Renny (The Henchmen MC #6)

by Jessica Gadziala

  "I talk to you all the time! When we aren't having sex, we're talking."

  "You talk about Hailstorm and your friends there. You talk about the places you've seen, the profiles you've done, the foods you hate and the movies you love. You don't tell me anything."

  "Has it ever occurred to you, Renny, that we are more than our pasts? Our fucked up childhoods? That that is only a small part of the whole picture? All the other parts- my friends, my travels, my preferences, my job- those things make up a bigger part of who I am than the fact that my parents don't fucking love me!"

  That last part was said on a scream that had the guys at the gates stop pretending to not be listening and fully gave us their attention as I slammed my hands into his chest, pushing him back against the gate.

  "I think you're fooling yourself if you don't think that them not loving you doesn't have a huge, life-altering impact on your life."

  "Oh for fuck's sake, Renny. It hasn't stunted me. I love people. I love Lo and Janie and Malcolm and Ashley and..."

  "You love people platonically," he cut me off. "You don't love anyone intimately."

  I felt myself jerk back from that, from the truth of it.

  Because, fact of the matter was, I did love people who, if my love was not reciprocated or if their love was stripped from me, it wouldn't devastate me. It was an easy love.

  "Have you ever been in love, Mina?" he asked, knowing damn well he knew the answer to that already. "Or have you been too afraid that no matter what you did, they could never love you back?"

  "I have never been with someone long enough to love them," I defended, knowing it was true. It was always easy, casual. Not quite one-night stands, but not quite relationships either. Dalliances. Flings. That was what I allowed men to be to me. If I was able to trivialize their presence in my life, it made it easier to refuse to allow my feelings toward them to be anything other than that- trivial.

  "Why? Because you wouldn't let them? Because they got tired of waiting around for you to let them in? To give them pieces of yourself?"

  "Because I didn't want them to be a bigger part of my life, Renny. Not every woman needs to have a man all the time. I have gotten along without one just fine for a long time."

  "Sure, baby, but why the fuck would you ever settle for 'just fine' when you could have more?"

  "Have more... what? This? Arguing?" I shot back. "This is so much fun and so damn fulfilling!" I added dryly.

  "It's fucking real at least," Renny countered. "It's not carefully chosen words that fit the carefully constructed puzzle you want your life to be, everything neat and tidy and in its place."

  "It's ugly," I said, shaking my head. "You see that you did that, right?" I asked, swallowing back a sob that tried to escape me. "You took something that had been nice, it had been good and kind and mutually beneficial, and you made it something else entirely."

  "I didn't want fucking nice from you, Mina. I didn't want you because of your perfections. I wanted you because I just fucking wanted you, flaws and all. But you wouldn't give them to me. You wouldn't trust me with the things that matter to you."

  "You don't under..."

  "I don't understand?" he snapped, pushing off the fence and towering over me. "I gave you the whole sordid story of my upbringing. You know shit that I have never told another fucking soul before. You got all my flaws, all my ugly. I trusted you with that. And you wouldn't give me the chance to show you that you could trust me with yours."

  "So you... what? You forced me to? You dug up my parents and you dragged them out here and you dangled them in front of me and you made me go in there completely unprepared. I haven't seen them in eight years, Renny! Don't you think I maybe had my reasons? Don't you think I, I don't know, maybe would have liked to have brushed my goddamn teeth and straightened my fucking hair before I saw them again and not gone in there in leggings some teenager would wear that my mother was silently judging me for from the second I walked in that door?"

  "Mina, calm down," he said, voice low and soothing and it was just about then that I realized all the probates had walked outside at the very loud scene I was suddenly making.

  "Don't tell me to calm down. Don't tell me that I am overreacting. How would you like it if I found your parents and dragged them here? If maybe I fished out a copy of Raising Renny and got to know everything you never wanted anyone to know and then used those facts to get a rise out of you? How would you like that? You know exactly what you would have done, exactly what I am..."

  "Don't," he cut me off, shaking his head. And, had my rage not been blinding me, maybe I would have seen the pain in his eyes. "Don't do this, Mina."

  "I didn't do this," I said, blinking hard because I felt the tears stinging in my eyes, completely humiliated that they existed at all. "I didn't do this. You did this. You made me do this."

  "We can..."

  "We can, what? We can work this out? No, actually, we can't. You wanted me to trust you and then you went ahead and did the one thing you could have done to ensure that I could never do that. Did you think this through at all? Or was this one of your 'I'm in a mood and therefore I can get away with anything I want' things? Because, I am not one of your brothers here. I don't have to grin and bear it. I don't have to put up with it. And I won't."

  "Don't be a coward, Mina," he said, shaking his head, tone defeated. He knew I was right. He knew he was absolutely in the wrong with what he did. He was even sorry about it.

  But there were times in life when sorry, while the only thing a person could say, still wasn't enough.

  This was one of those times.

  "I'm not being a coward, Renny," I said, feeling one of the tears slide hot and unstoppable down my cheek. "I'm saving myself."

  "From what? From me?"

