Page 1 of Carver (Satan’s Angels MC #8)

Carver

I t’s not the nightmares that haunt my soul. It’s the sweet dreams that leave me gasping and I always wake soaked in a cold sweat.

It’s almost never the same dream twice, but the theme is constant.

The future that I’ll never have.

The woman I’ll never stop loving.

I shake my head like a wet dog, trying to dispel the lingering mist of the dream even though it’s been hours since I got up and got to work, but it’s stubborn. The images aren’t water. They’re claws that dig deep into tissue and bone.

I pull out the old metal chair to the side of my battered workbench and drop into it. I angle my left hand across my body so that I can grasp the right. I tug on my fingers, one by one, as if that will bring the muscle memory back and teach them to be useful again.

My left hand is calloused and dusty from hours of carving.

It’s not like Avandale, an hour and a half southeast of Seattle is known for its sweltering weather and we’re well past summer, but today, it’s hot.

I’m an early riser, not by choice, but more from habit, especially when I surface from one of those dreams. I want to be as busy as possible to distract my mind.

Not that it ever works.

I crept to the shop this morning when the sky was still an ambiguous shade of blue gray. I’ve been working on a new piece for the past few hours. Half man, half bull. I have several pieces of alabaster I considered, but the marble called to me.

I’ve been working for hours, and slowly, without my noticing, the sun has heated the place up. I’ll have an hour or two in here while it’s bearable, but then I’ll have to get out or suffocate.

My neck often cramps when I work, as though my body hasn’t quite adjusted to the one sided battle that I force it to perform. I only have proper use of my left hand, arm, and shoulder, but I’ve been forcing that side of my body to work twice as hard for a while now.

I lift my hand to my neck and try to ease the painful cramp that’s seized there. I tilt my head, rubbing hard with my calloused fingers against muscles that feel like they’ve also turned to stone.

I stand and start to pace. The dome is emptier than it’s been in years. It’s unnerving, now that so many of the sculptures are gone.

Without their carved faces, my world is even emptier.

I pace for a few minutes before I realize that I’m doing my physical therapy exercises with my right hand and arm. I’ve had so much practice over the past year and a half that it’s second nature.

My eyes steal from the worn section of the workbench with my tools spread out, over to the far right side of the shop, over to the place where I nearly died.

I spent hours rocking back and forth, wedging a hole under the stone that toppled onto me, shimmying and bleeding out into the dirt, until I could drag myself back to the workbench for my phone.

I’m still thinking about the day I almost died, when I hear it. The crunch of gravel in my driveway before the truck door even bangs shut.

In the past, that hollow bang, metal on metal of a seventy-eight Ford pickup, used to bring me such unspeakable joy. Happiness, wild and untamable, because I never imaged that someone as pure and beautiful as Bronte could be mine .

My pulse picks up, enough adrenaline dumping through my veins that I’m able to wrench on my zip up and draw the hoodie in record time, ignoring the way the bones in my right shoulder grind together, and the fire that feels like tissues torn apart in my lower arm.

I have my bad side angled to the wall before the shop’s beat up metal door pushes in.

It’s so fitting that Bronte is ushered in by a beam of sunlight.

My heart slams against my ribs and rush of emotion clogs my throat—most of it anger. None of it at her, all of it directed to the unfair fucking universe.

I’ve never been someone who’s wanted to put my fist through a wall or break something. The last thing I ever wanted to become was my father, or one of my uncles. It’s engrained in my nature to run, to make myself invisible, as small as possible.

I can’t run now. There’s nowhere to hide. I hate this trapped, cornered sensation that closed over my head like a muddy bog, sucking me down into the black.

“Hey!” Bronte’s bow lips arch into a wide smile that I’ve done nothing to deserve.

She shuts the door, cutting off the wind.

But the sunlight is still here. It’s trapped inside of her, glowing on her skin, shining from her soft caramel eyes.

Her voice is the music my soul has been yearning for.

“You’re here.” She registers the empty space a second later, her smile falling away.

“Whoa,” she breathes, doing a quick onceover of the workshop. “Where are all the sculptures?”

