Page 132 of Caution to the Wind
He made a noise like a grunt, and his usual lack of eloquence made me smile despite the hard conversation. That was his magic, after all, making everything better.
“It wasn’t the reason,” I added, just in case he might’ve agreed with Florent’s fucked-up rationale even though he hated him. He was like that, Axe-Man. Always willing to self-flagellate. “I’m smart, so there’s that. But also, I didn’t have any friends so nothing distracted me from schoolwork.”
“Why didn’t you try to make friends…date, try on the normal young adult schtick for a while.”
The words stuck in my throat, but I forced them onto my tongue because Axe-Man deserved the truth, and it felt better than I’d thought it would to purge all the dust and gunk of my history. “Honestly, I didn’t even think about it. What happened to you, how I left you like that in the field, how I missed Mum’s passing, how Florent…betrayed me. It was all just too much. I didn’t trust myself, and I didn’t trust anyone else. And…” I sucked in a deep breath for courage. “Even after years passed, you and Cleo were still so elemental to me that it felt impossible that anyone could know me without knowing you. My love for you has always been the cipher needed to decode me.”
“You were never really in love with me, Mei,” he said, scrubbing a hand over his face. “You’d just had so little real affection ’til you met Kate, Cleo, and me that you thought we were better than we really were. Really are,” he corrected.
“I lived eight years without that affection and I still think you’re the best.” Admitting that was so vulnerable, like laying down willingly on an autopsy slab and cutting open my own chest.Here, I wanted to say,look at the way my loneliness has corroded my internal organs.
His heavy sigh stirred the hair over my shoulder, tickling my ear. I wasn’t sure what he would do with my confession, but the fact that he hadn’t recoiled with me seemed positive.
After a long moment, he asked, almost reluctantly, “What did you study?”
I smiled into the dark. “Not medicine.”
I waited for him to ask for more. What was my major? What kind of career had I made for myself? But it seemed Axe-Man had reached the end of his patience with himself and was finding a way to tap back into his resentment of me.
When he spoke next, his voice was deeper, clipped. “Well, it’s no wonder you made the mistakes you did with Florent for a fuckin’ father.”
I flinched, but he caught me in it, stilling me with his rough hands cupping my shoulders. It was like he wanted me to absorb the full blow of his words. The absolute insult of being anything like my father.
I shivered, but stilled. How funny that I’d always considered myself a rebel, yet I obeyed Axe-Man without thought, even to my own detriment. It went beyond atonement for my sins to something deeper that lived in my blood and bones, in the hardwiring of my circuitry. I’d rarely obeyed anyone my whole life, even when it was prudent, but Ilikedlistening to Axe-Man. And I realized it was because he was one of the only people in my life not to give me a reason to distrust him. Even in his hatred, I knew he would never hurt me.
“Did you really think I’d just…disappear on you?” I found the courage to ask because even though his dark mood spilled through the room, he was still sitting there behind me, holding me in an approximation of a hug from behind.
Another bear-like huff. He rolled the tension from his shoulders, letting his hot palms slide down my arms to rest on my thighs. Each palm was nearly the width of the meatiest part of my leg, and I worked out. It always made my mouth dry to see the size difference between us. To know, now tangibly, how easy it would be for him to bend and shape me into position for his pleasure. It didn’t help that I was naked, and he still wore his tee and boxer briefs.
“Not at first,” he admitted. “But one month into two, then three, then six and a year had passed. On the outside, maybe it wouldn’t’ve been so bad. Maybe if I’d been at home with Cleo on Cleary Street when you’d vanished, I would’ve understood… Nah.” He shook his head hard, hair flying, then laying with mine against my shoulders. I wished it was light enough to see the gold and black shine together. “I would’ve gone lookin’ for you. Fuckin’ what-ifs’ve always driven me mad. Doesn’t matter now. Back then, imprisoned and betrayed by my brothers in the club, I was fertile ground for believin’ the worst in people.”
My head dipped between my shoulders as I imagined him in that place. He would’ve been too big for the regulation bed, feet hanging off the end, and he already had trouble sleeping under the best of circumstances. Separated from Lin and Cleo, his women who were his life’s purpose. Suffering the consequences of betrayal from The Fallen, but also, however unintentionally, from me.
He would’ve waited for me every visiting hour. Looked for me in every letter received. Been alarmed and worried at first, then increasingly hurt until it tipped the scale into the kind of hatred I could still feel even now beating at my back.
“I’m so sorry, Henning,” I whispered into the bracket between my kneecaps, like hands cupped around a mouth whispering a secret. “I don’t think you’ll ever be able to know how sorry I am. How much the things I’ve done have haunted me and haunt me still.”
“I know a lot about hauntin’,” he muttered, moving away to lean back against the headboard. For a second, I was aggrieved, thinking he was pulling away from me, back behind his iron shield. But then he reached for me, by the hips, fingertips in my belly to pull me back against him. My relief was so acute that for one embarrassing moment, I thought I might actuallycry.
His rings caught the moonlight and glimmered like the flashing silver bellies of fish in a dark stream as he curled them over my thighs again. “He came to visit me.”
“Florent?!”
“Mm. I realize now, he came to gloat. Reminded me that he’d warned me what would happen if I got you into trouble again after Kate died. That he wouldn’t be so forgivin’. He was the reason I didn’t get bail. Guess the CEO of Barrington Grouse Oil’s got some contacts in high places.”
“Fuck,” I hissed, curling my nails into my palms until they broke the skin. “What a fuckingasshole. God, I wish I had properly gouged his eyes out.”
Axe-Man’s bark of laughter surprised me so much I jumped a little. He just curled me closer, burying his face in my hair to laugh against my neck.
It felt even better than the orgasms he’d given me.
“Fuck, I forget how fuckin’ bloodthirsty you can be,” he said, his voice still warm with humour. “You’re a dragon, all right. Teeth and fuckin’ claws.”
“I’m no dragon,” I whispered because it felt wrong to make light of something I’d wanted, a symbol I’d revered for my entire life.
It was the only design Axe-Man drew in my sketchbook that I didn’t have on my body because I didn’t think I’d earned it yet.
“Well, you sure as fuck got your teeth and claws in me,” he muttered, and I knew he was referring to the bite mark on his chest and the scratch marks I’d cut into his shoulders.