Twist (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 2)

by Susan Fanetti

  Rad chimed in. “Next week. We were thinkin’ you, me, and Griff, we’d take our ladies up to the cabin for a couple of days. Maybe pay a visit to our neighbors. If you think you’re up to it.” Rad’s mouth twisted into the smirk he got when he was laying hurt down on an asshole. “A little R and R—rest and retaliation.”

  “Holy fuck, yes,” Gunner breathed. “I’m up to it. Abso-fuckin’-lutely.”

  ~oOo~

  Gunner opened the motel room door. Evelyn stood on the sidewalk, dressed for work, in a navy suit and a silky beige blouse, with beige high heels. Her hair was coiled on the back of her head. No one who saw her out in the world would expect that she got off on the things she got off on.

  “Jesus Christ, Gun.” She pushed him back into the room and hooked her arms around his neck. “Jesus Christ.”

  He closed the door and hugged her back. “I’m sorry. I called as soon as I could.”

  That wasn’t at all true. He’d been out of the hospital for more than two weeks, and he’d had plenty of time on his own since. He hadn’t known what to say to her, or whether he should say anything at all. In her last message, she’d said she wouldn’t call again. The temptation to let it just drop had been powerful.

  It had been easier to simply avoid thinking about the whole thing, especially as he and Leah had been figuring each other out, actually becoming a couple, after they’d started living together. He hadn’t wanted to put any brain cells to the question of Evelyn.

  But she’d kept digging into the back of his head anyway. They’d been doing…whatever it was they’d been doing for a long time. He cared about her. She understood him in a way no one else in his life did. And that remained true. That would probably always be true.

  He needed to break it off, but she deserved more than for him to simply vanish. So he’d called her at work. She’d been stunned to hear from him and hadn’t even yelled at him for calling—or for vanishing. They hadn’t talked long, only arranged to meet during her lunch hour.

  “I was so worried. And furious.” Pushing back and clutching his face in her hands, she studied his new scars. “What did you get into this time?”

  “Long story. I’m okay.” He loosened her hands and stepped back. Lifting up his shirt, he said, “But this is why I couldn’t call you. I was in the hospital.”

  She gasped and reached out to run her fingers over the scars. “Oh, Gunner. You are going to run out of luck someday, baby.”

  “This didn’t feel lucky, trust me.”

  “Yet here you stand.” She came close and slid her hands up his chest. Gunner’s skin prickled, and his muscles twitched. His cock began to swell. Fuck, no. No, no, no. He took another step back.

  Evelyn dropped her hands and gave him a curious, guarded look. “Gun?”

  “We have to talk, Evvie.” He led her to the bed, but when he sat, she pulled her hand from his and stood there, looming over him.

  “That’s why I’m here? To ‘talk’?”

  “Yeah.” He could see armor slamming over her eyes and stiffening her shoulders. She understood already. Gunner prepared himself for a fight.

  But then she surprised him. She sat. “You found somebody. Of your own.”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “And you want to end this, what we have.”

  He couldn’t answer, but he met her eyes, and she saw the truth there.

  “Does she give you what you need? Because, baby, I know what I’m talking about when I say that what you need is what you need. You can’t pretend it’s not—not for long. There’s no peace in that.”

  Did Leah give him what he needed? They’d been fucking daily for the past few days. Gentle, normal sex—but special. Different from what he’d known, and, well, beautiful. For a girl who’d done the wild things she’d done, Leah didn’t know much about sex. Gunner had figured out that what she called her sex life had been much more about her letting things happen to her than about her making them happen or even wanting them to happen. Her stories about her ‘experience’ saddened him.

  Gunner enjoyed the fuck out of showing her how good it could be when you were with someone you loved. He was learning a thing or two about that as well.

  The right answer occurred to him. “I need what she gives me.”

  Evelyn smiled. “That’s not the same thing, though, is it? Gunner, I don’t make a claim on you. You know that. I’m not in this girl’s way. There’s no reason we have to stop. We can give each other what we need, and we can go home to people who don’t understand this part of us. It’s better for the people we love. It’s better for the love.”

  “I can’t. She needs to be the only one.”

  “And when you ask her to tie you down and whip you black and blue, what’s she going to say? Is she going to want to be with you at all then? Can she handle that part of you? Or will she think you’re a freak?” Her tone had grown harsh, and each word bit into Gunner’s head.

  He could not imagine ever telling Leah. She was young and innocent and probably didn’t even know people did this shit. He’d been innocent about most of it until a couple of years ago. “Fuck, Evvie. It wasn’t even a thing I did until you. I’m only like this with you.”

  “I know.” Gentler now. “Are you saying you don’t need it?”

  He needed it. Sometimes, he really did. Banned from underground fights and bar brawls, with no brothers who’d fight him like he needed, he didn’t have anything left but this.

