Chapter 2
2
Karma
Grief comes at you from all angles. From the memories that flood in when you’re all alone, to waking up thinking you’ll reach out and touch the person, believing it so hard it’s like a blow to the stomach when you realize the truth of the matter. And from doing the everyday things you used to do together. Those cases stop me dead in my tracks, unable to move until the pain passes, leaving me cold inside. Until the next time grief hits me.
There’s not much in my life that Reaper hadn’t touched. Fifteen years is a long time to spend with a person. It’s a lifetime. More than some people get. Knowing that hasn’t been much comfort to me. I would do anything, give anything, to get fifteen more years with him.
There’s also the insidious ways. The things you don’t expect. Like smelling his scent on an old piece of clothing and seeing him there before you, real as life, but nothing more than a ghost.
We got the monsters that took him from us. Tracked them down to their lair and set it ablaze while they slept. A no-name MC full of no-name members all under the age of thirty. The age of stupid. Thinking just because they got their hands on some machine guns, they should use them to steal. And kill. They’ll never get to see thirty and we’ll never get to see Reaper again.
Most days I still don’t fully believe that.
Such a sorry end for such a great guy. He was larger than life and he made our small band of outlaws a family. Those are the kinds of things we’ve been telling each other as we scattered his ashes all over the country in all the places he loved the most—from the Gulf of Mexico to the harsh mountains of the north.
What Grim and I don’t talk about is that Reaper was the glue that held the two of us together. I always suspected and now I know. Grim, Reaper and Karma. We were quite the trio. Now the one that made us make sense is just dust. Less than that, because all his ashes are scattered.
We still try to share a bed, but it’s so empty without Reaper. We still try to love each other, but all our conversations always end with Reaper. Tonight will be no different.
That’s why I’m just sitting in an old, pockmarked armchair in the parking lot of yet another outlaw biker, hooker and drug addict friendly motel/bar. The party inside the bar is getting louder, spilling into the parking lot where I watched the sunset and then the moonrise, trying not to think. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately—trying not to think. It hasn’t worked. Even though thinking never gets me anywhere good. It just makes my mind turn blacker than it already is. More putrid. More hopeless—if I had any hope left to give.
The armchair I’m sitting in smells like someone died in it. The room we rented for the night will be the same.
I’ve been on the run for so long I don’t remember the last time I slept in a clean room, on clean sheets, with a shower that hot water came out or a tub that wasn’t brown and black with old blood and rot.
I can look out as far as the end of my life and all I see is more of the same.
All of us Forsaken Outlaws have been on the run from the law for so long, I’ve forgotten what normal life might look like. Clean rooms in clean houses that you can call home.
Home.
A word I don’t know anymore.
Home was Reaper. Home was Grim. Home was the three of us together. Home was our other brothers and sisters. Home was the open road and the freedom it gave.
But freedom isn’t something you can ever hold. It’s just something you chase. I’m beyond tired of chasing it.
“Fucking metaphorical crap,” I curse at myself, finish my bottle of beer and toss it into a pile of garbage at my feet. The stench that rises from it as I do is something I don’t want to know.
Like so many other things.
I get up and walk to the bar. Time to find Grim and once again try and get back at least a little piece of the good that used to be. Thinking is overrated. Sitting still and silent is death. Swimming like a shark, never stopping, that’s where it’s at.
As the noise suggested, the party is going strong. This bar really has it all. From a couple of stripper poles on a low stage, to pool tables, darts, and a counter wide and long enough for doing shots off people.
When I came to life after Grim and Reaper saved me, I loved places like this. Loved the raw energy, the wildness, the unbridled celebration of just being alive and doing whatever the hell you want to do. Now I just want quiet and falling asleep in my men’s arms. Well, man’s… because one’s all I have left.
My brothers and sisters don’t seem to have the same idea tonight. Psycho is dancing with a mostly naked stripper like his life depends on it, Poison and Ivy are going at it on a table in one of the darker corners of the vast space and Toxic has a perky blonde who looks much too healthy to be in a place like this in his lap.
And Grim… he’s got his hands full too. And his mouth too. Sucking face with a guy that looks young enough to be his son, while a dazed and confused looking redhead caresses them both, one of her boobs hanging out from her dirty dress.
I stride right up to them, my thoughts black, my heart blacker. I wish I saw red, I wish my blood burned. But it’s all just ash.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I say loud enough to be heard over the thumping of the heavy metal song playing.
Grim’s eyes are like the sea. They change color with his mood. Right now, they’re black.
“What? I’m just having some fun,” he says.
