By Her Touch

by Adriana Anders

  “I thought we discussed this, Andrew. I thought we established that I could decide these things for myself.”

  A weird, choked-sounding chuckle came through the wood, and George relaxed slightly against the door.

  “I…” George swallowed, not entirely sure she should reveal this much, but too honest to lie. “I don’t want to give this up. I don’t care how hard it is. I…I like you. And I don’t want to lose whatever we’re doing. Okay, Andrew?”

  Another sigh, and the door swung unexpectedly back. Good thing he was there to catch her. He kissed her, hard, and she didn’t care. She wanted it. She liked it like that.

  “It’s not Andrew.”

  “Hmm?” It was hard to pull back and focus after a kiss like that, but she managed, bleary-eyed, her pulse going a million miles an hour.

  “My name. It’s not Andrew.”

  She blinked. “Oh.”

  “My name’s Clay.”

  “I see,” she said, stepping cautiously out of his arms.

  “No, baby. No, you really don’t see.”

  “Why don’t you tell me, then?”

  “How much time you got?”

  “For this? As much time as it takes.” George swallowed. “Clay.”

  * * *

  “What’s your last name?” she asked a few seconds later.

  He nodded, resigned. “Navarro.”

  “Oh.” She looked confused and took another step back, eyeing him. After another beat, she seemed to come to some decision. “It suits you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “To a T. It’s sexy.”

  That surprised a chuckle out of him.

  “You… Would you like a drink or something…Clay? I—”

  “No. Thank you. I want to come clean.”

  “Oh, right, well…do you mind if I…?” She led him back to her room, sat in the rocking chair, hands in her lap, face strong and set, and waited for whatever news he had to give.

  Christ, he liked this woman. Like, really, really liked her.

  Pushing back a wave of emotion, Clay sucked in a breath and settled into the armchair, needing to tell the truth.

  “I’m an… Was an undercover agent with the ATF.”

  George’s eyes were huge, her face unnaturally pale.

  “Still an agent, but… Actually, I’m not entirely sure I still have a job. Coming here, I mean. Boss wanted me to take a break, but I’m keeping my location quiet, and she’s pretty pissed.”

  “Oh, thank God.”

  “Thank God?”

  “I…I wanted you to be a good guy,” George said, looking like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. “So badly.”

  “Yeah? I get that.”

  “So, you were…undercover?”

  “Yeah. Can’t talk about my last case too much—still hasn’t gone to trial—but I wanted you to know. I…I guess I’m tired of looking like a bad guy all the time. Although…I’ve done some pretty horrible things.”

  “In the line of duty?”

  He grimaced. “Yeah. Didn’t always feel like it, though.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know how to explain.” He took a breath and rubbed a hand over his face, wishing everything were more like the movies—all black or white, good or bad. How could he explain this in-between shit to a civilian?

  “Going undercover’s like…like a blood transfusion or something. Like you’ve got to make room for the soulless bastard you’ll be pretending to be for the foreseeable future. And to do that, you’ve got to willingly rip out essential parts of yourself—parts like honor and humanity. The shit that made you want to do your job in the first place. That shit’s got to go, ’cause it’s what’ll get you made, right? So, by the time I’d finished with the Sultans, I was one of them. A full-fledged, motherfucking asshole of a murderous Sultan.”

  George gasped and started to speak. “Wha… Wait, I don’t… Did you—”

  “No. No, but there were moments where I got pretty fucking close, times when I’d be egging one of my brothers on and—” He stood, clearly startling George, and pulled his shirt up to reveal the severe burn on his side. “Remember you asked me about this? Who did this to me? I did, George. Me. I took a hot-ass iron, dialed it up high as it would go, and pressed it right over the tat there. You wanna know why?”

  * * *

  No! Stop it! George wanted to scream. Don’t say another word. I don’t want to know. But the desperation on Clay’s face was enough to make her stop and shove back the tears surging into her eyes and stinging her sinuses.

  “Tell me.”

  “’Cause I asked for that tat. Not like these.” He pointed to his eyes. “Or the ones on my hands. Those were forced on me, but this one…this one was my Sultan self feeling it. Feeling like one of the brothers.”

  “What about the one on your back?”

  “No, no. I got that when I became a full-fledged member. That one’s standard issue. If I wanted into the club, I had to get the colors on the back. This one? This was me—not me Clay, but me Indian Greer, telling those assholes that I’d die for them. Wanting to die for them.” He looked down at her defiantly and George wasn’t at all sure how he expected her to react. “How messed up is that, huh, George?”

  The tears overflowed—the feelings too—and George stood up, went to where he sat in that old wingback chair, and ducked to wrap her arms around him. She didn’t say a thing.

  “The worst part,” he went on, his voice floating into the air above her head as she squeezed into the tiny bit of leftover space, “the worst part is that those fuckers killed my sister.”

  George stilled, shifted back, and waited, her breath audible in her ears.

  “It was personal, me joining the Sultans. Always personal.” He sat watching her, defiantly. Waiting, if George wasn’t mistaken, for her to throw him out or something.

