Never was much of a man for envy until right about then.
"He's in rebuild-mode," Cash supplied. "It was like this after Pops got killed too, along with half the other men. Any guy he came across who seemed the least bit capable of handling this lifestyle, he kind of just pulled them in and had them prospect."
"Well, four new men in the course of a week isn't too shabby," Lo mused. "If they all pan out. Bet you'd be ahead of figuring that out right now if someone would get his head out of his ass..."
"I know I fucked up, Lo," I said, shaking my head. "No use squeezing lemons into the wound."
"Well, apparently there is a need for it since you spent the afternoon trying to numb your pain instead of figuring out a way to try to make it up to her."
"Make it up to who?" Edison's deep, unmistakable voice asked, coming up behind us.
I turned to find him cuffed again, but freshly showered, likely feeling a fuckuva lot more human than he had ten minutes before, and dressed in clothes that must have belonged to one of our fallen guys, just black jeans and a black tee.
"Renny pissed off his woman this morning."
"My advice, frate," he said, clamping a hand on my shoulder. "Fucking grovel."
"You don't even know what he did," Maze insisted, giving him a strange smile as he dropped down next to Lo as casually as you please.
"My experience with women, love, is that it don't fucking matter what you did. Whatever it is, you need to fucking grovel."
"But what if..." Maze started.
"You like the woman?" he asked, leaning forward, putting his elbows on his knees and looking at me.
I don't know why I said it, least of all to him, a perfect stranger, and surrounded by people who barely even knew the situation, but I did. "I love her."
"Then you grovel. You love her, you fucked up, you make it up. This ain't fucking rocket science here. Besides," he added, going for a little levity if the way his lips turned up into a smirk was anything to go by, "can't have you drinking this away when you can't hold your fucking liquor."
It was right about then that I remembered how much he had drank.
And the man seemed sober as a judge.
It was fucking impressive was what it was.
I looked over at Maze. "Any idea how late the mall is open to?"
She had been taking a sip of Vitamin Water when I asked and started to choke on it. "The... mall...?" she gasped out between chokes as Repo slammed his hand into her back.
"Yeah, I have to pick up some socks."
"Socks?" Cash asked, lips twitching. "Yeah, man, that's... ah... romantic."
"Trust me. It's a thing," I said, standing. "You gonna make your guys let me into Hailstorm are are there shoot to kill orders on me?"
She looked up, brown eyes warm, because if there was anything Lo was, above a certified badass, it was a hopeless romantic. And she was a sucker for a good romantic gesture. "I suppose I can have that order lifted for a little bit."
"It's going to have to wait," Maze said, making me freeze. She waved her phone at me. "The mall is closed until ten tomorrow."
Of course it was.
"Eh, maybe it's good," Edison put in. "Let her work through the anger first."
"She wasn't angry," Reeve said, drawing everyone's attention. He had been so silent I had forgotten he was even there. He looked at me then, face guarded, and gave me all I needed to know. "She was heartbroken."
SIXTEEN
Mina
"What'd the leggings ever do to you?" Ash asked, walking up behind me as I stuffed them into the garbage in the bathroom.
"My mother saw me in them. For that, they need to burn," I supplied, ripping off the shrug while I was at it and letting it follow the leggings into the garbage heap.
"You know," Ash said, watching my reflection in the mirror, "I've known you, what, five years now?"
"Sounds about right," I agreed.
"I've never seen you cry."
"Don't analyze me, Ash," I begged, shaking my head. "Believe me, I've had about enough of that today."
"It's just an observation," she said, shrugging. "Your nose gets red," she added, smiling when my eyes widened at the comment.
"Gee thanks for pointing that out," I said, laughing a little as I made my way back to the barracks to grab some new clothes. I dragged up my old, familiar utility pants and a somewhat roomy Army t-shirt I stole from one of the guys when they shrank it in the wash, and moved to sit down on my bed, reaching under my pillow and freezing.
"What's the matter?" Ash asked, sitting down on the edge of her bunk and looking at me.
"I left it there."
"You left what where?"
"My Gameboy," I supplied. "I left it on Renny's nightstand."
In fact, it had been there since that first night when he first pulled it out of my hands. I hadn't touched it since then. There was no need. I was calm there, comfortable. I had slept like a baby.
Ash looked at me for a second, knowing as well as anyone else in the barracks that I was never without it, that I all-too often could be found up playing it at night when sleep wouldn't come.
And I had just had a hell of a day.
I had needed to deal with my parents. That, in and of itself, pretty much guaranteed sleepless nights for the next month.
But on top of that, I had had that God-awful fight with Renny.
In general, I didn't have fights. Granted, I disagreed with others plenty. It would even come to words on occasion. But those words were always calm and carefully chosen. I didn't just... shriek and screech and say whatever came to me. That wasn't how I operated. It was ugly and messy.
And I liked my life as neat as possible.
So amid having that fight like a CD on a loop going around and around in my head, making me cringe at the things I had said, the volume at which I had said them, the carelessness with which I had done it all, and the sick-stomach feeling that all gave me, I also had to come to grips with what the argument had ended with.
