“It doesn’t matter. Fighting her for any of it would mean having to deal with her more. I just want her to go back to wherever she crawled up from.”
Which was Tempe, Arizona. Gunner remembered that scene at the cemetery, remembered thinking how strange it was for the woman to offer that bit of information at that moment, when there had been so many more important things that could have, should have, been said.
“Don’t you want to know why she left?”
In an alluring, habitual gesture, Leah tucked her hair behind her ear. She leaned forward and put her mouth around her straw. As he watched her take a drink, sucking soda delicately, her full pink lips pursed around the white plastic, Gunner’s cock stirred. There was no topic so heavy, apparently, that he couldn’t get horny around her.
“No,” she said as she sat back. “I honestly don’t care.”
He believed her, but he found it hard to understand. How could she not care to know why she’d been abandoned?
“What answer would make it make sense?” she asked, as if answering the question he hadn’t voiced. “Is there something that would make it okay that she just walked away from her only child and never contacted me again for ten years? Or that she came back now, like a carrion-feeder, dropping in to feed off the bones of my life?”
Leah sure had a way with words. “No.”
“Then why should I care why she did it?”
He had no answer.
She took her hand back and focused on her grilled chicken sandwich. After a bite and another drink, she picked up the hand he’d left on the table. Turning it so that the head of the Bull dragon tattoo on his forearm showed, she caressed the ink with her fingertips.
“Here’s what I think. Everything about the life I had before is gone. All of it. My dad is dead. My mom is dead to me. The one friend I thought I had is not my friend. The house I grew up in is gone. The church is gone. My car is gone. My job is gone. There is literally nothing left. There’s not even money coming from any of it. All I have is what I started this life with you with. I think God’s made things pretty clear: there is nothing for me to look backward to. The life I’m making with you—that’s all that matters.”
Gunner laid his other hand over her fingers, pressing them to his forearm. “I love to hear you say that, but Lee—there’s no way God wants you to be with me. I mean, fuck, look at me.”
Her eyes locked with his. “I am looking at you. I see you. I think I’ve always seen you. I love you. So does God. I believe that everything that happens…”
“Please don’t fucking say ‘everything happens for a reason.’ Please.” Just like there was no worthy reason for her mother’s abandonment, there was no reason for what had happened to Gunner’s mother and brother. If Leah wanted to think that a tornado that had killed her father and destroyed her life was part of a grand plan, that was up to her, but he didn’t need those words uttered.
“I was going to say everything that happens moves us forward. Even the terrible things do that. I believe that there’s always good to be found up ahead, and I do believe God knows that and points us that way.”
Gunner chuckled. She’d found the words to say what he hadn’t wanted her to, but in a way he almost believed. “That was slick. You’re pretty smart. You should go to college or something.”
She grinned back, and this time, there was no shadowy unreality to it. “That’s the plan.”
~oOo~
The night before Thanksgiving, Gunner woke up alone in bed. Gold light shone weakly from the half-open door, so he got up and shoved his legs into the jeans he’d tossed to the floor earlier.
Leah was on the sofa, her injured leg stretched out across the cushions. She was reading one of the fat novels she liked. During the summer, she’d started on a Stephen King kick and had read probably everything the guy had written. Now, she was reading Desperation, his newest release, in a big hardcover edition.
She hadn’t heard him get up or come to the door, so he said, “Hey,” and went to crouch at her side.
“Hi.” Without looking up from her book, she combed a hand through his hair.
“Can’t sleep?”
A distracted shake of her head. Leah was a good sleeper. She got at least eight hours every night unless she was getting up early, or staying up late, for a specific reason, and she barely moved all night long. Even all those horror novels she poured into her brain didn’t disturb her rest. Or all the horror of her life lately. She slept like an angel every night. So Gunner didn’t like her up at three o’clock in the morning.
He put his hand on her head and smoothed his palm over the sleek silk of her hair. “Something goin’ on in there?”
At first, she didn’t react. She stared at the page, but Gunner didn’t get the sense that she was reading. Eventually, she folded the dust jacket out to mark her page and closed the book.
“Don’t get mad, okay?”
She said that fairly often when she was about to share what was on her mind, but he couldn’t think of anything she’d ever said that had made him angry—at least not at her.
“Okay.”
“I can’t do dinner tomorrow. Or today, I guess. Thanksgiving. I can’t do it.”
They were planning, as usual, to go to Delaney and Mo’s house with all the rest of the Bulls and their families. Gunner’s father and sister were joining them, which was also pretty normal. Mo liked to pack her house with people.
“What do you mean? You feel okay?”
“Yeah.” She set the book on the back of the sofa. “I don’t know. I’m kinda freaking out about it, but I don’t know why. Just…the thought of all those people, and me hobbling around on crutches not being able to do anything, and…it just…it feels…I don’t know. I just can’t.”
