by Malcom, Anne
My stomach dipped, even in the midst of this, I wanted him.
“Never seen a man so in love with someone, never seen what I felt for you inside of somethin’ else. He went home to see them halfway through my tour. Could not stop talkin’ about it.”
He finished the smoke and lit up a new one.
“Then he came back. He didn’t say a word. Something about the way he looked told me not to ask. Something was gone. Somethin’ that made every single guy in my unit afraid of him.”
Liam looked to the pool.
“He never looked at the pictures anymore. He was still best at what he did. But became the best at worse and worse things.”
He turned back to me. “Wasn’t ‘til later that I found out he’d choked his wife so bad she’d been in hospital. Did it because she forgot to iron a shirt. A fucking shirt.”
He shook his head as if to shake out the memories. The futures he likely imagined when he heard that story.
“I left because it’s dangerous to be near me,” he said. “Because I didn’t trust myself around a world like the one I came from. I had to patch into the Sons, because here, I can feed my beast, hurt the right people. If I came back to you, I would’ve hurt the wrong ones.” He got up and still didn’t look at me.
He just walked away.
An hour later, we hit the deadline.
And we road back.
To damnation.
Chapter Eighteen
As much as I was sure Liam wanted to ride hard and fast to get back, we stopped in Texas again. I wasn’t sure if it was out of care for me or because even he, as strong and badass as he was, couldn’t ride for twenty hours straight through three states.
So we stopped at a hotel.
Slightly nicer than the other two we stayed at.
We were silent as we checked into the hotel. Well, I stopped being silent right after we got our keys and turned toward the elevator.
There were people in the lobby, waiting to check in. The fact that the hotel was nicer meant that we got looks for Liam’s cut, tattoos, and the fact our luggage consisted of two Walmart tote bags.
That didn’t bother me.
People who looked down on you were already below you.
No, what bothered me was a woman, well dressed, older, just the type you would expect to get drunk on gin and tonic at four in the afternoon and insult her housekeeper.
She was staring. At first, I thought it was because of the riff-raff that I was sure she tagged us as. But it became apparent exactly what she was staring at.
Liam didn’t seem to notice. Then again, Liam didn’t seem anything. He had his scary, cold and dangerous biker mask on. But only I could see it. Everyone else just saw the scar.
And this woman was staring.
I. Was. Done.
I walked up to her and she narrowed her eyes at me as if she were expecting me to rob her in a hotel lobby or something. “Excuse me, how old are you?” I demanded.
She blinked rapidly. “I don’t think that’s an appropriate question,” she snapped, recovering and jutting her chin up in the way asshole rich people did to try and make themselves seem important.
I laughed. “Well, you know what I don’t think is appropriate? It’s a woman with your advanced years and obvious thoughts of superiority staring at someone like she has the right to. Because I see you think money can buy you a lot, but it obviously doesn’t buy you class.”
“Well, I—”
I held up my finger. “I’m not done,” I interrupted. “You remember that we’re staying in this hotel. When you fall asleep, you remember that. And maybe next time you encounter someone that doesn’t look exactly like you want them to look, you won’t fucking stare.”
I turned on my heel and walked out.
Liam followed me.
He was no longer wearing his mask.
* * *
“What did you write?”
I glanced up. “What?”
Despite the slipping of his mask, Liam and I still hadn’t spoken since we arrived in the hotel room. Well, apart from him informing me that he was leaving to get us pizza.
He didn’t ask me what I wanted, he already knew what I liked.
What I liked on my pizza, how I took my coffee, that still hadn’t changed.
I no longer felt uncomfortable in the intimacy of that.
While he was gone, I decided to write in the journal he was now nodding to, standing in the doorway, holding pizza and a six-pack.
“In your notebook. I can’t imagine that you have a lot of things to find yourself grateful for today.”
That wasn’t true. I’d reached five.
I am inhaling and exhaling.
Liam is alive.
I have a nephew.
I have a happy and healthy family.
I finally know the truth.
I had no idea why I let him see it. I’d never let anyone see this. Though, I wasn’t sure if that meant anything since no one but my therapist knew that I kept this diary.
Liam put the pizza and beer down and took the notebook from me.
He stared at the paper for much longer than it took to read it.
Then he put it down.
“You’re grateful that I’m alive?” he said, voice almost a whisper. But a man who spoke like Liam didn’t whisper, he had a low, thick rasp.
The smallness in his tone hurt me. I didn’t hesitate to cross the space between us and cup his face the same way my mother had earlier today. “Yes, Liam. No matter who you came back as, I’m glad you’re alive. I tried to lie to myself and say I wasn’t. But I’m a journalist. I’m trained to spot lies. And that’s the biggest one of all. That even in the middle of this pain and misery, I feel joy that I’m standing in front of you right now.” I stroked his scar. “That I’m touching you,” I whispered.
