Yet three weeks could change more than in fifty-two of them.
The change being me. And everything else around me. I hadn’t heard a word from him. Not a fucking peep. After a year. After being in a shooting with him. After staring death in the face. Not with the shooting, but that empty look in his eyes before he walked out the door.
Because I’d been going over that look in my mind for the past three weeks straight, I thought I figured out what it was. It was what I’d seen in the mirror ten years before, my hair matted, my face bruised and a thin spattering of blood on my temple.
Not my blood.
His.
Gray’s.
Ten Years Ago
We were in love. Love that no one else understood. How could they? Love was a secret one only shared between two people. The only thing that two people could ever understand.
My friends were just being friends by questioning the secret.
Ashley just being Ashley, speaking in soft tones, asking me whether I was sure about this. Giving Gray wary looks when he came to pick me up after school.
Laurie was just being Laurie by squeezing my hand with understanding and twinkling eyes, telling me real love, like what she felt with a certain rough biker—felt real and good and right, and I better make sure that’s what this was.
Rosie was just being Rosie when she spoke in not-so-soft tones, telling me he was “a fucking loser you need to dump immediately.”
He didn’t go to school. He’d graduated two years before and was a mechanic in Hope. We’d met when Rosie and I were cutting school because our favorite vintage store was having a flash sale.
He’d been in the diner where we’d been eating burgers. Rosie had gone to the bathroom, threatening me with “death and dismemberment” if I touched her fries. She was too much like her brother sometimes. Scarier, actually, because Rosie would actually do it. Cade had a thing about hurting women. Especially over fries. Rosie took her fries very seriously.
But then again, so did I. So I was munching on her fries when he came and sat at the booth.
He slipped in, coveralls tied at the waist, exposing his wifebeater which was clinging to some nice muscles. I’d been around the Sons of Templar men for too long because I didn’t blink at them. They were nice. Not as nice as Cade’s, for example, but not something to sneeze at either.
His biceps were the same. His sandy blond hair was worn maybe a little too long, but the messiness of it brushing on his broad shoulders coupled with his icy blue eyes made it work.
In a big way.
He grinned easily at me. Confidently. In a way that made my stomach dip. In a way a man looked at a woman. Not in the way the arrogant quarterback leered at me after I let him take my virginity despite him being awkward and somewhat like a jackrabbit.
“I had to come over here and make sure I didn’t miss a chance to talk to the most beautiful woman in this joint. And all the joints in this county,” he said with an easy voice, a little husky like he smoked a lot. “And I have to make sure that she comes to dinner with me.”
It wasn’t so much the words, which were slightly cheesy and sounded practiced. It was more than that. The way he had about him, the way he looked at me, like he was seeing only me.
And that’s how it started.
I fell hard and fast.
They didn’t know the secret. But that was okay.
The men in the club didn’t know. Because I was still in school and Gray was almost twenty. They would most likely beat him up. Cade might kill him. Steg definitely would. He’d already threatened my prom date with a weapon before.
Mom and Dad were less violent, but I knew this would not go down well with my easygoing parents.
It was that much more exciting anyway. The secret.
Well, I thought it was.
Until Gray started getting intent on knowing where I was at all times. Who I was with. Making comments about what I wore. Telling me I shouldn’t be hanging around at the club, like one of “the club sluts.”
And then I started changing. Listening to what he said and only doing and wearing things I knew he would approve of. I could see it, that I was turning into something else.
I knew it wasn’t good. I wasn’t dumb. But I was in love. And so was Gray. He just got intense sometimes. And he always apologized.
I knew he’d apologize now. But it didn’t mean it wasn’t scaring me slightly. The way he was pacing, and his eyes wouldn’t focus on one thing. I think he was doing some sort of drugs, because he was acting more erratic lately and never seemed to have money. I’d loaned him money from my job at the café in town. Twice.