Thirty-Four
T he fuck? One minute I was comfortably sitting on the most uncomfortable rocky cliff, and the next I could have sworn I heard Camille’s voice. Turning to look for the source of her voice was a huge mistake, because the crumbling rocky edge did exactly what they warned us about, and it fucking crumbled. As I felt myself falling, I kept my eyes on her, watching as she kept coming, even though it clearly wasn’t safe.
I reached up an arm, as I seemed to be falling in slow motion, and felt her fingers wrap around mine. No. That meant I was dragging her with me. I couldn’t be the reason she died too.
More figures ran after her, and suddenly there were several bodies working together to drag her back, and with her, me. As much as I was going to try and release her grip to save her, now I couldn’t let go. I couldn’t let them save her without me, because well… nearly dying was a great incentive for avoiding exactly that. It was terrifying. And worse than that, I almost took her with me.
Once we were both lying flat on the soft grass a few feet away from the crumbling edge, my eyes locked on hers, and I found myself apologising, over and over again. We moved until we were wrapped around each other, and I was holding her once more, the woman I thought I’d lost.
“Jesus, you can’t fucking make out up here. That whole edge is gonna crumble, you dickhead.” I glared at Ice, but I didn’t resist when they dragged us away from the edge and to safety. I was covered in that stupid brown dust from the cliff edge, and so was Camille, but we were both alive.
“You stupid son of a bitch. What the fuck were you thinking?” A fist caught the side of my face, and I staggered back a step before I caught myself. I opened my mouth to defend my actions, but someone else got there first.
“Don’t touch him!” Camille shoved Reacher back, putting herself between us, and I couldn’t fight the proud smile stretching across my face as I watched my wife fronting at my Club President.
“You scared the fuck out of me!” He yelled, completely ignoring her. I noticed Alicia wasn’t with them, nor Tori. It was my brothers, Lissa, and my wife. My fucking wife.
Reacher was rubbing at his chest, and taking deep breaths, and I suddenly realised what I could have caused with my reckless actions. I stepped past Camille, and grabbed his arm.
“Brother, you good?” His response was a middle finger.
“Just give me a… minute, dickhead. You have any idea… how far we just ran?”
Thank fuck for that. If I’d caused his heart to give out, I’d never have forgiven myself. The only club members who knew about his recent cardiac incident were the ones with me right now, and they all looked as worried as I felt.
“Need us to get you a wheelchair, old man?” Ice offered a smirk, but it didn’t mask his concern even for a second.
The flying middle finger waved at all of us.
“Shut… it…”
We started making our way back down the gravelly road to the camper, and when we reached it, we sat Reacher down inside, despite his growling and slapping at our hands.
Lissa grabbed some water for Reacher, and passed it to him.
“Stitch, we’re going to talk about this, in detail, but for now, we need to get back.” Lissa looked firmly at me, and then turned to Ice, murmuring something quietly to him.
Ryder headed back out to the three bikes parked up. Wait. Three bikes and five people. That meant my fucking wife rode on the back of a brother’s bike. What. The. Fuck.
“Who had my wife on their bike? Which one of you fuckers had her arms around you?” My fists clenched as I glared at Reacher and Ice, fully prepared to go out and beat Ryder down, if it had been him.
“Reacher brought me with him, and if you want to blame anyone for that, blame the asshole who ran off in our damn honeymoon home!”
I loved her fire. That fucking fiery goddess of mine.
Cammy
O nce Reacher had caught his breath again, the bikers took off, Lissa wrapped around Ice on his bike, and we were left alone in the messy mobile home. An awkward silence fell, and then Stitch broke it, by insisting we get cleaned up after our little cliff diving episode. He literally joked about it, like it wasn’t the most terrifying experience of my life.
I reached up to slap him, and he caught my wrist, his intense eyes gazing deeply into mine.
“I’m so sorry, Camille. Jesus, I nearly took you down with me.”
I pulled my wrist free, and pointed at the bathroom.
“You clean up first, then we’ll talk.” I needed a minute to gather my thoughts before we had the conversation that we both knew was coming. It wasn’t just about the risk he’d taken. It was about the conclusions he’d jumped to. That territorial behaviour whenever his brothers were near me, although truthfully that was also kinda sexy.
