by Anne Malcom
I reasoned that Bull would be climbing the steps to get to Gray’s apartment on the second floor of the tired apartment building. I could hear the thump of motorcycle boots. Or maybe I was just imagining it.
Either way, I took hurried and painful steps to the door.
“Lucy!” Gray called from behind me. “You better not be goin’ anywhere,” he warned.
The sofa made a sound signifying the loss of his body, and his feet crunched through the bottles and wrappers. My hand opened the door at the same time Gray’s found my injured wrist.
I let out another sound of pain just as Bull stepped into the frame.
His face was marble at the beginning. Then the Devil lurked behind his eyes as he focused on my bruised face. Then down to the tee which was hanging on by a literal thread, exposing my bra and blackened breasts.
Then the Devil didn’t lurk. The Devil reigned. And focused a chilly glare. On Gray. On the hand at my wrist that I was reasonably sure was already broken.
It took him less than a second for all of that.
Another second to yank his gun, silencer attached, out of his cut, point it at Gray’s blond head and pull the trigger.
The soft pop was an echo in my head. Warm liquid splattered on my face as the pressure on my wrist released. There was a loud thump as a body hit the floor.
My head was about to move downwards but Bull grasped my chin gently, like it was made of china. But still with enough force to stop the movement.
The Devil still lurked, but he meant me no harm.
“Don’t, sweetheart,” he said quietly. “Don’t look. You don’t need the image of that in your soul.”
The softness in his voice, added with the sheer amount of words that were usually reserved for Laurie—he felt the same love for her too, despite him not letting it go anywhere until she was eighteen—was what made me pause.
For a second.
Then I put my uninjured hand on his wrist. He got the gesture, sighed. Then looked at me with something akin to pride and let me go.
He stepped into the apartment, shutting the door behind him, letting the daylight stay out there.
We weren’t in daylight here. Only shadows.
Plus, I doubted that any passing residents would take kindly to seeing a dead body if they glanced into the apartment.
Laurie wouldn’t take kindly to me putting the man she loved in prison for murdering my boyfriend either.
I moved back to accommodate Bull’s large expanse. My head went downwards.
Gray’s hair was no longer a dirty gold. It was red, pinky white in places. There were chunks of gray littered in the locks.
My stomach rolled. Once. I swallowed the vomit at the almost headless corpse of the man I thought I loved.
And then I promised myself I’d never do it again.
Love.
Bull and I had shared a connection after that. After what he did for me, I owed him a lot. Not just the killing but everything else. The covering up. The car crash he’d rigged to explain away my injuries. The silence he gave to everyone who questioned it.
I gave the same silence to everyone but Rosie.
She listened to me recount it in the emotionless and flat voice I’d come to adopt since that day. Her own face was emotionless. Until the end. Until two tears trickled down her face.
Rosie didn’t cry.
Not ever.
It didn’t last long. That deep kind of sadness that only the person who loved you deeply could feel for you. Next came the fury. “If he wasn’t already dead, I’d kill him. Slowly,” she whispered. Her tone brokered no doubt within me. She would have. I could’ve called her and got the same result. But I didn’t want that on her soul. Nor did I want it on Bull’s. But I knew he was practiced at killing, and I hadn’t actually planned on him doing it. He’d been a little… trigger-happy. And he hadn’t even blinked.
“Done a lot of bad in my life, Lucy,” he said to me on the way to the hospital, his jaw hard yet voice soft. His hand reached out to squeeze mine. “Killing that fucker for what he did to you? That’s not bad. Not even close.”
I didn’t tell Laurie. I knew Bull wouldn’t either. He protected her from everything. Even the Devil within him.
“And even though he is dead, I’m seriously considering digging him up so I can carve up his corpse,” Rosie added in the same serious tone.
“No,” I whispered. “I need this to be buried. Like him. I need it to stay in the ground and we carry on. I carry on.”
She gave me a sad look. “Of course you’ll carry on,” she said with certainty.
And of course, I did. I had no other choice, after all.
And I didn’t have a choice with Keltan either.
It was Wednesday. Which meant a deadline for my now regular column at Covet. And then it was wine time, with Rosie coming to pick me up. Healthy habits, denial and wine, to get me through.
I stared at my keyboard, the empty space where the words should go taunting me. Taunting me with the reality that a writer, any kind of writer, only sees when the page is empty. Because without the words to fill up our pages, our thoughts were free to confront us with what the words distracted us from.
Reality.
I couldn’t let a man consume me like this.
I couldn’t lose myself.
I couldn’t drown in this.
But I couldn’t breathe without it.
It was insanity. I knew that. The blank page was telling me exactly that.
My head snapped like a rubber band, in that way that it did when the words came. And then I wasn’t looking at a blank page anymore. In fact, I wasn’t looking at anything anymore.
I was in the place where my fingers danced across a keyboard, like that’s where my brain was instead of my head.
Royalty
Princesses.
They are real, of course. Grace Kelly. Diana. Kate.
Audrey Hepburn.
Okay, she technically doesn’t have blue blood, or a crown, but everyone can agree that she is royalty. Plus, haven’t we all seen Roman Holiday?
