Sexy as hell. But not funny.
Cade must have noticed the look on my face. "Eat your french toast and stop thinking about me naked."
"You don't know what I'm thinking about," I said. But I felt a warmth on my cheeks anyway.
"Junebug," he said. "I can read you like an open book."
I hope not.
I averted my gaze, feeling guilty that I'd been thinking about him and me and what it all meant. Then I looked down at the plate. "You made us french toast?" I asked. "I hope we're going running since we're carb-loading."
"You couldn't keep up with me, Junebug." Cade speared a bite of french toast and put it in his mouth.
I laughed. "Give me some of that," I said, grabbing a fork. "Somehow I think your decrepit old ass would have a lot harder time keeping up with me."
"Nice try," he said. "We're the same age."
"Yes, we are," I agreed. "But unlike you, I've aged well."
"Are you saying I haven't aged well?" Cade asked, gesturing to his naked body, covered in the apron. "Because this is grade-A meat right here in front of you."
I rolled my eyes and popped a bite of the breakfast in my mouth. Who knew Cade could cook? "Mmm. This is good. I guess you have learned some things since high school other than boozing and riding on motorcycles."
"You already saw some of what I've learned." His hand brushed mine as we reached for the plate, and I felt a tingle run up the length of my spine in response to his touch.
"Well, I seem to remember you being pretty good at that in high school."
"I remember both of us being pretty good together," Cade said.
We were pretty good together. Were being the operative word.
We ate in silence, and then Cade finally spoke, his gaze focused on the bedspread, not looking at me. "Do you ever think about what it might have been like if you'd have stayed here?"
I swallowed hard. If my parents hadn't been killed? If my sister hadn't committed suicide?
I think about it every day.
But us? I stopped thinking about that a long time ago.
Until he walked up that driveway. Now I couldn't stop thinking about it.
"No," I said. Lying to him. "Do you?"
Cade didn't look at me. "No."
I watched the muscles in his jaw clench, saw him swallow.
I wasn't the only one lying.
Later that night, we laid in bed, me on my stomach, Cade stretched out on his back, his body perpendicular to mine, head resting on my ass while he looked at the ceiling. Bailey stretched out at the foot of the bed, content after she'd run around outside.
"I looked for you, for a long time," I said, finally honest. "After I joined the Navy."
"You did..." Cade's voice trailed off to nothing, more of a statement than a question.
"It was stupid, I know. Silly," I said. The words just kept coming, spilling out of my mouth of their own free will, like I had no control over what I was saying. "And it was so long after I'd left here, after med school and everything. It was dumb. I'd heard you were in the Marines and I kept watching for you. I had this weird idea I might just run into you somewhere, like I'd walk into the waiting room of the clinic and there you would be. When I was in Afghanistan, I thought I saw you once. I knew it wasn't you, but I hoped..."
"I thought the same," Cade said. His voice was quiet. Somber. "I kept track, you know. Talked to your aunt."
"She never said."
"No," Cade said. "I never thought she would." He paused. "I don't think she liked me keeping in touch, you know? I was this huge reminder of what happened."
"It's not like I could forget."
"None of us could, June," he said. "We all lost."
I laughed, the sound bitter. "You lost your girlfriend," I said. "Not your entire fucking family." It came out harsher than it sounded in my head, and I was sorry as soon as I said it. Still, I felt my body tense, and I squirmed underneath Cade, wanting to be rid of him, needing him to not touch me.
Cade sat up, and moved away from me. I didn't look at him as I sat back against the pillow, drawing my knees to my chest protectively. Who did he think he was, comparing my loss to his? I lost my family, and then him too. He had only lost me, a high school girlfriend.
That's it. It wasn't the same at all.
"Junebug," he said. "I didn't mean it that way. I wasn't saying that my losing you was the same thing as what happened to your family. You know I wasn't saying that."
I exhaled, wanting to be rid of the tension I felt rising within me. Why did I feel so on edge? "I know, Cade."
"Why did you join?" Cade asked, still not looking at me.
"The Navy?" I asked. "Not to follow you, if that's what you're thinking." I blurted it out. Why was I being such an asshole?
It wasn't even the truth. Cade might not have been the primary reason, but he was at the back of my mind. He'd always been in my thoughts. I couldn't really say I joined without ever thinking about the fact that Cade was a Marine, could I?