It was time to put our cards on the table, and stop holding back on what we were thinking. I hoped there would still be an ‘us’ after this.
He didn’t take long getting cleaned up, and then it was my turn, and the whole time, all I could wonder was if he’d even still be there when I came out of the bathroom. I almost lost him. I almost watched him fall to his death, and I’d caused it. If I hadn’t distracted him. If I hadn’t called out and made him move, he wouldn’t have caused the edge to break apart.
He was sitting waiting for me when I stepped out of the bathroom, clean of the cliff dust, but still wearing my dusty clothes, because neither of us had been prepared to get changed too.
“I made coffee.” Stitch pointed at the two steaming mugs on the folding table. He’d also packed the bed away at last, giving us more room to sit together.
“Thanks. Uh… I know we need to have a serious talk, and put a lot of stuff out there that we’ve been holding in, but can I please… just for a minute, can you hold me? I need your arms around me.”
Stitch didn’t even hesitate, getting up from his seat, and folding his arms around me, crushing me against his chest. He kissed the top of my head.
“I never thought I’d get to do this again.”
Yeah, you and me both, pal . I wrapped my arms tight around him, taking in deep breaths to try and calm myself when tears threatened, and I didn’t want to release them. The time for tears would be later, if this didn’t work out.
We hugged for so long that I think we both just relaxed into each other, and finally it was Stitch who released me, and tilted my chin up, pressing his lips against mine just for a second.
“I’m sorry, wifey. I fucked up today. I guess I just kinda lost my mind. Jesus… what if the cancer is in my brain and that’s why I-”
“This is the problem, Stitch!”
He nudged me to sit down, and sat opposite me.
“Tell me.”
He was going to be mad at me for this. There was no way he wouldn’t be.
“The reason I went to see Ice this morning was to ask him for a favour, and you should know that he told me ‘hell no’, like a dozen times, because he said he wouldn’t violate your privacy like that.”
Stitch
T he fuck? I reached for her trembling hand and she let me take it. I squeezed it lightly, trying to offer her some strength for whatever the fuck she was trying to say.
“He touched you.”
“I was upset, Stitch. He was trying to offer comfort, well, actually I think he was trying to apologise because he thought he’d made me cry. He didn’t. I did. Ever since last night, I can’t help but think that I need to take action, because if I don’t, we’ll just be stuck in this holding pattern for as long as your stubborn ass can get away with it.” Okay… and we’re retrieving the hand. What the hell, I guess I got what I asked for.
“I guess I can be stubborn…”
Camille rolled her eyes. “I can handle stubborn, Stitch. What I can’t handle is this limbo we’re in. I know that right now you could choose to pretend everything’s fine, and nothing bad is gonna happen, but let’s be honest, you’re not even doing that. You’re not using this time for burying your head, and pretending you’re fine. You’re using it to try and tick things off a list before you die. What if you’re not dying, Stitch? What then? You could be living life the way you want to.”
Did I feel fully verbally spanked? Yeah, of course, and it was doubly embarrassing, because she was fucking right. Hadn’t I just been thinking the same shit, right before I nearly took a nose dive off a cliff, and made the whole thing moot?
“The life I want is with you, Camille. What if knowing is what pushes us apart? What if either knowing I’m dying, or knowing you’re stuck with me after all, is what makes you wise up to the mistake you made? I’m the mistake, babe, as you well know. How the fuck I’m sitting here with you, when you could do a million times better than a loser like me, I have no idea. I’m just as scared of making this end, as I am of finding out how long I have left. I mean, what if it’s years? Decades? Are you gonna want a divorce? This was never meant to be long term, was it? It was all part of the fucking game.”
She fixed me with that feisty glare that mostly just gave me a semi, and shook her head.
“I was never only in it for the short haul, dammit. You just had your head buried so far up your ass that you couldn’t see that. You think I’d just marry a guy out of the blue if I didn’t want him more than anything? If I didn’t fucking love him already?”
Love. We’d hinted at it, maybe even said it, but was it real? I was pretty sure she was it, for me, but what if what she felt was pity? Or some kind of infatuation for a man she thought would disappear from her life, so she’d desperately clung to me. Could it literally just be something like that? Wanting what she knew she couldn’t have for long?