It would be the first Thanksgiving without her father. Gunner wondered if that was the part she couldn’t articulate. “The first holiday is hard.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think that’s it. Holidays with my dad were always weird. There was lots of church stuff to do, and parties and dinners and stuff, but when we were home, he was worse than usual. Most Thanksgivings we ate at other people’s houses and then he drank himself into a stupor when we got home, and most Christmas mornings I had to wait until his hangover was under control before I could open presents. I don’t have a lot of great holiday memories with him. I was eight the last time I had a good holiday.”
Fuck that guy. Gunner had grown up thinking of Reverend Campbell as a good man. He’d been a role model in Grant for just about everyone. But what a weak shit he’d turned out to be.
He thought he understood, a little, what Leah was struggling with. She got along well with just about everybody in the club, and she was getting actually close with Willa and Mo, not to mention his sister, but holidays were about tradition, and she didn’t have any. No good ones. Her father had been dead a month, and her mom had just popped back up to take a fresh bite. Maybe she didn’t see it herself, but Gunner did.
Crouching beside the sofa, he comprehended that shadow he’d felt following her around for the past month. Maybe she was ready to tear her past from her life, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t feeling the pain of the rending.
It was hard to let go of who you’d been. Even the parts you didn’t like, the parts you couldn’t wait to get away from, were still you. And if you weren’t careful—if you didn’t have anyone to hold onto—you could fall into the howling chasm between who you’d been and who you wanted to be.
“Okay. We won’t go. We’ll just stay in and be quiet. I’ll pull the mattress out here, and all the blankets and pillows, and we can lay on the floor in front of the TV all day and watch one of the marathons on cable, or old movies or something. Or the parades, if you like that.” He smirked. “Or, you know, we could watch some football. That’d be okay. I’ll find a restaurant that’s open and bring back some takeout for dinner. It’ll be perfect.”
As he’d described the day, he couldn’t think
of anything he’d like more. Just them, snuggled together, letting the day go on without them.
“Yeah? What about your dad and Deb?” Hope twinkled faintly in her eyes, and Gunner knew he’d made the right call.
“I’ll call ‘em. They’ll understand. They’ll probably go to D and Mo’s just like they planned. Dad loves Mo’s sweet potato pie.”
“Okay.” She nodded. “That’d be…that’d be good. Great, actually.” Her voice broke, and Gunner shifted to his knees so that he could fold her into his arms as, for the second time since her father died, Leah wept.
~oOo~
Gunner was going to call this Thanksgiving a total win. He’d really come through. Everybody had understood why they were bailing on the celebration. He’d found a restaurant not only open on Thanksgiving and offering takeout but offering an actual turkey dinner. So he’d spread one of Leah’s flowery tablecloths over their little makeshift nest in front of the television, and they’d had roast turkey with gravy and stuffing, and cranberry sauce, and roasted Brussels sprouts (which—ugh—Gunner didn’t eat, or enjoy smelling, but Leah devoured), and soft rolls. Two slices of pumpkin pie rounded out the meal.
He didn’t push for football, but they found a channel playing famous movies from the Forties all day. It was a good day.
The sun had set, and The Big Sleep was playing, when Leah pushed her empty dessert plate away from the mattress and lay down at Gunner’s side. She lifted her t-shirt and patted her bare belly, which was a little rounded from her feasting.
“That was so good.”
He’d finished long before she had and had stretched out to watch her eat. Now he rolled to his side and put his hand over hers. “You having a good Thanksgiving, baby?”
“I am.” She smiled sweetly and licked a dot of whipped cream from the corner of her mouth. “The best one. Thank you for understanding.”
A powerful jolt of love and need surged through his body, and with it came an impulse he couldn’t resist. “Leah…I want you to keep my flame.”
Her belly went still under his hand, and he shifted his eyes to her face. Her eyes were there, waiting for his to meet them. “The tattoo?”
He nodded, but already the small rational portion of his brain was kicking the large impulsive portion for speaking out of turn. “I know you’re too young, but…fuck, Leah. I told you I’d wait. It’s too soon. I know that. But…” She wasn’t even twenty years old.
“It’s not too soon. When you say it’s too soon, you mean you don’t think I know what I want. You mean you think I’m too young and dumb to be able to make a decision like that.”
“No, that’s not…” he stopped, because she was right. He would have said it a whole lot differently, but it came to the same thing. She was young, and her life had been dramatically altered more than once in the five months they’d been together. Yeah, he worried that she wouldn’t want the same things when she figured out her new life.
“Gunner, look at me.”
His eyes had dropped to the narrow gap between them. He brought them back and faced her.
“So I’m nine years younger than you.”
“Nine and a half.” His birthday had been at the end of October; her birthday was, delightfully, Valentine’s Day.
