the arms of the man who was the antithesis of safety.
But the knocking persisted.
And I was one of those people who, when I was awake, I was awake. Once I had abandoned my dreams—or more accurately, my nightmares—I was ready to proceed in getting through another day.
For once, I wasn’t just ready to proceed and get through another day.
I was terrified of what the day would hold.
And it meant something. That I was alive. Properly and truly alive.
Gage was little more than a dead weight, and it took considerable effort and jostling just to get myself from under him—yet he stayed asleep. I wondered how tired a person must need to be to sleep that deep. Something warmed my terrified heart, because a person can’t be just tired to sleep that hard. A person had to feel safe, utterly and completely safe, in order to render themselves so vulnerable.
And a lot of people might argue that something like sleeping deeply when one was super tired wasn’t something you could control. I disagreed. Because I had the sense that Gage controlled everything about himself. His violence and menace weren’t borne out of chaos. No, it was structured. Controlled. He controlled it because if he let his guard down, his demons would eat him alive. So he chose to live in danger and violence in order to keep the demons at bay.
Much like I controlled my safety and logic in order to survive.
He just went a different way.
Okay, maybe a way different way. On a different planet type of way.
And yet somehow he was there. Naked in my bed, the sheets riding low on his hips so I was treated to the full glimpse of his muscles from the sun streaming in the windows. I didn’t think men had eight-packs in real life.
Gage did.
I doubted he had any body fat percentage, he was that ripped.
His entire chest was tattooed in such an intricate design, the art of it beyond anything I’d ever seen. And that was saying something since art was my life. My secret life, but my life nonetheless.
Though I knew I had to get up before the knocking finally woke Gage, I paused to feast my eyes on his chest.
It was like Gage himself, beautiful and ugly at the same time. Savage in its construction but painfully stunning to look at. From shoulder to shoulder, spanning his entire chest to the middle of his ribs, were the gates of Hell. It couldn’t be anything else. A hooded skeleton with illuminated eyes was perched in the middle, his hood and plumes of smoke snaking up toward Gage’s neck. Shadowed clouds were the background of the piece. Then, downward, merging into the skeleton’s body were two open large gates, their light giving way to darkness. Right in the middle of them was the Devil himself, holding a sword in one hand and beckoning with a clawed talon with his other. He stood on a floor of flaming human skulls.
That was the tattoo on close inspection. At first glance, the entire design and the details within it were in the shape of a human skull. The talent was incredible.
What it meant was horrifying.
Gage was literally wearing Hell above his heart.
And if that was on the skin above it, it was agony to think of what lay underneath.
But I couldn’t think on that now.
Not with the morning sun illuminating the darkness.
So I forced my eyes down, to not linger in the pit of pain.
His glorious abs had no ink and I was glad of it. Right where his hips went into that delicious male V was where the tattoos started again. A dark garden of decaying roses and crumbling ruins spanned his hips and moved downward.
My stomach hungered to yank the sheet down, expose the tattoos and more of the dark hair creeping upward from his groin.
I ached to explore him in the sunlight, to trace every inch of the beautiful artistry with my fingers. And my aching and ruined body craved something else. I clenched my tender thighs at the mere thought of it. The memory.
Desire for him consumed me in a dark way that definitely wasn’t healthy.
My eyes jerked to his arms, splayed along the bed now that I wasn’t encased in them. In the harsh light of day, the scars were just that—harsh. Brutal. Evidence of something literally ripping at his flesh, grinding it up. It didn’t look real.
It couldn’t be real.
But it was.
Because reality was always stranger than fiction. And it was always uglier. Harder to swallow. That’s why everyone preferred the candy cane fiction. Why happy-ever-afters always earned more than the tragic endings.
Because people didn’t want to be reminded that reality was harsh and cruel. They wanted to pretend, until the last possible moment, that life was like a Disney movie.
But there was no Disney here.
A tear ran down my cheek. I knew, was certain those scars—and the story behind them—were the key to him.
To unraveling him.
To destroying us both.
Because scars like that never healed. Neither did the person wearing them. I knew that better than anyone; I just didn’t have to look at my scars in the mirror every day.
My hands itched with the need to hold a paintbrush. To immortalize this moment, the way I felt living within it. To communicate it the only way I knew how. To hold onto this feeling, to put it somewhere tangible where I could revisit it after Gage’s chaos had torn out of my life. Because he had to tear out of it. He was a fire, an inferno, and I was shutting out all his air with my calmness. Fires needed oxygen to burn.
It was only a matter of time.
Hence my need to make this moment count before it was stolen away from me by that tragic reality everyone pretended didn’t exist.
But the person outside my apartment was obviously not going away, and I didn’t want Gage to wake up. I wanted to continue to keep him safe here. To let him sleep without demons.
For as long as I could, at least.
Because there was no way to fight off the demons. They always won in the end.
I padded quietly to my closet, yanking at my robe, hating that I didn’t have time to put anything on underneath. It was… naughty being naked underneath the fabric—no matter how thick and unsexy—and answering the door to an unknown caller.
