by Malcom, Anne
He still hadn’t quit.
Then again, I doubted lung cancer was a prevailing cause of death in outlaw bikers.
“He’s got club business.”
I had discovered that ‘club business’ was kind of a blanket statement for whenever the men in cuts didn’t want to explain where they were or what they were doing. And you didn’t ask questions.
Or weren’t supposed to.
I folded my arms across my chest, because the night was chilly, I was only wearing a tank and my nipples were having a reaction that had nothing to do with the chill in the air. “What kind of club business?”
Liam sighed. The sound carried over the distance between. “Doesn’t matter. Matters that from now on, to and from work, you’re on the back of my bike.”
I froze.
On the back of his bike.
I knew what that term meant too.
Obviously it didn’t mean the same thing with us.
But obviously there was no way in earth I could be on Liam’s bike, pressed up to his body. Touching him.
No. Fucking. Way.
“That’s not happening,” I said immediately.
“It’s not something you have a say in.”
I gritted my teeth if only to distract myself from the pain that came with this foreign man who didn’t ask me things, just told me what to do. Who had no care for my comfort or my autonomy.
“I would rather walk to the club. On broken glass, which is the equivalent of what these heels are.” I hissed back. I may have been back in my comfortable uniform, but the only footwear available to me was my skank heels. I didn’t want to get my Gucci sneakers stained from the floor of the bar. I turned on my heel and began to do just that until a hand circled around my upper arm.
It was painful. Not because the grip was tight. Because the grip was Liam’s.
“You think I’m gonna let you walk three miles at one in the mornin’, alone?” he growled. His breath was hot, smelled of smoke, Liam and destruction.
I tried to wrench my hand away. Tried being the operative word. He held fast. “You’re going to force me into something else, Liam?” I asked quietly. Exhaustion hit me truly and suddenly. Not physical, though I’d been on my feet all night and hadn’t had shit for sleep in what felt like years.
It was an exhaustion I’d been avoiding for years. Fifteen years worth of tiredness hit me in an empty parking lot at one in the morning faced with a biker I used to know in another life.
It must have seeped into my voice, that exhaustion, something in it caused Liam to let go of my arm. He let out a sigh. It was heavier than the last one. I battled not to let it sit on my shoulders. Because there was over a decade’s worth of tiredness and pain in that sigh.
“Okay,” he said finally.
I jerked in surprise. “Okay?” I repeated.
“Let’s walk.”
I gritted my teeth again. “The purpose of me walking is so I don’t have to be in your presence,” I said tightly.
Silence dragged on, stretching like half-chewed gum on the bottom of a shoe.
Liam finally spoke. Though his voice was Jagger’s. “You’re gonna have to be in it, like it or not, I told you I’d protect you.”
“Protecting me is leaving me, Liam,” I whispered. Why was I still calling him that? He kept giving me all the evidence I needed to bury Liam once and for all.
But I wasn’t strong enough.
It was that simple. I was holding onto a dream, a memory, a lie.
I couldn’t see his face in the darkness but I imagined it hardening, his features tightening.
“I’m not leaving you, Caroline,” he said, voice throaty. He cleared it. “So it’s walking or the bike, you decide.”
I bit the inside of my lip. Walk three miles in the middle of the night even though my feet were killing me. Or get on a bike with Liam for the two-minute ride.
It wasn’t a choice, really.
I started walking.
Motorcycle boots thumped against concrete as Liam fell into step with me.
“What if someone steals your bike?” I asked only so I didn’t have to suffer the silence that wasn’t really silence between us.
“No one’s gonna steal my bike,” he replied.
“Because everyone fears the wrath of the Sons of Templar?” I asked sarcastically.
He paused. It was only the thump of his boots for a moment, I thought that might be his only answer. He’d given me enough evidence of the wrath of the Sons of Templar after all. “Sure, some people won’t steal it ‘cause they fear us, rightfully so. The rest of them won’t because they respect us. The club. I know you won’t believe this, but the club’s not all bad.” Another pause. A longer one. “Fuck, maybe we are. No one comes out good in the middle of a war.”
“No,” I agreed.
The silence continued.
For three miles.
Scarlett’s words haunted me with every step. But I didn’t have the strength to do anything but put one foot in front of the other.
We reached the clubhouse and it was eerily silent. I watched the building as we approached and it seemed that it watched me back. With the deaths it held inside its walls, I wondered if it was a living thing now.
It felt like it.
Did enough death create life?
The man beside me was the embodiment of that.
Whoever he was.
As we approached the perimeter, floodlights switched on and I squinted with the harshness of the light.
“Jesus, Blake!” Jagger yelled. “It’s fuckin’ me. Put the weapon down before I shove it up your ass.”
I squinted past the offensive light, following Liam’s gaze upward to the man perched in a small watchtower structure above us. Sure enough, he was holding an automatic rifle, quickly moving the barrel so it was no longer pointed in our direction.
