Page 6

Whatever. It’s not important. What really matters is that I find the right thing to say to Kael. How ironic is it that I can locate just about anyone on this planet, but I’m at a loss to string together a few simple words?

I know why she hates me. She never got to say goodbye to her brother and I’m the one who brought her that grief.

I’ve uprooted her twice now. She wants to be rid of me and to get on with living and I keep turning up, dragging her back towards that blackness that she’s struggling so hard to avoid getting sucked in by.

I know she has nightmares and misses her brother.

I know she probably wishes it had been me and not him.

What I don’t know is how to help her get through just one more day.

This is her life now, whether she wants to live it or not.

The end of it is near. Maybe another year or two and she’ll be truly free.

How can I help her hang on until then when she’s so clearly unhappy?

With her crossed arms, twitching eyelid, and flatlined mouth and rage hissing off her like an overheated radiator, she looks like going straight to the kitchen and locating something sharp to plunge straight between my eyes is her current idea of a good time.

The thought of her trying to kill me, using all of her skill, strength, and training, pitting her wits and will against me, should not exacerbate my boner problem, but alas…

I’m starting to realize that I’m well and truly fucked.

Kael is no longer just an abstract in Marcus’ stories.

She’s not the sweet young woman navigating the world, going to college, the burgeoning artist. She’s not the sad, grieving woman who kept herself shuttered away, so brokenhearted and unaware that all that time, I was with her, even if it was from a distance.

There’s no distance now. Kael is very real, very obviously flesh and blood, and right in front of me.

“We need to talk.” Those are four shitty words that only a real dude-bro would say.

She rolls her eyes. “By talk you mean you saying things while I’m forced to listen and obey.”

“You don’t obey.”

I don’t know why my painstakingly organized world goes straight to shit the second Kael appears.

Hovering on the periphery, she’s fine, but the minute I get within a twenty foot radius, shit starts happening .

My brain, my control, and my senses all go haywire.

She probably gives off some kind of electrical impulses that screw my magnetic field seven ways to Sunday.

Her eyes narrow at the same time her body tenses up. She’d like to try me on, and I can practically see her trying to gauge whether being utterly humiliated is worth getting in a single shot.

“You know what? I’m done here. I’m done with you and this town and this shit!” She spins, stomping into the kitchen. From the doorway, it’s just a step up.

She wrenches open the fridge, grabs a pitcher of homemade lemonade with real lemon slices floating on top, and slams it down on the table so hard that the liquid leaps up and sloshes all over the place.

I grind my teeth. Not because she’s stubborn, petulant, annoying, and worse than having to dig an eight inch thorn out of your own butt hole, but because she doesn’t even move to clean up that mess.

She whips around with a glass in hand and bangs it down next to the pitcher, but doesn’t pour anything into it.

She’s too busy fisting her hands on her hips, jamming my t-shirt into her narrow waist, flexing one foot up and then the other to keep herself from pacing, all while giving me tremendous stink eye.

“I’m packing up and leaving. Don’t follow me.

Don’t interfere. I’m not a damsel in distress anymore.

I don’t need you to save me. My brother knew the woman I was before he died.

He doesn’t know me now. There’s not even a bit of me that resembles that person any longer, so your promise doesn’t hold. ”

“Sit down. I think you’ve got heatstroke.”

I swear that I came here with every intention of trying to make this situation better, not provoking Kael into a livid, nonsensical stage of anger, but her pupils literally dilate as she focuses on me.

Staring down a trained sniper, knowing you’re perfectly aligned in their sight would be less unnerving.

Anyone watching this from the damn window would get a kick out of how I automatically drop into a defensive crouch right by the door as Kael abandons all caution, loses her last fuck to give, and charges me.

I throw out a hand to keep her from getting close enough to me to do real damage, but also so that she doesn’t hurt herself as she tries to kick me in the balls and simultaneously punch me in the face.

She does land a stinging smack that glances off my cheekbone because she angles into my blind spot, and kicks me hard enough in shin while I’m trying to recalibrate, that I curse under my breath.

I have no choice but to grasp her shoulders, spin her, and pin her.

