Page 45 of Caution to the Wind

“I don’t deserve the hero worship, but I can live with that if it’s what you need to believe. I cannot and will not live with this…whatever that just was,” he said, struggling to find the words and growing more frustrated because of it. “I’m old enough to be your fuckin’ dad!”

“Hardly,” I scoffed. “Sixteen years isn’t that much.”

“Mei,” he said in a muted roar, finally touching me again but only to shake me by the shoulders once more. “There are more than just years between us. I’ve lived an entire lifetime compared to you. Been to fuckin’ war, killed men, and watched them die. Came home, married a woman, and adopted a daughter. You’re just a teenager graduatin’ high school, and you’re my daughter’s best friend. This will not happen.”

“Don’t reduce me to the years I’ve lived. I’ve watched a woman I love be murdered and die. I’m watching my own mother suffer and fucking wither away every single day,” I said, chin tilted, eyes burning in my skull. “You don’t have to return or even like my feelings for you, but I will not be ashamed of the way I feel. You’re my white knight, and it doesn’t matter if you’re too old or too outlaw or too whatever else you want to throw at me. I know in my bones that I’ll always feel this way about you. You see me, Henning, even when I feel invisible, even when I want desperately to remain unseen. That might not mean anything to you, but it means everything to me.”

He stared at me, vibrating faintly, eyes almost panicked with anger and confusion as they scoured over my face. “Don’t romanticize me. I’m a fuckin’ outlaw biker, for fuck’s sake, Mei.”

“An off-white knight, then,” I agreed, but my chin canted even higher in the air so I could look down my nose at him as I reiterated. “But stillmyoff-white knight.”

I stepped away from him, his hands falling off my shoulders to hang limp at his sides. I backed away to the gym, searching for the knob blindly behind me and then clinging to it like a life raft.

“My love for you isn’t conditional on you loving me back,” I told him even though my heart hurt, my head hurt, my very soul hurt. “So this won’t ruin anything between us unless you want it to. I hope you don’t. I know I’ll never be yours that way, but having you in my life is better than nothing. I…I don’t have many people I love, and I’ve already lost too many.”

He blinked at me, breathing hard, staring like I’d grown snakes from my head and transfixed him with my gaze.

I left him like that, opening the door and sliding into the locker room without another word. And when I went back to the dance I felt more alone than I ever had before.

HENNING

Usually,a ride through the night streets of Calgary on my bike calmed me. In the days followin’ Kate’s murder, I’d ride through the empty city for ages in the small hours of the night while Lin stayed at home with Cleo after she fell asleep. There’d always been somethin’ restless and yearnin’ in my soul that was only soothed by the vibration of the powerful metal beast beneath me and the growl of Harley pipes in my ears.

It did nothin’ to still the calamity of emotions wreakin’ havoc inside me that night.

The stoplights reminded me of Mei’s vibrant red dress and painted mouth, such a strikin’ difference to her usual black. The starless sky an acute reminder of the inkiness of her silken hair spillin’ around her shoulders, brushin’ my cheek as she’d kissed me.

Fuckin’ kissed me.

What the hell had she been thinkin’?

We were family, in a way, and I was sixteen years older than her. The idea of a romantic relationship with my best friend’s daughter was wrong and utterly fuckin’ impossible.

Only…

Only…

Alone on the back of my bike with my thoughts, I could reluctantly admit to myself that I understood why she might have developed feelings for me.

She was right.

We got each other.

Mei wasn’t just a touchstone and guardian to Cleo but also to me. The late nights when we both hadn’t been able to sleep, sketchin’ silently together in the kitchen or shootin’ the shit while we drank Longjing tea on the back porch lookin’ up at the stars. The iron bond we’d forged in the trauma of Kate’s death had been re-enforced over the last five years of shared memories and a growin’ understandin’ of each other as individuals separate from the parameters of our socially accepted roles.

Mei was more than my daughter’s best friend, and she had been for a long time.

That didn’t mean it was okay for her to kiss me or that I wanted her to do it again. Whatever she thought about her experiences and maturity, she was a kid to me, the same age as my daughter. She was so off-limits, my brain couldn’t even fuckin’ compute an alternate reality where she and I would betogether.

But I couldn’t deny the tangible connection between us. The fact that this girl had become as important to me as Lin, Kate, and Cleo, yet she had no definable role in my life.

If it was confusin’ for me, it had to be complicated as hell for her.

So, I could forgive her the kiss even though I knew it would haunt me. I could forgive her for thinkin’ she wasinlove with me ’cause the love we shared was so difficult to put in a properly labelled box.

Still, nothin’ would come from it.

Mei and Cleo would go off to college together and experience all the newness and wonder of a new settin’ with new boys to fall for and break hearts over. Mei would forget her feelings for me ’cause, let’s be fuckin’ honest, I was the least acceptable object for her affection, and she’d realize it as soon as other men came into the picture.