Chapter 23 #2
I pull her closer, falling silent, waiting for the moment she peels herself away from me and climbs out of my bed.
Exhaustion tugs at my eyelids. I fight to keep them open, but I’m waning.
Those fingers start moving again. Running up my stomach to my chest, tracing the scar, the tattoo, skimming over my jawline.
A heavy weight settles on my body, my limbs relaxing.
All I feel is Grace. Her hair tickling my neck, her breath on my skin, her?—
I’m driving home from shift. The road feels different somehow, the leaves the colour of fall when I know it’s August.
Emily’s upset with me. I should comfort her, but I don’t. I’m tired of having the same argument. Tired of feeling like maybe we’ve outgrown this thing we’ve built.
She wants to leave, and even though I keep telling myself I could stomach it, I know deep down I can’t. I’ll lose her before I lose this fight.
I’ve got her laughing. She takes her seat belt off.
That song again.
Linc!
Dead, cold eyes. Pale skin. Lips cracked.
Decker!
Someone’s shouting my name. But I can’t look away from her, from the blood pouring from the gash in her head, from her mouth and nose. There’s too much of it.
Emily’s hand finds her stomach. “Don’t you remember, Linc? We don’t survive this.”
Linc! Decker!
I snap my eyes open. My heart jumps to my throat. Emily’s right in front of me. In my fucking bed. Her pale, dead face hovering over me.
“Shit!” I yell as I push her away and throw myself from my bed. I stumble and land hard on my ass, then spider crawl back until I hit my bedroom wall.
“Linc,” a voice says, calmer this time, but shaky. Grace’s voice.
I blink. Grace. Not Emily. Alive. Not dead.
Slowly, I push up. My skin is slick with sweat, heart a jackhammer thrashing against my rib cage. And Grace is… I swallow. Kneeling on my mattress, eyes wide, hands up in defence, like she’s shielding herself. From me. She’s scared. I scared her.
I clear my throat. “Grace. I uh… I’m sorry. Did I…?”
Did I put my hands on you? Did I hurt you?
I pushed her, didn’t I?
My pulse kicks up a notch, my stomach lurching to my throat. That familiar feeling sets in. Guilt, blame, resentment. That same anger that chipped away at my old man, taking pieces of him, breaking him.
Breath held, I clench my fists.
Grace tilts her head, tracking the movement. “You were having a nightmare.”
My pulse only beats faster. Shit. Deep. Fucking. Breaths. “Yeah.”
“About Emily?” When I don’t respond, she says, “You were yelling her name.”
My shoulders tense. Fucking of course I was. I run a hand through my damp hair and push back the feelings, the sound of that song. Those dead fucking eyes. Everything I lost that day, everything I did after. Everything?—
“What the hell are you still doing here?” I snap.
Grace flinches at my tone, then hurt flashes across her face.
Fuck. I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean it to come out like that. I’m not used to this—someone in my bed. Someone in my life.
“Right.” With an icy glare, she hops off the bed and starts gathering her clothes.
Shit. “Grace. I just, uh, I just meant I’m surprised you’re still here.”
Ignoring me, she pulls on her jeans and grabs her phone.
“Wait. Hold on a second. Just… just don’t go, all right?”
She’s heading towards my bedroom door. She’s going to leave. Because I did that thing again. Because I don’t know how to be better. How to stop being so pissed off all the time.
“See you, Decker,” she says as she breaches the boundary of my bedroom.
“Please, Grace.”
She pauses. I say that word again. Please.
The game we play. First one to beg loses.
And I think I’m begging, but I only lose if she walks out that door.
I’m so tired of this. Being alone with nothing but nightmares to keep me company.
Of my life, of what I’ve let it turn into.
And this situation. Just sex. We agreed.
It’s nothing. But maybe I’m tired of having to watch her leave every night.
“Please,” I say again. “Just… don’t. Okay? Don’t leave.”
“And why the hell shouldn’t I?” She folds her arms across her chest.
I rub the back of my neck and sigh. “I’m sorry, all right? I didn’t mean to say it that way. I’m not used to waking up beside someone. It threw me off. I was just surprised you stuck around. All I meant by it.”
Her expression only hardens. It’s not good enough.
