by Anne Malcom
“I’ll get the plasters, Mom,” I said, trying to stop my tears. You weren’t allowed to cry when moms cried.
“I think we might need something bigger than plasters,” Mom whispered. “But I want you to go to bed. Watch your sister.”
I frowned at her. “I did. She’s sleeping. Now I’m watching my mom.”
“Get the fuck to bed,” Daddy roared, and I jumped because it was loud and he’d been all quiet.
Mom jumped too. She made a weird hurt noise at the back of her throat but managed to pull me into her chest.
I felt safe in Mommy’s arms, mostly. They saved me from monsters under the bed or bad dreams. But Daddy wasn’t a monster or a bad dream. And I was more scared of that.
“Don’t hurt her, Alastair,” Mom asked.
Her. Me. Daddy wouldn’t hurt me. I blinked up at his glassy eyes. They scared me.
He watched Mom and me for a long time. The longest.
“Fuck you and the fucking brats,” he said finally. “You can deal with this shit. I’m not doing it anymore. I can do better than this. Than all of you.”
He swayed weirdly but bent to snatch his keys from the ground. Then he stumbled out the door of the trailer.
Mom stayed still, with me against her chest until the sound of Daddy’s pickup truck roared away into nothing.
Then she said nothing.
Then she cried. In a way that scared me more than Daddy’s eyes.
Not that I ever saw those eyes again.
Mom found Pete almost as soon as Dad was gone. Immediately, actually. Dad split without a second glance, while Pete only had eyes for Mom. He was one of the nurses on call the night I brought her in, eight years old, struggling to hold my crying baby sister, my injured mother leaning heavily on me. She had made the drive, and the rib, which had at that point punctured her lung, made her pass out just as Pete was there to catch her.
Catch all of us.
Not exactly the stuff of fairy tales, a man falling in love with a woman after she stumbles into the hospital he worked at with injuries sustained from an abusive deadbeat husband and two kids in tow.
Not the stuff of fairy tales, but better if you asked me. It wasn’t pretty, and their relationship wasn’t perfect, but it was real. They found each other amongst the cruel and weird world, and it was right. And I had a dad. Polly had a dad. One dad. She didn’t have the memories of the sperm donor. But eight-year-old me did. The bad. And the good. The ones that haunted me because even though I loved Pete with all my heart and soul, a part of me was still eight and wondering and confused by the fact that her dad, the only man in her life, had hurt her mom so bad and left without even writing. Even on my birthday.
I didn’t need a shrink to know that my issues with guys, with commitment, were because of that. I just needed the strength, and the shoes, to get me through it.
But then it wasn’t completely that. Or even a lot because of that. It was a lot because of him.
Because of Gray.
But thinking of him so soon after remembering the day it all began—the ice, the drowning, everything—that was too much for me to bear.
Especially when I was starting to wonder if Keltan had offered me a life raft, and I’d been too broken to take it.
Because Gray.
And because me.
One Year Later
All the literature with romance and fairy tales painted love like a Monet—beautiful on first glance but a big old mess up close. Because of that, people had unrealistic expectations of those encounters that seemed, for a little moment in time, like they might be it.
Until you looked closer and saw the Monet.
Until you went a year without another glimpse. Because things didn’t get sorted in a week. Or a month. Or even six. When hurt was so deep, so tangled in the depths of you, it wasn’t an overnight type of thing. Men didn’t fix it all.
Keltan wanted me to go about saving myself.
So, I did.
I tried at least.
Or maybe I didn’t.
I threw myself into work and my blog and writing more freelance.
And I learned to pretend the stillness I showed the world was something I saw when I looked in the mirror, that chaos wasn’t lingering beneath.
That was until this day.
Until the sunshine and the beautiful chaos of another club party full of delightful men I still had yet to touch, despite the rules and my heart being ripped up anyway. I’d had less than a handful of wholly unsatisfying sexual encounters with men who ticked all the right boxes except one.
Well, technically two.
The first one being they weren’t him.
The second being more literal.
I did it out of stubbornness more than anything else. To prove to myself that I wasn’t ruined by one sexual encounter, by one small collection of moments with him.
My fake orgasms may have fooled the nameless men, but I didn’t fool myself with any of it.
Rosie, thankfully, didn’t mention it. So, I did the same with Luke.
Both of us were pretty good at living our lives, sucking the marrow out of them the best we could while minding the broken pieces. Dancing around them. That’s what this whole grown-up thing was, wasn’t it? Maybe I questioned the fact that I was one because of my lack of ability to say no to overpriced shoes when I needed to make car payments, and not trying to move myself out of my small hometown. But maybe I really was one because I still did the whole living, smiling and enduring thing despite the brokenness that it took Keltan less than a few moments to see and me a lifetime to fight against.
We watched our girlfriends, our family find it.
Even Bull.
That made my heart happy. Tentatively so, for sure. But despite my knowledge about the absence of fairy tales in this world, I hoped that the magic Amy and Gwen got was reserved for him too.
A few weeks before we got to meet her. Bull’s it. His second chance. Because of what the two of us had, the connection in blood not running through our veins but the blood spilled, I was more than a little protective. Not that I needed to be. She’d been perfect.