It had ended with Renny telling me he loved me.
A part of me wanted to shrug that off, roll my eyes, say it was silly, it was too soon. It was impossible.
But it was possible. It wasn't like Renny was some guy I met at a bar and went back to his house for a long weekend and had some fun.
I had known him for months. I had gotten to watch him from afar and interact with him on pretty much a daily basis. I got to know his quirks, his flaws, his positive attributes. I had a begrudging respect for his skill set, one that, despite what I had told him upon meeting about how I was way out of his league skills-wise, if I was honest, surpassed mine. He was funny and charming and forward-thinking. As a whole, he was good with his brothers as well as the kids and women. He was, bad moods and all, a favorite of Maze's and Penny's. He was a worthy opponent in a video game and by leaps and bounds, the best sex I had ever had.
I knew him.
And, in turn, he knew me.
It was entirely plausible that he loved me.
And, even as I tried desperately to find some kind of reason that it wasn't possible, the bigger part of me knew that it wasn't only possible, it was the damn truth.
He loved me.
He loved me and no one had ever really loved me before.
That was a hard horse-pill to swallow.
It was lodged in my throat and choking me.
It was dissolving and leaving a God-awful bitter taste in my mouth.
Ashley watched me for a long minute, likely seeing a range of emotions cross my face. I wasn't going to cry again. I was pretty sure I had gotten that out of my system before climbing into Reeve's truck.
He had been a surprisingly good companion while I was trying to put myself together. While I still didn't get him, I was starting to understand parts of him. In that car, his presence was calm and comforting. He didn't ask me questions. He didn't expect explanations. He just let me have my 'moment'. He just instinctively understood that not everyone need
ed or wanted to talk things out.
I didn't need to talk things out with people. If ever there was someone who understood their reactions and the motives behind their reactions, it was me. No amount of jaw-jabbing would change that. It was useless noise.
I appreciated Reeve's silence.
And when he pulled up to the gates and I thanked him and moved to grab my door handle, his hand had slammed down on top of my other hand and made my head snap back at him.
"You've had your moment," he told me. "You needed that to clear your head. Now you need to give this some thought, Mina. I don't know a fuckuva lot, but I know that some shit, shit like I saw between you and Renny, it's not common. You gotta decide if one fight, one fuck up, is worth throwing away something rare like that."
With that, he released my hand and I jumped out, uncertain.
I hadn't pinned him as sentimental, as wise. To be honest, I found that almost more unsettling than thinking he was just an enigma.
"My father said something really interesting to me when I was younger," Ashley said suddenly, breaking me out of my own swirling thoughts. When my gaze found hers, she shrugged a small shoulder. "He told me that the people who make the biggest impact in your life, the ones who shake you to the core, who make you really think and feel are usually the ones we desperately try to push away.
"Somewhere along the way, and he blamed Disney for this," she added with a smirk, "and romance novels, we have been convinced that love is pretty and flowery and heart-warming. But it's none of those things. Anyone who has ever been in love, truly, magnificently in love, knows that it is torture. It is ugly and messy and brings out the absolute worst along with the best in you. It hurts because it forces you to confront every aspect of yourself. It forces you out of your comfort zone. And people, well, we love our comfort zones. In fact, we tend to love our comfort zones more than we love our partners. So anyone who comes in and tries to drag us out of them, well, we make sure we push them away so we can jump right back into that comfortable feeling."
"How old were you when he told you this?" I asked, wanting to change the subject instead of agreeing to the truth of the statement.
"Twelve. When he first suspected I was gay and I had told him that I wasn't going to be friends with Jenny anymore."
"Because you had feelings for her," I guessed.
"Exactly."
"I think I'd like your father," I said, meaning it. It was so rare to find a parent who not only accepted their kids as they were, but tried to convince said kid that it was okay to be how they were amidst a society that was telling them anything but.
"He is a wise man," she said with a nod. "As such, maybe you should think on that, yeah? Because I think you're mad right now because you have been yanked right out of your little comfort zone and you are scared and unsure of yourself. But you need to stop and consider that in twenty-someodd years, nothing and no one has been able to do that, to drag you out of that comfort zone. So what does it say about Renny and your feelings toward him that he was able to do that?"
With that, she stood and walked out.
I was apparently surrounded by very wise people without knowing it. And they were all really good at that 'say something awesome and walk off like an action hero walking casually away from an explosion they just set' thing.
The worst part was she (and her father) weren't wrong. I knew enough of people to know that love was rarely pretty. Love was a murder-suicide. Love was slit wrists. Love was a depression that never went away.
Because love, well, love was scary. It was so terrifying that your knee-jerk reaction was to hide from it or go toe-to-toe with it and ultimately blow it up from the inside out.
Affection was easy. Comfort was too. Then because somewhere along the way, we learned it was better to not feel too deeply about anything, we began to take those two things and call it love. And, to be fair, many people pulled it off. Many people built lives and new generations on the back of affection and comfort.
But affection and comfort weren't love, they were safety.
Love was brutal and bloody and, above all, risky.
When faced with it, too often we realized we weren't willing to take that risk.
We were cowards.
I was a coward.
