by Anne Malcom
My eyes followed him as he snatched his cut from where it was draped over the chaise lounge in the corner of my bedroom, slipping it over his bare torso.
I was about to comment on that, though seeing him wear that piece of leather against his muscled, tattooed and scarred skin was probably one of the hottest things like ever. But it wasn’t exactly a practical thing to wear in public. And not just because I was getting all sorts of unfamiliar and rather violent feelings toward other women having the same reaction I was. It wasn’t safe riding his bike with so much of that skin showing.
Skin that didn’t need any more scars.
So primarily, I was going to comment out of worry for his safety, because his safety was now inexplicably connected to mine. And some of that comment was going to be motivated by a possession I felt toward that scarred skin.
I was going to, until I realized he didn’t have any other option besides wearing his cut on top of his bare torso. His shirt, which was still lying on my bathroom floor, was covered in blood, not something he could likely wear in broad daylight.
A bloodstained shirt would raise more questions than a scarred and beautiful body, obviously.
It was once I came to that conclusion that he was in front of me once more, still silent, still taking in every part of me with his violent gaze.
I expected him to say something. Because he was obviously leaving. And he couldn’t just walk out without saying something. Without addressing everything that just happened.
But that’s exactly what he did.
Right after he surged toward me, yanked me into his arms, pressed his mouth to mine in a violent, closemouthed kiss and set me on my feet facing the door he then opened and strode out of.
Without a freaking word.
Nine
“I’m planning on a dastardly early takeoff in the morning, so I’ll say my goodbyes here.” A cloud of Chanel enveloped me as my grandmother yanked me into her embrace with surprising strength. “I approve, my dear,” she murmured in my ear. “And you know David would’ve too.”
I was frozen as she gently extracted herself, giving me a kiss on the cheek and a wink before focusing on Gage, who was at my back, most likely stoic and blank-faced like he’d been most of the night.
He’d turned up at my apartment right on time. I was worried he wouldn’t turn up at all, and I didn’t even freaking have his number to call.
After everything that had happened with this man, and I didn’t freaking have his cell phone number.
There was no way to contact him, short of humiliating myself and driving my newly repaired car over to the Sons of Templar compound. He held the control; he could’ve just left today, and that would’ve been that. Everything was on his terms.
There was no control for me.
Me, the woman who needed to control her life in order to survive it.
But there was no surviving Gage.
Not after today.
I had expected a thousand and one questions from my grandmother when I’d finally emerged from my bedroom, dazed and confused from Gage’s exit. But I didn’t get a thousand. Or even one. I got a cup of peppermint tea all but thrust at me and a pat on the cheek. My grandmother’s warm, dry hand stayed there for a beat, her eyes twinkling, giving me silent support I didn’t know I needed and didn’t know she was capable of.
Then she demanded I drink my tea, then change out of my birthday suit and get into yoga gear so I could stretch.
She gave me a knowing look. “I’m thinking you need it.”
I didn’t even have time to blush or cringe a thousand and one times because she was already breezing down the stairs, yelling how she’d meet me at the yoga studio and not to ”dillydally.”
So I didn’t.
I drank my tea, changed into my yoga clothes, and did yoga with my grandmother. And she was right, I totally needed to stretch. My entire body ached like I’d run a marathon.
Upon inspection while I was changing, small bruises of varying colors covered my body. Fingerprints on my breasts. Hand marks on my hips. More fingerprints on my inner thighs. Faint marks on my upper arms. It sounded like a catalog of abuse. Instead, it was a road map of worship.
Gage’s worship.
And I needed more.
I forced my aching body into healthy exercise in order to try to distract it from its need. From its fear. Because fear was my default. There were two states of human emotion, only two. Everything else was a byproduct of one or the other. Those two states were love and fear. Both lived within the other. One was magnified by the other.
I didn’t love Gage.
Not yet.
But I feared him.
Worse, I feared loving him.
Because I would.
Despite how utterly insane the certainty of that thought was, I knew it to be true. In my bones, the ones I was sure held the evidence of Gage’s touch, I knew it.
My grandmother must’ve seen something in my actions that communicated how delicate I was. How fragmented my normally ironclad state of mind was. Because not a word was spoken of him until the early evening, when she was curled up on my sofa with her glass of wine and me with my coconut water.
Of course, that was after she’d ruthlessly made fun of me for drinking coconut water.
“It’s not fortune that’s given me this carefree, crazy life, my dear. It’s tragedy,” she said, after I’d listed the health benefits of coconut water and she’d pretended to go deaf.
My body jerked at the words, because they weren’t spoken in the same tone as the ones moments before. They didn’t even seem to be uttered by the same person.
No, it was like my grandmother had aged ten years in the ten seconds between topics.
I blinked at her.
She smiled sadly, taking a hearty gulp of her wine. “I know, you’ve known me as fabulous, funny, beautiful, and adventurous your entire life,” she said, her voice only holding a hint of that lightness that usually burst from every syllable. “But I’ve kept things from you. Because that’s what grandparents do. Keep their trauma from their young, fresh-faced, naïve grandchildren so they don’t tarnish them with the ugly truth. No, that’s not the grandparent’s job. Or a parent’s. The world does that well enough. And the world has done that to you. In the most brutal and ugly way possible. In a way that made me lose not only one precious grandchild, but a large piece of another too.”