Cade let out a laugh, but it didn't sound happy. "Got it, June. That's not what I was thinking."
I tried to explain. "I meant, I wasn't stalking you."
"Understood." But he just sounded irritated now. And with good reason.
"I don't know why I joined, exactly," I said. "I wanted out. I went to undergrad, and then to medical school, and everything just kept following me. All the shit from my past, it trailed me wherever I went. Friends would ask about my family, that kind of thing. It got old, and I wanted something different. I wanted a new life."
"In the military," Cade said.
I shrugged, tracing my finger over the pattern on the bedspread, picking at the stitching that unraveled on a part of the embroidery. "Yeah, I mean, I could start over, travel, you know? Be someone new. And there was this guy..."
"Shit, June," Cade said. "I don't want to hear about some other fucking guy."
"Shut up," I said. "I don't mean it like that. I was in medical school, doing my rotations. We were a couple years into the war in Iraq, and I hadn't even thought about the military as an option. I was pulling ER duty, doing easy stuff for the docs, and we got this guy, an ex-Marine, double amputee. Tried to slit his wrists. Did a decent enough job of it too, lost a lot of blood, but his mom had shown up at his house for a surprise visit and found him. I was working at a civilian hospital, so I had never really seen any of the Marines come in, you know? We just happened to get him because we were the closest place."
"When he realized we'd saved him," I said. "You know what he said?"
Cade waited, silent, still not looking at me, but obviously listening.
"He said it didn't matter, because he was already dead."
"Jesus." Cade shook his head, a strangled noise in his throat. "Shit, June, if you wanted to deal with that kind of stuff, why didn't you just become a head wizard?"
"I haven't heard that used since I was with the Marines," I said, stifling a smile at his use of the term. "Seriously, can you picture me as a psychiatrist? I'm too fucked up for that shit. Plus, I'm a great surgeon. Or, well, I was. I wanted to do something good."
"Why did you quit?" he asked.
I wasn't sure if he was talking about the Navy or medicine. Either way, I didn't like being on the receiving end of all the questions. Cade was really good at avoiding talking about himself. "Why did you?" I asked.
"I didn't quit," he said.
"I can add, Cade," I said. "You joined out of high school, you've been out for a few years now. That's what, ten years, in the Marines? Why didn't you stay in?"
"Twelve years," he corrected.
"Why did you get out?" I asked the question, even though what I really wanted to ask was, why did you join the biker gang? I had a feeling that question was the one that was too personal to ask.
"It wasn't by choice," he said.
"What do you mean?"
"Leave it alone, June," he said.
"How long have I known you, Cade? I can't as
k you questions?"
"You might not like the answers," he said. I had a feeling we weren't just talking about the Marines now.
"Tell me."
"Fine. You want to know? I got boarded out. I got twelve years in the Marines, made Gunnery Sergeant early, and got fucking boarded out."
"Oh," I said. He was medically retired from the Marines, so it wasn't by choice. I thought about his touchiness around the scars, the burns on his chest. He was physically okay, though, not permanently disabled, and that wasn't something that would get him medically boarded.
Which meant that the issue wasn't physical. "Oh."
"Yeah," he said. "Oh."
"Cade, I -" You can talk to me about it, I wanted to say. You can tell me what happened.
If there was one thing I knew about, it was about battling mental demons. But I stopped. Everything I could say would sound stupid, trite.
"Now you know," he said. "They wouldn't stay in because I'm too much of a fucking mental case." He looked at me, finally, and I could see the pain behind his eyes. "Are you happy? Now you know what a fuck up I am."
"You're not a screw up, Cade."
"Yeah," he said, his voice hard. "You're saying that now, because we fucked. Not because you believe that." He looked away, and I realized what it was, the look on his face. What I was always seeing flash across his face.
Shame.
And my heart broke for him.
"Oh, Cade," I said. No one thinks you're a fuck up, least of all me."
"Yeah?" he asked. "My father sure does."
"He's afraid of losing you."
Cade was silent for a moment, and I thought he might be considering what I was saying, thinking that maybe he wasn't the mess he thought he was. But then he spoke. "Do you know why I'm here, June?" he asked.