“I’m leaving now. Better be ready to get your drink on with Mia. I have now heard through my little birds—if you don’t get the Game of Thrones reference, we can’t be friends—that she may or may not be having some kind of romance with—wait for it—Bull.” Rosie paused. I heard a swift intake of breath on the end of the line and a string of curses.
“Dude!” she yelled, though not at me. I knew Rosie was prone to road rage and drove like a maniac. “You get your license in this century or when Hitler was invading Paris, grandpa?” she yelled.
There was a small pause, and then she launched back into conversation seamlessly.
“Okay, yeah. Mind blown. But she is like drop-dead gorgeous—you’ve seen that for yourself. From the grapevine and my birds, she’s also a little insane by the sounds of it, which is, of course, awesome. But just in case, put your fighting nails on.”
The fighting nails were not needed when Rosie, Gwen, Amy and I had drinks with her at Laura Maye’s bar. Not needed at all. She seamlessly fit into our group, not filling the hole Laurie had left but creating a new space for herself, beside the ghost she didn’t even know existed.
Rosie and I had known. Hence our drinking too many cocktails. No. That wasn’t why. We always drank too many cocktails. This was just another reason we used.
In the car on the way home, driven by Skid, a kid I liked and who was looking to become a prospect for the Sons of Templar, Rosie and I had debriefed.
“So, she was cool, don’t we think?” Rosie decided.
She was only slurring slightly. A feat considering she’d had four cocktails and Laura Maye had made them, which made it more like eight regular people cocktails.
“Mia,” Rosie clarified.
I nodded once, the motion making my head spin. I’d had five cocktails.
I may or may not have been drinking my feelings. Chasing away the
thoughts of a friend in the ground and one who wasn’t yet, but he wasn’t in this world either. And nurturing a hope that the totally insane—in the best way—beautiful single mother I’d been drinking with might be able to nurture a seed in ashes.
And then the thoughts of my own ashes came.
Of course, then chocolate eyes haunted my thoughts.
Like silence, alcohol was good for coaxing out thoughts that shouldn’t be thunk.
And getting you drunk. Hence me thinking a word like “thunk” and then rhyming it with another.
“Yeah,” I said quietly, drawing shapes on the condensation of the window. “She was.” I jerked myself up and decided that playing the tortured lovesick girl was so not my part. “Can you believe she was a mom? How old was she when she popped out that kid? Ten?” I asked.
The petite blonde named Mia did not look a day over twenty, nor did she look like she had a teenage daughter. Not only was she petite and didn’t betray any signs of having grown big with a child, she was also, like I mentioned, insane.
Not quite Rosie insane, but she would fit in with the rest of us.
No one mentioned Bull. This wasn’t our first rodeo. Or more likely, we did in passing, then watched the way her cheeks flushed with that movement. Rosie’s eyes darted to me at this small gesture, confirming her “little birds.”
We approved.
Now we could only hope that she had magical powers to bring the dead back to life. Because Bull may have been walking around and breathing, but he wasn’t living.
The silence returned. Ushering in thoughts that were banished when noise reigned. This wasn’t of Keltan, though. This was on the pretty woman Gwen and I had met while at the spa that afternoon. The beautiful single mother with great style, and a great sense of humor, so we’d naturally invited her to drink with us. And now the one who had caught the eye of the toughest and most troubled bikers in the club.
The one whose humanity was nothing more than shreds left behind when my friend left this world.
Was taken.
Brutally.
The scar was still raw. Still taunted me with the fact that it would never heal.
When you lost someone who was an integral part of your world, did that ever heal? The utter bitterness of the realization that you’d never laugh with them over drinks anymore? That you’d never see them smile with the man who filled her world? No, I didn’t think it did.
Now we were drinking with the woman who had the same golden hair as the one we’d buried years ago yet still walked the grass of our memories. Or mine, at least.
I knew there was no grass in Bull’s, only scorched earth that was little more than ash since Laurie was kidnapped, tortured, raped and then murdered for retaliation by a rival club.
Her crime? Love.
Just another causality.
But maybe he had another chance.
Could anything grow on scorched earth?
She was perfect.
Or unperfect. Because Bull didn’t need perfect; he needed someone to recognize the broken parts of him because she had broken parts too. That’s what everyone needed.
Apart from me, obviously. Because I fucked it all up.
But sometimes the stories weren’t about me. Even my own story. I was quite happy to use it to watch other people make their own.
The day before the party was the day that marked another year. Exactly. Four now. I didn’t have it in me to face any kind of battle like I did the year before.
No, I took the day off everything and spent it inside my cocoon of blackness, watching Audrey Hepburn movies and trying not to remember four years ago, when I’d been in a hospital waiting room with the rest of my family, watching the walking corpse of the man I considered a friend stumble through double doors and say, without speaking, that our friend was gone.
Of course I was more vulnerable than ever.
Of course the universe had to kick me when I was down.
In the form of an e-mail.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Running
Snow.
I know what today is. And like every single other day for the past year, you’re on my mind.
