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If he returned to me—fuck, I hope he’d return to me—I’d have to give him a horrible gift too. Something that I’d buried so deep inside of me that I’d have to rip the skin off my fingers in order to retrieve it. It was something I needed to purge.
The sound of a motorcycle jerked me out of my thoughts, and my pulse spiked from nerves and excitement. I all but ran to the front door. Well, tried to run. I could barely manage a brisk walk.
So he’d already made it in the front door by the time I reached the living room.
I stopped in my tracks.
He wasn’t covered in blood. That was a start.
But he was shimmering with a menacing energy that had my hair standing up on end.
He closed the door behind him, eyes bouncing around the room.
I held my breath as he walked toward me. I ached for him to cross the distance, to pull me into his arms. But he stopped short, putting a purposeful distance between us.
His gaze explored my entire body, it skimmed over every one of my visible injuries as pain contorted his face. He was torturing himself with the sight of me. But there seemed to be an edge of relief too. Like he was a man who had been holding his breath for a long time and could finally inhale and exhale comfortably.
Or at least, that’s how I felt. Like I’d only been halfway breathing this entire time without him. It was the longest we’d been apart since I woke up in the hospital.
We stood there staring at each other for a long time, the room darkening quickly. Candles I’d lit dimly illuminated the room, and the light from the kitchen helped further.
“I’m ready to be mad at you now,” I told him, my voice scratchy but understandable.
He stared at me and didn’t say anything.
My heart thrummed.
“It’s hard,” I whispered. “Because I can see the regret and turmoil on your face. I can feel it in the air. I can barely breathe through it.”
As if to prove it, I took a ragged breath, and it singed my lungs.
“It would be big of me to let it go, forget about it,” I continued. “I could pretend to forget about it, at least. It would make things much less complicated. Might make them hurt less too. But eventually, it will come out from somewhere. It will rot inside of me. Inside of us. And I can’t let that happen. I can’t bury my feelings for the temporary comfort of anyone. To temporarily protect anyone.” My eyes watered as I spoke. As I stared at the pain on Swiss’s face.
“So I’m mad at you,” I whispered. “I’m terribly mad at you. For turning so cold to me. For dropping me like I was dirt. For letting me leave with him. Not because he hurt me. I do not blame you for what he did to me. I know I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating because I see you’re still intent on carrying what’s not yours to carry.”
“You’re my woman,” Swiss growled. “And you got hurt. He almost beat you to death ’cause I let you walk away with him. It is mine to carry, Kate.”
I flinched at his voice. His words. The conviction in them.
“I showed you a specific part of me before all of this,” he continued. “I didn’t hide who I was. What the club was. But I wasn’t in a rush to peel back the curtain entirely. I was enjoying the honeymoon phase, I guess. I wanted to put my best foot forward.” He ran his hand over his head. “Fuck, I wanted to trap you. I wanted you to fall in love with me, to be too far gone by the time you saw the ugly parts of me. In too deep to leave. I’m not the good guy, Kate. I’m fucked-up. From the shit I’ve done. Shit that’s happened to me. It’s crippled me in ways that aren’t obvious until you get too close. Most people who see that side of me are not long for this world.”
Swiss’s face remained an expressionless mask. Whether deliberate, to intimidate me, or in order for him to get through telling me this, I wasn’t sure.
“When I feel hurt, betrayed, vulnerable, I turn into the person I am for the club,” he explained in a softer tone. “The killer. The man who doesn’t feel remorse for causing pain. For ending lives. For doing any number of fucked-up things. The man who likes that shit.” His eyes scrutinized me, waiting, inspecting, dissecting.
He was looking for disgust, I guessed. A sign that he was pushing me away.
I gave no such sign. Because I wasn’t disgusted with him. Wasn’t going anywhere. I tried to communicate that with my face, even if I was still mad at him.
“Not trying to escape the way I treated you,” he shook his head. “’Cause that shit is inexcusable. All I’m doing is making sure that you don’t take any of this on. That you don’t somehow warp my reaction into you not being good enough. Aren't worth fighting for. ’Cause you are. You’re too fucking good for me. And I knew it. Knew it since the moment I laid eyes on you. But I went after you anyway.”
The cicadas sang louder, yet not enough to drown out the quick thumping of my heart.
“I’ve been patched in the club for almost as long as you were married.”
I pursed my lips, or at least tried to, pain spearing through my mouth as I attempted the gesture. Though that pain was dulled by my fury toward Swiss. Instead of the lip pursing, I narrowed my eyes, but even that hurt.
“After I lost them, the club was what saved me,” he continued. “Turned me into someone completely fucking different, of course. Someone my family doesn’t recognize or understand.” He paused, staring out the doors to the fast-approaching twilight. “I see them once a year, maybe. Christmas. Or my mom’s birthday. Out of guilt more than anything else. I just make it harder for them, when they see what I’ve become.”
