Burn Down the Night (Everything I Left Unsaid #3)- Molly O'Keefe Page 0,60
I understood all too well.
Completely and all at once, I was done talking.
“What if I’m not hungry for steak?” I asked, cutting through the bullshit, “getting to know you” small talk that didn’t mean shit to people like us.
His lips twitched. “You want to have sex with me, Joan?”
“I want to have sex. You’re here.”
He laughed, tilting his head back and just filled the pool area with the sound of his laughter.
“Such a sweet talker. I can see why I married you.”
That made me laugh. For real.
“I don’t think you want to have sex with me,” he said.
“Why?” I laughed. “Because I’m bi? If you’re unfamiliar with the definition—”
“Not because you’re bi. Because you’re scared.” We weren’t laughing anymore. Our chests rose and fell in time, like we were on some kind of synced clock. Both of us forgot the beer and the steak. The pool in front of us, glowing like a bad memory.
“I’m not scared of you,” I whispered.
“You’re scared of something,” he said. “So am I. It’s why we haven’t touched. It’s why we stayed away from each other for months at the club.”
He was impossibly right. More right than I wanted to think about. Or look too hard at.
“It’s like the thing with the neighbors,” he said. “Someone calls the cops and both of us get yanked in. Mutual assured destruction. You and I have sex, get involved in that way…both of us burn. Both of us. We’ll tear each other apart until there’s nothing left to walk away from.”
I swallowed, but my mouth was dry. It was like every bit of moisture in my body was pooling between my legs.
“And you got a self-destruct button a mile wide, Joan.”
Oh, it was my drama that was too much. Hilarious.
“Yours isn’t? You’re the president of a motorcycle club. If that’s not a death wish waiting to happen I don’t know what is.”
I drained the rest of my beer and swung my legs over the edge of the lawn chair, ready to get up. Ready to give him a little speech about how he would be sleeping on the love seat tonight.
“I went to Arizona,” he said, and I stopped. Half-braced to leave—I froze. “That’s where I was when I was gone a while ago. I went to Arizona, because my mother is buried there and I realized I’d never seen her grave. And that I should. Because I was probably going to die. Either the assholes I called brothers were going to kill me, or I was going to get killed for them. And then I got out there and I got away from them, from the fucking back stabbing and the drama and the danger and…I decided not to go back. It was a fucked-up call, you know. Because the club was all I had ever known. It was all I’d ever wanted. Or thought I could have. But I had watched my Dad get fucked over by his “brothers.” I had watched them sell my mother drugs behind his back. I had watched them fuck her and then lie to Pops’s face. I got the president patch and I thought I could make it different. I could force us, this like random group of sociopaths to be brothers. To love each other. To look out for each other…that was the dream. It’s why guys paid dues and suffered through prospect shit. It’s why they strapped on guns and did terrible things in the name of the club. It’s why I did it. Because we were supposed to trust each other. We were supposed to be more family than our own flesh and blood. But in the end—there was no loyalty. No trust. Just a long line of men ready to put a bullet in my head for their own fucked-up reasons.”
He turned toward me again, his lips curled in a smile that made my heart ache. “So, yeah, I left. And I was going to stay away but my brother called me back and I went back, knowing it was the end for me. Lagan. The club. Pops. Any one of those things could have killed me. I never expected it would be you with a bomb strapped to a chair. But I wasn’t even surprised when Rabbit pulled that gun.”
He hadn’t been. I’d seen his face that night, resolved in the firelight. He’d seen that moment coming a mile away. And again, I understood that down to my feet.