11 - Kilian
Kilian
I INVITED THEA to the clubhouse because I wanted to. No other reason. I wanted her here, so I asked.
I was supposed to meet her at the gate, but Ronan got there first. Then Soren came down from the deck. And I’m standing by a pillar twenty feet away, watching the three of them talk.
That was fifteen minutes ago, and I’m still standing here.
The clubhouse is a long, single-story structure made of concrete and corrugated stainless steel.
Outside, there’s a wide wooden deck built right to the cliff’s edge.
The only thing between the railing and a two-thousand-foot drop is your own good sense.
Most of us are short on good sense, which is why I had the railing built to chest height.
Out back sits another corrugated steel structure, a warehouse of sorts for Sentinel, where we house the helicopters we use for the bushfire detection runs. It’s the business I built from the money attached to my name.
Every piece of this compound, I had a hand in building. It’s home. To me. To my men. Everyone here earned their place the same way I earned mine: by bleeding next to each other until the bleeding became the bond.
Today Thea is here too, sitting on the oversized leather couch, laughing at whatever Soren said, and the sound carries all the way across the room to where I haven’t moved.
Ronan hands her a beer. She takes it with both hands. Her shoulders are loose, her face open.
She’s a bruise of color against all our brown and black and steel. The pink dress she wears belongs at a tea party, not in a biker clubhouse full of ex-soldiers with scars no one can see.
Finally, I push off the pillar and walk inside. Ronan clocks me first. His expression doesn’t change, but his eyes move from me to Thea.
“There he is,” Soren says, and I don’t know what’s gotten into him, but there’s too much warmth in his voice today.
She straightens a fraction when she sees me, and the light catches the loose strands of her hair.
“She’s visiting me,” I say.
“Sure she is.” Ronan lifts his beer.
“I was just telling her about the west coast contract,” Soren adds and I nod.
Then I look at Thea. “Ready?”
She looks from the men, then back to me. “You didn’t even say hello.”
“Hello.”
She breathes a laugh through her nose, but sets the bottle down and says goodbye to them.
“Come back without him,” Soren calls after her.
Outside, the air is cool and comfortable. I hand her the helmet. She takes it, climbs onto the bike behind me, and I start the engine. The rumble fills my skull, chasing out every thought that isn’t about the road disappearing under the front wheel.
Five minutes after, I pull off at the overlook where the mountain drops and the whole of Albury Creek is below us. The jacarandas are just purple dots from up here. There are few fat clouds, and the sky is blue going orange.
I kill the engine. Thea gets off first and walks to the railing, putting both hands on it.
“Wow,” she says.
I don’t look at the view for more than a second. I already know it’s beautiful. I know what it does at this hour, when the sun turns ordinary things gold.
I keep my eyes on her instead. The wind pulls strands of hair from her clip, and she doesn’t bother pushing them back. She’s staring at the town below, at the flat farmland that stretches out beyond until it blurs into the horizon.
Thea is a stunning, stunning woman, and she’s here in the place I call home. And I’m standing five feet back from the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met because there’s a weight sitting in my gut.
It’s been there since she walked into the club and laughed at Soren and sat there on that couch with them. She looked out of place in every way, but still she looked like she belonged in my world.
It looked right.
That’s the problem with this thing in my head.
It doesn’t need an anniversary or a song or a familiar face.
The most ordinary, unrelated thing can drag me under…
like a woman laughing in a room full of men I trust with my life.
Before I knew it, water was closing over my head. It’s so goddamn hard to swim back up.
“Are you okay?” She turns to look at me.
“Yeah.”
She holds my gaze, and I can see her turning the word over in her head. She doesn’t believe me.
I walk to the railing and stand beside her. The weight in my gut doesn’t go anywhere.
“The guys seem nice,” she says after a while. “Really nice. Not what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
“I don’t know.” She looks at her hands. “Less. I expected less… I guess.”
I don’t follow up on that.
“When did you leave the service?” she asks.
“Over three years ago.”
She nods, slow, and waits.
“It was after Simon died.” The valley is very still below us, seemingly waiting for me too. “I couldn’t keep my head straight after that. I couldn’t pretend it hadn’t happened. So I retired, came here, his town. Some of my men followed.”
“Does it help?”
I don’t answer fast. A cloud moves overhead, and the shadow of the ridge starts to creep across the valley floor.
“It’s—” I stop.
I don’t have a word for it. Is this even just guilt? It’s not even a feeling anymore. It’s weight. It’s load-bearing, and everything in my life sits on top of it.
“It doesn’t get lighter.”
I drag in a breath.
The rest of the words are right there, sitting behind my teeth, and I can’t hold it back anymore. It’s been eating me alive for three years, and she’s standing here with her eyes on my face, and the dam is cracking.
“Simon didn’t want to enlist.” I hear myself say.
“I talked him into it.” I press my thumb into the compass tattoo on the outer side of my wrist, the same exact one on Simon’s.
We got them freshman year of college, drunk and already feeling like soldiers.
“He’d found out that a woman he knew was pregnant with his child.
He was still figuring out what that meant, what kind of father he was going to be.
I sat across from him and told him the army was the answer.
That we’d serve, save money, come back better men.
” I dig my thumb harder into the ink. “He wasn’t sure. He said so. But I kept talking.”
The wind breezes through the valley below, and a flock of birds fly across the orange sky.
“After a while he said yes. Because I managed to talk him into it. We served. And then he died.” I don’t look at her. “And Sara doesn’t have a father. She will never have one. Because I kept talking.”
Thea is very still beside me. I can hear her breathing.
“Kilian.” Her voice is quiet, but not soft. Her fingers curl around my forearm. “It’s not your fault.”
I don’t say anything to that, because what do I say? Every day I look at Sara, I see what I took from her. Simon was a good man, and he would have been a good father. She got me instead, and no matter how hard I try, it doesn’t feel close to enough. It’s like a debt that has no bottom.
“You can’t force a grown man to do what he doesn’t want to do.
Not really.” She turns to face me fully.
“Simon heard you. He thought about what you said. He had every reason to say no, a child on the way is a big one, and he still said yes. That was his choice. You don’t get to take that decision away from him. ”
I stare at her, and the words are a wall I can’t get past.
“If you carry all of it as your fault,” she continues, “then you’re saying his decision didn’t matter.” She holds my gaze. “Is that who Simon was? A man who couldn’t think for himself?”
No, Simon wasn’t that. But knowing it and feeling it aren’t the same thing.
I’ve been carrying this for more than three years. Treating it as penance, because holding onto the guilt was the only way any of it made sense.
Am I disrespecting Simon?
The thought lands in the same place as the weight, and I don’t know what to do with it.