The pure thought of such a thing would’ve had me erupting in hives in any other situation. I wouldn’t have been able to walk through my living room and down my stairs in normal circumstances. But these circumstances were far from normal, so I did walk through my living room and down the stairs, pausing to kick my ripped pajamas underneath the sofa and not entirely unpleasant pulse in my core.
I went downstairs, the ghosts of last night caressing me and abusing me at the same time.
I turned and yanked the door handle backward just as the knocks paused.
The second I opened the door, I smiled.
It was instinctive. Habit. A calm happiness settled over me at the sight of the person I would’ve said personified chaos—until I met Gage.
“Well, finally,” a voice snapped. “What do you think you’re doing, leaving your poor old grandmother freeze in the cold? I could catch my death out here,” she accused, rubbing her arms across the smooth cashmere of her sweater to make her point known. My grandmother committed to her theatrics completely and fully. Always.
I smiled, knowing the sharpness in her voice was as fake as her hair color. But like her bright red locks, it was flawless. Only those who knew her best—me, in other w
ords—would recognize the slight warmness in her tone and in her eyes.
I leaned back on my heels and folded my arms. “We’re in California, so I’m thinking you catching your death is one of the least possible outcomes of you standing out here at eight in the morning. I haven’t heard about any persons reporting anything more than a slight sniffle from exposure in Amber, and that’s more likely to do with the ease of the spread of the common cold than the actual temperature,” I said, my voice calm and orderly.
My grandmother pursed her lips, eyes warm. She didn’t speak; she was used to this kind of stuff from me and knew I wasn’t finished.
I wasn’t. “And a certain woman, perhaps even the one standing in front of me, told me that age was just a state of mind. She also threatened to scalp me if I ever mentioned the word ‘old’ in any kind of proximity to her.” My eyes flickered upward in a poor imitation of her practiced sharp and teasing gaze “As for the ‘poor’ part of that little statement, you’re wearing a fur vest and your purse is worth as much as my mortgage payments,” I commented, my voice dry and my words accurate.
My grandmother was old money with a decidedly new age state of mind. It was a chaotic and dueling marriage, but she made it her own, like she always did.
She scrunched up her barely lined face—thanks to one of the best cosmetic surgeons in the country, she looked at least twenty-five years younger than her eighty years. “Oh, are you ever just going to let me be wildly dramatic and wildly fabulous without hindering me with such things like details?” she snapped. “Plus, this purse could be a knock-off, the fur could be faux and I could’ve lost all my money in a poker game that I played with a Calvin Klein model with a decidedly deceiving poker face.”
I smirked. “You don’t play poker.”
“Exactly. Which was why I might’ve lost all of my money purely because I was bored and it was a Tuesday. You don’t know that.”
“I know your poker face is better than anyone in the world’s, despite the detail that you never play poker,” I replied, quirking my brow. “And you told me that you were more likely to fight a crocodile in the wilds of Australia than be seen dead—or alive—wearing anything fake. Including your fur. Which isn’t politically correct anymore, in case you were wondering,” I added, though I knew it was a vintage piece belonging to her mother, not something she purchased on a regular basis.
She rolled her eyes. “Not once in my life have I wondered or cared about what’s politically correct, Lo,” she replied, using the nickname one of only two people could call me. The other was dead, so I guessed it was only her who could call me that now.
“Why are you leaving me standing on the doorstep like some common postman?” she added, spitting the word out as if it weren’t the champagne she drank from France and merely a cheap imitation.
Her turquoise-painted eyes flickered over me in suspicion, as if she was only now noting my attire—or lack thereof. She knew me almost better than I knew myself, so she was aware of how out of character it would be to answer the door in a robe, something she did all the time. Though she would be wearing a silk kimono and cradling a glass of wine with a splash of orange juice. Or a martini with no orange juice to be seen.
“You’re about as likely to answer the door in a robe as I would be to be wearing faux fur,” she said, voicing my thoughts. Her pink-painted lips parted to reveal sparkling white teeth as she smiled wide. “Has it happened?” she asked, voice hopeful. “Has Hell finally frozen over?” She scrunched her nose up again. “I hope I’ll get a full refund. I had a prepaid one-way ticket there. It’s a prestigious place, you know, and I wanted to know I got the best real estate.”
I rolled my eyes to hide my growing discomfort at her advancing years. No matter how good her plastic surgeon was, or how hungry her energy for life was, life was finite. The thought of her light going out filled me with so much dread, I could barely breathe around the pain.
Because that’s when I would be truly alone. When the second and last person to truly understand me, to accept me, left this world. I’d have my parents, whom I loved, but it was different. Like life, the number of people in this world who truly saw you for who you were and celebrated that were finite.
“You’re never going to die, Nana,” I said, forcing the bitterness of the words and their untruth from my tongue. “You already said you were going to do the whole Vanilla Sky thing, despite how badly that turned out for Tom Cruise.” I wasn’t lying. She had all sorts of harebrained schemes—this was only her latest.
