“She’ll survive,” my uncle answered. “She’ll bounce back when you’re gone, and we’ll all be here for her. She won’t be alone.”
“I never meant to hurt her like this,” Ham sounded like he was broken, but it was nothing compared to what I was feeling at that moment. I could feel myself falling to pieces on the ground, the earth-shattering around me and swallowing me whole.
I wanted to scream at him, to tell him he didn’t have to leave, he didn’t have to hurt me.
What the hell had I done wrong?
And why the hell was Uncle Leo just sitting there listening to him go on about walking away.\ saying that it was okay.
Was he really that eager not to have me as part of the club?
I knew things had been a little crazy. I’d gotten hurt, but surely he saw what these people meant to me. Surely, he knew what I’d finally realized—that this was my place.
At first, I was scared, I didn’t know if I was strong enough, but now I realized that it didn’t matter. Because walking away would hurt so much more than staying and fighting it out, pulling on my big girl panties and standing by the man who I loved and who I thought loved me.
“Come on,” Uncle Leo urged, and suddenly my body was alight as I heard them moving toward the door. “Get some food, take a deep breath.”
I scampered around the corner of the hall as they exited the double doors, my body sinking to the floor.
“I’m just gonna go upstairs,” Ham said as they stepped out of the meeting room. “I’ve got something that I want to do first. Can you stop Meyah if she comes in? I won’t be long.”
I sat on the floor of the hallway that led down to Optimus’ office and the doorway to the garage.
The ache in my chest was raw and very real.
Ham hadn’t been a part of my life for long, but he’d become important to me.
More than important.
Essential.
I’d been invisible for as long as I could remember. All through elementary and junior high I had very few friends. I was reserved and ridiculously shy, but also very smart and far ahead of normal kids my age. It turned out those two things were probably a horrible mixture because in turn, it meant I spent a lot of time alone overthinking and analyzing things. I questioned why we didn’t have as much family as other people, and why neither mine nor Denver’s dad had stuck around to help raise us.
Nick was the first guy to really take any notice of me, and after the shit hit the fan, I found out why. He saw me as an easy target. The quiet girl who dreams of fairy tales where the popular guy from the football team chose her to be his girlfriend. He caught me, hook, line and sinker, and I fell for everything he said. I was your typical teenager with daddy issues. The moment a guy paid me the attention I craved, I folded—a complete fucking cliché.
I gave him exactly what he wanted even when I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted it myself, and then he moved on to the next gullible sucker.
It hurt. I’m not embarrassed to admit that what Nick did, and the lies which followed, they made my senior year—what should be one of the most amazing and exciting years of my life—hell.
Nick and his bullshit rumors, they had crushed me.
But they also bought me Ham.
The relief I felt when Hadley pulled over that day to rescue me from Nick and his goons, I can’t even begin to try and measure. That day was one of the worst and one of the best days of my life.
Uncle Leo never brought his brothers around to the house. It had been a long time since I’d seen any of them other than a passing glance as they rode through town or maybe from the car when Mom would pick up Macy.
Then suddenly Ham was there, threatening Nick and looking like he wouldn’t think twice about shooting Nick’s dick off and dusting off his hands like a job well done. He stood up for me. He scared off the bullies when they tormented me. He backed me when I wasn’t strong enough to back myself. Then when I started to hang out at the clubhouse, I could always feel his eyes on me, watching me and following my movements. We barely said a few words to each other, but he made me feel like I was important.
I couldn’t just sit here and let that melt away.
I needed to hear what he had to say.
Maybe it was all just something stupid.
I jumped up off the floor and took a deep breath. Ham told my uncle to stop me if I came in, so I was going to just have to breeze through like nothing had happened like I was just heading through like normal. As I breathed out, I made a run for it, ducking out of the hallway, my eyes focused on the stairs.
“Meyah?” I heard Uncle Leo call, but I ignored him, refusing to even look over at him and the group of people he was standing with, grabbing the banister and taking two stairs at a time up the staircase.