Thirty-Three
S he was still morose when she woke up, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t a hangover or anything. Something was bothering her.
What worried me was that maybe she’d had time to absorb what I’d done, and realised she didn’t want to be around a person who could do that to another living being. Never mind that the asshole deserved it. Never mind that he didn’t pay for long enough. What if she saw me as the monster now? What if she was afraid of me now?
I stayed in bed, or on it, since we hadn’t even undressed last night, and waited for her to finish in the bathroom. When she returned, I tried to coax her back to the bed, but she shook her head.
“I need some fresh air, Stitch. I need to take a little walk or something.” A walk? Without me? I sat up, smoothing my hair back.
“I’ll go with you.”
She shook her head. “Don’t worry, I’ll be a couple of minutes at most. My head’s just a bit woozy after last night.” She was lying to me. It was so clear to me that she was hiding something from me.
Why now, after we’d fixed what was wrong with her life? As I watched her walk out of the camper, fighting every instinct in me to follow her, I suddenly realised that maybe that was the problem.
She didn’t need me anymore. She didn’t need any of us, did she? She was safe now. There was nothing stopping her from going back to her old life, nothing stopping her from going back to whatever she had left after he’d decimated her life. Why the fuck didn’t I see this coming?
I used the bathroom, brushing my teeth and staring at my stupid face in the mirror. What the hell had I done? Dumb fuck, that’s me. I just took away the only reason she had for being here with me.
I desperately wanted to shower and put on clean clothes, but I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to find her. I had to confront her, and try to find a way to stop her leaving me. Even if I had only months left, I wanted every minute to be spent with her.
I pulled the camper’s door open and as I did, I caught sight of her. She was across the car park, and talking to someone. Ice . She was talking to Ice? What the fuck. I watched them closely, pushing the door closed again, to watch through the window, so they wouldn’t spot me.
Was he touching her? Was she hitting on him? Was there something there that I hadn’t seen?
Ice lifted his hands and looked like he snapped at her. The fuck? My hand grabbed the door handle, even as I realised I couldn’t go out there, because I had to see what happened next. Was it a lover’s spat?
Ice ran his hands over his buzz cut head, and then he was shaking his head, definitely arguing with her. What the hell did they have to argue about? I thought they barely knew each other.
Camille folded her arms, her head lowered, and then he touched her. He fucking touched her. I couldn’t take it anymore. The door was open and I was striding across the car park, heading for the asshole touching my wife. He caught sight of me just as I dragged his arm away from her, and shoved him back.
“The fuck are you doing? You touching my fucking wife, brother?”
Ice held his hands up, but he looked the kind of pissed off I hadn’t seen since he was on the coke. I hoped to god that he wasn’t using that shit again, not now he had a fucking live-in therapist.
“You fucking talk to her. In fact, you know what? I am absolutely not getting fucking involved in this. You want to know stuff, you fucking talk to him, yeah?” Ice edged past me and stalked over to his cabin, slamming the door behind him.
I turned to look at Camille, and my heart stuttered in my chest. She was in tears. Why the hell was she crying? What did he fucking do to her? I grabbed her shoulders, trying my best to be gentle.
“Babe, did he hurt you? Did Ice do something to you?”
She shook her head, keeping her eyes down, and let out one of those shuddery gasps that told me the tears hadn’t just started. No wonder Ice was freaking. I looped my arm around her and started walking her back to the camper, but she pulled back.
“I can’t, Stitch. I can’t… I can’t do this. I… it’s breaking my heart, do you see that?” I backed up a step, feeling my heart stutter in my chest. She didn’t want me, that was what it was about.
“You can’t… I knew it. I fucking knew it. I tried telling myself that it wasn’t what was happening, but I’m an idiot, aren’t I?” Jesus . She’d probably been begging Ice to get her away from me, to get her out of town, and back to her fucking old life.
I could feel the rage inside me, the pure desperate anger at losing everything I thought I’d finally fucking found, and yet… the overwhelming emotion, drowning out the anger, was sorrow. Devastation. Her heart was breaking? Join the fucking club.
I turned and strode back to the camper, fighting the urge to run, to get away from her before the rage won out, and I did something I could never take back. Before I screamed at her for giving me so much hope, just to tear it away from me. Before I dragged her with me, and kept her, even though what she wanted was away from me.
Before I knew what I was doing, I was in the driving seat, pulling out of the car park, in that stupid cumbersome fucking camper truck. I had no idea where I was going, but ‘away’ was all I could think of right now. Away. Away from all of them, specifically away from her.
