And then something in the air changed. Maybe it was Dwayne talking to me, standing close, brushing the hair from my face that the wind had blown, obscuring my view of Keltan.
“But for now, I’ll go see to women who promise a fuck of a lot less but don’t have any rules,” he added, eyes on the scantily clad girls lingering in the opposite corner of the party. We were standing closer to the parking lot, mainly because of the distance it offered between Keltan and me. My placement this entire afternoon had counted on where Keltan moved to at any given moment. And he circulated. As if on purpose.
When Dwayne lowered his hand, I was met with Keltan’s hard jaw, his own glare that rivaled mine. Though his was focused on the back of Dwayne’s head. Despite the fact that Dwayne gave me a wink and sauntered away towards the club girls.
Keltan kept his gaze on Dwayne for a second, and then he began to weave through the sea of bodies with one destination in mind. His eyes on me told me that.
I wanted to run.
It would have been smart.
But then again, I’d been running for a year.
So, I stood still.
Unfortunately, standing still was not preferable when an afternoon party turned into an afternoon bloodbath.
I didn’t hear the gunshots properly at first. You’d think that gunshots would do a pretty bang-up job of breaking me out of my Keltan daze.
I would have thought so too.
But the reason I properly registered the gunshots was because my eyes were on Keltan’s and they shuttered immediately at the first, going blank and empty and almost robot-like. Then his steady walk turned to a sprint. Towards me. Which wasn’t the best idea considering my current placement. I was on the edge of the grassed area littered with picnic tables and people. On the other side of me was the parking lot. The parking lot that four bikes had roared into and opened fired on the grassed area littered with people. Women. Children. My family.
I didn’t watch the bullets fly for too long because I was hit with a large force and tumbled to the ground.
The large force being Keltan’s body which he used to cover mine the entire time the bullets were flying.
Which seemed like two seconds.
And a lifetime all the same.
The water splashing on my face was ruining every inch of my makeup. But right then, makeup was the last thing on my mind.
People were shot today.
People died today.
A person. A man I’d known since forever. Who was always part of the club. Who I thought always would be.
Then he wasn’t.
Right in the sunshine we’d only just started to enjoy after too many clouds.
The chaos after the shooters had roared off was somewhat blurry, but my clearest memory was Keltan lifting me to my feet, clutching my face in his hands, eyes going over every inch of me to make sure there were no bullet holes.
Once he’d been satisfied, his eyes closed in such a physical gesture of relief that I felt it in my soul.
Then he pressed a kiss to my head.
“Get inside. Now,” he’d demanded. Now that his eyes were open they were closed off, empty. Devoid of what I thought would always be there. That spark.
I’d done what he said, mainly because it was the only thing to do at that second. Help the people, my people, who were bleeding from gunshot wounds, soothing crying children.
Inside had been more chaos. Tears. Mourning over someone else the club had lost.
My escape to the bathroom was so I could breathe without choking on it all.
I assumed it was Rosie who was opening the door. It was the women’s bathroom, after all. And I guessed she needed to breathe too. And possibly take swigs from a bottle of tequila she’d no doubt be bringing in.
Except it wasn’t Rosie.
I found that out when I dried my face and lifted my head to make eye contact with Keltan.
Or the man resembling Keltan. His face was blank. Still devoid. Still robot-like ever since that first gunshot had triggered something in him.
Something I wondered might have to do with the battles he’d left behind a year before that hadn’t left him.
I turned. “Keltan,” I began.
He crossed the distance between us in an instant. His hands tangled into my hair with a brutal intensity that bordered on pain as he yanked my mouth inches from his.
“Don’t say a fuckin’ word,” he hissed. “No more words. No. I need to feel you. Need to fuckin’ drown in you.”
And then he did. Or, more aptly, I drowned in him the moment his mouth fastened over mine, and he kissed all sense of reality and logic from me.
More importantly, he kissed every demon that had lurked to the surface with the events of the afternoon.
And then he banished them to depths of my mind that I didn’t even know existed when he lifted me so my dress rode up to my hips and my ass settled on the cool porcelain of the sink.
He never lost contact with my mouth as one of his hands left my hair and yanked my dress up further before ripping the small lace panties I was wearing.
Ripping. One-handed.
His fingers entered the soaking flesh that was all his the moment his mouth fastened on mine. One year before. Outside a coffee shop.
They brought about the quickest, and so not fake, orgasm I’d ever had. In a year. Or a lifetime.
It was still rolling through me as his fingers left me and he surged into me.
His mouth left mine, and he rested his forehead on mine, one hand clutching the back of my neck roughly, the other biting into my hip, keeping me in place while he brutally pounded into me with such force I idly worried about the sink collapsing with the motion.
I worried about that for less than a second.
“Open your fuckin’ eyes,” he commanded on a thick growl.
I immediately complied. And drowned in his solid black irises, more wild and feral than I’d ever seen them.
It was right there. At the surface. His chaos. His demons. And he was showing it all to me.