  "From someone who would willingly do something he knows will hurt me. If you were just any guy, Renny, maybe I could have looked this over, chalked it up to you being an idiot. But you're not an idiot. And because you are who you are, you knew exactly what you were doing and exactly how much you could hurt me. And you went ahead and did it anyway. You hurt me on purpose. To prove a point. So, yes, Renny, yes. I am saving myself from you."

  His face fell at that and he looked away for a long second before looking back, his face accepting. "That's really a shame then, Mina."

  I didn't want to ask. The bigger part of me knew I needed to cling to self-preservation above all else right then.

  But the words came from somewhere deep, a place I didn't want to analyze because I knew exactly what I would find there.

  "Why's that?"

  He moved a step closer, making me have to turn my head up to keep eye-contact. His hand raised slowly, tucking my hair behind my ear and gently swiping the trail the tear had left down my cheek.

  "Because I fucking love you, Mina."

  With that, his hand dropped and he made his way toward the gates that the guys had already opened, likely anticipating one of us at least would be storming that way eventually.

  I watched him.

  I hated to admit that, but I watched his back as he made his way up toward the front door, punched in the codes, and disappeared inside.

  Then and only then did I turn away from the compound.

  That was the precise moment that the dam broke too- the tears streaming down frantically, my breathing going shallow, my sobs a strangled little noise from trying to keep them in.

  "Come on, babe," came a voice from behind me, very possibly the last voice I expected to hear. I could have anticipated Laz with his seemingly big heart. And I could have expected Cyrus with his easy-going sweetness. There was no way I could have guessed that Reeve would be the one to come to me. His hand went to my lower back, putting firm pressure there and pulling, making me fall into step with him as he walked me away from the compound.

  "Where... are," I started, my voice breaking before I took a deep breath. "Where are we going?" I asked a little less pathetically.

  "My car is do
wn the side street. Figured the last thing you'd want is everyone gawking at you when you're trying to have a moment."

  "A... moment?" I asked, reaching up to wipe my hands down my cheeks.

  "A strong person like you doesn't have break downs. They have moments. You're having one."

  Somehow, that helped.

  He had, with just a few words, compartmentalized the entire situation for me, made it easier for me to box it up and seal it, then put it on a shelf to be taken down and dealt with later.

  And I knew, I just knew that it was because he, at some time or another, had had a moment of his own, had needed to box up something and seal it and store it.

  I had the distinct feeling, too, that he had never taken it back down, that it was still sitting there waiting to be opened.

  "Here," he said, letting his hand drop and he bleeped the locks on a black pickup truck that was just a couple years old and dented and dinged. He wasn't one of those guys who made you take off your shoes before you got in. He was one of those 'a car is just a car' guys. I had always much preferred those. "Hop in," he added after he opened the door for me.

  And with no other real option and, in that moment, feeling rather close with him, I hopped in and he shut the door and made his way around the hood to hop in himself.

  "You need a drive? A drink? Or home?"

  I laughed humorlessly at that. I needed them all. "Well, Hailstorm is a thirty minute drive away and it's home and I can have a drink... or five, there."

  "Hailstorm it is," he said, throwing the car into reverse, backing out of his spot between two very close cars with an almost careless precision that made me queasy, then started up the road toward the hill that was, for all intents and purposes, home.

  "You alright?" he asked a long five minutes of silence later as I stared out the window.

  And then I did the damnedest thing.

  I gave him the truth.

  "Not really," I said, looking over at him.

  He nodded at that, like he understood exactly how I was feeling. "Well, you will be," he said casually, but with so much certainty that I found myself believing him- this man who was all but a stranger to me, a complete and utter anomaly, someone I didn't even begin to understand, I believed him completely.

  I would be okay.

  Even if I had just pushed away the only person, I was sure, who had ever actually loved me.

  FIFTEEN

  Renny

  I was such a fuck.

  I knew that.

  Hell, a part of me had probably fucking known that while I was making the damn phone call to her parents.

  I don't even know what I thought my endgame was there. I had known going in that there were issues there, especially with her mother. But I had figured maybe her avoiding them had made her intensify them in her head.

  I should have known better.

  Her mother, for all intents and purposes, was a fucking ice queen, a stone cold bitch. I didn't like throwing the 'bitch' word around too often, but if there was ever a woman who deserved the term, it was Akari Piek.

  I had anticipated her being cold and withholding toward Mina. That sounded par for the course. I hadn't exactly expected the judgment and condescension that dripped from every syllable when she spoke.

  Dedrick Piek, though, I had him wrong.

  I expected a workaholic. I was both right and wrong when I first met her and called her an army brat. Her father wasn't in any army, but he did a lot of contract work with different armies all around the world. His specialty being intelligence extraction.

  I hadn't expected him to genuinely not give a shit about his daughter. That was a wholly unexpected, unpleasant surprise. I had figured that with a cold and withholding mother, any decent man would step up and try to fill the void. I was completely off on that. Dedrick Piek didn't want children and he didn't care if his offspring knew that.

  I could sympathize with the coldness she experienced, having ice cubes for parents myself, but I had always been wanted at least. I was never seen as an inconvenience or made to feel like a chore. If anything, my fucked up parents got their kicks raising me.