Blake was one of the youngest patched members. He wasn’t even old enough to drink, but he managed to make sure he replaced his blood with alcohol in all the parties I’d seen him at. Though there was youth in his face, there was none of it behind his eyes. Though he was easy to laugh, to joke, it was all empty.
“Jagger? Dude, what the fuck are you walkin’ for? Your health?” His voice was scratchy, appealing, like the rest of him. Distracting enough for most of the female population not to notice the danger he wore underneath it all.
“Yeah, for my fuckin’ health,” Jagger muttered. “You know what’s good for yours, kid, you’ll open the fuckin’ gate, rouse a prospect and get them to get my bike.”
I could tell Blake itched to ask a lot of questions. But Liam’s voice didn’t really broker such questions. So instead, the gate opened.
We walked to the clubhouse in the same silence we’d adopted for three miles. It was the silence between two people who were pretending there was nothing to say between them, two people who knew each other too well to have such a thing as silence.
The common room wasn’t empty, a handful of club girls were scattered around, in varying states of undress, tangled up with men, also in different states of undress.
My eyes ran over them without reaction.
Even if this wasn’t a nightly occurrence in the place that was my prison, I wouldn’t have a reaction. Sex was the least shocking to me out of all the things humans could do with an audience.
We both came to a stop outside Liam’s room.
As before, when I’d been too afraid to cross the threshold outside, now I found myself terrified to go inside, to close the door and be suffocated by my loneliness.
Liam didn’t say anything. Didn’t make a move to leave, just stood across from me, staring at the door.
“I feel like I need to thank you,” I said finally, moving to meet his eyes with whatever strength I had left.
He blinked. “Thank me?”
I nodded. “I used to think that having you, us being together, it meant I would never be alone, never be lonely. Even with you halfway across the wor
ld, even though I didn’t see your face, hear your voice for weeks at a time, I knew you were still there. I knew we were still there. We were okay. I was okay. Never alone.”
I paused. For a long time. Long enough for those memories, for that pain to wash over me. Somehow fresh, somehow more powerful than whatever was before that.
As I was learning, there was always more pain with Liam.
“Then you died,” I whispered to the door. “But even then, I wasn’t alone. I was lonely for you. Fuck, was I lonely for you.” I tried to conjure up those days, the darkest of my existence.
But even with my newfound capacity to remember, to experience pain and still remain standing, my body wouldn’t let me go there. There were some things that your mind didn’t let you remember.
“I missed you with parts of me I didn’t know existed,” I said, still talking to the door. “With a pain I didn’t know human beings could conjure up without outside forces. I felt all of that. But not quite alone. You were there. Somewhere. Inside me. Outside me. Watching over me.” I shook my head, smiling wistfully.
I didn’t know where I found the strength, maybe it wasn’t strength, it was tiredness that had me meeting his eyes.
Another wave of pain at those emerald irises.
At the unmissable scar.
At the body, taut, wired, coiled.
“I used to talk to you,” I said. “I was convinced you were somewhere. You were with me. It’s what people do to survive death. Convince ourselves that it’s not just some yawning black hole, that the person who was once everything isn’t reduced to nothing but compost.” I didn’t move my eyes from his. “Though most people don’t have their dead ones come back to life. And you wanna know what’s funny? I’ve never felt more alone than when I saw you in that alleyway.”
He didn’t move.
But he flinched.
Somewhere deep inside that, I knew was the worst and most visceral kind of pain.
The most lasting.
I felt satisfied landing that blow.
Emptily satisfied.
I moved my eyes and my hand went to the doorknob. I waited. For what, I didn’t know. For him to stop me. Stop the pain.
He did neither.
So I walked through the door and closed it in his face.
The locks clicked.
On my side this time.
Every story that I worked that made a splash, that was real and good, was not purely a result of good reporting. Sure, I was a good reporter, but those stories were not made purely by my talent. Not by a long shot.
My career and my position in the industry was based largely on luck.
My first assignment in Afghanistan, I was allotted a ‘fixer,’ Dariush. Every foreign journalist was required to have one. They were designed to take care of our safety, facilitate our stay, help with visas, and transport us. Mostly they were employed by the government to make sure we behaved.
Dariush was different than most. He was intelligent, young, though married with two infants, incredibly sloppily dressed and spoke immaculate English. He also abhorred the state his country was in and went out of his way, while putting his life in danger, to help me. To help my story by putting me in contact with people who would give me the real scoop.
The same happened in every war-torn country I visited. With people who had little more than nothing, but information, and that was everything.
There was Uri in Israel.
Anatoly in Moscow.
Faheem in the Sudan.
Zamir in Iraq.
All men. I didn’t know if this was because I was a female, because men were the only one allowed to ‘fix’ things for reporters, especially female reporters. It didn’t much matter.
Each of these men worked constantly for terrible money, worse—read, no—benefits, in beyond dangerous circumstances, risking their lives for a foreigner, with the hope a stranger might help their country with some uncensored news coverage.
Which wasn’t the case often enough for my liking.
I wondered who my fixer was here.
If there was ever a chance of ‘fixing’ this.
