“Beebs? Baby, hi. At least say hi.” Hoosier knew better than to reach for her. She couldn’t abide to be touched.
But she stopped and turned to face him. “Hi.” The word was flat and cold.
Margot tried, offering, “I made a casserole. It’ll be ready in about fifteen minutes.”
“Not hungry.”
“We were thinking about waiting for Blue, so it might be later before we eat.”
“Not hungry.” She turned again and left the room. As an afterthought, on her way through the doorway, she added, “Thanks.”
~oOo~
“Vulture’s gonna talk to you again.” Blue handed Hoosier a beer. “I think you should listen and think hard.”
They were sitting on the deck of Blue and Margot’s new house. Margot was seven months pregnant, and they were getting serious about the reality that a baby—a little girl—was coming. Around the continuing tasks of keeping Hoosier’s family together, Margot was beginning to feel the need to feather her own nest. So Blue had bought her a nest.
Hoosier remembered these last months when Connor was on his way. Bibi had painted, papered, slipcovered, and curtained every square inch of their house.
That had been a happy time, a happy memory. Now it only made him sigh.
“Why? Nothing’s different. I can’t bring my family back into the outlaw shit, Blue. I can’t.”
“I didn’t say this before, but I’m goin’ to now. You’re thinking about it wrong. You can’t keep them safe outside the fold. You don’t just wipe off twenty years in, Hooj. You know that. You’re not built for the straight n’ narrow. What you need to do is come in closer. The money’s better, for one thing—and I know how tight things are now.”
“Fuck you, Blue.” He moved to stand, but Blue’s arm shot out and held him in place.
“I’m just sayin’. You got needs you’re not meetin’. But here’s more. The problem with the Blades was the distance, not the closeness. We were on the field, but we didn’t matter. Nobody was countin’ us in their whole check. You take this patch, you’re in it. People are payin’ attention when we take a risk. We matter. Our families matter. We don’t get set aside or left behind.”
The truth was that Hoosier missed the MC life every single day, and working at a bike shop owned by an MC made that loss bitter and acute every single day. He had no concept of his own identity without the club. He was suffering. Fuck, he was completely miserable.
He wanted it back. He wanted the brotherhood, the fellowship, the strength. He needed it. He needed to belong somewhere. He needed a haven, and his own home was no longer that. His home was the site of his worst failure and his deepest guilt.
He turned and looked through the open back door. Bibi sat at the table inside, shucking ears of corn. She was better, a little. Capable now, at least, of noticing the world around her. But she was still so damaged. She cared about nothing, not even her husband and child. Not in any way they could see.
No. He couldn’t risk bringing that world anywhere near her again. He’d lose what little he had left of her.
Feeling that bitter sense of loss, he shook his head. “No. Call Vulture off if you can. I’m out.”
“Damn, brother. I get it, I do. But it’s a mistake. And I fuckin’ miss you.”
“Yeah.” It was the only response Hoosier had to offer.
~oOo~
Home that night, after Hoosier had put Connor to bed, he found Bibi in the kitchen, dishing herself up a bowl of butter pecan ice cream. He smiled. They’d had a good day at the Fordhams’. She’d even gotten involved in the conversation at supper, and she, Margot, and Connor had blown bubbles in the yard.
She looked over her shoulder as he came into the room, and his heart leapt when she smiled at him. She never smiled anymore. “You want some?” she asked, pointing the scoop at the carton of ice cream.
“Don’t mind if I do. Thanks.” He leaned on the counter and watched as she brought down another little glass bowl and filled it.
As he watched her, his cock filled out. They hadn’t had sex in six months, they’d barely touched in that time, and he missed the hell out of her, but he ignored the need that pooled low in his gut. Maybe he’d never have her again. If she’d only smile at him every now and then as she just had, he thought it would be enough. His love for her was so much bigger than the needs of his body.
However, when she handed him his bowl, their hands touched, and he must have broadcast his body’s need. Or she’d seen his erection swelling in his jeans. Something. Their eyes met, and she yanked her hand away and put her back to him again.
Holding the cold bowl of ice cream, Hoosier came up close behind her, but he didn’t touch her. “Bibi.”
She didn’t respond, but he needed to talk to her. He needed to be able to talk to his wife. He needed it. So he put his hand lightly over her shoulder and felt her go stiff at once.
Looking down at her bowl of ice cream, her voice in the awful, flat, absent tone he’d grown to loathe, she said, “I know it’s been a long time. You can fuck me if you want. It’s okay. I don’t care.”
In six months of loneliness and distance, of guilt, of his own unexpressed and unassuaged pain, his own loss, Hoosier had never felt that Bibi was the cause of any of it. She had never hurt him. He had hurt her, he had not taken care of her, and he had been paying the price for it.
But that flat statement, uttered with her back to him, hurt more than anything he’d felt in six months. I don’t care. Those words were empty, but they were full of it.