  Instead, she took his hand and nudged him until he sat back and made more room for her beside him.

  “Tell me the story,” she said, sliding in close.

  “You don’t want to hear about—”

  “I want to hear your story, Clay. Tell me your story.”

  “My story?”

  “Who are you? Where are you from? I don’t know anything.”

  “It’s not very—”

  “Tell me about you. And your sister. Please.”

  Forehead resting on his fists, tension palpable, he shook his head.

  “Okay. You don’t have to.” She ran a finger over one of those fists, felt it loosen, took it in her hand, and waited him out.

  “I don’t know where to start,” he finally said.

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-four.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Baltimore.” He paused, head tilted to the side, and focused on her. “How old are you, Doc?”

  “Thirty-three.”

  He gave a satisfied harrumph and wrapped one of those solid arms around her. “So, the Clay Navarro story. Short version.”

  “Long version’s fine too.”

  “How about the medium version?”

  “Okay.”

  “I grew up kinda lower middle class, I guess you could say.”

  “Working class,” she corrected in her know-it-all way, before tamping that down.

  “Right. Blue collar, or whatever.”

  “I’ll stop interrupting. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” said Clay with a small smile in her direction. He squeezed her hand. “So, we did okay, with both my parents working. Then my mom died when we were little.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Oh. Sorry, I thought I’d told you. Carly.” There was a moment of silence, and George could feel the importance of the name.

  “Your
sister.”

  He nodded. “My little sister.”

  “Okay. Go on.”

  “So, anyway, Mom got breast cancer, and…well, she died, and without health insurance, we ended up living in the projects.” George swallowed past the lump swelling in her throat. “Christ. I didn’t mean to go back this far.” Clay swiped a hand over his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose, and went on. “I was pretty close with her.” He paused before saying the name again. It came out strangely slow and foreign-sounding. “Carly. After Mom died, we got pretty close. The place where we lived sucked, and Dad…Dad didn’t do so well. You know, Baltimore. Not the easiest place in the world, especially for a Latin American whose English was still rough. So, anyway, Dad died when—”

  “Your father too? What of?”

  “Untreated pneumonia.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Shitty job, no savings, no insurance. And he wasn’t all that fond of hospitals, so… Yeah. Anyway, I wanted to…I wanted to be a history teacher, of all things. I’d had a good one in high school. Inspiring, you know? And so the plan was, community college first and then…Too much detail.” He urged her to shift to one side and stood up, running his hands through his hair, and George watched him cross the room, flick aside her bedroom curtain, which she didn’t remember closing, and look outside. Paranoid or just cautious—she suddenly wasn’t so sure.

  He told the next part from his spot by the window, voice muffled. “Carly was a wild child. She was impatient and needy and… Man, she was a handful. I tried to help her, tried to keep her in line, but I had my own things I wanted to do, so by the time I realized shit wasn’t what it was supposed to be, she was…” He turned, met her eyes, and she thought she’d never seen a face so filled with pain—so marked by regret. “She was too far gone. Hooked on smack, crank, whatever the hell she could get her hands on. And she’d gotten into this Aryan brotherhood thing, which was fucking ironic, considering our dad was South American, so… I tried to get her out. I swear I tried, George.” He was pleading with her now, and George’s eyes burned with a new veil of unshed tears. “I tried, but it was too late. Too late for my baby sister and…” The hand that ran through his hair shook with emotion, and she wanted to get up and hold him. “Carly got involved with those fucking creeps, and eventually—or actually, pretty fucking quickly—she died.”

  His eyes when they met George’s were naked, raw, open, sad…but not dead at least. No, so alive with pain that she could feel it, a gaping wound in the middle of her bedroom. She did get up then, crossed to him, and wrapped her arms around him, trying her best to hold his broken pieces together.

  “And you joined the ATF after that?”

  “My mission in life’s been to take those fuckers down.”

  “I’m sorry, Clay. I’m so sorry.”

  “You know, I haven’t told this story since…since right after it happened. The cops didn’t give a shit. They had bigger fish to fry than some poor little smackhead like Carly, but I knew…I knew exactly who’d done it. It was the fucker she’d been hanging out with. A racist MC son of a bitch. Those bastards killed her. The official line was that it was an OD, but I’d seen her body. I’d seen what those motherfuckers had done to her, and I knew.” He stopped talking, and she tightened her hold before stepping back.

  “Jesus, how did I end up here? With you? The most amazing woman I’ve ever met. I…I’m not sure I deserve this. Whatever this is.”

  “Whatever it is,” she echoed, and looking at this man, she knew it was more than sex. She wanted to show him with her body, her embrace.

  “Come on,” she whispered. “Come to bed with me.” She urged him. “Please.”

  “There’s more. I want to tell you everything.”

  “I know. Let’s go to bed, and you can tell me.”

  They settled in, Clay on his back and George on her side, facing him. She wanted to touch him everywhere, to wrap him up and never let him back out. She wanted to save him. Instead, she put her head on his shoulder, curled one arm over his chest, and waited.

