CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Sean
It’s always fucking Eric Clapton. After a hundred and thirteen days out here, you’d think this motherfucker would listen to something else, anything else.
But he never does, and I’m at the point where I’d rather listen to the incessant grunts of my newest bunkmate fucking his hand beside me at night than listen to my Staff Sergeant’s continuous Clapton tracks.
As we drive through the desert on the outskirts of Kandahar, I glance at Private First Class “Buck” Buckman, beside me.
Fucker’s gone to the dark side, tapping his first two fingers on his knee and humming along to the opening strings of “Cocaine” as my Staff Sergeant, Keenan, sings the words out loud and off key from the front passenger seat. He spits some chew out the window so he can really get the lyrics out.
Telling my Staff Sergeant to shut the fuck up wouldn’t lead to a very good start to my day, so instead of doing that I just keep my mouth shut and look out at the same beige landscape I’ve been looking at for months.
A mirage in the never-ending stretch of sand happens every four seconds at this speed.
I count them as we drive. The closest we’ve gotten to anything green was when we were stationed outside Herat for a few weeks, but it’s June now and that was April.
I glance ahead, seeing the city in the distance through the glimmer of another mirage. The sun reflects off every building and you can almost see the steam rising from them, like we’re about to enter hell itself.
It was a short ride in from our base to carry out this non-combat evac operation.
We’re 11th Marine Expeditionary, Special Ops.
We’re capable of handling anything, but today it’s our job to meet six embassy staff brought in from another city and offer them an escort to a deemed safe site. Standard procedure.
Standard Tuesday in the hottest fucking place on earth. Like I said—hell.
“Deep dish Chicago,” Buck calls over the music and the road. I cuff him upside the back of the head as my stomach growls just thinking about real food.
“Pussy,” Wolfe, my lifelong brother, says from the driver’s seat.
We all chuckle. On the list of things we miss, eating pussy is probably number one.
“Oh yeah, what I wouldn’t give for a big old plate of pussy right now,” Buck says, turning to face Wolfe.
“With a side of soft skin and cherry red lips,” Keenan says from the front seat. “Fuck, I love a woman with red lips.”
I stay in a sort of trance … one, two, three, four … listening to their chatter for the next few minutes. There’s no sense in chiming in.
Wanting something out here is both pointless and useless.
Because out here we have nothing, we are nothing, and longing for the luxuries of home doesn’t help the days go any faster.
Dust spews from our heavy tires to make a near constant cloud around us as the opening strings to the next song begins.
“Layla.” For the millionth time this tour.
We don’t even make it to the first verse before a deafening, vicious blast rocks our Humvee.
It takes me a second to realize we’ve been hit, and by the time the realization settles in my head, we’re already airborne.
“Is this what you need me to tow?” A heavy voice cuts into my flashback the next afternoon.
The past feels even more prominent now, and I blink to get my bearings then glance toward Layla’s open garage.
Sometimes the memory is so vivid, so present, that I can almost feel the pain, smell the desert and the diesel fuel.
“Yeah.” I point to the Lincoln SUV waiting in her garage for a tow. “Thanks for taking it right in, Mikey. I’m pretty sure her alternator is shot, and the battery.”
He nods. “We’ll take a good look at it.”
I gesture to my bike. “I’ll follow you over.”
“I need you to have a look at the body for me,” I say, turning to Wolfe.
He owns the custom body shop next door to our mechanic Mike, and now that it’s been towed, Layla’s SUV is sitting in the lot between Wolfe’s garage and Mike’s.
I tell him all the places I noticed rust, remembering them all from when I first looked it over in her garage.
Wolfe eyes up the Lincoln. Simply repainting isn’t really his forte. He designs and creates really kickass customs for some pretty high-end clients. He’s an artist when it comes to this shit.
“Yeah, I can slide it in.” Wolfe scrubs his jaw and examines the rust along the bottom of the SUV, then clears his throat, pulling his gloves off and stuffing them into his overalls. “It won’t take much to fix, and we’ll clay-bar the underside when we’re done to give her a couple more years.”
