me that wanted the excuse to act on the rage I felt all the time, to be able to do it under the guise of club business. Working in a white collar job, securing networks from hacks like myself...it wasn't exactly an outlet for anger.
I couldn't explain why I was sitting in my bedroom, cleaning my weapon. It didn’t need cleaned, but I felt drawn to it, without any sense. I knew I shouldn’t be, but I felt like I was on auto-pilot. It started this morning, the impulse to clean it, then the vague thoughts about what if I used it.
It would be better for MacKenzie if I weren’t around.
Better for her to be with her grandmother.
She’d be happier, surrounded by family.
You weren’t meant to raise a kid, not by yourself.
April was the only parent worth her salt. You don’t have your shit together to take care of yourself. You can’t take care of a kid.
MacKenzie would be better without you.
It would be better if you were dead.
I told myself I was just cleaning it, that’s all. I hadn’t used it in a long time. I wanted to make sure everything was still in working order.
Even I knew when I was bullshitting myself.
I held it, felt the weight of it in my hand, the cool sensation of the metal against my palm. I wondered how it would feel to put it to my temple and pull the trigger. I thought it through carefully as I turned the weapon over in my hands.
I thought about the people I’d killed, and how they felt when I did it. I didn’t feel badly about the men I’d killed, about beating one to death with a sledgehammer, smashing him into a bloody pulp until he was completely and entirely obliterated. I didn’t feel remotely guilty about wrapping a chain around the other one and dragging his body behind a vehicle, while his cries of agony rang out through the desert night. And when I watched Axe peel a man’s scalp from his head before slitting his throat, I felt satisfied. Thrusting my knife into Mad Dog’s belly was like the icing on the cake.
I didn’t feel badly about any of it. Those shitbags had killed April. They had ripped my wife from me, taken away MacKenzie’s mother. They deserved to die. They deserved far worse than the horrors Axe and I had inflicted on them.
What kept gnawing at me, clawing away at my insides, was that I’d felt good when I had done it. Killing them wasn’t some sober act of retribution for April’s death. It was like some kind of switch got flipped when I picked up the sledgehammer. Something turned off in my soul. Killing them felt fucking amazing.
It shouldn’t have felt that way. I wasn’t that person.
I didn’t want to be that person. If I was, what would happen the next time someone crossed me?
And what the hell kind of father could I possibly be with that kind of darkness in my soul? It was my fault MacKenzie had lost her mother. I had brought that on her, with my involvement in the club. Sure, Mad Dog’s men had killed April, but her death was all my doing. Her blood was on my hands.
Since April’s death, I felt adrift. She was my anchor, always had been. We joked about her being a ball and chain, but it was a good thing, in my case. She kept me tethered, tied to family and the things that were important to me, when I could have kept running out of control with the club, like back in the early years with them. When she died, I lost my moorings.
I looked back down at the piece in my lap. It would be so easy to just end everything. I sat silently, the weight of the options heavy on my mind.
Then I set the weapon on the nightstand, beside the slip of paper with the phone number on it. I don’t know why I had kept it.
Or why the fuck I picked up the phone then. I should have done something else, called a friend. Shit, called a hotline or something.
But I didn’t. I called a woman I didn’t know.
When she answered, I almost hung up.
“Hello?” She asked it three times before I swallowed the lump in my throat and spoke.
“It’s Joe. Hammer. The computer guy,” I said. Why the hell was I calling her?
“Hammer,” she said, her voice soft. “I wondered if I would hear from you.”
“I don’t know why I’m calling,” I said.
She was silent, and for a minute, I thought she’d hung up on me. “It’s okay not to know,” she said.
“I-” How the fuck did I explain what kind of mental space I was in right now? I didn’t know why the hell I was calling her.
"My wife -" I began. I couldn't continue. It was too painful to explain to someone who didn't already know. She couldn't possibly understand.
"You lost her," Meia said.
"She was murdered."
"Loss is difficult," she said. "You begin to despair, to think you're better off dead."
"You lost someone close to you."
"Yes," she said. "A long time ago."
"How do you get past it?"
"You don't," she said. "It's just becomes a part of you, woven into who you are."
"It never gets any better, then."
"Pain dulls," Meia said. "Maybe it's not as sharp as it used to be, yes?"