My hands shook as I set my glass down beside me, afraid of squeezing it too hard and smashing it in my hands.
My grandmother never spoke of David.
Never.
I used to think she did it because she wanted to respect my wishes. Because she knew I couldn’t talk about him when every breath I took was him. Because she saw how tenuous my grip really was on sanity.
But now, her eyes, the absolute and utter sorrow entrenched in them, told me something different. Told me I wasn’t the only one holding onto sorrow.
“I was terrified that I had lost my lively, adventurous, spirited Lauren. I was heartbroken by the thought that David’s death would not just happen once, but a thousand times over forever,” she continued, voice sounding older and more tortured than I’d ever heard it. “I had faith though. I had to, because there wasn’t a thing I could do to bring you back to yourself. I know that because I’m wise and worldly and I’ve had tragedy in tenfold. I’m not talking about us losing our beautiful David, because that’s something more than tragedy. There isn’t a word for the pain of such a thing. There shouldn’t be a word. It shouldn’t happen. But this world is ugly and cruel, so it did. My heart breaks anew every single morning when I wake up and remember it wasn’t a terrible nightmare.”
Tears fogged my glasses. “Me too,” I croaked.
She smiled, sad and full of pain. “I wish I could tell you that was going to change, say it would get better with time, but that’s not true. And I never lie to you. I don’t tell you everything though, because I’m a woman of many talents and just as many s
ecrets. Ones I keep like baubles to hand out to you when you need them.” She paused. “I’m being metaphorical right now. You’re not getting any of my jewelry until I croak. I need it all.”
I choked out a hysterical and tear-filled laugh.
“But I’m talking about little pieces of my life I’ve collected and kept, despite the pain in doing so, in case they might help my beautiful and tortured granddaughter.” She sipped her wine. “And as much as it hurts to remember, I’m glad I have to, because it means good things for my Lo. The best. And it’s in the shape of a rather delicious man, if I do say so myself. Shirtless was more than impressive, so I can just imagine him pantsless.” She winked at me.
I rolled my eyes. Of course my grandmother had to get lewd in the middle of a heart-to-heart.
“Beautiful he may be,” she continued, “he’s broken. Dangerous. Any fool can see that. And your grandmother is no fool. I don’t just mean those scars and that motorcycle cut. That’s just surface. It’s nothing compared to what lies beneath.”
She took another sip and I thought on how much my grandmother saw. And my heart hurt because I knew that if she saw that much in such a short amount of time, she was battling more pain than I’d realized. Because it was almost impossible to see true pain—ugly, true, visceral pain—unless you knew what it felt like.
“I loved a man like that once,” she said, her voice quiet.
I jerked. “Grandad?” I asked, squinting and trying to remember the blurry man from the photos of him where he always seemed to be surrounded by cigar smoke and wearing a frown.
Grandma rolled her eyes. “Heavens no. I despised your grandfather,” she said conversationally.
I blinked. “What?”
“Ugh,” she groaned like a teenager. “He was such a bore. I would’ve ditched him the second I realized he had as much personality as a two-bit vibrator.”
I nearly choked on my coconut water.
Grandma continued, smirking. “Anyway, I didn’t ditch him because I had a little boy whom I adored. And I loved him more than I loved myself. Which is a feat. Your grandfather had much the same opinion. We lived different lives, with different lovers—me at least. Who knew what that piece of cardboard did?—and put on a united front. Obviously I still escaped as much as I could. Still was me. Your grandfather worked too often to disapprove too loudly. I tried to give your father the most exciting life possible, but as you’re aware, he wanted a stable one. And stability and excitement are not conclusive. I wore myself out giving him a pair of—on the surface—stable parents. So we gave him that until cancer took away his father, and then he did everything he could to escape his now fully insane mother.”
“He doesn’t know?” I whispered, thinking about my father’s resentment toward my grandmother, wondering if it would change if he’d known what she’d done for him.
Grandma shook her head. “Of course not. As I said, it’s a parent’s job to keep all the ugly secrets,” she said, confirming my hunch. “But we’re not talking about that,” she continued with a raised brow, as if she knew I was about to push the subject.
“We’re talking about Mick—not Jagger, though I may or may not have been there and may or may not be legally bound not to talk about it.” She winked. “But my Mick was it. You know the it.” She gave me a shrewd look. “He gave me my last time. And he gave me knowledge of how beautifully wretched love was. Because he had darkness. Different than your Gage, but then everything’s the same in the inky blackness, isn’t it? Painful, ugly, torture. It was torture loving him. But I would’ve lived it my entire life.” She looked at the windows, but she wasn’t seeing the ocean.
Her eyes sparkled with tears.
My grandmother never cried.
Never.
Not even at David’s funeral.
