Eleven
She woke to bright sunlight against her eyelids, and slowly opened them, squinting. It was morning, early judging by the slant of the cold rays filtering through the windows. She was sore all over, and tired, her limbs heavy with fatigue, but it wasn’t an unpleasant feeling. She was still snuggled down in Michael’s bed, the covers tucked beneath her chin. But Michael was no longer beside her; he sat on the edge of the bed, massaging his scalp with his fingers, working his hair up into disarray in what struck her as a habitual morning behavior.
All of this she noticed with a fast glance, and then she sucked in a breath, when her gaze latched onto the wings.
From the base of his neck to the base of his spine, spanning the entire width of his back were two massive feathered, folded wings, their roots at his shoulder blades, their tops curving up over his trapezius muscles, the pointed tips falling softly at his hips. They were rendered in gorgeous detail in black and gray ink, a tattoo that seemed alive, ready to lift and stretch, and blot out all the light from the window. In magazines, and in the locker room while the other girls changed out of their uniforms after work, she’d seen wing tattoos, most of them small and cartoonish. These were nothing like those. Stunning, graceful, textural…she thought she might feel the fibers of the feathers if she touched them.
And so she did. Holly sat up and leaned toward him, laying her hand against one wing, and feeling only the smoothness of his skin.
His back tightened beneath her touch; he stiffened all over.
“Michael, they’re beautiful,” she said with reverence, letting her index finger trace the shape of one feather. When he didn’t respond – he didn’t pull away, which she took as encouragement – she scooted closer, and let her fingers keep wandering, tracing. “Did it hurt?”
His head shifted toward her, so he could see her over his shoulder. “Yeah. It bled a lot.”
“Worth it,” she said, smiling. “They’re so pretty.” She let her head fall against his back, so her cheek was pressed to the warm, tattooed skin. “Do you have any others?”
“Nah, only those.”
“Those are enough.”
He made a grunting sound that she thought was an agreement. “You hungry?”
“Starving.”
He found a long-sleeved shirt and old cotton sweatpants for her to wear. They swallowed her up, the legs of the pants puddling around her ankles, the sleeves hanging off the ends of her hands. She pushed them back, folding them up three times, pushing them to her elbows, and then gave him a quiet smile, to show him that it was fine, and she was happy and could make do. Her hair was in messy knots on her shoulders and her makeup had been smudged last night; there were traces of mascara on the pillow, smell of her soap between the sheets. Looking at her, as she adjusted the sleeves one last time and asked if he had eggs that she could cook them for breakfast, Michael was gripped by the urge to throw her down on the bed and have her all over again.
He didn’t do it, of course, but the fact that he wanted to frightened him a little.
“Yeah,” he said, pulling on a shirt. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
She didn’t need showing, though, leading the way down the hall back to the kitchen, legs of the sweatpants folding around her tiny feet and making scuffing sounds against the carpet. Such a little thing, he reflected, staring down at the top of her head from behind, able to measure the span of her waist with one hand. She carried herself with the quiet confidence of a larger person, though, as she went into his kitchen and opened up the fridge. Everything about her movements was easy and unhurried. There was nothing proprietary about the way she pulled out the carton of eggs. Not a woman taking over, or feeling entitled, no. Just someone who was at ease with him now. They’d been as close as two people could get, and now she was comfy, and relaxed, and her eyes were affectionate as she looked at him and asked, “How do you like your eggs?”
“Scrambled.”
Another smile. “Me too.”
He got down skillet and spatula for her, two plates from the old widow’s collection that he set on the counter beside the stove. Then he started the coffee. For years, he’d bought his morning cup of black at whatever gas station or doughnut shop was most convenient. At home for Christmas one year, Wynn had fussed at him. “You know how much money that wastes?” he’d demanded. Michael had felt guilty. He was the sort of man who ought to make his own coffee, and so he had ever since, and had plenty of filters and dark roast for the machine.
While it brewed, he propped a hip against the counter and watched Holly work.
Her small hands were familiar with this routine: cracking the egg, catching the drips, tossing the shells, washing at the sink. When she picked up the spatula, she made quick, practiced strokes through the yellow puddle of eggs.