I push past the redhead and pull the guy off his lap. He falls to the ground because he’s weak and they both hiss at me, but they’ve already decided not to fight me. I can see that clearly in their fuzzy, strung-out eyes. Grim is strung out too. But not badly enough to cloud his eyes. He knows what he’s doing.
“We need to talk,” I say to Grim. “Outside.”
He groans, but I turn and walk out, because I need to get away from the noise of the song that’s making my head spin, away from the smell of sex and death in the air that’s turning my stomach, away from the rotting wildness that might’ve just driven the final nail in the coffin of what was, of what might’ve been, of the love that used to be my home, my safety, my anchor. The love that’s now less than ash in the wind.
I’m afraid he won’t follow, but he does, all the way into the shadows beside the building where the noise isn’t so very loud that I can’t feel my heart beat.
My heart’s racing and my eyes are burning. Almost as bad as the tattoos on my arms. This is another ending. I can feel it. And I don’t want to know. I don’t want to talk. I just want what was.
I grab the lapels of his riding jacket, surprised to see my hands shaking.
“What’s happening to us, Grim?” I ask, my voice shaking too.
He’s a big guy, with muscles that radiate power and energy. His slanting eyes are sometimes as clear and blue as the summer sky and his bristly black hair makes him look like a wolf. Free and dangerous. Strong and wild.
But now his usually piercingly blue eyes are flat and black, and his hands are like two vises as they close on my wrists.
“Nothing’s happening,” he says. “It’s already happened. There’s no way back. And I’ll be damned if I spend another night pining over what was. It makes me sick.”
My eyes burn worse than ever. I don’t want to pine either, I don’t want to regret, I don’t want to wish for things that can never be again.
“But I still love you,” I say. “So much.”
I try to melt into him, but his strong hands on my wrists are holding me away. I regret going soft now. But I could always be vulnerable with him, because I knew he’d always protect me.
Now his eyes are just two black stones.
“I love you too, Karma. I love you more than life,” he says. “But it’s not enough. You’re hurting and I’m hurting you, and together we’re just hurting worse. It’s gotta stop. I’m leaving first thing.”
His words hit me like fist-sized balls of jagged hail. He can be so mean when he’s drunk.
“What are you saying?” I ask, my voice catching in my throat and so weak I hardly recognize it. Where’s my anger? Where’s the strength that I fought so hard to find?
“I’m saying it’s not working anymore,” he says. “I’m saying I need my freedom. I need to be a lone wolf now.”
“What about me, huh?” I ask. “What about me?”
He finally releases my wrists and pulls me into a tight embrace, the kind that only he can give, the kind that fills my belly with fire and makes the world stop spinning so very fast. He smells so good, like wood and fine liquor, like the clean sheets I yearn for and the wild zest of our love as we mess them up.
I lean my head back for a kiss that would make all those things even better. But he just gives me a peck on the forehead and holds me tighter.
“You’re a strong woman, Karma,” he says. “You’ll survive.”
The way he says it makes me think he doesn’t know if he will. And here we are again. At the end of another heart-breaking conversation.
He lets me go so completely it feels like he never held me at all.
“You can’t be serious, Grim,” I snap, somehow finding the strength he accused me of having.
“I am,” he says. “I can’t lose you too.”
His eyes are blue like the clearest skies again. For the first time in months, he doesn’t look older than he is. He looks young again.
“What kind of bullshit is that?” I ask. “You don’t want to lose me so you’re breaking up with me?”
He shrugs. “It’s better this way. Easier. Time to be hard again. It’s the only way to survive.”
Then he gives me a long look, his gaze caressing me from my lips to my boots, making me feel like that first time he showed me just how fiercely he loves me. But all that’s in the past now, frozen in a time that is no more. It might as well be a million years ago.
My mind is rushing and buzzing with all the things I want to say, to scream, to beg for. It all boils down to one little word. “Stay.”
Too small a word to have an impact.
He shakes his head. “We gave it a good try. But it’s over.”
He gives me one last look then walks back into the noisy, putrid bar.
I want to run after him and beat him until he sees reason again. I want to curl up on this dirty ground and cry myself to sleep. I want to scream until my throat bleeds. I want to turn back time and do it all over again. Do it better.
He can’t be serious.
But I know he is.
I lost both my lovers under that bridge, by that cold black river. I’ve known it ever since. I just haven’t admitted it to myself. And no amount of raging, crying, or wishing will change that. No amount of talking or begging will either.
So I just walk to my bike. All my stuff’s still on it because I knew we wouldn’t be staying here long. I just didn’t know I’d be leaving behind the most precious thing left in my life when I rode away.
But that’s what happened.