Well, I wasn’t entirely sure, as I wasn’t in a state to notice other people’s emotions since I’d been drowning in my own, but I was pretty sure.
And now she was almost crying.
“We only had six months together,” she whispered. “Six months of the most beautifully ugly love I’d ever experienced.” Her voice broke and she snapped her gaze away from the window with a force that told me she was yanking herself back from the past before it swallowed her up. “And I lost him. In something as utterly common and cliché as a car accident, of all things. Someone ran a red light. He died on impact. Thankfully, I guess, since his life had been so full of pain that it would’ve been cruel if his death was too.” She leaned forward and topped off her wine from the bottle on the table.
I watched, frozen. “How come you never told me?” I asked, my voice little more than a whisper.
She smiled. “Because, my dear, the pain was so great that if I uttered the truth, I was worried I might just fall apart and never find myself back together again.” She said the words lightly, almost casually, and that made them that much more painful to hear.
I leaned forward. “Grandma,” I croaked, wishing I could find something to say that would take away the pain on her beautiful face.
She waved me away. “I’m not telling you this for sympathy,” she said, almost dismissively. “I’m telling you this because that’s what pushed me to live. Really live. I know your father disapproves of the way I live my life. My carelessness, as he sees it. But my chaos is careful in its construction. Designed to ensure I make it through the day without falling apart. That’s what we’re all trying to do, get through the day. Sometimes the ones who seem to make life harder are the ones who make the days that much easier.”
She let her words sit, crowd the room, crack my heart. She wasn’t bothered by my silence, my inability to figure out what to say to that. I didn’t think she even expected me to say anything; what I had to say wasn’t what mattered.
She just sipped her wine.
And then she looked at me. “You know, honey, you’re not him if you want to have a sip of wine,” she said gently. “And this isn’t me pushing this on you just because I want a drinking buddy. I have plenty of those. It’s actually nice having a sure-thing sober driver, so it’s to my detriment that I’m speaking on this.” Her eyes twinkled. “But I will speak on it because it’s apparently the night for a purge. You’ve been too hurt to live your life because of how David’s ended.”
I tried not to flinch at the way the words grated against the air.
I was sure Grandma saw my reaction, but she continued. “I see there’s a man who will show you something more than fearing death. Who might teach you how to live. You might resurrect him,” she murmured, confirming that she saw everything on little more than a glimpse.
“David had an illness, honey. A chemical imbalance. And he had troubles. Bone-deep troubles that he saw as insurmountable mountains. And he found something to turn them into molehills. And it was his end.”
She paused, taking a huge gulp of her wine.
“It’s an illness you don’t have,” she said firmly. “You might have the mountains, honey, because everyone does in one way or another, but you’re willing to climb them. Fuck, I think you’ve found a man who would carry you over them. Who would walk through fire. But I don’t want him to do that. I just want him to show you that you can walk through fire. You can live.”
Again that heavy silence settled over the room.
“I think I might be starting to,” I whispered in response.
She grinned. “I think so too.”
And then, not long after that, Gage arrived.
Right on time.
He’d barely looked at me all night.
Apart from the way he’d devoured me with his carnal glare the second he turned up, yanked me into his arms for a brutal and closemouthed kiss, of course.
He’d done that in such a way that it seemed like it was beyond his control, like he was angry he was doing it.
Or maybe that was my overactive imagination.
I hadn’t been angry that he did it.
My lips had been craving his all day. Eve
ry single cell of my body had been. And my blood roared in response to his touch, his kiss, even if it was considerably inappropriate in front of my grandmother.
“Hey,” I whispered when he yanked his head back, glowering.
He didn’t answer for a moment, his eyes searching my face. “Will,” he murmured, tone deeply intimate and yet coldly detached at the same time.
I would’ve said such a thing was impossible before.
But with Gage there was no impossible.
Because he was an impossibility. His very presence. The ghost of his touch on my lips. We’d driven to dinner on the bike, him wordlessly shoving the helmet at me serving as him telling me as much. My grandmother had not made a tut of disapproval at that as my mother would’ve, or a load protest like my father.
No, she literally clapped.
With glee.
I was lucky I’d worn a motorcycle appropriate outfit, considering I’d stupidly hoped I’d need to wear one. I’d gone for my black capris, skintight, ending just above my ankle so I could match my light pink booties to them. The heel was higher than I normally wore, but it did something good to my legs. Which was why I’d bought them in the first place.
And never worn them before. It had been a rare impulse purchase at the mall.
Because I didn’t think I was the person to wear lace-up, blush-pink suede booties.
Because I’d never thought I was the person to feel at home pressed into one of the craziest bikers in Amber. The biker she belonged to. The biker she’d had sex with moments after he confessed to murder.
I would’ve said such a thing was impossible.
But Gage was impossible.
So I did ride on the back of his motorcycle to dinner at Valentines.
He didn’t speak to me when we pulled up, just rested his hands lightly on my hips once I’d climbed off, kept me rooted in place while his eyes ran over the V-necked cami underneath my blush pink jacket. It was black silk with a lace trim, the lace covering the fact that it dipped way low.