Smudged makeup and all, her face was pale and beautiful, with her sloped nose and her smooth cheeks. There was something peaceful about her, a contentment that radiated outward, and slowly covered him, lowering his blood pressure. She’d been that way from the first time she’d slid into his booth at Bell Bar. How someone with her past could find peace, he didn’t know. Maybe, after all she’d been through, the simple acts of taking an order or making breakfast were a rare joy.
She glanced over at him as she plated the eggs. “You’ll have to let me cook you dinner sometime.”
He shrugged. “I always eat.”
“You eat greasy bar food,” she said with a little laugh. “I meant a real dinner. From scratch.” She handed a plate to him, expression full of hope and longing and question. “Do you like lasagna? I make a pretty good lasagna.”
He took the plate, but didn’t pull it toward him right away, lingered so they both held it, so he could imagine he felt her touch through the china. “Yeah, I like lasagna.”
She beamed, and he knew he was sunk.
**
Mercy was saying something in the living room that Ava couldn’t hear above the swish of the toothbrush in her mouth. She spit, rinsed, racked the brush, and said, “What?” as she left the bathroom.
He was doing pushups on the rug in front of the couch, shirtless, in track pants, the morning sunlight gliding across all the muscles in his back and arms as he levered up again and again in quick succession.
Ava propped a shoulder against the doorjamb and smiled to herself, watching. “Mmm, that’s what a girl likes to see first thing in the morning. Work it.”
“Stop objectifying me.” He panted and laughed at the same time.
“I seem to recall there being a comment about my ass last night,” she reminded.
“If your ass doesn’t want a comment, then you shouldn’t go grinding it against a guy’s crotch in the middle of the night.”
“It’s debatable who started that.”
“Whatever. You wanted it.”
She laughed. “Right. So, what did you say before?”
He finished his set with a deep exhale and sat back on his heels, breathing hard.
Ava took a quick, clinical inventory of him in the daylight. He was gaining back some of the weight he’d lost while his leg was recovering. He was still thin, but his chest was hard, glimmering with a light sheen of sweat.
She forced her eyes up to his.
He was nodding toward the babbling TV. “They’re talking about that girl that got murdered on the news.”
Ava turned her attention to the old console set, and the hair spray-shellacked anchor who was reporting live outside of Bell Bar. The woman was bundled up in wool coat, scarf, and bright pink ear muffs, her breath misting as she stood on the sidewalk in front of the bar, her face crimped with displeasure at the awful cold.
“…Police are still searching for a suspect in the death of local waitress Carly Adams. Adams was killed five nights ago outside the popular Bell Bar” – the anchor pronounced the name of the bar with a crispness that hinted she’d never said it before – “where she worked. According to eye witness testimony…”
“Have you guys heard anything about that?” Ava asked, turning back to Mercy. “There’s not some serial killer on the loose, is there?”
Mercy shrugged, frowning as he continued to stare at the screen. “There’s been nothing in the outlaw grapevine. Whoever killed her isn’t on our radar. Musta just been a pissed off boyfriend or something. Mugging gone bad.” But she could tell he wasn’t satisfied with the lack of answers. The Dogs liked to keep a firm finger on the crime in this city.
He got to his feet, and Ava didn’t miss the slight grimace that meant his knee was still hurting him. She bit back a comment. She was going to have to trust that he wouldn’t overdo it with the workouts; she was tired of griping at him about it and getting a stone-faced response that reminded her eerily of her father.
“Are y’all looking into it?” she asked.
He sat down on the sofa. “Dunno. I just do what they tell me to.”
Ava snorted as she went to sit beside him, settling sideways with her legs pulled up so she faced his profile, that sharp French aristocracy line of his nose. “Poor baby. Just an attack dog, huh?”
He leaned back against the cushions, rolled his head toward her and sent her a comically sad look. “Yeah. Poor me. You wanna console me?”
He’d pulled her up into his lap when they both heard the startling sound of a key going into the lock from the landing outside. Ava lifted her head, breaking the kiss the same moment the door opened, and there was her dad, framed by the weak glow of morning sun, standing at their front step.
He greeted them with, “Jesus, are you ever not doing that?” and a fierce scowl as he stepped in and heeled the door shut.