“Thanks, brother.” I pat his chest, offering him no explanation to the question I know he’s got running through his head.
But he scoffs. He isn’t letting it go. “Alright, I fuckin’ give in. The fuck is really going on with you? With this woman?” Wolfe stares at me. “I’ve known you a long fucking time. Are you having some sort of breakdown? You need anything?”
There’s no rational explanation yet as to what I’m doing here.
My need to look after Layla when she’s stubborn as fuck and doesn’t want to accept help easily is unexplainable, and the need to be near her is part of an equation I just can’t solve yet.
There has to be a logical answer, but right now I don’t have it.
I shake my head. “I think it’s the exact opposite of a breakdown,” I tell him, thinking of the way her eyes darken to a rich chocolate whenever I look deeply into them.
“Fuck off,” Wolfe says. “After a few days?”
I look him dead in the eye. “This woman—fuck, within the first few seconds.”
As I looked around her place this morning after she’d left for class, I realized two things: her back door is way too easy to get into, and there’s more to the story of her losing her parents than I initially dug up.
She doesn’t know who killed them, and the look of pain in her eyes when she talked about them triggered something in my brain.
Now finding their killer is like a dripping faucet in the back of my head I can’t ignore.
I need to know who did it. I need to know why and make it right for her.
With one phone call, I already have the hunt started.
I continued through her house alone, spending way too much time doing things I probably shouldn’t.
Cleaning, organizing, reorganizing. My obsession grew as I breathed in her perfume and looked at photos of her on the walls.
Her smile never truly reached her eyes in any of them.
While I worked, I tried to find any rational explanation as to why I can’t stop thinking about her, and the only conclusion I’ve come to is that a rational reason doesn’t exist. The feeling of peace that spread over me when Layla wrapped her arms around my waist on the back of my bike yesterday is a kind of calm I’ve only felt once before—when I was deep in the desert—and all I know is I need more.
Wolfe folds his heavy arms over his chest. He knows me better than anyone, so I get why he’d be skeptical. I’ve never seen Wolfe with a woman for any longer than it takes to fuck her and move on. I’ll admit that was my way before too, but now …
“I don’t get it.” He fixes me with a questioning stare.
“I dunno, man,” I offer, running my hand over my head. “All I know is this woman sets something off in me. It’s like I’m just acting on something before I even know what the fuck I’m doing.” I shrug. “I can’t explain it, yet. I’m working on it.”
“You vetted her good?” Wolfe looks me up and down, switching to club business. He’s good at not pressing any kind of emotion for too long. The club sits above all else, and he’ll want to be sure we know every little detail about her before I decide to make her mine.
“Of course,” I retort.
“So you’re gonna make her your ol’ lady? Be a one-woman man? For real?” he muses, his face breaking into a rare smile. “You sure you didn’t eat some of those shrooms Robby brought in?”
I shake my head. “Never been more sober,” is all I offer as I walk towards my bike.
“Chapel at eight tonight,” he reminds me. “Stop at Belgrave first—and fuck, keep your head in the game before the pussy,” he adds, mentioning the clinic where I’ll need to grab our weekly cut of profits on my way to the club.
“On it,” I call back. I straddle my bike and move to put my helmet on, suddenly remembering the way it felt to have Layla’s warm thighs pressed against me.
My mouth waters, just recalling the way she tasted.
If she was anyone else, I would’ve fucked her already and moved on, but the part of this puzzle that consumes me is that I need her to admit the truth to herself.
That she wants me in the same unexplainable way I want her. I want her to beg for me.
I don’t just want part of her body—I want every part, and I already know I won’t fucking stop until I get it. I clip my helmet and pull my bandana up, but before I fire up my bike I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket.
When I pull it out I see that it’s Frankie Steadman, our town’s deputy sheriff and friend of the club. I tug my bandana down.
“Been waitin’ for you,” I answer. “You better have some good news for me.”