9.
Bear
I followed closely behind Rocky’s truck—the same truck that I had seen parked in the clubhouse grounds for years. The one I had seen parked outside his house—a house I had been to. The same truck that had come to my house once or twice.
I followed the truck, now knowing that it was so much more than just a damn truck. Inside that truck was my past. Inside that truck was a future I had laid to rest. I had settled that debt and left it behind. Left her behind. I wasn’t a good man, and no one would ever say that I was, but when I had left Dahlia back in New York City I had done so with the best intentions. Back then, I had been a good man, and I’d had a good future planned for us.
She pulled down a familiar street before pulling up onto a drive and coming to a stop a minute later outside the house she shared with Rocky. I pulled up on the curb in front, my engine still running as I stared at the house and the truck and the shine of her hair through the window in disbelief.
It felt too surreal—to be here, with her, but Rocky gone. It made no sense. I had been here. I had seen that front door open hundreds of times. I had seen the sun shining off the windows. I had laughed when I heard him catching shit from his wife—his wife that was actually my first love. How was any of this real? How had I never known that she was so close?
How had she been living here all along, with one of my friends, and I hadn’t ever even seen a photo of her or heard him say her name? He’d always called her his woman , never Dahlia, or maybe I would have put it all together.
And then what?
What would I have done?
What the hell could I have done?
I stared at the truck, seeing her red hair through the glass and remembering how back then it had been short and almost black. That I had run my fingers through it while she slept, and she had smiled in that sleepy way of hers, her mind halfway between that place between sleep and awake. Things had felt so easy back then. Until I went and ruined it all.
The driver’s side door opened and she stepped out on to the drive, never once looking my way. Was it wrong that I wanted her to? That I wanted to see her smile? That I wanted to make her smile?
Not even just that I wanted to take away her pain—pain that I had been party to, not once, but now twice—but that I wanted to take away her pain with my touch.
I swallowed, feeling sick at my own thoughts. What was wrong with me?
Dragging a hand down my face, I switched off my engine and stepped out onto the weed-riddled sidewalk. The sun was beginning to set, and it had been a long-assed day, yet for the first time in months I felt wide awake. Seeing her had awakened something inside me. A piece I had long thought dead.
Walking up to her door, I let out a sigh when I saw she’d closed it behind her. I tried the handle but found it locked, so I knocked heavily, waiting a beat for her to speak before rapping my knuckles again when I got no reply.
It had been a long time since we had talked, and I didn’t want my first proper words to her to be through the wood of her door, and yet here we were. I knocked again, heavier this time, before looking across at the front windows.
“Dahlia,” I called to her. I tried to say her name as gently as I could—she’d been through a lot recently and had then seen me for the first time in years, but my frustration at being shut outside won through.
Despite everything that had happened between us all those years ago, and how things had been left, it irritated me that she didn’t at least want to talk.
I never thought I would see her again—and I knew that was entirely my fault; I had left her so she didn’t owe me shit, but surely she must have been curious. At least a little. She could shout and hit me if she wanted, I didn’t care. But to just lock me out like this was bullshit. There was too much to say.
I slammed the side of my fist against the door harder. “Dahlia, open the fucking door. We need to talk.”
The door stayed locked, and when I glanced across at the large front window, I saw that the curtains had been pulled across, effectively blocking me out.
I thumped on the door again and let out a growl of frustration. “Fuck’s sake. JD said I had to check the house, so either open up or I’ll have to kick the door in.”
I waited a beat, but when I still got no reply I lifted my foot, ready to do exactly as I promised because I had to speak to her, whether she liked it or not. JD would be pissed, because he hadn’t said anything about checking her house, never mind kicking the fucking door in. What he’d said was to follow her everywhere until the matter with the other club was resolved. To take her to the bank and to the lawyers, and to make sure all the paperwork got filed on time. But I was taking liberty with his words and decided that part of my protection of her should be to check the house and make sure no one was in there that shouldn’t be. JD was trying to keep me sober, and he was trusting me to do a good job. He had no idea, though, that Dahlia and I had history—no one did, and I had no intention of telling him either.
“Dahlia…please.” I really didn’t want to scare her or even piss her off any more than she clearly was. I just wanted to talk to her. I wanted to see her.
I rested my forehead against the door and took a deep breath to calm myself. I could feel my hands shaking; the urge to go get a beer and fuck this all off was strong, but I knew I couldn’t. I had abandoned her once; I couldn’t do it again.
The sound of a lock turning had me straightening up, and seconds later the door opened. She’d turned and walked away before I could even catch a glimpse of her, so I stepped inside cautiously.
The lights were off, the curtains drawn, and the smell of stale beer and rotting food turned my stomach. I clicked the front door closed behind me and followed the sound of tinkling glass, heading through the gloomy living room and into a brightly painted kitchen beyond. I couldn’t help but smile, remembering how she always told me she wanted a yellow kitchen so it felt like the sun was always shining. I had always thought it was a terrible color for a kitchen, and I still didn’t like the color in general, but I had to hand it to her; it did look like the sun was shining.
I found Dahlia crouched down by a small round table sweeping broken glass into a metal trashcan that she had dragged in from outside. The kitchen looked like at one time it had been neatly organized, clean and tidy, but right now it looked like a couple of raccoons had gotten in and ransacked the place. Glass and broken pottery was on the floor, and the kitchen worksurfaces were covered in partly prepared food that was rapidly beginning to smell. Pictures hung wonky on the walls, and it looked like someone had recently made their way through at least half a crate of beer. I recognized the beer and knew that it was Rocky’s favorite brand, and my smile slowly fell.