He put his hand lightly, hesitantly on my hip. “I didn’t use to feel anything about being alive,” he said. “I didn’t feel anything but shame. I tried to build a life as far away from what I could’ve had with you so it would be like I really was dead. And it suits me. As much as I fucking hate to say that to you, I couldn’t live any other life. I couldn’t have come home. There would have been one day you forgot to close the kitchen drawer or got the wrong brand of yogurt and I would’ve done something so ugly and destroyed the beautiful life I didn’t deserve.” His hand tightened on my hip. “Destroyed the beautiful woman I didn’t deserve.”
“I know,” I whispered.
I didn’t like the truth of what he was saying. But no one really liked the truth. The truth was a bully we all pretended to like. Never had I gotten that quote from my favorite book like I did now.
His eyes moved over my face, something working between us. Something weaving through the air, now we had cleared the space with the truth earlier today. Something pivotal.
Because I’d told myself that once Liam told me the truth, I’d be forced to make a decision. I’d imagined the decision itself would be some pivotal, climactic moment, like in the movies with all that sad music, it’d probably be raining and it would become a defining chapter in our story.
But the decision was small, blink and you miss it type small. It was me packing up that Walmart bag and getting on the back of Liam’s bike. Something about the way he looked at me sitting on it told me if I didn’t get on, he’d just drive back, leaving me with only the vision of his cut and I’d never see him again. He was giving me an out.
I didn’t hesitate.
I got on.
And he drove off.
No rain.
No climatic moment.
It wasn’t a chapter in a story.
It was barely a footnote.
But it would define the way it ended.
And here we were, in a hotel room, one last night of just us before we went back to the club for whatever ending awaited us.
This was the moment.
The pivotal one. Where we made declarations. Promises that would be brok
en.
But he stepped back.
My hands stayed suspended in the air for a beat.
Liam moved to open the pizza boxes, pass me a beer.
I took it wordlessly, the smell of pepperoni and mushrooms filled the air. Our favorite. The one food that we both liked the same way.
We ate in silence, I forced the pizza down even though my stomach was churning. The beer went down much easier.
“You want to ask me shit now?” he asked, putting the pizza away and giving me the last beer. I was outdrinking him.
“What shit?” For once, I didn’t actually have any more questions.
No. That was a lie.
I had a lot of questions.
Like, do you still love me? Is this going anywhere? Will you give up the club for me?
But they were not the questions even someone like me asked.
“For your story. You’re still writing it, aren’t you?”
The words were a blow. A dumping of cold water into my psyche. The story. What brought me here, what drove me for the past decade, I’d all but forgotten about the story because I was too busy thinking about our story.
Liam obviously wasn’t.
I cleared my throat. “Yeah, sure, of course. I’m still writing it.”
Something moved in his eyes. Disappointment?
But I had already transitioned myself into my old skin, the journalist mode that I used to feel so comforted, so insulated in. Now it was just cold. Ill-fitting.
I moved to the Walmart bag, rifling through to find the one thing I’d had on me while I’d been scaling the clubhouse wall. I didn’t pack a toothbrush, but a small tape recorder, I’d shoved in my pocket. Maybe I was still a journalist.
“Do you mind if I record you?” I asked.
He shrugged in response, lighting up the smoke that reminded me of yesterday’s that didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that the room was nonsmoking, I guessed. He didn’t ask me if I minded the smoke. I wasn’t sure it was because he didn’t care if I minded or if he knew I’d come to crave it, despite what it did to his health. We were bad for each other’s health, no matter what.
I didn’t need the recorder.
I had one with me out of habit. Much smaller than the one I started with over ten years ago, green, afraid, heartbroken. Not unlike today. Maybe the only thing that had changed since then was the tape recorder. Maybe that was the horrible truth I’d been trying to ignore.
What if I was exactly the same as the girl with the tape recorder and a broken heart all those years ago?
I had the tape recorder out of habit. I took it—or a much bulkier version—everywhere in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Europe. Because a lot of my interviews were facilitated by translators, who couldn’t always be trusted to give me exact translations. Sometimes it was because they thought they were being helpful, saving time, or saving face from seemingly fatal faux pas. But all of my questions where intended the exact way they came out. Before I left, I made sure to study the culture of the region I was reporting on relentlessly. Even if it meant reading on a turbulent and crowded flight into an airport with a safety rating that would’ve closed any American contemporary.
I knew what background and manners dictated exchanges wherever I was in the world. Most of the time I respected such things, as all visitors and reporters alike should strive to do. But other times I was required to surpass culture in order to obtain the truth. I had to deliberately subvert social norms in order to get the right answer.
And the right answer almost always came from a place of anger.
But my translators didn’t know that.
Mostly they knew I was a Western woman, coming somewhere she didn’t belong, asking questions she couldn’t possibly understand the answers to.
Other translators had different intentions, whether they be for ill or for good—in their eyes, it was always for survival.
That’s why tapes were crucial.
I could listen to them later, attempt to translate them with rudimentary knowledge and a shitty internet connection or send them back home to my trusted experts—a lot of whom replied with translations peppered with opinions. Whether it be humor at the ‘balls I had for a woman’ or others who berated me for asking questions that could get me killed.
