I felt warmth at that small smile, at that small gesture of acceptance from the notorious matriarch of the biker family.
“Holy fuck,” Gwen breathed. “No way. Gage did that? Are you sure he wasn’t admitting it was him on the grassy knoll?” She winked at me as she spoke.
But Amy didn’t give me time to answer. “Oh my God, coffee!” she exclaimed, snatching a cup out of Gwen’s hand.
Gwen scowled at Amy’s other hand. “You already have coffee. Why are you stealing mine?” she hissed, her pretty face contorting into rage with a speed that was equal parts scary and impressive. “They cut your hands off for that in some countries, you know.”
“This isn’t coffee,” Amy replied, shaking the other cup. “This is a mimosa. Parents get judgy when I bring a champagne flute.” She rolled her eyes, sipping from Gwen’s cup. “Apparently it’s not seemly to drink at your son’s baby dance class.”
“It isn’t seemly at all, Amy, just downright bad parenting. I’m shocked and appalled and frankly disappointed,” Gwen said, folding her arms. “That you didn’t bring me one too,” she added with a wink, swiping Amy’s cup.
I smiled as they bickered.
“Oh shit!” Mia exclaimed. “I forgot to check the boys for knives.”
I started to laugh, because checking two boys under ten for knives at a soccer game was obviously a joke and Mia had a killer, albeit a little insane, sense of humor.
But she went running off in the direction of the team huddle.
Gwen didn’t go running. She shrugged when Amy looked at her expectantly. “This is not my first rodeo, I already confiscated Kingston’s weapons,” she deadpanned, sipping from her cup.
I shook my head and chuckled, letting the warmth of the sun heat me.
Little did I know the sun was about to fall from the fricking sky.
Fifteen
“I swear, when our kid grows up, it’s not playing soccer,” I said, sinking down on the sofa. “Seriously, it’s a brutal sport.” I scrunched up my nose. “Or maybe it was Mia’s boys who made it that much more brutal. I don’t even know how they managed to tie up that one kid in the goal netting. I guess it was pretty impressive.” I paused. “Though I’m sure Kingston helped, he’s better at getting away with it than the others.”
It took me a second to understand the silence that came after my words, realize it wasn’t Gage’s normal silence. No, this one was filled with something that raised the hair on my arms.
My eyes snapped up to meet Gage’s.
He’d been staring at me since I’d gotten in, obviously, because that was Gage. But sometime between his harsh and beautiful kiss hello and me sinking onto the sofa and talking, his stare had changed. Emptied.
“What?” I asked, tensing, bracing.
“When our kid grows up,” he repeated the words I hadn’t even been fully aware that I’d said. That had tumbled right out of my fantasies and into the air because I’d been so comfortable. So happy.
That was a grave mistake.
I saw that now.
But it was too late.
With everything Gage and I had shared, all the wounds we’d exposed to each other, I’d settled comfortably into the fact that we were tattooed on each other’s souls. Our demons were all but married, and I’d imagined that same permanence with a certainty that was obviously a mistake. Gage hadn’t spoken about marriage or anything like that, but he’d made promises about life and death. About forevers. So I’d logically taken ‘forever’ as marriage and kids.
But there was no logic here.
Only pain.
“Well, I mean… I’m not talking now or anything,” I said quickly, my voice shaking for reasons I didn’t quite understand. But I also knew that I meant maybe not now, but soon. Because I was in my early thirties, though I wasn’t worried about my biological clock. More about creating a family, something beautiful from the ugliness that brought us together. “I just mean—”
“I don’t want kids, Lauren. Or marriage.” The words were spoken flatly. Cruelly. But that was the point. Gage was using them as shields—no, as weapons to push me away, prod at me so I would retreat.
Sweat beaded on my temples as my heartbeat increased and panic started to set in. “Well I know obviously now isn’t the most ideal time. We haven’t even been together for—”
“No. Not now, not ever.”
I flinched.
He had no reaction to it. Not even a Gage reaction to show what my pain was doing to him. There was nothing. It was like my offhand words had scooped out his soul and there was nothing of him left.
“What?” I asked, my voice bland and empty. I hated it.
“I don’t know why you’re acting so fucking surprised. You’ve heard about my past, know what I went through.”
I stood, intending on going to him, on taking his hands, but his entire body repelled me, created a barrier that I didn’t even dare cross. So I just froze in front of him, an awkward distance that didn’t feel right between us.
But it somehow felt permanent.
“Gage,” I whispered, pain etched into the single word.
“With all the ugliness you’ve seen of the world, why the fuck would you want to bring another person into it?” he clipped.
I flinched again, but I was determined to not back down, to try and fight. “With all the ugliness I’ve seen, why wouldn’t I want to add some remarkable kind of beauty to it?”
He looked at me a long time with that brutal and empty gaze. The pain that gaze roused rivaled that of him telling me about his daughter. It was different though. Then, he was opening up to me, showing me everything bloody and broken inside him.
Now he was slamming everything closed, taking away everything with that gaze.
My hands shook at my sides.
He stepped forward, quickly, purposefully.