  “I don’t know where to start.”

  She pictured Clay the first time she’d seem him. “Your eyelids,” she said with a long caress. “Start with your eyelids.”

  “That was Ape, a.k.a. Harold Herndon. But he’d beat the crap out of anyone who used his real name.”

  “So, Harold.” She forced a smile. “He did your lids?”

  “Yeah.”

  When he didn’t go on, she prodded. “Against your will?”

  “With a tattoo needle against my eyeball.” He paused, shuddered, and then turned to her. “Same night I was shot. The whole damned operation was coming together that night. Ape and I were supposed to go with Handles for the final exchange, but he surprised us all by leaving alone. He must have known, even then, about me. Or had his doubts. And while he was gone, somebody ratted me out to Ape.”

  “Who was it? How did they know?”

  “Still got no idea. But it was someone close.”

  “You mean—”

  “I mean somebody on the inside. Someone who’s supposed to be on my team.”

  “Oh no.”

  “They shut me up in my room, waiting for Handles to come and…I don’t know, deliver the fatal blow or whatever. That’s when the shit really hit the fan. I wound up on a bed, with a couple of bullet holes in my back…one in my thigh.”

  George’s pulse took off fast, too fast. He had to see he was killing her.

  “Your thigh?” She reached down and ran a hand down one leg, then the other, until she found it—a chunk taken out of the side of his thigh. “This is why you limp.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Clay, I’m—”

  “It wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to me. Another time, I got stuck at the bottom of a well shaft with a dead woman and another biker.”

  “Another biker? You thought of yourself as one of them?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I was one of them.”

  She took that in, understood it for what it was. A warning? An admission of guilt?

  “Had to be in order to get them to believe.” He hesitated.

  “And the woman.” George tilted her head back to get a good look at him. “Was she someone you loved?”

  “Jesus,” he said. “No. No, I didn’t love her, which is so much worse. She was…” He turned his face away. “She was nobody.”

  “What were you doing at the bot—”

  “Rival club attacked us.” He leaned away from her. “Why am I doing this, George? Telling you this shit? I’m looking back at my life, and it’s like this big hunk of swiss cheese, you know? Only instead of air, it’s full of huge, black holes. And no matter how hard I try, no matter how much I work to push those holes away, I get sucked back in, over and over again, every single goddamned night.” Clay rolled slightly, trying to rid himself of George’s weight; she let him. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. You’re just too… I’m just this big black hole, and you’re so full of sunshine. What if all this shit rubs off on you?”

  She opened her mouth to respond, but he stopped her, shook his head as if to clear it, and went on through tightly clenched teeth.

  “Something I need to tell you, George.”

  She stilled. After everything he’d just laid at her feet, his tone of voice said this was worse. “Okay,” she said reluctantly.

  “I watched you. Before.”

  “What?”

  “Stood out there in the woods across the street. Watched over you.” He laughed, a hard, regretful sound, and something uncomfortable shimmered down George’s back.

  “You watched me?”

  “God, it’s even worse out loud, isn’t it? It was… It’s such a bad world, you know? And after you got attacked by those little thugs, I…I couldn’t stand the idea of you being on your own, w
ith no idea of all the shit out there. So I came here and made sure you didn’t get hurt again.”

  “Have you done this before? With other women?”

  He let out another harsh laugh. “No. Apparently, I’ve only recently turned to the dark side.”

  As understanding dawned, everything inside of George softened, opened up. What must it be like to be this man, walking around with the weight of the world on his shoulders?

  “Every night, George. It’s wrong, and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. But I just wanted to make sure you were safe. I couldn’t stand to see you get hurt again.”

  George swallowed back that image of this man standing sentinel in front of her house, doing the only thing he apparently knew how to do—taking care of people, saving them. Just not himself, it turned out. He needed someone else to do that for him.

  He looked devastated when she took his cheeks between her hands. “It’s okay,” she said, granting him the absolution he couldn’t give himself. “Let me take care of you, Clay. Let me…let me hold you. Will you do that? Will you just let me hold you tonight?”

  He nodded—this big, hard, uncompromising man—and once the incomprehension left his face, the hope she saw there was so bright, so new, so clearly against the grain that it nearly broke her heart.

  16

  George awoke on her bedroom floor and unwound herself carefully from An—No, Clay’s arms. ATF Agent Clay Navarro.

  She considered trying to rouse him and get him to move to the bed but decided against it. Best to leave him there, where he seemed to be getting actual rest, as opposed to whatever he’d suffered through while they’d lain on the mattress.

  Quietly, she moved around, gathered the things she’d need for work, took a quick shower, fed and released the animals, and left, feeling…

  Lord, what would you call this sensation? Giddy, certainly. Fulfilled, yes. But not quite happy. Satisfied but not content. Something was missing, something she’d forgotten about, and she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

  She was the first to arrive at the clinic, her brain fully occupied with thoughts of Clay as she set up for her patients and shifted gears in her mind—preparing to face a day of work when all she really wanted to do was help him tackle his demons.