“Nine and a third, if we’re splitting hairs. Okay, so I’m young. Granted. Still, I’m not a kid. I think I’ve had to deal with a lot of grownup shit, don’t you?
No denying that.
“Do you think I’m dumb?”
“Fuck, Leah. Of course not.” She was sharp as a tack—much smarter than he was. And more than just book smart, she was perceptive.
“So we agree that I’m smart. But you think I don’t know what I want.”
“I think you’ve had a lot of changes, and you’re still spinning. You don’t know where you’ll land yet.”
“I’m not spinning, though. I was—I think I was spinning a lot before you. But I’ve landed right here. I’m sad about my dad, about losing him, and about what happened between us, but there’s nothing inside me that feels doubt. Not about my mom, or my dad, not about my past, not about you. Not about me. I know what I want. I want to start college next fall. I don’t know what I want to study, but that’s not doubt. That’s just…openness, I guess. Burt used to say that the first couple of semesters are for figuring out what to study. So I’ll figure that out. The only other thing I want is you. I want to marry you and get a degree and start a career, and then, someday down the road, have your babies. I’d like to have two or three kids. It’s not like I haven’t thought about this stuff, Gun. I don’t know why you think I’ll change my mind.”
Laid out so reasonably, it made perfect sense, and Gunner didn’t know what his hesitation was, either. They could both be impulsive, but what had grown between them wasn’t impulse. Moreover, if he faced the truth head on: Leah was mature for her age, but he really wasn’t. The things he struggled with, not just the impulses but the needs—they made his head young. He didn’t stand up on his own all that well. He and she probably met in the middle, maturity-wise.
Who the fuck was he kidding? Leah was the mature one. Her naïveté didn’t change that. Experience didn’t always equal growth. He was certainly a testament to that truth.
That didn’t address all of his worries, however. “Who I am, what I do—that doesn’t bother you?”
When they’d talked about the club and what she should know about their business, she’d given the perfect answer: she didn’t want to know anything he didn’t want to tell her. But she knew enough to know things were often illegal and occasionally violent. It was impossible not to know at least that much.
“You’re making me mad. What do you think we’ve been doing all this time, if you think that bothers me? I mean, fuck, Gun. I learned to shoot for you. ”
She hadn’t exactly ‘learned to shoot.’ She was a terrible shot and still jumped every time, but she got close enough to make somebody think twice if they threatened her. But the point he was making was bigger than that. “I don’t want you to feel trapped. You were trapped with your dad. I don’t think I could stand it if being with me made you feel like you needed to sneak away to be free.”
She sighed, and he heard the anger in it. “I told you what I want. What do you want?”
That was easy, and Gunner decided that the time for doubt had passed. Scooting as close to her as he could get, he swept his hand over her belly, around her side, and under her back. He leaned over until his beard brushed her lips. “I want you. I want you to keep my flame.”
With a sassy smirk, she said, “Then I’m getting a fucking tattoo, and you can shut the fuck up.” As he laughed at her use of his favorite word, she grabbed his beard and planted his mouth on hers.
The end of the movie played to an audience that had forgotten about it completely.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Two weeks before Christmas, Leah finally got free of the cast. Her leg and foot felt odd, and got stiff by the end of the day, but getting that nasty thing off was easily one of the best days of her life since the tornado.
This afternoon was putting her newly healed limb through its paces, though. A week and a half before Christmas, she was on a marathon shopping excursion with all the old ladies: Mo, Joanna, Willa, and even Maddie, whom Leah barely knew. They’d done the Promenade and Wal-Mart already, and after lunch, they were going to Utica Square, where Joanna had a shop.
Now, they were taking up a round table in the middle of an Italian restaurant near the Promenade, drinking red wine and eating free bread while they waited for their lunch.
Leah hadn’t done much shopping yet—a few small, silly things for Gunner; a scarf, a pair of gold earrings, and cologne gift set for Deb; and an engraved walnut chest for organizing photographs for Sam, Gunner’s dad. She’d have to pick that up in a few days.
She’d also gotten her contribution to the ‘gift grab’ for the Bulls’ holiday party—that had been the most fun so far, with all
of the women yukking it up over the weirdest, wildest, or raunchiest things they could find for twenty dollars.
And she had wrapping paper and ribbons and cards, too.
Actually, she’d gotten a lot of her shopping done. Most of it. Except the most important part. She didn’t have a real gift for Gunner yet, and she had no idea what it should be. He liked bikes and cars and video games. And her. There didn’t seem to be much potential for good gifts in that list. Unless there was a Harley thing. Maybe something for his bike? Where did one get something like that?
“You with us, love?” Mo asked and tapped her half-empty wine glass against Leah’s full one.
Twist (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 2) Page 34