“You’ve known true sorrow and it’s made you so fucking kind. So fucking remarkable.” He brushed my cheek and I flinched. Not because his grip was so hard. No, because it was so soft that it was barely even there. “I’ve known true pain and it’s made me cruel. Cold. I’m barely able to give you what you need, Lauren. What I can give you, it’s not what you deserve, but I was makin’ peace with that, ’cause I’m not the good guy. But no fuckin’ way can I give you that.” He shuddered. Actually shuddered. “No fucking way can I watch you grow with my child, see you glow with life and see that happiness again. Because it’ll drive me over the edge. I fuckin’ know that. I won’t be able to handle feelin’ all that happiness. I’ll go in search of nothing.”
His hand left and he stepped back, his boots an echo in the halls of Hell.
“I may deserve nothing, Will, but you sure as shit don’t.”
I waited for more.
Because an ending to what we had needed to be more than that. It needed to be a battle. It needed blood, suffering, pain. Me clutching on so tightly that my nails ripped off.
It couldn’t be that simple and agonizing.
That anticlimactic.
But it was.
Gage turned around and left. I was still in a state of shock until the door slammed, and a short time after that, his bike roared away.
He hadn’t even paused at the curb.
He just left.
I stood dry-eyed in the living room for a long time, gazing blankly at the shards of me that had been crushed under Gage’s motorcycle boot as he walked away.
Then I sank to the ground.
And those broken pieces cut me to shreds.
Gage
He didn’t know where to go after leaving Lauren’s apartment. Hell would’ve been a nice respite from the utter emptiness he’d felt since walking out that door. And then he’d gotten his wish, since the itch, the need to fill that emptiness with junk thrust him into the pit again.
But he was glad for the distraction, focusing on fighting his need for a fix instead of fighting his need to turn his bike around and bowl through Lauren’s door, take back ever
y word he’d said, tell her he’d give her fucking everything. But he couldn’t. Because he was a fucking coward. Because he was afraid she’d give him everything and then the ugly world would take it away.
And he couldn’t fucking take that.
He wasn’t as strong as Lauren was to forge through her fear, her ugliness, and create something beautiful. And that meant he didn’t deserve her.
So he pulled his bike into his house, was inside the empty living room before he really knew how he got there. No fuckin’ way he’d go to the club. Not like that. He was actually scared of what he’d do to one of his brothers if they looked at him the wrong way. He didn’t trust himself not to kill a member of his family if that meant his need for blood might chase away some of his need for her.
So that’s why he was at his empty house. Because there was no one to hurt there but himself. And he’d stopped himself from yanking his knife from his belt and dragging it down his arm.
Instead, he’d yanked something more dangerous from his pocket and laid it on the table in front of him.
He stared at the phone.
And it stared back.
With more force, more strength than anything else he’d gazed at. It was a fucking phone. He’d stared at some of the worst people to walk this earth—before he’d stained the soil with their lifeblood, that was.
He’d stared down the barrel of a gun many times. And once, it’d been his finger on the trigger of the gun he’d stared at.
And all those times, he’d felt nothing.
Maybe a tiny bit more than nothing, which was why he did the things he did. Why he chased death, to make sure he didn’t spend too much time thinking about how it chased him. So he couldn’t dwell on what it had already taken from him.
How it had already taken everything.
Those times, staring at things that could kill him, it was death that kept him alive. And it was the feeling that was a smidge more than the abyss of nothing that kept him chasing it.
Blood.
Violence.
Danger.
Pain.
But when he was staring into her hazel eyes, he saw a fuck of a lot more than nothing. Felt a fuck of a lot more than nothing.
It made him feel everything.
And that was worse than staring down the barrel of any gun.
Fuck, that was the barrel of a gun.
And it was those hazel eyes, her warm and soft touch amidst the hardness and coldness of his world that had him staring at that phone in the first place.
The phone that was a lot more dangerous than any murderer he’d sat across from, anyone he’d killed. More dangerous than the murderer he saw in the mirror.
But he found himself dialing.
Listening to the ring that felt like dirt on his fucking grave.
Hearing the faint and tired voice on the other end of the phone tore through him like a bullet. Paralyzed him like knife shredding through his spine.
His grip tightened on the phone as demons clutched at his throat, choked silence out of him.
Heavy breath covered his silence. A hitch in those breaths that sounded something like hope. But Gage wouldn’t know what hope sounded like. What it fuckin’ felt like. Hope abandoned the damned.
“Christian?” the soft voice asked.
Another bullet.
A muffled sob broke through his heavy silence. “Christian? Is that you?” That time it wasn’t a question but a plea.
His insides shredded. He was sure she would’ve forgotten. That he would’ve been the black mark they’d painted over by now. That he was nothing more than a scar.
“It’s okay. You don’t have to talk,” the voice hiccupped, full of fresh pain, not something that had even scabbed over, let alone scarred. There was a pause, a slight muffling of the phone. “Gary!” the broken voice called to the background.
And then he didn’t hear any more because the phone smashed against the wall seconds after Gage had thrown it.