I needed just as much distance from the club who’d let me walk into this stupidity with my fucking eyes shut. Maybe it was just that they figured I’d be dead soon anyway, so why bother stopping me from making a complete fool of myself. Giving my heart at last, trusting someone at last, and learning the hard way that nothing was real, or even going to last the small amount of time I had left.
Maybe it was even time to take control of that aspect of my life. Maybe waiting for death to come for me at an excruciatingly slow pace was the wrong move. I could make it happen in an instant, couldn’t I?
Camm y
I ’d tried running after the camper, but Stitch was gone before I could even catch up to the door. Where was he going? What the hell was he yelling about? But he didn’t yell, did he? Even though he sounded like he was losing his mind, like his heart was literally breaking in that moment, he still tempered himself. He still held back the fury, and kept his voice low enough so he wouldn’t scare me.
My god. He was the best man I’d ever known. To fight to control his anger that way, when he clearly thought something weird was going on, was everything to me. He’d saved me in so many ways, and now he’d just run away and I had no idea why.
I ran back to Ice’s door and pounded my fist against it. Ice wrenched the door open, a snarl on his face as he prepared to yell, and then he saw it was me. His eyes tracked the car park around me, and instantly alighted on the empty space where the mobile home should have been.
“ Fuck . Get in here with Lissa, and I’ll get the Pres.”
I was grateful for his ability to read the situation in an instant, and save me from having to try and explain.
“Babe, come and sit down.” Lissa guided me onto the sofa, and sat with me, stroking my hair back.
“What happened?”
“Hold that thought. Tell us all at once.”
Reacher and Alicia followed Ice in, both fully dressed and clearly more awake than I felt.
“He left me.”
Reacher groaned, running a hand through his hair before he looked straight at Ice.
“Get tracking him. He must have his phone.”
“He has mine too. He… everything’s still in the mobile home. ”
“What happened, love?”
I met Reacher’s eyes as he sat down on a chair and faced me.
“I don’t know… I was talking to Ice, and he freaked out.”
“I touched her, and I know I shouldn’t have, because that set him off.” Reacher shot a glare in Ice’s direction, before turning back to me. Ice was tapping away at a tablet and muttering to himself already anyway.
“I asked Ice for a favour, and when Stitch saw us talking, he went off at me. Well, at Ice, actually.”
“If he touched you, I’m surprised Stitch didn’t take him down. You don’t touch a brother’s old lady.”
Sadness filled me at the reminder that I wasn’t even that to him. I saw the same sadness reflected on Alicia’s face in that moment, and saw how it hurt her that she was a wife, but not an old lady. She deserved that fucking title for sure. She was like a mother to the club members.
“You know, you should just make her your old lady, regardless of any opposition. She’s your old lady already, in her heart, where it counts.”
Reacher’s frown smoothed, and he caught Alicia’s hand, dragging it into his lap to wrap both hands around it.
“I appreciate that, but get back to what happened with Stitch. Why were you talking to Ice?”
I heard Ice groan, and took a deep breath, because I’d started all this mess, and it wasn’t fair of me to have dragged him into our business like that, even though he’d refused. He’d been right to refuse too, but it still left us without answers.
“I asked him to hack something for me, and he refused. He’s right to say hell no, but I was desperate.”
Reacher didn’t look away from me.
“Hack what? Stop dragging this out, Cammy, because right now my brother is out there hurting, and likely doing something dangerous or stupid. Sometimes a man needs to be saved from himself, you feeling me?”
Oh god. I hadn’t even thought about him hurting himself, but hadn’t he just lost everything he thought he had? At least, that was how he saw everything, so what the hell were we doing sitting here?
“Oh god.” I was up and out of the seat, and Lissa’s attempt to grab me missed by an inch. Reacher caught me at the door, however, and hauled me back by my arm. Something he wouldn’t have been able to do if only Stitch were here with us right now.
“Speak, dammit.”
I swallowed hard. “I told him that I couldn’t go on like this. That it was breaking my heart.”
“For fuck’s sake!” Reacher stormed from the room, with Alicia offering me an apologetic smile as she hurried after him.
Lissa caught my arm, but I was still standing there dumbly, knowing the weight of the words I’d carelessly spoken to a man on the edge. Whatever happened next would be entirely my fault.
“You broke up with him?”
“No! God no, that’s not what I meant, but I think that’s how he took it.”
Ice stood up, looking at both of us before he headed for the door.
“Let’s go.”