“Morning, Dad,” Ava said, sliding off Mercy’s lap to sit tucked beside him. “How are you? We’re fine. How nice of you to drop by.”
He aimed a finger at her in warning, the way he’d always done.
“My house,” she said, quietly, chin lifting.
“She sasses who she wants to here,” Mercy said, with a decisive scowl. “And forget ‘good morning.’ How the hell’d you get a key?”
Ghost’s hands went to his hips, his chest lifting, jaw grinding as he struggled internally. He looked as stern and commanding as always, but Ava could see the helpless frustration in his dark eyes, so much like her own and Aidan’s. He was at all times consumed by the authority his presidency afforded him. But here, in their house, he didn’t have that MC reach. He didn’t know what to think about that.
“Mags has a spare. In case of emergency.”
“And the emergency is…”
“I got a call from Abraham Jessup this morning,” Ghost said, settling some, more comfortable talking club business than anything personal. His eyes flicked over to Ava, a pointed glance.
She nodded and got to her feet, trailing a hand affectionately across Mercy’s chest as she moved toward the kitchen.
Behind her, she heard Ghost say, “His son-in-law’s gone missing. He wants to see us.”
“You don’t have guests over very often, do you?” Holly sat across from him at the round wooden table in the kitchen, knees drawn up so her feet perched on the edge of the chair, coffee mug held in both hands.
“Never,” he admitted, shocked that he’d done so. Looking at her face just made his mouth open up and his tongue start moving.
She wasn’t like other women, though. There was no censure or laughter in her eyes as she nodded. She wasn’t judging him for being a recluse. After all, she didn’t have friends or guests either.
“Why do you want to know?” he pressed.
Her expression became sad, wistful. “Because I’m afraid you’re going to spend Christmas alone.”
“Christmas?”
“It’s the day after tomorrow.”
“I know.” And usually he was on the road by now, headed out to the farm. Usually, he’d already checked in with Uncle Wynn, about when he’d be arriving, and how long he’d be staying; they would have had the usual small talk about the dogs, distinctly not talking about the Dogs, leaving that conversation for the last day, before he left, when Uncle Wynn cautioned him yet again about the way a lonely life on the road was unhealthy for a man, as if he had any room to talk.
“Weren’t you going to spend it alone?” he asked Holly.
“Yes.”
He held her eyes a moment, held them a beat too long, until it couldn’t be written off as a natural pause.
Holly unfolded her legs and stood, collected their empty plates. “I should get these in the dishwasher,” she said in a voice he knew was falsely cheerful. Her back looked tense, inside the borrowed shirt, as she rinsed the dishes at the sink.
Michael felt a stab of regret. She felt bad now, and that made him feel bad, but he didn’t know how to fix it. The girl needed friends. She needed a family – a real one, that had no relation to the filth that had raised her. So what did he do, invite her to have Christmas with him?
In truth, he was feeling in desperate need of seeing her again, and again.
“I guess I should get going,” she said, still facing away from him, loading the dishwasher. “I have to work this afternoon, and I should go by the store first, and–”
“Holly.”
She closed the dishwasher and turned to face him, eyes wide with sudden nerves.
“Have you ever had Christmas?”
She glanced down at her bare toes, peeping from the hems of the pants, and he saw the tiny shudder move through her.
“Hol.”
Her eyes came up to his face, and her mouth was very small and bow-shaped, pressed tight with the revulsion of her memories.
“What I meant was, have you ever had a nice dinner, and a drink, and a fire to sit in front of on Christmas?”
She shook her head.
Michael swallowed and felt the dry sides of his throat sticking together. His mother hadn’t had those things either, because her husband had killed her before they could start a new life at Uncle Wynn’s.
He looked at Holly’s complete delicacy of form, the way she was as beautiful as she was, in ways he couldn’t quantify, despite the awful things done to her. Camilla was twenty-seven years in the ground, but he could do something for Holly. He could settle the cosmic score just a little.
And he needed so much more of what they’d had last night.
“You can come here,” he told her. “We can have Christmas.”
It was wondrous, to watch her absorb his words, and hold them in close behind her eyes to stop the tears, the breath lodging in her throat. “I can cook,” she said, in a quiet, straining voice. “I can make all the things you’re supposed to make.”