  People thought he was out of control. What they didn’t know, however, was that all fucking day, every fucking day, he wrestled with his head. He fought to control himself from the moment his eyes opened in the morning until he passed out at night. There was a place inside him that was like a black hole, and he felt the constant pull of its vortex. One day, he’d get sucked into it and just fucking implode.

  It wasn’t that he was out of control. It was that sometimes, when life was too much to manage, he got tired and slipped, and he caught himself by the fingernails, at the edge of that abyss.

  Pain—on his terms—eased the pull. Simple as that.

  Yeah, he needed it. He was fucking nuts.

  Evelyn was getting into his head and twisting his thoughts into knots. He stood and made as much distance from her as he could, pacing for a minute and then leaning back against the wall near the bathroom.

  In the two years they’d known each other, they’d almost always gotten this very room. Gunner knew every inch of it by heart: the cheap prints of woodland scenes in plastic frames bolted to the fake-oak paneling; the Seventies-era, pressed-wood furniture with its edges peeling in slim strips; the florid yellow polyester bedspread and matching drapes; the groaning window-unit air conditioner that dripped steadily into the threadbare, paper-thin greenish carpet. In the bathroom: the cluster of cigarette burns on the Formica countertop, at the edge of the sink, and the cracked tile behind the faucet.

  The place was the textbook definition of sordid, as was what they did in it.

  They’d been meeting at this cheap-as-fuck motel by the interstate ever since the first night, when Evelyn had found him sitting alone at the bar in a cheap-as-fuck tavern, his knuckles and his face swollen and still gunked with blood from a night in the fights. They’d kicked him out that night after he’d dropped onto a guy he’d already KO’d. He hadn’t been able to stop, and he hadn’t been hurt near enough to ease the beast that rode him.

  Afterward, he’d stopped at the first bar he’d come to, looking to deaden the need that way.

  Evelyn had taken him here and cleaned him up. As she’d tended his wounds, she’d seen the way his body fed on pain. That first night had been relatively normal, but within a month, she was bringing that black duffel, and within a few months, it was crammed full of shit Gunner had never seen before. Shit for her to use on him. Shit he’d kill anybody else for suggesting he’d allow it to be used, much less seek it out.

  He’d found out she was married about five months in, when she’d forgotten to t
ake off her rings.

  Fuck, it was all so fucking trashy. He slammed his hand back to the paneled wall.

  “I don’t want it. I am a freak, and I fucking hate it.”

  Evelyn sat where she was and considered him. Gunner stared back, fighting the urge to run from the room like a bitch.

  “Evvie, please. Tell me I can do this. I love her. I need to be normal.”

  Evelyn’s estimating regard changed into something Gunner couldn’t read. Time froze; she stared at him, and, needing an answer, he stared back. Then she stood and smoothed out her skirt. He watched her warily as she came up to him. As before, she put her hands on either side of his face.

  “You aren’t normal, baby. But that’s okay—normal is boring. You feel so much shame for this, and you shouldn’t. What we do here is different, not deviant. It’s okay to need things other people don’t need and can’t understand.”

  It wasn’t okay, not to him. He wasn’t okay. “Evvie…”

  “I won’t tell you you can do it, Gun, because I don’t know if you can. I’ll tell you I hope you can. I hope this girl makes you happy. I’m glad you found somebody to love. You deserve that. If you need this to end, then it ends. I won’t try to contact you. I’ll find what I need with someone new. But if you need me, call me. I’ll be here for you.”

  She pressed a light, almost maternal kiss to his lips. Then she picked up her bag and left the room.

  After the door closed, Gunner slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor. He stayed like that for a long time, his head spinning, landing nowhere.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  When Leah was a little girl, when she had a mother and a father, her little family had come up to The Osage often. They camped in a blue canvas tent, spending a week or sometimes two playing house in the woods. During the days, her father had fished, and her mother had read or gossiped with women from around the campground, and Leah had found other kids in the campground with whom to forge fast, brief friendships. Left to their own devices so long as they’d stayed within hollering range of their mothers, the kids had formed a band together, hiking; playing tag and hide-and-go-seek; swimming until their skin shriveled and their ears sloshed; and digging up nightcrawlers to hang on hooks dangling from their bamboo poles and fish from the swimming dock, pulling up the occasional bluegill or sunfish.

  Some days, their moms would call them back for lunch. Other days, they’d look toward the swimming beach and find their moms, in their conservative bathing suits, terrycloth cover-ups, round sunglasses, and floppy hats, laying out picnic lunches. On the best days, the kids would carry sandwiches—peanut butter and jam, or bologna and Kraft cheese, on Wonder bread—folded up in plastic wrap, and little bottles of fruitade with foil lids, and they’d eat their lunch out in the woods or at the end of the dock, their feet swinging over the water.

  Every afternoon, as the sun went low, the rumble of outboard motors would fill the air, and the fishing fathers would return, docking their little fiberglass or steel johnboats. Girls would run back to their campsites to help their mothers with evening chores, and boys would meet their fathers at the fish-cleaning stations to help with that manly work.