“Stitch, say something, dammit. Is this not what you want? Did you only get into this because you figured it’d be short term? I really hope to god that you didn’t marry me just for a fucking laugh.”
I grabbed her hand again. “Will you shut that gorgeous mouth for a minute, babe? You’re right, okay? You’re right about so much. I am being a dick by hiding from my results. I know it. I’ve known it all a-fucking-long. I’m being a coward, and the longer it takes, the harder it is to chase it up.”
“It’s time, Stitch. We both need to know, so we can make our future, right?”
Jesus. Why was it so hard to take that step? Had all of my courage been in the one ball I’d lost?
Cammy
“ W ait, so what did you ask Ice, exactly?”
I felt my cheeks redden a little, because it was bloody intrusive, what I’d asked him to do. I wondered if Stitch would see it as an option now, or whether he’d put it off yet again.
“I asked him to hack your medical records, Stitch. To find out what the hell the test results were, so you’d finally know.”
I wondered if that had even occurred to him, or maybe asking the doc at the clubhouse, because he could have probably gained access too. From the look on his face, I was pretty sure he hadn’t let those thoughts in at all. He dragged his fingers over his jaw, taking a resigned breath.
“Well, I guess we could ask him again. With me there, he can’t really say no, right?”
Suddenly it was happening too fast, and how crazy was that? In as long as it took Ice to hack a record, we could have an answer. And if it was the one Stitch had been so terrified of, it would be the end of frivolous things like a honeymoon.
“Wait.”
His brow creased, and he stopped his slow descent out of his seat.
“For what?”
“One more day. Let’s just take one more day of this honeymoon. Let’s leave the others, and get away somewhere. Have one more day of not knowing, and then we’ll find out. If it’s the news we’re both praying we don’t hear, then we’ll have to deal with that. At least for today, let’s try and enjoy the not knowing. Is that weird?”
He shook his head. “It seems to be how I roll these days, babe. Let me go ring the guys and tell them we’re heading out. You grab your phone and decide where the hell we’re going. I won’t be long.”
I watched Stitch step outside the mobile home, and lift his phone to his ear. I was glad that we’d decided on one more day, because as much as I was pushing for answers, I wanted at least this version of him for a day longer. If the news tomorrow was the worst possible news, then I’d be there for him through every damn minute of it, no matter how hard he’d try to push me away.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I dug it out to find a text from Lissa.
Lissa : Hope you’re doing okay, babe. If he tries any other crazy shit, make sure you let us know. If they have to drag him home in chains, they will. They all care about him a lot.
Me : He’s not suicidal, babe. He’s struggling with something we can’t even begin to understand, but we’re taking today to keep pretending, and tomorrow he’ll push the hospital for news. Keep your fingers crossed, because I want him around for a long time.
Lissa : Ice already tried to hack his records, but don’t tell him I told you. He couldn’t get in, but he’ll keep trying.
Ice couldn’t get in? From what I’d heard, that bastard could hack anything. Was it a bad sign that he couldn’t get into Stitch’s files? What if they were flagged for some reason?
Me : Do you think that’s a sign that it’s bad news?
Lissa : Don’t go reading anything into it. He said their systems might be down, if not just that they’ve updated their firewalls since he last tried.
Me : Okay, gotta go. Love ya, girl.
I shoved my phone back in my pocket as Stitch pulled the door open.
“Okay, babe. Where are we going?” Shit, I didn’t even look. Stitch took one look at my face and started laughing.
“Seriously? You had one job! Ugh, fine… I’ll do that part as well. Leave it all to me, I see how it is.”
At least he was laughing again, and acting like a dumbass, and I loved that side of him so much.
“I love you, Stitch. Don’t ever fucking change.”
He grinned widely. “Wouldn’t know how, babe. And look…” He dragged me up from the seat.
“I’m sure I’ve said this before, but I love you, and I’m never letting you go, so get used to this. Me. Because somehow I’m going to keep you forever. Got it?”
I didn’t get a chance to answer, because his lips were on mine the next second, and I gave everything I had to that one kiss, the promise of everything we wanted.