In the car on the way home, driven by Skid, a kid I liked and who was looking to become a prospect for the Sons of Templar, Rosie and I had debriefed.
“So, she was cool, don’t we think?” Rosie decided.
She was only slurring slightly. A feat considering she’d had four cocktails and Laura Maye had made them, which made it more like eight regular people cocktails.
“Mia,” Rosie clarified.
I nodded once, the motion making my head spin. I’d had five cocktails.
I may or may not have been drinking my feelings. Chasing away the thoughts of a friend in the ground and one who wasn’t yet, but he wasn’t in this world either. And nurturing a hope that the totally insane—in the best way—beautiful single mother I’d been drinking with might be able to nurture a seed in ashes.
And then the thoughts of my own ashes came.
Of course, then chocolate eyes haunted my thoughts.
Like silence, alcohol was good for coaxing out thoughts that shouldn’t be thunk.
And getting you drunk. Hence me thinking a word like “thunk” and then rhyming it with another.
“Yeah,” I said quietly, drawing shapes on the condensation of the window. “She was.” I jerked myself up and decided that playing the tortured lovesick girl was so not my part. “Can you believe she was a mom? How old was she when she popped out that kid? Ten?” I asked.
The petite blonde named Mia did not look a day over twenty, nor did she look like she had a teenage daughter. Not only was she petite and didn’t betray any signs of having grown big with a child, she was also, like I mentioned, insane.
Not quite Rosie insane, but she would fit in with the rest of us.
No one mentioned Bull. This wasn’t our first rodeo. Or more likely, we did in passing, then watched the way her cheeks flushed with that movement. Rosie’s eyes darted to me at this small gesture, confirming her “little birds.”
We approved.
Now we could only hope that she had magical powers to bring the dead back to life. Because Bull may have been walking around and breathing, but he wasn’t living.
The silence returned. Ushering in thoughts that were banished when noise reigned. This wasn’t of Keltan, though. This was on the pretty woman Gwen and I had met while at the spa that afternoon. The beautiful single mother with great style, and a great sense of humor, so we’d naturally invited her to drink with us. And now the one who had caught the eye of the toughest and most troubled bikers in the club.
The one whose humanity was nothing more than shreds left behind when my friend left this world.
Was taken.
Brutally.
The scar was still raw. Still taunted me with the fact that it would never heal.
When you lost someone who was an integral part of your world, did that ever heal? The utter bitterness of the realization that you’d never laugh with them over drinks anymore? That you’d never see them smile with the man who filled her world? No, I didn’t think it did.
Now we were drinking with the woman who had the same golden hair as the one we’d buried years ago yet still walked the grass of our memories. Or mine, at least.
I knew there was no grass in Bull’s, only scorched earth that was little more than ash since Laurie was kidnapped, tortured, raped and then murdered for retaliation by a rival club.
Her crime? Love.
Just another causality.
But maybe he had another chance.
Could anything grow on scorched earth?
She was perfect.
Or unperfect. Because Bull didn’t need perfect; he needed someone to recognize the broken parts of him because she had broken parts too. That’s what everyone needed.
Apart from me, obviously. Because I fucked it all up.
But sometimes the stories weren’t about me. Even my own story. I was quite happy to use it to watch other people make their own.
The day before the party was the day that marked another year. Exactly. Four now. I didn’t have it in me to face any kind of battle like I did the year before.
No, I took the day off everything and spent it inside my cocoon of blackness, watching Audrey Hepburn movies and trying not to remember four years ago, when I’d been in a hospital waiting room with the rest of my family, watching the walking corpse of the man I considered a friend stumble through double doors and say, without speaking, that our friend was gone.
Of course I was more vulnerable than ever.
Of course the universe had to kick me when I was down.
In the form of an e-mail.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Running
Snow.
I know what today is. And like every single other day for the past year, you’re on my mind.
Wondering if you’re still running. Or if you’ve found someone else to make you stand still. If you’re wearing red dresses, scaring children in the morning and drinking martinis in the middle of a biker party.