Michael nodded. “I got plenty of whiskey and firewood.”
She smiled, and it cracked, and her lips trembled.
Michael wanted to go to her, but it felt too soon and dangerous to do that, so he stared down into his coffee instead.
It was too cold to even think about putting her shorts back on, and besides that, Michael wouldn’t hear of it. “You’re gonna catch pneumonia and die,” he said, and insisted she keep the clothes he’d given her to wear. That was fine with her; they smelled like him, and the cedar drawer of the dresser he’d pulled them from.
In the bathroom, she scrubbed her face, combed her hair and tied it back with an elastic from her purse, and then it really was time for her to go, and she didn’t want to.
She faced him in the foyer, the house looking even more dated, but charming around them in the daylight. She twisted her hands together as the nerves stole over her, and as she stared up into his unforgiving face. It was a different breed of nerves from last night, though. Now, she was nervous about leaving him, breaking the spell of last night. She didn’t want to lose this, whatever it was. It was the most wonderful, precious thing, and she wanted to hold it close, to preserve it in her cupped hands and keep it burning.
Michael, again with the power to read her thoughts, said, “The other two will be cautious now, but I’ll get to them. They won’t be able to hide for long.”
She smiled, marveling at this new soft underbelly in his voice, and at the way such harsh words were like the sweetest love poetry to her ears. She nodded. “I know you will. You’re…you’re wonderful…”
“Ah, Holly, don’t…”
“But I mean it!” She stepped in close to him, her heart pounding. She couldn’t hold her hands back, clutching at the hard knots of his biceps. “I know it doesn’t mean much, coming from me, but you’re wonderful for what you did.” She felt the pressure of tears at the backs of her eyes and blinked against them. “What you did for me…” She bit down hard on her lip, on the verge of losing her composure completely. How could she make him understand what this meant to her? All of it.
He swallowed, his throat rippling in a way that looked like it hurt. His eyes were trained on her face, a striking depth to the hazel centers she hadn’t seen before. He wasn’t going to speak, she realized, only stare at her. But she felt his hands at the backs of her arms, clutching her as she clutched him.
“Oh, Michael.” She flung her arms around his neck, pressed herself against him and strained on her tiptoes, so she could tuck her face into the crook of his neck. The disbelief and the joy and the rapture crashed over her again, too consuming to be real. “You killed him. You really did, you killed him.”
His voice was thick. His hands were against her back, smoothing up and down the length of her spine. “I really did.”
“Tell me how to thank you,” she said against this throat, kissing the skin there. “I’ll do anything.”
He put his hands on her shoulders and eased her back, so she could see his face again, the pain pressed into the sinister lines of it. “Don’t thank me.”
She started to protest, and he shook his head. He wasn’t going to talk about this, acknowledge what it meant to her.
“When’s dinner tonight?” he asked, changing the subject without grace, his gaze almost desperate.
Holly reeled in her composure, lowering down onto her heels, nodding. “I get off at ten. So, eleven? It’ll take the lasagna a while to bake.”
“I’ll come by the bar.”
The tears rallied again, in her eyes, putting pressure on her sinuses. He had to know how excruciatingly magical it felt to think that a man who had killed for her, who had given her the first physically pleasurable moment of her life, would then come wait for her after work. Was this what normal girls felt? Was this the wondrous comfort Ava Lécuyer had in her husband?
“Okay,” she whispered.
But as she was turning for the door, his hands captured her, curled lightly around her throat. And he kissed her with the sudden, assured fervor of a drowning man.
Holly opened her mouth against his, melted into his chest, as his arms stole around her. She let him in and in, his tongue and his lips, and his hands going under her shirt in the back, finding her warm naked skin, overcome by the thought that in this small way, giving herself over to him, she was easing a deep ache he carried inside himself.
His breathing was ragged as he pulled back, his eyes liquid and sparkling, the way they’d been last night.
“Go,” he urged.
And she laid her hands against his face, and whispered, “I can’t wait to see you again,” before she left.
Michael stood in the foyer a long time after the front door closed, after he’d watched the Chevelle go rumbling out of his driveway. The house was silent as a tomb. Mocking him.
You thought you liked all this loneliness, it whispered to him, in the utter stillness. You were wrong.