Though I knew there wasn’t. You couldn’t fix what wasn’t broken, but you could break something so badly that there was no possibility of reparation.
That was me.
Beyond reparation.
Beyond redemption.
* * *
I was up early.
Because in my real life—or whatever passed for it—I was always up early. Constant sunrise bombings, alternating with calls to prayer didn’t exactly promote sleeping till noon.
I had been waking early since I’d become a reluctant resident here, but first I’d been confined to this room, so unable to do my morning routine, which usually consisted of a shitload of coffee, a quick yoga session and a bagel smeared with enough cream cheese to clog my arteries.
I didn’t much worry about calories since my life was pretty much lived on the edge of death. Fitting into my jeans never really bothered me. That and I’d seen people starving, actually starving, children dying, their malnourished bodies bloated and skinny at the same time. No way was I going to put myself on a diet, starve myself like so many women did. It certainly wasn’t helping those who actually starved, but it worked for my guilty conscience.
My routine had been obviously ruined along with whatever was left of my sanity.
It was the morning after walking those miles with Liam and our collective demons that I decided I needed to take control of whatever I could. Which wasn’t much. But my morning routine might work.
I dressed in leggings and an oversized tee, yanked my hair into a messy bun and did a quick lot of stretches in the small amount of floor space available to me. No way was I trying it in the common room, not just because of the littering of condom wrappers, empty bottles, unconscious bodies and whatever bacteria resided there—though that was a big contributor. No, because I didn’t want to run into Liam, skulking around from wherever he was staying.
I hadn’t asked him where he was sleeping, though our exchanges didn’t really have space for benign questions such as that. We only had space for those big, yawning, gaping, painful questions. Like ‘why did you fake your own death and leave me alone with my broken heart, you miserable bastard?’ kind of questions.
And I wasn’t strong enough for the answer just yet.
Me, the person who made her living out of asking some of the hardest questions in the world, did not have enough courage to ask the one question that mattered.
It rang around in my skull as I tried to repair my aching body.
Once finished, my stiff and sore body was loosened somewhat. But no matter how much yoga I did, I wasn’t going to stretch away the tension that was coiled in my soul.
I dressed in my last lot of clean clothes, reminding myself to venture around the clubhouse, or at least ask Macy, to find out where to do laundry.
I thought I’d feel more comfortable in my boyfriend jeans, black tank, Gucci sneakers, and red lipstick—not wearing scant and tight clothes and enough makeup to sink a ship.
My hair was slowly returning back to its normal color, though it was a strange in between now. Though that worked, since I felt like I was in between. Halfway from that girl in miniskirts and crop tops, but somehow still miles from the woman who routinely wore bulletproof vests with ‘Press’ plastered on them in block letters.
As if a collection of five words on the vest would provide me with some other layer of protection. Words protected no one. But I had experience in knowing they could harm just as well as any bullet.
Maybe that was why I was too scared to ask Liam those questions.
Because I didn’t have on my emotional bulletproof vest.
I had considered myself and my fragile mind lucky that I encountered no one while thinking these thoughts, pouring my coffee in the thankfully clean kitchen off the common room.
The kitchen was well stocked, with a mixture of extremely health
y food—even fricking kale, which apparently Claw put in his smoothies—and total junk. I veered toward the total junk.
I was halfway through a bagel when my luck ran out.
No, that wasn’t quite right, my luck ran out about ten days ago, with a bullet in an alley.
No, that wasn’t quite right either.
My luck ran out when I heard a scream down the street and my blood went cold almost fifteen years ago.
Liam didn’t look like he was expecting me when he entered the kitchen.
I wasn’t expecting him either. Not just in the kitchen, but here, walking the earth at all.
You’d think I would’ve gotten used to it by now. Not just seeing him when I thought he was dead for fourteen years, but seeing this new, hard, scarred version of him.
You’d think someone as accustomed to trauma as me, to seeing all sorts of horrors, I would’ve been able to brace for impact.
I couldn’t.
There was a handful of seconds, every time I laid eyes on him, when his presence tore through every single shield I’d managed to build. Like knives. But it wasn’t the pain that was the worst, I was used to that, it barely went away. No, it was the sheer and primal joy that came from my heart before my brain could catch it up.
Because those few seconds weren’t full of ugly truth and reality of what him living, breathing, walking around in a motorcycle cut meant.
No, those seconds were simple. Liam was alive.
It was the transition from simple to painfully complicated that was the worst thing. Having to let go of that warm joy and replace it with the cold truth.
I quickly swallowed my half-chewed bagel, the sides of it scraping my throat. For a second, I thought it might lodge itself in my airway, a panic came with the thought of standing there choking in front of Liam, on a fucking bagel. But then a strange sense of longing overtook me. I wanted to choke in front of him. Give him something tangible to be presented with. Show him what his presence did.
But I swallowed.
“I was just leaving,” I said coldly, skirting around him. Or trying to.
He snatched my wrist. The skin burned from contact. I even looked down to see if smoke was arising from where our bodies met.