She wants an explanation, to understand where my head’s at.
She wants more from me. But I’m not good at that part.
I’m not good at being honest. How can I be?
Half my week, I’m wearing the badge and playing good guy, the other, I’m bumping shoulders with the very criminals that badge is meant to take down.
Most days, I straddle that line so tight I’ve got no fucking clue which side I’m actually on.
But I guess Grace already knows all that.
I clear my throat. “These… dreams I have. The nightmares. They’re really fucked-up. Sometimes when I wake from them, it takes me a second to… acclimate, I guess. I can be a bit?—”
“Of a dick?”
“I was gonna say prickly, but yeah, sure. A dick.”
“I can handle fucked-up, Linc. What I can’t handle is whoever the hell you just turned into. I don’t like the way you talk to me when you’re pissed off. I won’t put up with that shit. I can’t. Not again.”
“Right.” My breath rushes out of me. “Fuck-boy mode.”
A small smirk crawls up the side of her face, but it quickly vanishes, as if she’s caught herself before she can let me off the hook.
“Yeah. And it seems to be your factory default.” Scowl still in place, she takes a few paces forward, shortening the distance between us.
Still wary, still keeping me at arm’s length. “You… want to talk about it?”
“No. I don’t know.” I wipe the sweat from my brow and sigh. “It’s not something I like to put into words.”
“You told me once you don’t sleep. Is this why? Do you dream about her a lot?”
“Lately? Yeah. Almost every night.” My heart has slowed, my breath back to steady and even.
Her throat bobs. “You must still really love her.”
“No. I mean, yeah, of course. We started dating when we were fourteen. That’s a hell of a long time to be with someone.
She was my best friend, you know? That kind of history doesn’t just go away.
But her and I…” I let out another one of those big breaths.
“We weren’t really good at the end. Not sure we would have stuck it out.
But I miss her. I hate that she’s dead. I hate that I have to look in the mirror everyday with that guilt.
I hate… everything that was taken from me that day. ”
Because she’s not the only thing I lost.
I don’t know why, but I want to tell her. Explain. I want her to know. I want someone to know. I need the guilt of it off my chest, the burden of it lifted from my shoulders. Just for tonight. Someone else to hold on to it for me.
Grace steps closer, brows knitting together, reaching out as if she’s about to touch me. But then she seems to think better of it and drops her hand. “I should… go.”
Fuck, please don’t. Please.
“Yeah,” I say slowly. “I guess you should.”
Fucking coward.
“Unless… do you need me to stay?”
Need isn’t the word for it.
She must sense it, that I’m on the edge, about to topple over, guilt-ridden and broken.
Ready to fucking beg because for the first time in years, I don’t want my bed to be empty.
I don’t know how I can keep living like this.
Lonely, pissed off, stuck on an endless loop, reliving that day over and over again.
A shaky breath escapes me. “She, uh, she was pregnant. Emily was. I didn’t know until after she died. Her mom let it slip a few days after I got out of the hospital. It fucked me up a little. A lot, actually. It, uh?—”
My voice cracks. It’s been so damn long since I said the words out loud.
Since I let myself think about it. It’s been easier to pretend I didn’t lose more than just her that day.
But just like the dreams, it nags at me, keeps me up at night.
Reminds me that when I crashed Em’s car into that rock face, I took two lives.
“God, Linc.” Grace closes the distance between us and loops her arms around my waist, pulling me in tight. I rest my chin on her head, leaning into her embrace, the warmth of her skin, the smell of her hair.
Wrapped up in Gracie.
“I’m so fucking sorry,” she murmurs.
An emotion I haven’t felt for a long time crawls its way up into my throat. I have to swallow it down to stop the sob rolling through me from escaping. And that familiar anger that always comes with it. Blood-boiling, pulse-throttling, need-to-kill-something kind of rage.
Maybe she feels that too—my muscles tensing, my heart rate kicking up a few notches—because she suddenly tightens her grip, tugging me closer. Her hold quells the torrent storming in my chest. Stress and agitation leak from my body, and I sigh out a long, deep breath.
“You can go. You don’t have to stay here.”
We’re quiet for a long while, swaying slightly, me clutching her like she’s a goddamn lifeline.
Eventually, she sighs. “Why don’t we get back into bed?”