My own demons couldn’t help but come to the surface too, to make his acquaintance while he owned every inch of my body, thrusting into me in exquisite brutality.
We stayed like that, my legs wrapped around his hips, as he continued to ravage me. As the storm inside me both stilled and came to a wild crescendo at the same time.
“Snow,” he rasped. It was in between a growl and a plead. And it was all I needed to break apart in his arms, milking his release from him as he let out a hiss of breath and yanked our mouths together.
The only sound in the bathroom afterwards was heavy breathing and the roar of the storm he’d created between the two of us.
The one I was happy to stay in.
For it was much better than what waited outside that door.
Or inside my mind.
But all good things came to an end.
In fact, everything came to an end.
That was the bad news.
And the good news.
He pulled back from where his head was buried in my neck to meet my eyes for a beat.
My frazzled mind registered all and nothing of what was going on inside them. But it recognized it. The false stillness that had replaced the chaos of before. That flat gaze.
Then he broke eye contact in order to pull out of me, and the loss of him signaled something that accompanied that look in his eyes.
The water of the tap beside me echoed through the small bathroom.
He didn’t lift his head as he tucked himself back into his jeans and then cleaned himself from me.
The gesture was somehow final.
When he was done, he grasped my hips lightly and lifted me, releasing me the second my heeled feet and weak knees held me upright.
After, of course, pulling my dress down in a very orderly and detached manner. The brush of the fabric against my bare and tender skin had me sucking in an audible breath.
Keltan’s eyes snapped up, meet
ing mine with a swirling dark desire before they shuttered.
I couldn’t look away, couldn’t break it. Even though that stare hurt in ways I couldn’t comprehend.
We stayed like that for moments. Lifetimes.
Then his hand moved to grasp the back of my head, yanking my mouth to his for a brutal closemouthed kiss.
Then he let me go.
And walked out the door.
And I stood there in the quiet. In the storm. Wondering how the fuck I would endure this one.
Three Weeks Later
Strange how in a year nothing could change.
Yet three weeks could change more than in fifty-two of them.
The change being me. And everything else around me. I hadn’t heard a word from him. Not a fucking peep. After a year. After being in a shooting with him. After staring death in the face. Not with the shooting, but that empty look in his eyes before he walked out the door.
Because I’d been going over that look in my mind for the past three weeks straight, I thought I figured out what it was. It was what I’d seen in the mirror ten years before, my hair matted, my face bruised and a thin spattering of blood on my temple.
Not my blood.
His.
Gray’s.
Ten Years Ago
We were in love. Love that no one else understood. How could they? Love was a secret one only shared between two people. The only thing that two people could ever understand.
My friends were just being friends by questioning the secret.
Ashley just being Ashley, speaking in soft tones, asking me whether I was sure about this. Giving Gray wary looks when he came to pick me up after school.
Laurie was just being Laurie by squeezing my hand with understanding and twinkling eyes, telling me real love, like what she felt with a certain rough biker—felt real and good and right, and I better make sure that’s what this was.
Rosie was just being Rosie when she spoke in not-so-soft tones, telling me he was “a fucking loser you need to dump immediately.”
He didn’t go to school. He’d graduated two years before and was a mechanic in Hope. We’d met when Rosie and I were cutting school because our favorite vintage store was having a flash sale.
He’d been in the diner where we’d been eating burgers. Rosie had gone to the bathroom, threatening me with “death and dismemberment” if I touched her fries. She was too much like her brother sometimes. Scarier, actually, because Rosie would actually do it. Cade had a thing about hurting women. Especially over fries. Rosie took her fries very seriously.
But then again, so did I. So I was munching on her fries when he came and sat at the booth.
He slipped in, coveralls tied at the waist, exposing his wifebeater which was clinging to some nice muscles. I’d been around the Sons of Templar men for too long because I didn’t blink at them. They were nice. Not as nice as Cade’s, for example, but not something to sneeze at either.
His biceps were the same. His sandy blond hair was worn maybe a little too long, but the messiness of it brushing on his broad shoulders coupled with his icy blue eyes made it work.
In a big way.
He grinned easily at me. Confidently. In a way that made my stomach dip. In a way a man looked at a woman. Not in the way the arrogant quarterback leered at me after I let him take my virginity despite him being awkward and somewhat like a jackrabbit.
“I had to come over here and make sure I didn’t miss a chance to talk to the most beautiful woman in this joint. And all the joints in this county,” he said with an easy voice, a little husky like he smoked a lot. “And I have to make sure that she comes to dinner with me.”
It wasn’t so much the words, which were slightly cheesy and sounded practiced. It was more than that. The way he had about him, the way he looked at me, like he was seeing only me.
And that’s how it started.
I fell hard and fast.
They didn’t know the secret. But that was okay.
The men in the club didn’t know. Because I was still in school and Gray was almost twenty. They would most likely beat him up. Cade might kill him. Steg definitely would. He’d already threatened my prom date with a weapon before.