I threw myself back onto my bed, pressing my palms into my eyes.
As a whole, I wasn't one for regrets. Though that, for the most part, was because I never acted without thinking. I never said something without weighing my words. My entire life was a expertly played game of chess.
Then Renny came, grabbed the board, and shook all the pieces out of their places.
I found out something about myself when he did that too- I found that I didn't so much like my life neatly arranged as I didn't honestly know of any other way. Until he showed it to me.
Had he given me some time, I would have given him what he wanted- my past, my scars, my damage. I probably would have given him anything he wanted. I had already given him more than I had given any man before.
My heart, I realized as I felt the hollow spot in my chest.
He had ripped it out and shoved it in his own.
As I lay there, I started to wonder if it would always be there, if I would never get it back.
I had a sneaking suspicion as I slowly drifted off sometime late that night, that I was just going to have to get used to no longer feeling that beating in my chest.
--
"Mina," Ashley called, making me jump. I had been entirely too focused on writing down my notes on Cyrus, Lazarus, and Reeve for Reign. Just because I had needed to leave the compound didn't mean I was going to leave the job unfinished.
I was better than that.
"Yeah?" I asked, looking over at her, slow-blinking a few times because, I tried to convince myself, I had been staring at my own writing for too long. The reality was my eyes were swollen from all the crying from the day before. But I didn't want to admit that, not even to myself.
"Lo wants to see you in the spare room," she said, walking away before I could even question her.
The spare room?
As a whole, we all slept in the barracks. It was what was most familiar to most of the ex-military members of Hailstorm. And it was just prudent. But Lo kept a spare room with a single bed and a nightstand and a dresser off all by itself. Occasionally, she would find someone who was suffering some severe form of PTSD and had raging nightmares that would keep everyone awake. Or sometimes we would even need to offer a safe haven for someone we had come across in an operation who couldn't be expected to sleep in a barracks full of strangers. So that was why we had the spare room.
Seeing as it literally had nothing in it aside from those three items mentioned, I couldn't fathom a reason Lo wanted to meet with me there. There were offices all over if she wanted to get some privacy to talk to me or yell at me.
I felt my stomach twist, remembering how she had gotten me to go back to The Henchmen compound in the first place.
She had threatened me.
No, worse.
She had threatened my job.
I couldn't help but wonder if my relationship and subsequent dissolution of it and departure from the job she sent me on was why she wanted to see me. To fire me. To kick me out. To tear away the one true constant in my life.
Hailstorm, for all intents and purposes, was my comfort zone.
It was all I had in the world.
She couldn't take that from me.
"Lo?" I asked, walking into the empty room, dark, as most of the rooms at Hailstorm were since we had no windows, save for one lamp. "I knew she couldn't have meant the spare room," I said to myself, shaking my head.
Then the door slammed shut behind me, making my stomach drop to my feet, my hand instinctively going to my pocket where I kept a small self-defense keychain with slots for my fingers and very sharp points meant for serious eye-gouging.
I whipped around, throat tight.
And I didn't find Lo.
> Oh, no.
I found Renny.
Seeing him, my belly did an intense little fluttering thing that I tried to ignore or find any explanation for aside from happiness.
But I could find none.
"What are you doing here?" I asked, forcing myself to cross my arms, maybe the only way I could prevent myself from walking over to him and wrapping my arms around him.
In that moment, I was starting to wonder if Ashley was right, if I was pushing him away for the wrong reasons. True, he had screwed up. But everyone screwed up. Never having been the type to overreact to, well, anything before, it had been hard at first for me to see that that was exactly what I had done.
"I think my past behavior has proven that I'm not exactly the kind of man who gives up easily."
I felt my lips curve up slightly at that. "You mean your borderline obsessive flirting?"
His smile went a little boyish at that. "I like to think it was me knowing exactly what I wanted and aggressively pursuing it."
"Call it what you want, it was obsessive," I said, trying to not be quite so taken with that smile as he moved closer, stopping just a couple feet in front of me.
"Knew it would be something special," he said, shrugging. "I wasn't wrong."
"Renny..." I said, shaking my head as he got a little closer.
"I fucked up," he offered without even the slightest bit of hesitation, something not like him. He didn't joke; he didn't hedge; he didn't try to make light of it. "I have no excuse. It was a shitty move and I was thinking of myself and not you and that's fucked up. But I can't take it back, Mina. Doesn't matter what I say or do, that's something that is always going to be between us if you can't forgive it and let it go."
"Us?" I croaked out, my voice a strange, raspy version of itself.
"Yeah, see, way I figure it, there's going to be an us. Maybe you'll see I am genuinely sorry and want to make good right now and you'll take me back. Maybe you're going to be pissed for a while and I will have to wait it out. Maybe you're gonna be stubborn and take off and not come back to town and see me for fucking years. But there's not one situation where I don't see this being it for the both of us. True," he allowed, "we could try to move on, fuck other people, try to get to know other people. But you and I both know it wouldn't be the same. It wouldn't even be fucking close. Maybe you're willing to settle for that. I'm not. That's why I'm here."
Renny (The Henchmen MC #6) Page 20