Not leaving, then. Thank fuck.
It’s more of that quiet as I settle beneath my sheets, and she’s on my chest, those fingers of hers back to tracing over my skin as she rises and falls with the rhythm of my breath.
“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” she says finally. “You don’t have to tell me anything.”
I release a shaky breath. “Maybe I want to.”
She gives me an encouraging squeeze.
That’s all it takes for the words to flow out after almost ten fucking years.
“Before she died, Em and I… we were in this weird place. I wanted to settle in South Bay. Focus on our careers, save some money, get out of our shitty apartment. The family stuff was supposed to happen later. We’d obviously talked about the whole kid thing.
We’d been together for so long at that point, it was one of the next logical steps, you know?
Buy the house, get married, have kids.” I let out a deep sigh.
“She changed the plan. Or maybe I did, I don’t know.
I couldn’t picture this life we’d decided on.
Didn’t see how I’d be happy with it, and she couldn’t figure out how to be happy in South Bay.
So we were… in a sort of limbo. Maybe just waiting for the other to say it. That it was over.”
I stare up at the ceiling, willing the usual images of her dying out of my head.
I hate thinking of her, because this is what I get.
The blank stare, dead eyes, all that blood.
Or the other version of her. The sad smile, the hand I should have squeezed, the stretches of silence, the fight we both kept trying to win.
A reminder that at some point, we let our love slip away, that we decided what we had wasn’t good enough.
“For a couple of weeks before the accident, she was really pushing to leave. We’d agreed to wait, to talk about it down the road. But she wanted the hell out of South Bay, and I was hell-bent on sticking it out in the heart of biker territory. To clean up our town, to make a name for myself.”
Those last words come out bitter. I didn’t really want all the small-town glory my dad had hoped for me, but I wanted to make him proud. Take down the Sinners like he’d been gunning to do for half his career.
“I guess now I know why she was so adamant about leaving this place behind. She knew the danger of staying here. Of what my badge meant in this town. Of what it could mean to raise a kid here.” I swallow, and Grace squeezes tighter.
“I don’t know how far along she was. It must have been early, though.
Early enough that I didn’t notice. Or maybe I wasn’t paying attention.
” I swallow past the lump growing in my throat.
“We should have left. She practically begged me to. If I hadn’t been so stubborn, if I’d have listened to what she was trying to tell me, she’d still be alive.
And I’d have a ten-year-old kid running around. ”
Heat stings at the backs of my eyes. I can barely get out those last words. Me. A father.
It’s almost a joke at this point. The man I was back then? Sure. He could have stepped up. Showed up for our kid. But now? I’m not sure I could stomach it. The man I’ve become has no business being a father.
Grace says nothing. She doesn’t tell me it’s not my fault, that my anger and guilt are misplaced. Because that’s not what I need. There’s nothing she can say to lessen the burden of this weight I carry with me, the grief I can’t let go of.
Eventually, she asks, “What ever happened to him? Do you know? The other guy driving.”
Yeah. I know. All too intimately.
“Dead.”
“Karma.”
“No. Karma had nothing to do with it. That was all me.”
She pauses, looking up at me for the first time since we got back into bed. “You? You mean you?—”
“Killed him. Yeah.”
She tilts her head. “Did it… give you what you needed? Did it help?”
“For a bit,” I admit. “It was… freeing, I guess. I’d never killed anyone before.
I wasn’t even sure I could do it. Wearing the badge means I’m supposed to trust the system to take care of the criminals.
But I didn’t get justice. Emily didn’t get justice.
So I took it upon myself to get it for her. But after…”
The anger came back in full swing. Worse, because when I took that life, I paid a price. The cost of my soul, payable to Axel Donovan.
Grace settles back onto my chest. “So now you’re all… deep breaths and blades.”
I snort. “And punching bags.”
“Right. For what it’s worth, what you did? It was the right thing. It was justice.”
I tilt up her chin and kiss her. It’s long and drawn out, and I almost can’t manage to pull my lips from hers.
She makes it easier to take in air, to pull oxygen into my lungs. It’s a problem. Because this is just sex. Nothing . Which means eventually, it’ll be another thing I lose.
And I’m so fucking tired of losing.