Mom and Dad were less violent, but I knew this would not go down well with my easygoing parents.
It was that much more exciting anyway. The secret.
Well, I thought it was.
Until Gray started getting intent on knowing where I was at all times. Who I was with. Making comments about what I wore. Telling me I shouldn’t be hanging around at the club, like one of “the club sluts.”
And then I started changing. Listening to what he said and only doing and wearing things I knew he would approve of. I could see it, that I was turning into something else.
I knew it wasn’t good. I wasn’t dumb. But I was in love. And so was Gray. He just got intense sometimes. And he always apologized.
I knew he’d apologize now. But it didn’t mean it wasn’t scaring me slightly. The way he was pacing, and his eyes wouldn’t focus on one thing. I think he was doing some sort of drugs, because he was acting more erratic lately and never seemed to have money. I’d loaned him money from my job at the café in town. Twice.
Plus, his apartment was never exactly clean, but the littering of take-out wrappers and beer bottles on the floor and coffee table was just gross. It didn’t exactly put me in the mood for sex.
And that was the other thing. The sex had always been good, not that I had huge amounts of experience, but it was nice. Lately it was… not as nice. He was rougher with me. He didn’t care when he squeezed too hard, or drew blood when kissing.
So, I was wary of this.
Which had started the pacing.
And the yelling.
“It’s because you’re fucking someone else, isn’t it?” he yelled, stopping in front of me.
I crossed my arms, mainly to hide the shaking in my hands. “How could you even say that, Gray?” I asked in a small voice. “You know there’s only you.”
He rolled his eyes. “No, I fuckin’ don’t. Not when you dress like a whore, won’t fuck your man like you should and hang around with biker assholes,” he hissed, eyes going down to my black tailored shorts and slouchy tee.
Not exactly whore chic.
I narrowed my eyes at him, despite the wild look on his face and the volatile atmosphere in the air. “Don’t you say a word about them,” I ordered quietly, my own fury nothing like the roar of his. “And I’m leaving. Before you say something you regret and won’t be able to apologize for later.
I went to turn, planning on walking out the door and calling Laurie to pick me up. She wouldn’t judge me like Rosie would. No, Rosie would never judge me. She’d judge Gray, though. Might even try and do something like burn his apartment down. She had kind of a track record.
We both did.
But instead of leaving, I was yanked back by Gray’s rough grip on my wrist.
I cried out in pain at the pressure of it.
But it was nothing compared to what came after it.
He stopped eventually. Grew bored. Or maybe his fist got tired. He tried to do… other things after that. Things that would have scarred me worse than what his fist could do. Despite the pain, I’d tried to fight him. But I didn’t fight enough. He’d ripped off my tee, grasped my breasts so roughly I could already see purple on them. But then he couldn’t perform. That made him angrier. And his fists found a bit more energy.
Then he just stood over me. My thoughts were jumbled, and I was in a lot of pain, curled small so he had less surface area to hit. Blinking up at him through swollen eyes, for a split second, it wasn’t Gray. And I wasn’t in his filthy living room. I was in my trailer, looking up at my father holding a beer bottle by the neck and wearing that same empty and cruel expression.
And then I was back.
I didn’t know how close hate and love were before that. How quickly one could cross from one to the other. But looking
into those empty eyes I’d tricked myself into thinking were full, I hated him. With a placid kind of purity that felt much more right than the love I’d been convinced was real. True.
“You don’t leave. Ever. You try, I’ll kill you,” Gray promised in a voice so cool and ugly it hurt like an invisible punch.
Then he walked over to the sofa, slumping down on top of paper wrappers and switching the TV on. Watching it like nothing happened.
Like I wasn’t curled on the stained carpet, broken.
Because it had hurt. A lot. Him hitting me. But not the most. The most pain came from that empty and cruel look from the man who held my heart. That empty and cold look that was identical to the man who had done the exact same thing to my mother.
To me.
Yeah. That killed.
But I didn’t sink into it. That feeling. Instead, I found whatever strength I had left and crawled into his bathroom, grabbing my bag along the way. I’d discarded it on the floor in my excitement to see him.
The man who called me a whore, beat me and left me on the floor like a battered animal. The man I hated more than I’d ever loved.
Once I made it inside the filthy room, closing the door and locking it behind me, my fumbling and shaking hands fastened around my phone.
I stared at it for a long time. The longest. It wasn’t that I didn’t have anyone to call; I had too many. All the numbers promised different outcomes. Safety. Love. Escape.
Revenge.
That was the one I picked.
“Bull,” I whispered in a scratchy voice.
The roar of the Harley was what signified his arrival. He must have ridden fast, considering Hope was at least a half-hour drive away. Or maybe I’d nodded off. My head had taken a lot of knocks and it did feel cloudy, like I needed the oblivion of sleep. Though I didn’t think it was my physical injuries that craved oblivion.
I managed, through sheer force of will, to stand up and fasten my hand around the doorknob.
The TV was still going when I emerged, Gray’s blond head still focused on the box of moving images.