Maverick
“You’re shitting me.”
Alessa sighed. “You say this often and I still don’t know what it means. How can I shit you? It makes no sense.”
Scraping a hand over my head, I shot her a sheepish glance. “I’ll stop saying it.”
“Good. It’s impossible to shit a person. Amara is right. Our curse words are far more imaginative.”
Grinning, I told her, “You’ll have to teach me some.”
“You say this because Hawk offered to learn.” Her eyes narrowed. “You’re playing a competition with him?”
“No. We just want our Old Ladies to be happy.”
And to understand them when they grumbled under their breaths in Ukrainian if we did something to piss them off.
At least, that was my intention.
Alessa, though inordinately patient, got angry with me a lot.
Mostly because I never did what the doctors asked of me.
She dragged off her scarf and dumped it on the back of her chair before she plunked herself down. “The coffin was empty. I’m not shitting you.”
“Can I have my phone?”
When the doctors had asked me to limit my screen time today, I knew she’d worked in cahoots with them.
If I’d have known, I’d have brought a spare phone, well aware she’d take mine with her.
As it stood, I was going to die of boredom.
The treatments were tedious, and watching daytime TV was beyond excruciating—technically, I wasn’t even supposed to watch that either.
My head wasn’t aching as bad though. I knew the screens exacerbated migraines, but doing without them was impossible.
Not only did my brothers need me; coding—hacking—they were what I did.
Or what I used to do, anyway.
Lodestar had picked up a lot of the shit I did for the club, and while it had given me time to create my app that’d protect kids when they were online, I was starting to feel a lot less useful.
My identity was in crisis because my purpose had revolved around computers for so long, and what I could uncover for the club…
“Maverick?”
I jolted when I saw Alessa had her hand outstretched, my cellphone held in her palm.
Grabbing it, I immediately felt better and began scrolling through my notifications.
When I saw the message from Nyx asking me to look into Grizzly’s disappearance, I couldn’t deny my relief.
I’d suspected they’d go to Star for that, and though I wouldn’t have blamed them, it would have felt shitty not to be asked.
“There’s a problem?”
“No.” I shot her a smile. “No problem.”
“They asked you to find where this Grizzly is?”
I nodded.
She sighed. “I wish I could ask you not to work on this, but Rachel was so—” Alessa murmured something in Ukrainian. “So, so sad. I did not like to see her hurting. If you could find her answers, I know she would feel better about this.”
“I’ll do my best, sweetheart,” I told her, snatching her hand and pressing my lips to her knuckles. “Did the doctors say when I’m getting out of here tomorrow?”
“Before noon.”
I grunted.
Accessing the information I needed wouldn’t be as easy on my phone, but I’d figure out a way to make the magic happen.
Rachel wasn’t the only one who needed answers.
“I’ll spend the night, yes?”
A grin creased my jaw. “You gonna monitor me, babe? Gonna get all bossy on me?”
Her eyes twinkled. “This I can do.”
I hummed. “What’ll you do if I get out of bed?”
“You will have to discover this if you do it,” she said snootily. “But Giulia told me about this—”
“What are you talking to her about sex for?” I complained.
“She was talking. I listen. She’s interesting.”
Giulia was many things. Interesting? Not so much.
Alessa clucked her tongue. “She is interesting. She was telling me about this thing she called edging—”
I almost choked on my tongue. “Edging? You know what that is?”
She sniffed. “She told me, so tak.”
“Okay, what is it?”
“It’s when you… when I…” Her mouth pursed. “What’s the word for when a dick grows hard? I do not remember.”
“Erection?” I chuckled.
“Tak. Edging is when you have erection and I don’t let it come.”
“My dick doesn’t come. I come.”
“There’s a difference?”
“I mean, technically, yeah. My dick’s attached to me.” I scratched my head. “Why am I not surprised Giulia’s been researching that?”
She shrugged. “Giulia knows many things.”
Most of them psychotic, I felt sure.
“So, that’s your punishment if I get out of bed? You’ll edge me?” I smirked. “For how long.”
“Full day.”
I whistled. “Twenty-four hours for getting out of bed once? You’re hardcore, babe.”
Her smile was winsome. “Very.”
Snickering, I shook my head. “What if I need to piss?”
“That is different.” Her eyes narrowed upon me. “Unless you use it as an excuse. I will time you.”
Rolling my eyes, I muttered, “Maybe you should just handcuff me to the bed and be done with it.”
“Giulia also told me about this. Some men like this, tak?”
“Some men do,” I concurred carefully, watching her expression.
Sex wasn’t as much of a minefield as it used to be, but doing was different than talking ironically enough.
When I touched her, I knew she could differentiate between my hands and some creep fucker who’d used her in the past.
Words weren’t like that.
They didn’t allow for that kind of nuance. At least, not when her English often failed her during highly emotional conversations. It might’ve been easier if she were a native English-speaker, but she wasn’t, and we had to work with what we had.
If that meant I was careful when I navigated chats like these, so be it.
Alessa’s eyes shifted from mine to the bed and back again. “It’s something you like?”