I was under no illusion as to what kind of questions I was asking Liam.
The switching on of my tape recorder had nothing to do with language barriers. Harvard scholars or linguists weren’t likely to be fluent in outlaw.
It wasn’t for that, no.
I just wanted to hold whatever piece of Liam I could in the small device. So I could carry him around with me when this was nothing more than another yesterday.
I turned the tape recorder on.
Liam looked at me expectantly.
I ran through the questions I should’ve asked in my head. The questions that would give me the story. The questions that would push Liam and me farther apart, back to our respective corners as reporter and outlaw.
It was the smart thing to do to ask the questions. For my career. For my sanity.
I turned off the recorder.
Liam watched me, saying nothing.
I hated how he watched me.
I hated how he could make the simple human habit of staring seem like a sexual act. Hated that my panties dampened, that my nipples hardened, that every part of me responded. I hated that it was something more than sexual. A lot more.
I hated that I wanted him to stare at me like that for the rest of my life.
“I need to ask you something,” I said.
“Thought that’s what we were here for,” he replied. “Though since you turned off that,” he jerked his head to the tape, “I’m guessing it’s off the record.”
“With us, nothing’s ever off the record,” I said.
He only nodded once.
Plus, I didn’t want to have the opportunity to reply to what I was about to ask him.
“What was...do you...is it,” I stammered on my words like a kid out of college in their first interview.
Liam was patient.
Kept staring.
“Breathe, Peaches,” he said. “You can ask me anything. I won’t protect you from the answers, as much as I want to.”
I took a breath. “The other night when you...” I trailed off. Cried in my arms. Showed me Liam wasn’t dead. Started to make me fall in love with you all over again. “Broke the door,” I said lamely. “Was it...” I trailed off again. I should’ve been asking whose blood he had on his hands. But it didn’t matter. Once blood became a stain, it no longer mattered. Blood needed to be fresh for it to matter in the news industry. And there was the fact I didn’t care whose blood it was. There was something I cared about a lot more. “The drugs,” I said. “Is it something you do often?”
His eyes changed as if I’d caught him off guard. I guessed he expected me to ask about the blood too. About the club, about the silent war that was dead bodies and bloodstains. “Not often,” he replied. “Well, not anymore. When I first got here, I smoked because it numbed me. Physical pain from my injury, but more than that too. I was weak at the start. Could handle the physical, not the emotional. Got stronger. Stopped smoking. Stopped doin’ shit that would numb me because I realized I deserved to hurt. To feel every inch of that shit for what I did to you. To my family.”
A tear trailed down my cheek. “And that night?”
“I was a coward again. I couldn’t face your pain. I couldn’t even fuckin’ look at something you had to live with for fourteen years.”
His words were weapons, even though I knew he wasn’t using them that way. But everything was a weapon with Liam now.
* * *
The sliding door opened and closed, but I didn’t move, didn’t falter my gaze from what was in front of us, even if it was just houses and fast food restaurants. This was the last time I’d wake up in a room that wasn’t inside a biker clubhouse. The last morning things between Liam and I woul
d even be just the littlest bit simple.
Liam sat down beside me. Didn’t touch me, didn’t pull me into his arms as he used to do in a life before.
“I used to love being alive,” I whispered. “It didn’t start with you, though the romantic side of me would love to say that it did. But it didn’t. For as long as I could remember, I was just a happy person. I stared at the world in wonder, ordinary things never ceased to amaze and delight me.”
I tried to reach for all those moments.
My cloudless skies.
“A sunrise. A sunset,” I said. “The way the air smells before rain. An old couple holding hands on a park bench. Every day I fell in love with the world a little deeper.” I glanced to my side, where Liam was watching me, in jeans unbuttoned and no shirt.
I swallowed roughly.
There were scratches on his torso from my desperate need for blood last night.
“And then I met you,” I said through my desire. “I didn’t think I knew a love so deep, it amazed and delighted me more than the whole world could.” I gritted my teeth and tore my eyes from him. I couldn’t look at him for what I was about to say.
“That day, that moment I found out, I lost it. Brutally and immediately. That love for the world was gone.” I squinted at the horizon, yellow, orange, faintly blue. “I didn’t even want to die. Because a part of me was already dead. A part of me that loved the world. Maybe, if you had come home, that part would’ve inevitably died with some other disaster, but I don’t think so.” I sucked in a rough breath, twisting the fabric of his tee between my fingers. “Because losing you wasn’t a disaster. I don’t even think there’s a word for what that was. And I’ve tried to find it. A word for it.”
As a journalist, I was supposed to know all the words for suffering, to use them creatively, in a way to make the biggest impact on the world. I did that. But I couldn’t do it for myself. A word hadn’t been invented for what I felt.
“I stopped searching for what made me love life,” I whispered. “I hate you for taking that from me. And now, since I’ve been here, in your ugly, brutal and violent world, I hate you for giving it back to me. It didn’t happen immediately. I didn’t even notice it. But I love a sunrise again. And that’s because of you.”