"Maybe," I said. It still felt pretty damn sharp, even after two years. "Sometimes I don't think I can take it anymore."
"Suffering is a part of life," she said. "So is loss. Struggling against it, not accepting it, does not change it."
"Accept my wife's death as fate or some shit?" I asked. "You're going to tell me it's God's will or something?"
"Nothing so trite, I hope," she said. "But accepting the inevitability of the suffering that comes with life makes it less difficult. Because then you are not struggling against reality."
"Shit, talking to you is making me more depressed than I was before."
Meia was silent, and for a minute I thought she might have hung up the phone. When she finally spoke, her voice was soft. "It will pass," she said.
"What will?"
"What you're feeling right now," she said. "It will pass. You will keep waking up and one morning, you will find that the darkness is not quite the shade of blackness that it used to be."
I didn't know if I could do it. I didn't know if I could just keep waking up, if I could keep putting one foot in front of the other. "Is that what you did?" I asked.
She was silent for a long time before she finally spoke. "No," she said. "I embraced the darkness."
I hung up the phone, my mind still reeling after talking to Hammer. As if I somehow knew him. I didn't know him. I needed to remind myself of that fact. Listening to him talk about his dead wife, the one who was murdered - it didn't mean I knew him. Just because he had lost someone important didn't mean I understood anything about him.
It didn't mean anything. It meant only that he understood loss. And he knew nothing about me. I had talked about my loss like it happened a long time ago. My sister's suicide had happened long ago, but my loss was ongoing. That I hadn't told him, afraid of getting a man like that involved.
And darkness, I thought. That he understood, too. He was calling because he was steeped in it. It was a crisis. I didn't understand the crisis exactly, but I knew that much. I understood desperation - blackness- when I heard it. I'd been there so many times before.
I walked out of the bathroom, my phone in my hand, and set it on the nightstand. Aston rolled over, mumbling something incoherently in his sleep. It was risky, unfathomably so, taking Hammer's call, speaking to him in whispers in the bathroom. I stood there for a moment beside the bed, looking at Aston’s sleeping form. He looked peaceful, lying there, his chest rising and falling with each breath. Like he had nothing weighing on his conscience.
Conscience. As if he had one. He had no conscience, nothing to worry about, that much I was certain of.
It would be so easy to kill him, right now.
If not for Ben.
Aston rolled over onto his side, then propped his head up on his hand, letting his eyes roam the length of my body. He trailed a finger down the middle of my back and over my rear, and I shivered at his touc
h.
"Meia," he said. "Your body is perfection."
I closed my eyes, murmured something unintelligible in response. I didn't want to hear Aston talk about my body. Instead, I pretended to still be dozing, while all the while my mind was preoccupied with thoughts of him.
Hammer.
There was something bizarrely comforting about listening to Hammer talk. I'm not even sure why I gave him my number, except that there was something...wounded...about him, like a dog that had been abused. But it was more than that. There was something more than sadness behind his eyes - there was anger. And that I was familiar with. That was a look I recognized. I'd seen it in myself countless times.
I wasn't sure why I kept talked to him on the phone. He felt like a kindred spirit.
Of course, I also couldn't help but think about how he'd looked at me that first day we met, that fire in his eyes that sent a surge of arousal through me. That wasn't exactly something I was familiar with.
Aston's touch jolted me back to reality, his fingers between my legs, inching their way forward, touching me. "You're wet," he whispered.
But it wasn't because of Aston. It was the thoughts of Hammer that were making me wet.
I rolled over onto my side, looked into Aston's eyes. And as his hands began to roam my body, touching my breasts, then his fingers slipping inside me, I found my thoughts wandering like they always did. It was the same thing I'd done since I was a child, back when I'd been forced to endure what I'd had to endure. I was an expert at drifting away, to a fantasy place in my mind.
But this time, for the first time, I thought of someone else. Hammer.
And that fact sent a rush of fear through my heart. I didn't need anyone to make me think of the possibility that there might be more than this for me in life. I didn't need to put anyone else in harm's way. I already had my sister's blood on my hands. I had failed to protect her. I was responsible for my son's life now. That was the most important thing.
I embraced the darkness.
Meia's words echoed in my head. Embrace the darkness. Not fight it. Maybe it was part of my nature. Maybe it was fighting against it that was killing me inside.