“The cuffs? I guess. If you liked it.” I shot her a dopey grin. “I pretty much like anything we do together, babe.”
That brought some of the warmth back to her expression. “I like very much as well.”
“Good.”
“Good.” She bit her lip. “Men did this to me.”
“Tied you down?”
The thought alone made me want to kill someone, but I knew she’d been through far worse than just that.
Not that that eased my anger any.
“Tak. I did not like it. I don’t know why you would like it. It’s not nice. To move is freedom. I would not tie you to the bed even if it meant I could get you to rest.”
She said that so earnestly, my heart about fucking melted in my chest.
If anything, that was the danger here. Not my brain, but a heart that literally turned to a mass of melted sinew and muscle whenever she was around.
“Thank you, sweetheart.” I reached for her hand and squeezed her fingers. “But whatever we do together, it comes from a place of love, doesn’t it?”
She blinked. “Tak.”
“So it’s different. They bound you to the bed to control you, to take away your freedom. We wouldn’t do it for that reason, would we?”
“I do not know.”
“If we did it, it’d be to give each other pleasure. Not pain. Wouldn’t it?”
It took her a while to process that, and I left her to it, checking my phone, wanting the words to really resonate without me pressuring her—even if that was only by looking at her.
Me: Bear never mentioned to anyone that Grizzly might have been buried elsewhere?
Link: We asked around the MC, and no brother says Bear ever mentioned anything about that.
Nyx: Not surprising. Most of the Old Guard weren’t in today. It was all younger brothers.
Sin: I’ll head into town and go and speak with them. They hang out at Daytona a lot now. I can kill a couple birds with one stone.
Me: Bighead. Know you’re good but are you that good?
Sin: Haha. You know what I mean, dipshit.
Me: :P
Steel: I just don’t understand any of this.
Sin: How many fucking times? I’m telling you he was dead.
Me: He could’ve had a pulse.
Sin: I’m telling you he didn’t.
Me: Okay.
Sin: Okay?
Me: Okay.
Nyx: Jesus, we get the picture. It’s OKAY. FML. Whether he’s alive or dead, his body ain’t where we thought it was.
Me: How your mind works is disturbing, Nyx.
Sin: You only just got freaked out by him?
Me: Fair point. If he’s alive, Nyx, his body is attached to him. I shouldn’t have to explain that to you like you’re Amara.
Nyx: Fuck off.
Link: Whatever’s happening here, it can’t be anything good.
Me: I disagree.
Sin: Why?
Steel: You just being difficult?
Me: No. Not at all. Bear and Rex had similar natures.
Nyx: Don’t bring that up right now. Rex is still smarting about Kendra being his half-sister.
Me: Yeah, but I’m not bringing this up with him, am I? I’m talking to you, on a chat he isn’t included in.
Nyx: True. What’s your point?
Me: Even if Bear didn’t know about all the shit Grizzly’d done in his time, and I’m talking about what happened with Rachel here, the way Sin ended him would have resonated with Bear.
Sin: What do you mean?
Me: On a scale of 1-10, how rational is Rex?
Nyx: 10
Link: 11
Steel: 10
Sin: 9.5
Me: Exactly. What’s rational about his agreeing to exhume Dog and Grizzly just so that they’re no longer in the graveyard?
Nyx: Not very rational.
Me: It’s the height of irrationality, in fact. If that’s Rex’s reaction, why wouldn’t it be Bear’s?
Link: You mean you think Bear disposed of Grizzly before the burial because he didn’t want him in the graveyard?
Me: Yeah. That’s what I’m thinking. I’m going to look into it, see if his social security number has been triggered in recent years. Of course, that’s if he kept his identity, which, let’s face it, if he moved to fucking Dallas, it wouldn’t matter worth a damn if he kept his ID as is.
Me: So, whatever whatever, I’ll dig into this. But I don’t think we have to worry.
“You are right. We give each other pleasure. No pain.”
Alessa’s words had me jolting in surprise.
I quickly tapped out:
Me: GTG.
Then turned my phone over so I couldn’t see the screen, just in time too.
Her brow had furrowed and she was moving to her feet, settling on the bed at my side. Realizing what she was about to do, I shuffled to the edge so she could join me.
With her curled on her side, she tucked herself around me, and as was usually the way with us when it came to moments like these, we sat in silence.
Sometimes, that was the easiest means of communicating.
Not because words and feelings were hard, but because reconnecting didn’t need either.
It needed touch.
It needed love.
At moments like these, I didn’t even need a cell phone or a computer to entertain me.
I just lay there with her, breathing her in, absorbing her as much as I could. Not just because my brain could trip a fuse and I’d be hurled back to Afghanistan, but because I loved her. Because I needed her imprinted on me.
I needed her to know she meant more to me than code.
Because she did.
This whole new identity of mine had one stabilizing force—Alessa.
She was my light through the darkness.
Which meant us lying together, breathing the same air, reconnecting, did more for me than any of the treatment the doctors put me through.
She wasn’t a miracle in the flesh—she was just my reason for breathing.