Rocky, my friend, my brother, her fucking husband, gone—dead. And all because I had been too drunk to go on the job with him.
My palms itched to grab a bottle of beer and down it in one, guilt and shame burning through me. I knew it would calm my nerves and steady me for what had already been a shitty day and was rapidly descending into an even more shitty night. And yet I also knew I wouldn’t be able to stop after one beer. I never could. Because the urge to drown out the voices in my head that told me I ruined everything I touched, that I was a killer, that I was scum, they shouted less when I drank.
I looked around, my gaze finally landing on her small frame, and feeling a stab of guilt. Guilt for all those years ago, and guilt for now. Every time I was in this woman’s life, I hurt her. I dragged a hand over my short beard and forced myself to not succumb to the internal war inside me. Right now, she needed help, and that’s what I would do.
“How can I help?” I asked, my throat raw with emotion.
“I thought you needed to make sure there were no big bad men in here.” She looked up at me through her thick eyelashes. “Maybe go do that.”
How could I tell her that the only big bad man in here was me?
I had been an asshole to leave her twenty years ago, and not much had changed since then because I was clearly an even bigger asshole now. I had done things I knew I should be ashamed of and yet wasn’t. Things that would make most people sick to their stomach. But I didn’t flinch. I had left her to save her, and in doing so I had doomed myself. But she would never understand that.
It hadn’t worked anyway—look where she was. Widowed and alone, and all because of me. I wondered if she had finished out college and dared myself to ask her but chickened out at the last second. I was a grown-ass man that had taken bullets, and sent men to ground, and yet speaking to the woman that I had imagined spending my life with scared me more than anything.
I turned on my heel and went to look around the house instead.
The place was a decent size, two bedrooms, a living room, a bathroom, a good-sized yard. It was nicely furnished and well decorated, and it made me happy for her. Before me she’d had a life and a future, and then I had come into it and ruined everything. Wasn’t that what I always did? Yet it looked like she had picked up the pieces of her life and made something for herself. Or at least she and Rocky had…and then I had ruined everything for her once again.
God, I was a piece of shit.
My hands were shaking, and I squeezed them into fists and willed them to still.
I stared around the main bedroom, running a hand along the white cotton bedsheets and taking in the scent of her unfamiliar perfume. I picked up a framed photograph from her bedside cabinet and stared down at the woman I had loved and the man that had got to have her. It was their wedding day, and she was wearing a long white dress made of lace and pearls. Her hair was tied up on her head and flowers had been stuck in it. She was looking at Rocky and he was looking at her. They were smiling like they were the only two people in the world. I pressed a finger to the picture, wishing I could feel her soft skin, or run her hair through my fingers. Wishing, with everything in me, that I had been the man in the photograph.
Rocky hadn’t treated her well, I knew that. At some point between their wedding and now, he had turned into an asshole and had forgotten how good of a prize he had gotten in her. God, he was an idiot. And I was an even worse one because I had laughed about it with him.
I wasn’t sure how long I stood there staring at that, but when I looked up she was in the doorway watching me, a strange expression on her face.
“I’m sorry, I…I was just looking.” I shrugged and put the photo down.
Dahlia came toward me and picked it back up. She smiled down at the picture, quiet as her memories ran through her head. I wanted to leave and give her some space to be with him. She didn’t need me here for this, and yet I found I couldn’t leave. I didn’t want to. Just being here, near her, breathing the same air as her, feeling the heat from her body, it made me feel better in some sad way.
“He sang to me that day,” she finally said with a melancholy smile.
“Didn’t know he could sing,” I replied, and she sighed.
“Neither did I. But he could and he did. It was just before our first dance; he got the microphone from my cousin, who was the DJ, and he sang some song that had played the first night we met.”
I didn’t want to know.
I didn’t want to hear their love story.
How they met. The life they had built. I didn’t want to know any of it, and yet I found I was hungry. Starved for any information on her. It wasn’t that I wanted to know, it was that I needed to know—anything and everything.
“What song?” I finally said, hating myself for asking.
“Yours…” she said. She put the photo back down and turned away from me.
“By Russell—” I paused thinking, trying to remember the singer’s last name.
“Russell Dickerson,” she finished for me.
I smiled. I liked that song too. And if she had been my woman, my wife, I would have sung that to her. Goddamn but Rocky was a smooth bastard. A lucky one at that too, because he got the girl.
And then, just like me, he had blown it all away.
I dragged a hand down my face, my own self-pity burning through me. I was pathetic. I was jealous of a dead man. How could I stand there and say that he had been lucky when he was gone now? I looked at her turned back, noting her shaking shoulders, and realized that she was crying, and I reached out a hand. I wanted to pull her to me, to try and comfort her, but I had no right.
“I should go,” I said, briefly closing my eyes.
She sniffled and wiped at her face with her hands. “House all clear then?”
“Yeah,” I agreed.
I felt glued to the spot, rooted in the ground like I was rotting away by being there. I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to walk out of that room. I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to walk away from her ever again.
“Okay,” she said, her voice a whisper, and I didn’t need to worry about walking away from her, because she walked away from me this time.