He barely noticed the carnage against the ringing in his ears.
The need for a fix.
For blood.
For her.
He stood, going to satisfy one of those needs.
Lauren
One Week Later
I didn’t get out of bed for an entire day. That might’ve been nothing to people who partied till the sun came up, binged on Netflix, or were just plain lazy.
I was none of those people.
I was strict with my wake-up time, though being up and ready for the day wasn’t the intention. People were supposed to be up, being productive; it was what the normal structure of the world demanded. So I did it, because it was what was expected. Even on the days that my mattress seemed to grow arms and my mind grew roots, urging me to clutch to the nothingness of sleep.
But I didn’t cling to that nothingness for the same reason that I didn’t drink coffee or alcohol. Because it was easy. Mind-altering. A coping mechanism.
Until Gage, of course.
Then there was no wake-up time.
There was only us.
And my mattress didn’t need to grow arms when I had scarred ones around me. And my mind didn’t need roots since it belonged to Gage.
And he was gone.
I’d expected him to come back. To realize that walking away wasn’t an option when we were so tangled in each other.
But he didn’t come back.
And I didn’t get out of bed.
Then Monday came. And my alarm sounded.
I hadn’t moved in twenty-four hours.
I didn’t want to move for twenty-four years if that meant I wouldn’t be moving toward Gage. Or that my body wouldn’t be aching from his touch. Already that ache was disappearing. It was hard to tell though, through the repeated slicing of my heart with every breath I took.
It was tempting. But I didn’t do it.
I went to work.
I smiled at people.
I did my job.
Then I went home.
And I saw the half-painted image of Gage at my window. It was easily my best yet.
“Paint me like one of your French girls,” he purred with an accent.
I burst out laughing as he laid a gentle kiss on my nose, as if he sensed that I was nervous.
Beyond nervous.
I’d never painted someone living before.
Every single face in my studio—or broom closet—was painted by memory. Since a lot of them were David, there wasn’t much choice but to paint them from memory.
And painting was so painful, so private to me, that doing it front of Gage—doing it of Gage—was being naked in a way I’d never been.
He gripped my face, searching my eyes. “Know you’re scared of this. Just means you’re doin’ something right.”
And then he kissed me again.
Not on my nose, or tender.
He snatched away all my uneasiness with the kiss, and when he was done, I was pretty sure I could conquer the world.
“Sit,” I commanded, nodding to the chair by the window.
He grinned wickedly. “I like it when you’re bossy, Will. Save some of that for later.”
My stomach dipped at the prospect. Gage was in charge in the bedroom. And not in a way that took away my power. In a way that empowered me more than anything else ever had or ever would.
But the thought of having him at my mercy, at playing with that darkness he’d let out in me… I swallowed roughly.
“Paint first, fuck later,” Gage said, voice thick, as if he’d read my mind.
And with what I thought would be great effort, I started. But once my paintbrush started moving, it became a blur. As simple as breathing.
I didn’t notice the time go by.
Gage did.
“You have to sit still,” I snapped, looking from my canvas to my subject as he shifted in the chair.
He gritted his teeth. “How the fuck am I meant to sit still with you standin’ there, looking like an angel ripe f
or the picking, screwing your nose up in concentration, begging to be fucked?” he growled.
My brush paused and my breathing stuttered. I glanced back down at my canvas. “Well, considering you’re a self-professed badass who can do anything and everything, I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”
There was a heavy silence after his surly grunt.
And then when I thought he was settled again, he moved. The brush was out of my hand and I was over his shoulder before I could properly understand what happened.
A sting erupted on my ass after a loud slap.
“Fuck now, paint later,” he decided.
It was only when I felt a sharp pain in my palm that I realized I was on my knees, ripping at the canvas with my bare hands with such vigor that I’d stabbed myself with the wooden backing of the canvas.
I looked down at the blood, disinterested in it. The pain was little more than nothing. I pressed against the small shard of wood sticking out of my palm with detachment. The pain intensified as it ripped farther into my skin.
I toyed with the idea of pressing harder. Ripping, pulling, tearing at my skin as I did with the canvas. It was tempting.
But then I pulled it out, pushed to my feet, washed out the wound, poured disinfectant on it, and bandaged it correctly. It was funny how easily the shackles of my normal life fastened around my body now that my heart was dead.
I carried on like that for a week. A zombie of my former self. No, I was my former former self. Before Gage. It just felt like a zombie because I knew what it was like to be alive.
If Jen noticed the fact that I was precisely on time for work every single morning, she didn’t say anything, just smiled and handed me a cup of tea, talking about stories, the weather, nothing. It was a kindness, not probing me or my broken heart. Especially since it was already being probed with knives from breathing.
Some women knew you needed to pretend that your world wasn’t imploding just to get through the day, that to be a friend was to pretend right along with you.
Jen was one of those women.
Amy was not.
I had purposefully left earlier in the morning so as not to catch her wanting to walk with me—though she didn’t do it as often, as she’d walked in one morning to Gage fucking me against the wall. She hadn’t even blushed, just nodded once and said, “As you were.”