Chapter 10
Esme
I’m going crazy. I know this room isn’t a cage, but all I have is my tumbling thoughts burning a hole in my brain.
I’m curled in the middle of his bed, a tight ball falling apart in the way I didn’t find myself needing to do when James brought everything crashing down.
Knowing that I hurt the one person who has always been there, always solid, always caring, always so selfless, so fucking immensely, kills me.
I’ve spent all this time sobbing my heart out. I’ve cried so hard that my eyes are nearly swollen shut. The silence in the room is a roar in my throbbing head. My throat is raw, my lungs are on fire, and my stomach is so painful that even setting my palm on top of it hurts.
I can’t talk to Wizard like this.
He’s coming back. This place isn’t just a clubhouse. It’s his family and his life. It’s been all he’s had when his parents proved that they’d never understand him, when James was an asshole, when I was too oblivious to see what was right in front of me.
I peel myself off the bed and walk to the bathroom, feeling like a zombie. It’s fitting, given that it’s how I’ve stumbled my way through life.
I flick on the light and force myself to look in the mirror.
I recoil, taking an actual step back. My hands grasp the edge of the sink, keeping me there.
I force myself to look at the unhinged mess I am.
At the dark, haunted eyes. The wild mass of knots that my hair has become.
The flushed, swollen cheeks, my bloodshot eyes.
I’ve been the kind of person who pastes on a smile when I’m dead on the inside. Faking it until I made it.
But I didn’t.
It’s not James that kept me in that cage. It wasn’t my parents. It wasn’t this town or anyone else. It was me. There’s no blame. No more excuses. Just. Me.
I need to make this right.
I look myself in the eye in the mirror. Really look.
“Moment one,” I breathe. This is the first moment of putting all this shit back together.
I can’t change the past, can’t undo the years, can’t fix someone else’s brokenness.
I can offer an apology that will be almost meaningless because words are shit, but they’re all I have. And then I can… what?
I don’t know what, but curling into an unmoving ball in here isn’t going to help.
I strip, get the shower going, wait for it to get hot like Wizard instructed.
I’ve always wanted that fire that people talk about filling them up. I want to burn. I’ve never had the right tools. The fuel, the matches, the spark, the flame. What was I waiting for? For someone to hand them to me? To do the hard work for me? To give me the answers? That’s not how life works.
By the time there’s a knock at the door, I’ve been sitting perched on the edge of the bed for a while.
My hair is still damp but no longer dripping onto my clothes.
My hands are sore from clenching them in my lap so tightly.
My shoulders ache from being hunched over.
I’m wound so tight I could cause a low level explosion. A spark plug, not a spring.
One look at Wizard’s face and I realize that there’s more than one way to be wrecked. He’s not holding anything back anymore. The energy that radiates from him is nearly nuclear, filling every inch of the room like a bomb blast. “Do you want to get out of here?”
Wizard’s eyes are wide and green, vibrant in the hall lights.
They’re shining far too intensely, and not in a good way.
His hair is a mess from tugging off his helmet, though not flat like I thought it would be.
Beads of sweat glisten on his forehead. He’s so fucking tall and broad that he fills up most of the doorway.
His leather jacket with his patches gives him that bad boy aura that never fit quite right with all his baby faced innocence, but that seems to be gone.
Stripped away in the time between us heading up onto that roof and right now.
He’s still the man I know, but he’s more of a stranger than he’s ever been, brimming over with restless energy and bristling with hard edges.
I don’t know if this is a good idea, but staying in this room will suffocate us both. “Yeah,” I find myself saying, the only word that I can get out until I take a step back and try to mentally recalibrate and unstick my tongue. “Uh, should I get my keys?”
His face blanks for a second, then he tilts his chin down. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“What are we going to do? Walk?”
“Yeah. Sure. Maybe. If you want to.”
I don’t know what I want. That’s always been my problem, hasn’t it? “Okay.”
This is the stiffest we’ve ever been with each other, but leaving the clubhouse and walking through the industrial edge of Hart long before anything is set to come awake, I still feel safe with Wizard beside me.
“I went to my parents’,” he says. “After a long ride of trying and failing to get my shit in order. I don’t know what I was hoping for, but it went exactly like I thought it would.”