All iconic, real-life versions of women who embodied the image that Disney has made so darn romantic.
It isn’t the unrealistic expectations of men that have damaged women so much. We aren’t stupid; we quickly see the lack of men on shiny steeds and are educated on the assholes that make up an alarming percentage of the fairer sex.
Mostly we see that princes are not all they’re cracked up to be.
To be a princess as a girl is encouraged. Dress-up gowns made of the most flammable polyester that I worry about young girls being near a flickering candle while dancing around with a plastic crown atop their head and dreams in their mind.
Here’s a secret. We may ditch the polyester (thank GOD) as we turn into women, but a frightful amount of us are still wearing that plastic crown—albeit in our own imagination.
No matter how much we consider ourselves feminists, how independent we can be, how many more opportunities we have to make ourselves into something more than a girl in a polyester dress waiting for a man in tights to come and save us—we still are. Versions of it, for sure, but give a woman an opportunity to be a princess, and I’d wager she’d take it.
Because that’s the secret. Society wants us to be princesses. Not so we can wear pretty dresses and look nice, but so the bigwigs can sell movie tickets. So those plastic crowns keep them in the black.
It’s encouraged to wait for a prince to save us.
But what if we don’t want the title of princess? Despite what the current reigning monarch of England is communicating, we still haven’t gotten it. We don’t have to be princesses.
We can be queens.
We don’t need a crown for that.
Nor do we need polyester dresses.
Or dresses at all.
Or pastels.
*Sits here typing this in black leather pants, the whole outfit as black as my royal heart*
I’m part of a
family that is a different kind of royalty, but the feudal system is still present. So is the idea that a woman can’t rule. Well, at least that’s what they want you to think. I’m lucky enough to have seen firsthand that women can be queens. They might need to be saved every now and then, but most of the time they’re the ones doing the saving, without even knowing it.
Just some food for thought.
You don’t need a man, or a crown, or a dress to be a princess.
Why be princess when you can be queen?
“I’m here.”
I closed the door to my house and stared at the empty cul-de-sac, apart from Mrs. Hesten chopping her roses. She glanced up through the sun, using her hands above her brow to stop her squinting. She gave my tight black skirt a disapproving look, despite the fact that it reached my knees.
I waved.
She nodded tersely back, then went back to her roses.
I focused my attention on the empty, well-kept street, still slumbering in its afternoon nap.
“You’re not here. I’m here. Here being on the street where your car would be, and I do not see it,” I replied, my heels clicking on my cobbled walk as I unlatched the gate to lean against it. I should have a chair put out here; the amount of times Rosie did this was ridiculous.
“I am here, you just can’t see me,” she protested. Though her mouth was muffled in such a way that I pictured her hastily applying lipstick while speeding through the—thankfully—abandoned streets of Amber.
It wasn’t just my geriatric cul-de-sac that dozed at early evening on a Wednesday night; small towns did it too. The air was too hot, and the town was too quiet for much else.
Unless you were in any way connected to the Sons of Templar. Then you knew that though most of the town was sleeping, bikers rarely slumbered, and if they did, either they’d passed out from too much Jack or had too many Janes in their beds.
Though, these days there was less sluttiness from the men. Though Lucky picked up the slack that Cade and Bull, and now Hansen from New Mexico, had left.
“Why do I always fall for this?” I asked myself. I still had the phone to my ear but Rosie wasn’t listening to me, too busy shouting at some “asshole who wouldn’t know a turn signal from a G-spot.”
The glint of glass against the disappearing sun had me push up to standing.
“Okay, that’s not as bad as usual. I was totally thinking you’d only just left the house,” I said into the phone, squinting at the shape of the car that wasn’t a telltale VW Beetle.
It was something much more masculine. And wasn’t driving erratically, so the warning signs went on.
“I haven’t just left,” Rosie protested in my ear. “I’m passing Laura Maye’s bar right now.”
The warning signs flickered with her words—Laura Maye’s bar was still ten minutes away, maybe six with Rosie’s driving. Or more if she crashed. Again.
The black SUV pulled up on the curb, and I did little more than stare as the engine cut off and a large and arguably delicious figure rounded the hood.
I watched his journey, staring from his Ray Ban-covered eyes, to the black tee, to the faded jeans and signature boots.
His sunglasses were locked on me. As were the eyes behind them, I imagined.
His jaw was hard.
“Oh shit,” I muttered into the phone.
Then I realized he had no reason at all to be angry. I was the one who’d been left standing in the middle of a bathroom after being shot at and then having mind-blowing sex with him.
“Chill out, dude,” Rosie said, mistaking my tone. “I’m sure everyone is expecting us, as we are the life of the party, but everyone knows I’m almost always at least an hour late.”
“It’s not that—”
My words were cut off because the phone was taken from my ear.
I watched him coolly but not without rage as he pressed the big red button on it and then slipped it into the back pocket of his jeans.
“We need to talk,” he said by way of greeting, voice rough and firm.
I stared at his sunglasses, my reflection glinting off them. To the observer, I would have looked as I always did, with my signature makeup of winged black eyeliner and red lip, slightly turned down in what most would call a “resting bitch face.” I called it the face that saved me from the world.