And he’d had all he could take of that dish. He’d swallowed emptiness down until he was choking on it.
He threw the bowl across the room; it crashed into the wall next to the pantry door and shattered. The spoon and chunks of glass bowl clattered to the floor as butter pecan slid down the wall. Bibi had put up a wallpaper with a pattern of tiny roosters and sunflowers, and Hoosier found himself watching as the ice cream covered a flower, then a rooster, again and again on its oozing way to the floor.
Bibi set her full bowl in the sink and walked away.
When he was alone, Hoosier sank to the floor and then sat there, leaning against the bottom cupboards. They couldn’t go on like this. Connor needed his mother. Hoosier needed his wife. And Bibi needed her life. Something had to give.
Not knowing how long he’d sat there on the floor, he finally got up and cleaned up his mess. Then he washed his hands and went to find his wife.
She was in the bedroom they still shared, sitting on the side of the bed they still both slept in. Just sitting there, staring at her hands in her lap.
He went around the bed and crouched in front of her. “Bibi, look at me.”
When she complied, he asked the most important question in his life. “Do you still love me at all?”
She didn’t answer, and Hoosier’s loss was complete.
Swallowing down the jagged emotion in his throat, he took her hands, holding on tight when she tried to pull back, and said, “Bedelia Beth, I need you to tell me. Do you love me?”
She stopped fighting his hold and returned her eyes to his. After a breath, she said, “I love you. I don’t know if I love you enough.”
Trying his damnedest to ignore the flaying pain in his chest, he pushed for more. “Enough for what?”
“Enough…enough to…” she stopped and, again, tried to pull her hands from his. But he wasn’t letting go.
“Talk to me, Bibi. Fuckin’ talk to me. Goddammit, you’re tearing everything down, and I’m on my fuckin’ knees here, helpless.”
“You’re helpless? You did this! They took me to get to you, and you left me there! I knew you’d come for me, I said it in my head like a prayer when they were…when they were…when they—but you didn’t! You didn’t come!”
For six months, he’d been thwarted in his need to offer her comfort. For six months, she’d pushed him away, locked him out, turned her back. In all that time, she’d never said a word about those thr
ee awful days.
They had happened six months ago, but the memory of them, the pain and horror, was almost as fresh as if they were still in that cabin right now.
Now, he tried to pull her close, into his arms, but she wouldn’t come. “I did, baby. I came as soon as I found you. I never stopped looking. I’m so sorry you were hurt, but I found you as soon as I could.”
But that wasn’t true. Chuck had held him back from even looking for hours, for almost a full day, waiting for word from Simon McCall.
A man who yet walked the earth. Without a patch, Hoosier had no power to reach him.
When she spoke again, the anger and heat had left her voice, leaving behind the flatness he hated. “Not until they took everything. You didn’t save me. You just found my body.”
“Don’t say that, baby. Goddammit, no.”
“Why not? It’s true.” She wrenched her hands from his, and Hoosier sat back, out of his crouch, landing on his ass on the floor.
“You don’t know if you love me enough to forgive me.” The enormity of that truth overwhelmed him.
She sat there on the bed, staring at him, her face a blank.
“Bibi. Baby, please. We’re talking now, though. That’s something. I will do anything to make this right. I need you. I love you. We can fix this.”
“No. There’s not enough of me left to fix.” Something went through her eyes, like surprise. Then she took a deep breath. “I’m leaving.”
“What?” She’d made the decision in that moment, he knew. A snap decision to leave him. Needing to find some strength, he scrambled to his feet and stared down at her. “No. No, Bibi. No.” It hadn’t occurred to him that she would actively choose to leave him. He’d been afraid that she’d kill herself, or that she’d…fade away somehow, but not that she’d pack her bags and go from him. Not make a choice to live without him.
She stood up. “Yeah. I am. It’s okay. I never came back.”
When she tried to sidestep him, he grabbed her arm. His head was a rat’s nest of emotions and questions, and he had no way of finding a path to reason. He didn’t know if he should fight, if he should stop her by any means he could, or if he should let her go. But he did know one thing. “You’re not taking my son from me.”
“No, I’m not.” She pulled on her arm, and he released her.
Bibi loved their son with her whole self. She had embraced motherhood with a fervor that awed him. Motherhood was the foundation of how she knew herself. And she’d just set Connor aside without the slightest hint in her voice or her words that he mattered at all.
She was lost. He had lost her. They both had.
So he let her go.
~oOo~
He let her be gone for three weeks. Then he left Connor with Margot and Blue, and he rode north. He’d asked Vulture to help him, and with the club’s resources behind them, they’d found her in a fleabag motel outside of Eureka.
The sight of her van in the parking lot made his heart pound for what felt like the first time in weeks. Being without her, even the faint version of her he’d had for so many months, was killing him. If she was really leaving him and their boy, she was going to have to fight him to get it done.