Wondering if you’re still running. Or if you’ve found someone else to make you stand still. If you’re wearing red dresses, scaring children in the morning and drinking martinis in the middle of a biker party.
It’s probably not smooth to tell you that. That for the year I’ve been here in the City of Angels, of perpetual summer, I’ve been thinking of Snow. Of the queen. But I don’t give a fuck. Because I’m still running.
And I know today, of all days, you need someone to tell you that it’s okay. To run. To stand still. To fucking embrace that broken shit you try so hard to separate yourself from.
Yours
K
In the movies, when heroines got heartfelt letters from their sweethearts, they read them over and over, staining them with their tears or fading the paper with the sheer amount of reading.
But this wasn’t a movie.
And he wasn’t my sweetheart.
Yet I stayed up all night poring over the words anyway.
Because I was self-deprecating like that.
Then I got my ass up. After deleting the e-mail.
Made some resolutions as I got ready for the club party celebrating Gwen and Cade’s anniversary. The resolutions were not to let him fuck me up anymore. Not to have him in the back of my mind like a squatter in an abandoned building. I’d try to find a way to evict him.
Mia’s daughter’s band was playing. Mia’s sixteen-year-old daughter, who was dating seventeen-year-old Killian. Though he didn’t look seventeen. He was a man already, and he should have been breaking hearts all over Amber. He probably was now that his man-boy heart only belonged to one girl. I’d known him since he was in diapers, known his dad too, until he died. His mom was a fucking shit show of a human being. His remaining blood failed him after his father died, but the club would never do so.
I had no doubt he’d be after a patch the second he turned eighteen.
Again, I couldn’t be happier, watching the way he watched the pretty young teenager with a penchant for boho and the most amazing voice I’d ever heard.
So yeah, I’d been happy. Until I lost my breath. Until my eyes had stuttered on chocolate ones that swirled the second I locked my gaze on them.
My guess had been right. He did grow his hair longer, so it curled down the nape of his neck.
“Here,” Rosie shoved a martini glass in my face, her eyes on the same place as mine. “You totally need this.”
I took it, swallowing once, twice, three times as Keltan’s eyes never moved from mine, even though he was fisting a beer bottle of his own and talking to Gwen.
“Yeah, I totally need about twelve more,” I agreed, tearing my eyes from him. Stopping myself from thinking about how fucking good he looked in his plain tee and jeans. Better than I remembered. Bigger than I remembered. Bigger in the sense of his muscles had grown, and bigger in the sense that his presence seemed to take over the entire party. Which was a feat in itself considering the caliber of men attending, each of whom radiated masculine hotness and testosterone. All of whom were nothing. Not when I only had eyes for one man.
Rosie’s hand gave mine a quick squeeze, her kohl-rimmed eyes deep with sympathy. “You good?”
I nodded once. “Of course. It’s been a year. And it was one night. I’m over it,” I lied.
Rosie, the good friend she was, pretended she believed me.
I tried to pretend too.
I’d been dodging him the entire time. Physically, at least. My eyes kept betraying me and going in his direction. Since I couldn’t control my gaze finding him, I made sure that every time his stare met mine, I was glaring.
His stare met mine a lot. It was burning into me the entire afternoon.
“You still got your rules?” Dwayne asked,
sipping his beer, the column of his throat moving pleasingly as he did so.
Dwayne was an attractive male, so I appreciated it. His real name wasn’t actually Dwayne, but we all called him that since Gwen had arrived and christened him due to his unbearable likeness to The Rock. His features were a little more harsh, rough, wild than the man himself, but that made him hotter. And the hardness behind his eyes too. Chaos that didn’t exactly hide, but you didn’t see it purely because you were looking straight at it.
I sipped my own drink, trying to focus on the attractive man’s face and not look to Keltan for the thousandth time. “What?”
He gave me a hard yet soft look, tinged with chaos. “You know, the rules against you having any sort of relationship with anyone in the club?”
My brows rose in surprise. “You know about them?”
He chuckled, the sound rough and pleasing. “Babe, everyone knows about them. Look at you.” His eyes went down to my dress. I’d deviated from my usual black and gone for a nude, tight tank dress with sandals that tied up my legs.
His gaze was hungry. And it didn’t even register downstairs.
Downstairs reactions to stares were reserved for one man. The man I had resolved to forget.
The man at this very party.
Even after a year, my downstairs had reacted almost as violently as my heart with that first glimpse of him.
“Every man in this fuckin’ club knows about the rules because every man in this fuckin’ club has thought about the multiple ways he could attempt to break them,” he murmured, stepping forward a little so the distance between us went from friendly to… something else.
Well, something else for him. My downstairs area still didn’t respond.
“I’ve been lookin’ out for you since college,” he continued. “Also been lookin’ for ways to break those rules too.”
I blinked at him. “Sorry, Dwayne. You may be in a club that prides itself on its ability to break every rule in the book, but not my book. The rules stay.”
He tilted his head, regarding me. “Yeah. Or maybe I’m just not the man to break them.” His voice wasn’t unkind, or even angry. It was knowing. He gave me a grin. “I’ll still be spitballing ides, just in case.”