I try to be careful and not bruise her or scare her.

I’m much larger than she is and I’m terrified that I’ll hurt her.

Or that she’ll get too close to me and accidentally brush up against places that she shouldn’t.

Places that have no business noticing just how gorgeous she is when her cheeks are flushed, when she’s breathing like an enraged bear, and has the fire of a thousand stars that she’s gathered up and swallowed.

“Whoa. Stop. Calm down.”

What can I say? I was a soldier and a SEAL, not a damn therapist. Though maybe I should be doing some kind of training because saying the wrong thing when it comes to this woman seems to be my specialty.

She tries to rear forward and tear away from my hands pinning her to the wall, and since I’m not holding her tightly, she nearly succeeds. She’s an inch away from slamming her face into mine as she attempts to headbutt me.

I rocket back out of reach just in time to keep her from breaking her face.

She bars her teeth at me like a crazed animal.

Seeing her so distraught, so past control, tearing out of her skin and losing her mind like this, is like walking into teargas, stepping on a rusty bear trap, and falling into a spiked pit, but it’s not the physical parts of me getting torn up. It’s what’s left of my heart and soul.

What am I even doing? I passed some of the most rigorous training on this earth to become a SEAL and went into situations that most humans couldn’t even comprehend.

I never fully drowned.

Not until right now.

“You’re just going to have to make it work,” I bark, too fierce and rough because I’m coming undone on the inside.

I’m the one that needs to hold this together.

“I’m sorry.” Probably should have led with that.

“I didn’t do this just to hurt you. I swear it.

I know this is the last place you want to be and I’m the last person on earth you want to be here with.

I know that you think every single club is like Marcus’ and it’s triggering.

I know that this all messing with your head, but I swear to you that there are good people here.

People who want to know you and would welcome you and even come to love you if you gave them half a chance. ”

“What would you know about love?” She spits at me.

She’s right, and about more than just the few times my hide made for good target practice. Here I thought she was nothing like her brother, but Kael is just as perceptive as he was.

I’m not heartless, but I know nothing about any kind of love except brotherhood.

I remember being something close to happy in brief moments as a kid, and there was a certain contentment in my achievements, in jobs and training and belonging to something as an adult, but lately, I’ve known enough sorrow, regret, grief, and frustration to drown most of that shit out.

“Anyway.” Her lips twist into a sneer that still can’t manage to make anything about her delicate beauty look ugly. “They’re a bunch of people who will one day just get into war with a bunch of other people and get themselves all killed.”

“It’s not like that here.”

“No?” She can’t keep a flash of pain from storming into her eyes. Instead of hiding, she rolls with it, letting the thunder crash free, transforming the air between us into something electric. I’m still holding onto her.

I need to let her go.

I don’t.

The truth is, she needs someone to hold her, even if it’s me, and even if it’s because she wants to maim me.

I know how her grief has set in and taken hold of her.

Everything she does has been to beat it back, beat it down, just plain beat it.

She’s trying to find her way back to the person she was before her world imploded, but she keeps watching that memory get further and further away, like fighting a powerful current.

I’ve seen too much of death myself. I know grief, and I was still unprepared for the bulldozing I took when Marcus died.

I’m right there, swimming upstream with her, even if I’m supposed to be her life raft.

“You’re wearing your hair weird. Shaving off your beard won’t help you fit in here.”

Every time I move around, I change my appearance. That’s the smart thing to do. When we got here, I shaved part of my head on the one side, leaving it short and kept the other side long. I style it so that it falls over the scars on my forehead, obscuring the ones that are hardest to hide.

“I saw it in a barbershop, it looked cool.” I’ve never been afraid to admit the truth, and that takes Kael aback.

“What?”

“Some guy leaning on the hood of a muscle car, wearing a plaid shirt and tight fitting jeans. Looked like a fucking lumberjack, except I doubt he’d know one end of an axe from another.”

She blinks up at me like I’ve lost my mind and then she laughs. “It looks more emo or hipster than lumberjerk, and certainly not biker. I was going to tell you that if you were trying to fit in here, you’re failing. Horribly.”