  Families would have their supper in their nuclear units, and then, as night took over, the easy sounds of settling would roll through the camp. Voices would drop to a lower register. Music—guitars and fiddles and harmonicas—would waft up with the smoke of campfires, none playing the same tune, but harmonious nonetheless. Into that quiet, children would bed down in flannel-lined sleeping bags atop inflated rubber swim rafts and fall asleep to the lilting lullaby of adult conversation and the crackle of a dying fire.

  Leah had never been out of the state of Oklahoma, but on those trips not even an hour north of the house she’d always lived in, she’d had great, grand, wild adventures.

  She hadn’t been into the Osage Hills since her mother had left.

  Riding now with Gunner over roads she’d once known well, Leah felt the strongest pang of loss that she’d felt since the day she’d learned her mother didn’t want her. The memories she’d carved deep into her head, those memories she’d saved to keep her anger stoked, they were all of the life she’d had in Grant. These memories of camping trips in spring, summer, and fall—she’d neglected to forge them into armor. They were tender and raw and beautiful, and her heart ached.

  As they passed the big sign for the park and campground, Leah swallowed an empty stone from her throat. She tightened her arms around Gunner’s chest and laid her head on his shoulder, taking solace when he tipped his bare head and rested it on her helmet.

  The Bulls’ cabin was higher in the hills, nestled in heavy woods. Tall-trunked trees stood like sentries around the log building. The ground was mostly barren, with a few patches of scrabbly grass; the tree canopy was too dense for much ground cover beyond the drifts of many seasons’ worth of fallen leaves. A big fire pit took center stage in the largest sunny space, about thirty feet or so from the cabin.

  Gunner parked his bike beside Willa’s Explorer; she and Patrice, Griffin’s girlfriend, had come up early to stock the kitchen and get the beds made. They’d asked Leah to come up with them, but she’d had to work—and riding up with Gunner was much more fun, anyway.

  Encountering all those painfully great memories had probably been easier with him than it would have been with women who were barely more than acquaintances yet, too.

  As she took off her helmet, Gunner’s happy grin, the one he always wore when they rode, slipped. “Hey—you okay?” He caught her hand and gave it a tug.

  In the weeks since he’d been home from the hospital, he’d told her no less than five times that he wasn’t any good, and she needed to be sure she really wanted this life they were making. Leah had never seen anything from him but good. Even that day at the donation drive, when he’d scared everybody, including her, with his frenetic violence—she now understood it far differently. She’d had a glimmer of understanding then, knowing that it had had to do with his twin.

  Now she thought she understood that since Martin’s death, Gunner had lived with a crucial piece of himself missing. He was a psychic amputee. She didn’t know yet what he didn’t have that he needed, but she could see him, feel him, need and seek.

  She wanted to help him find something to fill his empty space. She wanted to be that something.

  She thought she might be able to empathize with that a little bit. She hadn’t lost a twin, but she had lost a mother, and she’d been limping through her life ever since. Now she’d lost a father and a home and a town and friends, and staying upright would have been impossible without Gunner’s steady, strong arm. He was good. He was wonderful.

  Like now—just a glance, and he knew there was something off.

  She moved close, into the shelter of his arm, and set her head on his chest. “Yeah, I’m okay. We used to camp up here, when I was little, and I was thinking about my mom. Just got a little sad.”

  In the course of their learning about each other, she’d told him about her mother’s leaving. Now, he pressed his lips to her head. “Love you.”

  The exact right thing to say. She rose onto her tiptoes and kissed his throat. “Love you, too.”

  He took the pack off the back of his bike and grabbed her hand. “C’mon. I want to show you the cabin. It rocks.”

  It did rock. Except for a huge screened-in porch, it wasn’t fancy at all. A simple log cabin, with old-fashioned screen doors that creaked on springs and slammed back into their jams with a satisfying clap.

  The simplicity was its charm. From the ancient rolled linoleum, its old glue giving so that each step across the floor crackled, to the wood-frame furniture, with flowered cushions, clustered around a stone fireplace in the living room, to the deep, chipped-porcelain double sink and Fifties-era blue refrigerator and range in the kitchen, to the heavy oak paneling on every wall, to the old iron-frame double beds in each of the three bedrooms and the claw-foot tub in the only bath
room, to the mounted animals, rifles, and fishing gear that provided the wall décor everywhere, it was kind of absolutely perfect.

  Gunner led Leah through each of these spaces, finding stories to tell in every one, and Leah followed him, listening intently, picking up his glee. Two of the bedrooms had already been claimed, so Gunner and Leah dropped their packs on the chenille-clad bed in the last room, at the back of the cabin, nearest the bathroom.

  “The pipes howl something fierce, so don’t freak out when somebody flushes in the middle of the night. Everybody hates this bedroom because the pipes are right there”—he pointed at a wall where a big fish had been mounted as if frozen during its fight against the hook—“and it’s fucking loud. Sorry we got stuck back here. We can sleep out on the porch if you want.”