"I hope because you want to be here." My voice shook as I said it. Shit, maybe he really didn't want to be here. I picked at the stupid piece of thread on the bedspread, wanting to yank it out, unravel the whole thing.
"Not here with you," he said. "Here in West Bend."
"No." He was in some kind of trouble with his biker club, but I was afraid to ask what the specific brand of trouble was.
"The Marines were my whole life. I couldn't fucking deal with it when I got out. It was the only thing I knew, since high school. The discipline, the structure, the brotherhood - I was fucking lost without it. When I found the MC, it was someplace I fit, someplace with other vets. With people just as fucked up as I was. No one gave a shit that I'd spent the last twelve years being a killer."
I opened my mouth, started to say something, but Cade kept talking.
"In fact," he said. "I had certain skills that were useful in my new line of work. They gave me a family, a home, when the Marine Corps kicked me out of mine."
"So what happened?"
"The Inferno," he said. "My fucking club, the people I thought were my fucking family, they tried to kill me."
Shit. I had thought it was something big, but not that.
"They tried to kill me, kill Crunch," he said. "Would have fucking killed April and MacKenzie. After I did everything for those assholes."
"I'm so sorry, Cade," I said. What else could I say?
"Do you know what it's like to lose yourself, to lose everything you believe in?" Cade asked. "To lose who you are?"
I lost my family before I turned eighteen. "Yes," I said.
Cade looked at me for a long moment, and nodded. "You would be the one person who could understand that, June," he said. "The problem is, what did you do with your shit? You became a fucking doctor. Joined the Navy. I didn't exactly go the honorable route."
"What do you mean?" I asked. "You joined the Marines."
"And then I joined the MC, June."
"You had your reasons, I'm sure," I said. "It was a place that fit. It wasn't all bad, from the beginning, right? You couldn't have known."
"June," he said. "You need to stop. Stop defending me. It's not worth it. I'm not worth it."
"Don't say that," I said. "It's bullshit. And, besides, I'm not defending you. I can think for myself."
"Do you know what I did for the MC?" he asked.
I shrugged. Nothing good, I was sure. "Probably a whole bunch of criminal stuff. I'm not naive, Cade. Give me some credit. I just think that you feeling ashamed of what you've done is pointless. Just because you've fucked up in the past doesn't mean you're fucked up forever. There's always a way to right things." I listened to myself say the words, the person who believed people couldn't ever change.
Did I really believe that, or was I just naively hoping Cade could change?
"June." He brought his face up, looked at me, unblinking. "I was the enforcer for the MC."
"So what?" Enforcer. I had an inkling of what that meant.
"So," he said. "It's not just because I was good at throwing punches, June."
"It's because you were a sniper," I said. "So you killed people for the MC." I wasn't asking. I was listening to how it sounded, the statement coming out of my mouth.
"On occasion," he said. "Still think I'm not fucked up forever?"
I couldn't answer.
"Yeah," he said. "I thought so." He exhaled, his eyes down, looking like he was deflating as he sat there. My heart ached for him, for the pain he carried. I wanted to tell him I couldn't answer because I was the one who was permanently fucked up. How could I judge him, when I was just as bad? It's not like I hadn't ever killed anyone.
"Cade," I said. I couldn't take it, watching him hurt like that. I crawled over to him from where I sat, moved across from him, put my fingers under his chin and tilted his head up. He shook his head away, and I took his face in my palms, made him look at me. "You're not fucked up."
"Don't, June," he said. "You don't know all of it. Not everything."
"What else is there?"
He took my wrists, pulled my hands off his face. "June. There's something..." His voice started to crack. "Shit, I can't even say it."
"What is it?" I pulled back, already tense. What could be that awful that he was so ashamed?
"June," he said. "Hell, I don't even know how to say it. Your sister- the ranch hand, it's all my fault, what happened."
"What are you talking about?"
"I knew about the two of them. I caught them together once, in the barn. I threw him out, sent her home. I should have done more, but I didn't. And it was my fault. If I would have kicked his ass, told someone..."
"This is your big secret? The thing you're so ashamed to admit?"
"June, I don't even know what to say..."
"Cade," I said, taking his head in my hands again, "I knew about them too. That night? I knew my sister was going out to party with him. She snuck out of the house."
"You knew about it," he repeated slowly.