Stitch
T he view was amazing from up here. The crappy camper hadn’t made it as far as the road at the top of the cliff. The damn thing was too heavy and sluggish on the roads. I’d dumped it and started walking, because I knew I needed to be up here, looking down on everything, while I contemplated my future.
Before Camille, my fear had been that I maybe had months, maybe even less. My fear had been not having time to do the things I’d wanted to do. Having my life cut short.
Now it was more about the fact that, what if I had months and months left, and I had to spend them alone, without her, without her smiles, and her giggles, and her touches, and her kisses? What if the last part of my life dragged on endlessly without the one thing I needed more than more time?
How did she become more important to me than breathing? Than existing? What had happened overnight to make her decide that being with me wasn’t what she wanted? That it was hurting her? Was I hurting her? Was that what it was?
Not the rough sex, I’m not that much of an idiot. She loved that part. She loved being manhandled, and slammed against furniture, as I rammed her with my cock. No, of course not that.
Was it my prognosis hurting her? Was it being dragged into a relationship that had an in-built expiry date? Was it the not knowing, the uncertainty of my future? As much as I kept hiding from knowing the truth, what if I was living on a knife edge for no reason? Was it my refusal to accept what might happen? Or was it the fact that I seemed to have grudgingly accepted that the end was nigh, regardless of the facts?
I knew it had taken too long for the test results to come through. I knew I should be chasing them up. I knew I should be ringing the hospital and hounding them for more information, but fear kept stopping me. Once I made that call, once I got that information, it was done, and there would be no going back to the suddenly blissful phase of not knowing.
Suddenly this would feel like the part I should have dragged out, wouldn’t it? Because once I knew the answer, once I knew how long I had left, I’d feel it ticking away, hour by hour, minute by minute, waiting for pain and the internal decay of my body as cancer ravaged it.
I edged closer to the crumbling layer of rock at the top of the cliff. There were warning signs everywhere, stating that I shouldn’t have moved past the barriers. There were more signs here, warning of the eroding cliff edge, of the danger of it breaking apart beneath my weight. This was the other way. Instead of making a call, instead of finding out the truth, and having to live with it. This was the way of taking control. Of making a decision that might just bring that truth in an instant. If I dislodged enough of the rock that I fell to my death, at least it’d be over. If I didn’t, then maybe now wasn’t my time, or maybe it was an hour from now. Or a day.
I reached the very edge of the cliff, feeling a few pieces of crumbling rock shift beneath my toes, sending a small amount of gravel down to the beach below. There were no people there, because it was all cordoned off for their safety. Clearly they were all way smarter than me, because they were heeding the signs. I carefully dropped down onto my ass, legs dangling over the rough, rocky cliff.
The view from here really was spectacular. The sky so blue, the sea reflecting the colour in beautiful symmetry. The beach looked larger than it probably would when the tide came in. There were cliffs heading all the way along the beach, in a horseshoe kind of shape. It was the kind of place people visited with their cameras, to capture the stunning contrast of rocks and sand and water. It was a fitting place to make this decision.
Cammy
T he mobile home was parked up near the bottom of the steep road, and Ice cursed as he stepped out of it, with two phones in his hands. This was all we had. The location of the deserted vehicle, and no idea where Stitch had gone from here.
“Jesus… we don’t have time to search up and down from here. We need more bodies.”
Lissa patted Reacher’s arm as she looked around, walking over to read a sign by the side of the road. I joined her, reading it with a sense of trepidation. It warned of an unstable cliff ahead. Unstable . Dangerous. On the edge of falling.
“He went up.”
Everyone looked at me as I spoke.
“You sure?”
I wasn’t sure, no, but he’d been on the edge of losing everything, or at least that’s what he thought. As far as he was concerned, he was already half dead, and I knew he feared the end so much, that lack of control over the way he left the world. Suddenly the edge of a cliff seemed like the only place he’d be.
“Yes! He’s up the cliff. We need to hurry.”
“Fuck!” We all started running up the steep road, our hearts in our throats, as we wondered if we’d find him, and if we’d get there in time to stop him from doing something he could never come back from.
It took too long, and we were all exhausted when we reached the grassy top of the cliff. We all stopped for a moment, our eyes searching for a blonde man in a leather cut. He wasn’t here! He… Oh god. I was running again, my chest burning from the exertion, desperation fuelling every heavy step in his direction.
“Stitch!”
He turned to look at me, and that’s when we heard rock crumbling, and he disappeared amid a cloud of beige dust.
“NO!”