In the past, I’ve made arrangements with her to be here for pickups. Most customers purchase online, but their couriers or delivery people have to come here. Bronte makes sure that part of my job goes smoothly. Even before the accident, I shut out as much of the world as possible.

After tracing the near empty area where I cluster all the finished works, her eyes land back on me. There are windows punched haphazardly all around the shop. They let in more than enough light for me to work and they highlight the way Bronte’s face softens as soon as her gaze settles on me again.

She’s so in love with me, and as it always does, it chips away at my insides. I’m a block of stone, but not one that can be carved. I’m the one that goes wrong, that keeps breaking, pieces chipping off like shale, falling away and away and away, until there’s nothing left.

“It’s weirdly sweltering out there. I have other groceries in the car. Can I take them up to the house for you?”

The house is basically nothing more than a shack.

I never allowed Bronte to go in there until after my dad was dead and my uncles had vacated their single wide trailers and moved on.

As bad as he was at fathering, my dad was the glue that held my so-called family together.

After he was gone, my uncles wanted nothing to do with this place.

I cleaned it out after, taking all the trash to rot in the garbage pile out back. I would have preferred to burn the thing down, and even had plans on doing it, but then… the accident… and it wasn’t like I was going to be doing any building anytime soon.

I promised to give Bronte her dream house, put together with my own two hands.

It’s just another oath I broke.

“Yeah.” I duck my face like she’s not used to seeing the fucking mess of it. “I’ll help you.”

To her credit, she’s never made me feel less than .

She’s taken the attitude that I can do whatever I want.

If I can carve one-handed, then I can certainly carry boxes and bags of food.

She hasn’t coddled me one bit. She’s never cried in front of me.

She didn’t lose it the first time I shoved the wreckage of my face into hers, called myself a monster, and said that it didn’t need explaining as to why we couldn’t be together anymore.

The next day she brought a bunch of information on facial reconstruction surgery that she’d printed out. Doctors and clinics in Seattle.

She grasped my arms and tilted my face, so I had to look at her and told me that having my jaw broken, my cheekbone and part of my temple crushed, and my ear fucked up mattered to her because my pain was her pain, but she’d never stop loving me. Not even when I stopped loving myself.

I told her to leave me the fuck alone.

She’s refused, coming every week to drop off groceries, even when I don’t call her about anything related to my work.

We leave the shop together.

Like the rest of the world, the sunlight loves Bronte.

It paints her in gold from her ash blonde hair down to the sturdy leather work boots on her feet.

Her freckles stand out in the daylight. They’re dusted all over her face, including her chin and her forehead, never clustered, all in random patterns.

I tried counting them once. Tried kissing every single one.

Her oversized sundress rustles gently in the breeze, highlighting her tall, trim figure.

She could be at home in California on the beach, but she also looks every inch the small town farm girl that she is.

I nearly miss my next step, I’m so busy watching her walk. She turns it into an artform, her hips swaying naturally with every step.

Uncharacteristically, it hasn’t rained in days, and her old pickup is coated in a layer of dust from the twenty-five minute drive from her family farm to my place.

She swings open the passenger door and grabs out a few cloth bags. She passes them to me and then gives me a small box. It doesn’t matter that I only have one good hand. I can easily shove it through the handles of the heavy bags and balance the box against my chest.

Even before carving, I was strong. I had to learn to look after myself, my mom left when I was five and it was just me and him. And my uncles.

It kills me to be an asshole, but I start walking towards the house ahead of Bronte. I force myself not to look over my shoulder to see if she needs help with the rest of what she brought.

People always expected that I’d be an uneducated, cussing redneck, good for nothing big old stupid son of a bitch just from the looks of me. That, and most of the people around here know my family history. I wanted to prove them wrong. Forget uphill, it was a straight vertical battle.

Is it fucked up that having half my face crushed freed me from caring what those people think? Some days, I want to use it like a tool. An ugly carving of rage, frustration, and misfortune.

A cruel tale as old as fucking time. Life likes to entrench people like me into a rut. No matter how hard we try, we’re not going to climb out of it. I tried. I tried so hard, for so long, but in the end, I got shoved right back down to the bottom again. This is what caring gets you.