So I started embracing my own darkness. By data searching Meia. She’d told me to leave it alone, but I couldn’t. I wanted to know who she was, and whether she was safe. I wanted to know why she was with Aston.
I wanted to know everything about her.
But with all my skills, I’d basically found nothing. She was a blank slate before she was with Aston. She'd been photographed on his arm a number of times over the past two years. But prior to that? It was like she'd never existed.
I wanted to know why.
I think it was also because I couldn't sit there anymore at night, alone, thinking about April being gone. I couldn't sit there in the darkness, thinking about where I'd gone wrong with my daughter, about whether or not she'd ever be okay, or whether she'd be depressed forever.
I told myself it was out of concern for Meia that I did what I did next. And that I didn't tell her.
It wasn't that I was becoming obsessive.
I only wanted to make sure she was safe.
I started following her, watching her. I noted the men who tailed her, not every day, but sometimes, from a safe distance. The one who sometimes sat outside her apartment in a car. I started tracking their schedule.
I wasn't becoming obsessive.
I was still in control.
He called that night, the person to whom I'd already become too attached. Tayza had a point about letting go, not becoming too attached to some things- attachments to people were dangerous. This - whatever this was with Hammer - these phone calls that I'd begun to look forward to, were dangerous for him. He didn't need to become involved with this.
I was home alone, sitting on the floor, trying to calm the storm that raged on in my mind. Meditating only seemed to make it worse, to give more freedom to the thoughts that swirled around like whirlpools in the water, threatening to pull me down into their depths.
When Hammer called, I was grateful for the interruption. And not only because it gave me a reason to get out of my head. But because it was him. I’d been talking to him, stolen phone calls at night. I knew it was stupid, foolish, even if I was taking precautions, walks late at night, using my disposable phone. I had only taken that unnecessary risk the first time. I was being smart.
I swore to myself that I would stop whatever was happening with Hammer.
I would quell the little flutter of anticipation I felt when he called on the phone. I would not think about the way my heart started to beat wildly in my chest, or the way I was beginning to draw comfort from the sound of his voice.
I would let go, before anything went any farther with him. This I could do.
I had to do it.
I pulled the top off the beer and dialed the number, all the time wondering what the hell I was thinking. I'd talked with Meia three times on the phone this week. I followed her a few times, told myself it was okay, that I was just making sure she was not being hurt. Of course, who the hell knew what was happening once she went into Aston's penthouse?
I couldn't know, and it was starting to eat at me, the knowledge that she wasn't safe.
I kept telling myself to let it go.
The conversations were mostly one-sided, me talking and her listening, and I wondered what she must think of me. Pathetic, that's what she must think. She had to see me as a pathetic excuse for a man, some broken man whose life ended with his wife’s death. Part of me felt I should be over this by now. Other people got past death. Other men lost their wives. I wasn't the first person in the history of the universe to have lost someone.
Yet here I was, on the phone pouring my guts to someone I didn't know in the slightest.
And then I asked the question. "Can I meet you in person?"
My usual self-assured attitude was suddenly gone. Suddenly I was nervous.
Then the nervous feeling was replaced by something else. And before I could take back my question, she said, "Yes."
When I opened the door of the hotel room, she smiled at me, the expression brightening her face. I hadn't seen her smile before. It made her look suddenly younger, lighter. Less burdened somehow. Then it was gone, as quickly as it had appeared.
"Meia," I said.
"I don't know what I'm doing here," she said. But she stepped closer to me, and I stood there in the doorway for a moment, with her inches away from me, looking down at her. I had the sudden impulse to kiss her, as she looked up at me, uncertainty and apprehension etched on her face.
"I don't know what I'm doing here either," I admitted.
But I stepped back and she walked inside anyway, her eyes surveying the room before she peeled off her coat and laid it over a chair. She looked exquisite, despite being in a simple dress, one that skimmed her body, barely giving a hint of what was underneath.
I didn't know what the protocol was for this. I didn't know why the fuck I was so nervous. I'd never been nervous about anything in my life, and I felt my heart race as I stood there. "Why did you agree to meet me?"
"Why did you ask?" She sat on an overstuffed chair, crossed one leg over the other, looking around the room and then back at me.