My heart squeezes and furious anger sours my stomach. He was hoping for the same thing that every kid wants. To be seen, accepted, and loved unconditionally.
A hard shiver rattles my bones. It has nothing to do with the temperature. It’s still warm, a little close and sticky, the night sky the same bruised black velvet hue it was earlier.
“It was bad,” he adds, needlessly. Toneless, trying to disguise his obvious hurt.
Wizard has to be a thousand times more frustrated than I am.
“They’ve never even tried to understand you,” I snap, my anger cutting through the few inches of space between us.
Wizard’s so close that our shoulders nearly brush on certain steps.
“They refuse to even acknowledge your reality. I’ve heard them say that the club is full of bad elements, that it’s a useless establishment to collect broken and unstable people.
They’ve never once used your club name.”
Wizard sighs, shoulders drawing in. He stares forward, so I do too, quickly flicking my eyes away to give him some privacy. The sidewalk is a narrow strip. It’s probably why he’s walking so close to me.
“They’ve always known me as Neal. As their son. Not as a Satan’s Angels member. Wizard’s just a name…”
“How are you not even mad about what I just said?”
“I am mad,” he says, but it’s a whisper. How can soft words carry more weight than a shout or a growl? “I’m mad about all of it. Not the name thing, but the fact they can’t see what’s under their own noses.”
I want to try and fix this for him, even though I can’t. “It’s a cliched saying, love is blind. But it’s true. Your parents can’t see James as the rest of the world does. I’m glad you went there and I’m sorry that it was torture for you.”
Wizard stops dead. His eyes rake over me. I’ve never felt so stripped down, nothing but bones and soul. My own vision doubles and then blurs.
“You tore a hole in the universe, Wizard,” I mumble. I can’t not do this for a minute longer. “There’s always going to be a before and after on the timeline. Before I knew. After I wasn’t such a blind, terrible, horrible idiot.”
“You were trying to survive. That’s the timeline. Before James. During. After.”
His soft voice wraps around me, but instead of blanketing me, it flays me. My stomach twists. I can’t look him in the face, so I do the cowardly thing and study the narrow sidewalk. I focus on a crack where a weed is poking through. A small bit of defiant greenery in a sea of development.
“I thought maybe we could do something,” Wizard says.
He waits for me to look at him, his face mostly blank, but he’s never been able to hide the way he naturally gravitates toward hope.
“I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be in Hart, but I think getting away would be good for both of us.
We don’t have to make big life decisions or answer all the hard questions.
We could just take a breath. I’m always here.
Always working. I love it, but… I don’t know.
Maybe it’s just been a few too many years without a day off. ”
He pauses on the sidewalk and turns to me.
“The club owns a cabin in the mountains. It’s rustic, but safe.
We have security up there. I’ve actually been meaning to update it for a few months, but I haven’t felt like I could get away, and Dravin has been busy.
Maverick is new, and his old lady has some stuff she’s still working through, so I didn’t want to send him out there.
I could have asked Atlas, but with the store and picking, it’s a busy time for him and Willa as well. ”
“You could go and multitask.”
“We could.”
I lean in a little bit closer, until our shoulders brush. I steal a glance at him, drinking in the side of his face. He’s golden in the streetlight. Still hard. Beautiful. It’s like I’m seeing him for the first time. Not just with new eyes, but with them both wide open.
“I texted Tyrant to ask him about it before I got back to the clubhouse, and he reminded me Crow and his old lady are going out there in a few days. Tarynn owns a shop here and she’s had the time booked off for almost a year.”
Disappointment I have no business feeling filters through me. I lean back, putting some distance between us. “That’s fine. It’s probably—”
“I called Crow. He doesn’t mind.”
“It’s like, four in the morning.”
“He wasn’t asleep. He said they’d love to have company.”
“Uh, they planned a private getaway, and they don’t mind doubling up?”
“The cabin’s not that small.”
“I think this might be a polite we don’t mind, not a genuine we don’t mind, because of the brotherhood thing.”
“He really didn’t mind,” Wizard insists.
“What if she does?”
“He wouldn’t have said he didn’t if she wouldn’t like it. Tarynn’s great. You’ll love her. She has pink hair.”