  And, being that my parents read into everything I did, they rarely criticized little things like how I dressed or did my hair, choosing instead to theorize on what made me do such things.

  I'll never forget the fucking look she had on her face when she saw them. All her guards, they all fell away. She was vulnerable. But not in the good way like when I was inside her. It was a raw, awful kind of vulnerability that made it clear exactly how awful she felt and how much she hated me for forcing her to confront those feelings.

  I saw the decision before she even did. Her mind was made up the second my hand hit her knee, trying to comfort her. She didn't want me touching her. And, quite frankly, if someone's touch suddenly disgusted you, there was no chance at saving things.

  I had tried.

  But she was beyond that.

  I didn't even wait around to see what response she had to me telling her I loved her. It wasn't some coercion tactic on my part. I just wanted her to know.

  Because it was the fucking truth.

  I loved her.

  I wasn't sure when it happened. Really, it could have been anytime between her showing up during mine and Duke's fight that afternoon and the night before in bed with her. It could have been the first time she let me kiss her or put my hands on her or take her without anything between us.

  I had no idea.

  But there was no denying it.

  I hadn't recognized it right at first or was just chalking it up to being attraction or some superficial shit like that. But the warm feeling in my chest, the way just hearing her laugh made me smile from across a fucking room, or how hearing her threaten to 'put a cap in my ass' on Grand Theft Auto made me happier than any goddamn sexual experience ever had. It was the way sex wasn't just sex anymore. Even when we were fucking- dirty, rough, hot, even then it wasn't just fucking. It was deeper than that.

  I loved her.

  And as the cliche went, I lost her.

  I had looked back out the slot in the door to see Reeve, of all fucking people, come to her rescue and lead her away as she broke down.

  I walked behind the bar, going right to the bottle of whiskey and drinking out of it.

  "That ain't gonna help," Laz warned as he walked past. But he left it at that. There was no lecture. The last thing I needed was a lecture of the evils of alcohol from some holier than thou recovered bastard.

  It wasn't going to help; but it was going to numb the stabbing feeling in my chest a bit. I knew that at least.

  "Hey Renny," Lo's voice called, curious, as she walked up to the bar, head cocked to the side.

  "'Sup, Lo?"

  "Do you have any idea where Repo keeps the pickling spices?"

  It went over my head for a second before her brow slowly raised and I remembered a threat she made before things finally started for me and Mina. She had made a veiled threat about pickling my cock like Rasputin.

  "I fucking tried, Lo," I said, tipping up the bottle for another long swig.

  "Did you?" she asked, brows drawing together. "Because it looks a hell of a lot like you woke up in a mood this morning and conned me into letting you take Mina out to give her a 'surprise' and obviously led her into some kind of fucked up scenario. That doesn't sound like trying to me. It sounds like you just want to be able to do whatever the fuck you want to do and everyone else is just supposed to deal with that. Well, news-fucking-flash, that isn't how relationships work."

  "She wouldn't give me anything, Lo," I said, shaking my head, feeling the booze start to kick in, leading me more toward the dark side than the happy drunk I was hoping for.

  "What are you talking about? She gave you everything. I have known that girl since she was nineteen years old. If you think the Mina you first met was cool, Renny, the one who came to me was about as warm as fucking liquid oxygen. It took her years to be able to do something as sim
ple as laugh around most of us. The girl that has been in this clubhouse the last few days is the Mina I always knew she would be if she let her guard down- warm, sweet, fucking happy. That is everything. What more could you have wanted from her?"

  "Her past," I admitted, suddenly not understanding why that had been so important to me in the first place.

  "Right," she said, eyes angry. "Because heaven fucking forbid Renny doesn't get the answers he wants right when he wants them. It's only been a couple days. You couldn't have given her more time than that?"

  She was right.

  She was fucking right and I had nothing to defend myself with.

  There was no excuse.

  "Maybe this is insensitive," Lo said, her tone holding no apology, "but maybe consider some fucking therapy."

  With that little death blow, she stormed away toward the basement where I could hear one of the kids in the middle of an epic shit-fit.

  "Alright, what we got here?" Cyrus asked, walking behind the bar, tilting his head up at the shelves of liquor on the back bar. "I'm usually more of a whiskey guy myself, but you've had your mouth all over that one. Brothers or not, we're not swapping spit. So... vodka it is," he said, taking the bottle off the shelf and grabbing a glass.

  "What are you doing?"

  "Day drinking is fine. Drinking over a woman is fine too. But those things can't be done at the same time and alone. So, here's to those who wish us well; the rest can go to fucking hell," he declared, clinking his glass to my bottle, and throwing it back. "Mother fucking shit," he declared when he slammed his glass back on the bar. "Forgot how much vodka burns."

  "You realize we're bikers, right?" I asked, shaking my head. "We don't have to do the responsible drinking thing. I can drink alone during the day over a woman."

  "Yeah, well, I'm fucking bored," he shrugged. "Besides, that looked brutal. She wasn't even yellin' at me and I think my balls shrank."

  I snorted at that, shaking my head, and raising the bottle again. "Yeah," I agreed.

  "Mina doesn't strike me as the crazy chick type so I'm assuming you actually fucked up."