She waved her hand. “Well obviously I’ll have you for company, I’ve already got plans in place to kidnap you when you’re in your early sixties and freeze you. I won’t tell you the exact date because that would spoil the surprise.” She narrowed her eyes. “Stop stalling,” she demanded, as if I were the one talking about future kidnappings. “Have you got a dead body up there or something?” Her eyes widened like a kid in the proximity of ice cream. “First of all, if you do, I’m so proud. You’re finally breaking free of those shackles constructed by society. And second, shame on you. You always promised you’d call me when you needed help burying a body,” she chastised.
I shook my head. “And I always promised that it was not a matter of when I killed someone, considering burying a body—or creating one—is not on my bucket list,” I replied, gritting my teeth at the fact that my grandmother was saying all this in jest, yet she didn’t know how close to the truth she was. A naked man lay in my bed. One who had created a body. But I doubted he’d need help burying it. Especially from an eighty-year-old woman.
“Whatever.” She waved dismissively, her jewelry glinting in the morning light. She uttered the word with the same attitude of a teenager.
And my eighty-year-old grandmother had the mindset of one. As well as the personal style of a fashionista in their early twenties.
She had on a bright pink beret, somehow not clashing with her expertly styled and curled crimson hair. In addition, she was wearing a matching pink fur gilet. Large diamonds decorated her ears and neck. She never left the house without diamonds. She sometimes left the house in a silk kimono, but never without diamonds.
My grandmother had never grown up and was always of the opinion that normalcy was death. How my father had turned into the ordered and sensible man he did was beyond me—maybe from the grandfather who died before Dad finished high school. But maybe his orderly life was the ultimate act of rebellion that he’d found some kind of solace in. I knew he resented his mother for not giving him the upbringing he gave me. The nuclear family. The white picket fence.
My grandmother once said, “I’d rather be impaled on a white picket fence than live behind one.”
I’d gotten my sensible and ordered traits from my father.
But I had a wildness in me that I knew I’d inherited from my grandmother. She knew it too, which was one of the reasons we got on so well. She was always trying to coax it out of me, urge me to do something ‘fun,’ and doing something fun with my grandmother more often than not meant doing something illegal.
I was more inclined to let her lead me astray before me clinging to my sensible roots was for survival instead of habit.
And for the past ten years, it was for survival.
She understood that. Let me be. As much as someone like her could, at least. Because she was hurting too. Bleeding. Not like me, but she was wounded deeply. Though she didn’t let those cuts fester, bleed, continue to drain the life from her like I had. She’d only thrown herself into life more, with fewer reservations—if she’d ever had any in the first place.
But she didn’t abandon me, despite the fact that my coping mechanism was the polar opposite of hers. She never called, never planned visits—since she never usually planned, because “that’s not how fabulous things happen.” She would just turn up on my doorstep, like right now.
And usually my lack of a life meant that was never a problem. She was never interrupting plans because I never had them, though
not for the same reason as her.
“So,” she jerked me into the present. “Why are you guarding the door like some Brit outside Buckingham Palace?” she demanded. “Well, not exactly like one of those pompous pricks, because you’re moving and talking and wearing a lot less.” She waggled her eyebrows.
“Oh my gosh,” she exclaimed, her eyes going wide in realization and peering up the stairs. “You’ve got someone up there. And not a dead body. A live one. A man one.” Her eyes went over me, electrified with a youth that not many had when they were young, let alone eighty. “You finally got laid!” She clapped in glee.
Heat crept up my neck. “Not finally,” I snapped. “I’m not a virgin.” She knew that because she was the one I’d told about the fumbling encounter that was my very first time. I hadn’t gone into details, because I didn’t do sharing of such personal things, but I told her enough to let her know the experience was not one I was keen to repeat.
“This is a different kind of virginity,” she said, waving in dismissal. “There’s the first time and then there’s the last time. You know, the time that changes everything and you’ll never be the same again?” She nodded, not to me but to herself. “You’ve had it.”
I groaned, palming my forehead. “Can we please not talk about this?”
“If you can’t talk about life-changing sex with your grandmother, then who can you talk to?”
I raised my brow. “Um, anyone else on the entire planet? Or no one?”
She winked.
“And you’re the one not letting me in and causing me to come to such realizations on the street, so you’ve really only got yourself to blame,” she continued, her sly grin still in place. “You’ve got to learn how to lie better, my darling.” She patted my hand, and then, with a strength that surprised me, she pushed past me and damn near skipped up the stairs. “Now let’s see this hunk of man. And find out if his grandfather is single. And still alive,” she sang while ascending.
“Shit,” I muttered, closing the door and resting my head against the wood. It wasn’t that I was embarrassed of Gage. It was the exact opposite. I knew my grandmother would approve, wholeheartedly, especially given the fact that he was in a motorcycle club that may or may not break the law on a daily basis.