Or saved the world from me.
It was almost always blank, bordering on disinterest by default. It turned into a smile with friends, a wonky grin after a lot of cocktails, but mostly it stayed like this. That didn’t mean I wasn’t feeling. It didn’t mean I didn’t observe the slightest twitch to my eye in Keltan’s shades.
“Babe?” he probed.
I’d been silent, fury brewing like the stew my dad made that packed a punch.
“You just pulled my phone from my ear while I was speaking into it,” I said calmly.
He pushed his glasses to the top of his head, sighing as he did so. “I said we needed to talk. I need to explain about last time.” He glanced at my door, then back to me, his eyes going down the entirety of the tight skirt and equally tight off-the-shoulder shirt Mrs. Hesten had been judging not moments before. Though he didn’t judge. The heat in his eyes was unmistakable as he met my cool gaze, which thawed only slightly with the heat.
“Okay,” I said, my voice still calm.
Perhaps if he knew me better, and had, like Rosie for example, known this tone like the time my hairdresser cut bangs I didn’t want, he’d know what the tone meant.
But because he wasn’t Rosie, or the hairdresser who now worked two towns over, he didn’t know. His attractive and downright distracting face stayed the same as he folded his arms.
“You needing to talk, I’m guessing it’s about some sort of life-threatening, urgent situation like a bomb threat that only I can save the world from in the next ten minutes?” I continued, crossing my own arms. “Not the day, three weeks ago, when you fucked me in a bathroom and then left without a word. Because we don’t need to talk about that now. We should have talked about that three weeks ago. So now, I’m assuming it’s something far less urgent.”
His mouth twitched but didn’t turn up to a grin. Lucky. No matter how hot those dimples were, revealing them at that juncture wouldn’t have been smart.
“No,” he said evenly.
I nodded.
“So, you’ve come to tell me that Anna Wintour has her jet waiting at the town airstrip and will leave without me if I don’t drop everything to converse with you before taking off and becoming junior editor at Vogue?”
Another twitch. A glimmer of a dimple. It was gone before it could be fatal.
“Not sure I know who she is, but no,” he said.
I opened my mouth.
He held up his hand. “I’m gonna stop you because I’m getting your point, Snow.”
I glared at him. “You’re getting how colossally stupid it was to come rolling up to my house, unannounced, after our… incident, then waltz up to me and snatch my phone from my hands as if I couldn’t have anything more important in my life than giving you, the almighty one, my undivided attention?” I hissed, the coolness from before replaced with white-hot fury.
His eyes searched my face, and he stepped forward.
I stepped back so my booty collided with my fence. “I wouldn’t advise touching me right now if you’d like your wrist to remain attached to your hand,” I told him evenly, reining in my emotions.
He stopped, jaw hard. “I do like ‘the almighty one,’ just for future reference. But yes, I did believe us required your undivided attention, and I didn’t want to give you any fuckin’ chance to run away. I needed you still.” His last words were a murmur. The sound of a shared moment, a reminder of it. A dirty trick to play on the girl who only played at cool and calm, especially with him around.
I swallowed it, the reminder of the moment. The moment itself was rattling in the junk cupboard of my mind where I shoved all unwanted feelings. The place that was starting to
bulge at the hinges.
“There is no us,” I hissed. “I thought I made that clear. And then you made it even clearer three weeks ago. After a year. Those actions made it crystal.”
Keltan thought for a beat and then disregarded my warning, stepping forward. I had no escape thanks to the stupid fence that had first drawn me to my little house, but I now wanted to burn down. He backed me against it, his body pressing against mine, and his hands framing my jaw.
“You know what you made clear?” he murmured, eyes on mine. “That you’re scared. That you’ll run from this until I find a way to make you still. And that you’re worth it. Me runnin’ after you. This is me runnin’, babe. Me chasin’.” His eyes traced my lips. “And this is me catching.” He paused. His eyes went faraway and hard like they had three weeks back. “And that day, after watching bullets fly around the air in the one place I was already fighting a battle unlike one I’d ever seen? That was me running too. I’m man enough to admit that now.”
The battle behind his eyes gave me pause more than words themselves. I saw it. Clearly. The battle that explained a little and a lot.
“Well, you seem to have found a way to entertain yourself while you were waiting,” Rosie said dryly. The interruption was a welcome one, considering the clarity that had me reeling. Though Rosie misjudged Keltan on my doorstep, her bright pink lips stretched to a grin, and her arms folded across her chest.
Rosie’s grin widened. “So, I’m guessing you’re not coming to the party?” Her eyes ran along Keltan like he was a sugar-filled dessert and she was coming off a no-sugar diet. “Or are you taking a rather large and delightful man as your accessory? Good choice. Much better than a Fendi, and he goes with your outfit much more than any bag ever could. He’s very on trend.”
I shifted my scowl to Rosie. “I’m coming.”
Though I said this at the same time as Keltan uttered, “She’s not coming.”
I shifted it back.
Keltan’s dimples deepened. “You’re gonna make yourself dizzy, darting the death glares around like that. Find someone to focus it on,” he suggested helpfully.