He pulled his chopper up next to the van and dismounted. His legs shaking, he took a minute, leaning on that van, and collected himself, preparing for every scenario he could imagine.
Not even on those occasions when he’d waited against a wall with a gun drawn, prepared to kill or be killed, had he known fear like he knew walking to her motel room and knocking on that dented green door.
When she checked the peephole, he heard her, maybe even felt her—a rustle and pressure at the door.
Then, for countless, anguished seconds, nothing. He prepared to knock again, but as he raised his fist, the chain rattled, the knob turned, the door swung in, and she was there.
And she looked like shit. Her hair was lank and dirty, her eyes were sunken and ringed with dark, bluish skin, and her cheekbones jutted out like wings. Her t-shirt hung loosely on knobby shoulders. She’d lost weight since she’d been taken, but holy hell, had she eaten at all in the weeks she’d been gone?
“Bibi, Jesus.” He reached out to her without thinking, but she didn’t pull away. She let him touch her. More than that, she let him pull her into his arms, and when he had ahold of her, she sagged, and he had all of her, was her only support.
And fuck, she was so thin. Everywhere he touched her, he felt the sharp angle of bone.
“I got you,” he whispered, burying his face against her neck. “I got you, baby. I’m here.”
“I can’t…I can’t…” she tried, but then sobs overwhelmed her.
He picked her up and carried her into the room and to the unmade bed. There he sat and held her, rocking, until she had cried herself out. When she was calm, resting in his arms, taking hitching breaths, he asked, as gently as he could, “Are you hurt? Did somebody hurt you? Did something happen—something new?”
She shook her head. “I can’t leave. I got myself here, and I got checked in, and then somethin’ happened, and I can’t get back out.”
Either she wasn’t making sense, or he wasn’t finding it; he wasn’t sure which. This hadn’t been among the scenarios he’d prepared for. “I don’t understand. What happened? Why can’t you?”
“I don’t know. I’m…Hooj, I’m so scared. I’m scared of everythin’. I’m sick with it.”
Understanding dawned, and he leaned back, setting her gently away so he could see her face. She had scars—on her chin, her forehead, her jaw—but those were healed wounds, aging pain. The dark circles and sallow color were fresh pain. “You haven’t left this room since you got here?”
She shook her head.
“Baby, that’s weeks. How’re you eating?”
Sniffing, she sat up straighter on his lap. “One of the maids. Juana. She brings me somethin’ on her break. She’s been helpin’ me.”
An image rose in his head of his wife, his vibrant, sassy old lady, cowering behind the door of this shitty motel room, snatching sandwiches offered by strangers, like a feral dog. He pushed it away and took her head in his hands. “You’re comin’ home, Beebs. Enough of this.”
“I’m so broken, Hooj. I’m no good for anythin’. I can’t be a mother. I can’t be a wife. I can’t be anythin’. I can’t even take care of myself.”
“That’s bullshit, Bedelia Beth. You just need to come back to us, and we’ll all take care of each other. Come home. Come back to us. We need you.”
The conversation they were having now, in this wretched, anonymous motel six hundred miles from home, was deeper than any they’d had since the day she’d been taken. More actual words had already moved between them here, he thought, than any one exchange in all that time.
“How’s Connor?” Her lips trembled as she asked, and he moved his hand so he could lay his thumb there and calm her.
“He misses you. He asks after you every day. But he’s good. He’s with Margot and Blue.”
She pulled her head from his hold, and a bitter wave crossed her face. “She’s more a mother than I am. To Connor or anybody else.”
The urge to shake her nearly overtook him, but Hoosier held on to calm. “No. You are Connor’s mother. Nobody can take that from you unless you give it up. He needs you. Come back with me and be the mother he needs. We had a good life before all this, and that life is still there. Let the life we have fix what’s broken in you. And between us. I know you can’t forgive me—”
Now she put her hand over his mouth. “I forgive you. I know you would never have done anything you thought could lead to this. I do love you enough.”
“Then Bibi, come home. Jesus God, please come home.”
“I don’t know how. I don’t know how to get back to my life. I can’t even get back to my car.”
“Lean on me. Let me carry you until you can put your feet down. I’m not giving up on us. I’m not giving up on you. Don’t you give up, either.
”
Her big brown eyes, sunken so deep in her tired head, brimmed with tears. “Will you be there?”
Though her words sliced at him, he smiled. “I will always be there, Bibi. I’ll never let you down again, I swear to God. I love you.”
“I love you better,” she whispered and was crying again. He pulled her close, and this time, she hooked her frail arms around his neck and returned his embrace.
That night, he tried to get her to go out with him for a meal. She wouldn’t go, so he brought takeout back and stuffed her full. Then they slept together in that bed, and she let him hold her.
Dream & Dare Page 14
