Tiger
TALKING TO SUMMER about my shitty past was something I definitely didn’t want to do. But she’d looked so hurt that I couldn’t seem to stop myself. If she wanted to hear it, then where would be the harm in telling her?
It was all in the past now anyway. It didn’t have any fucking power over me.
I got Summer to sit on the stool at the counter that divided the rest of my space from the kitchen, while I opened the fridge and got out some eggs and bacon.
If she wanted to hear this shit, then I’d tell her while I cooked, give me something else to focus on. Of course I’d rather have given her the orgasm I owed her, but she clearly wasn’t going to drop this until I’d given it to her.
You want to tell her, come on.
Well, okay, maybe I did. She’d been upfront with me about her asshole of a father and how he’d basically undermined her confidence, making her think she was to blame for her mother leaving. Making her scared of him.
It made me want to punch that fucker in the face so hard it was a good thing Summer was here to distract me with my own issues. Because I was definitely itching to get on my bike, take a trip down to the station and confront that asshole. Not a good idea, what with him being the police chief and all.
Trying to ignore the urge towards violence, I put some coffee in the coffee maker, then got a pan prepared for the eggs and bacon. I could feel her staring at my back, waiting for me to speak, and since this wasn’t going to get any easier, plus the fact that I wasn’t a fucking pussy, I just came out with it. ‘No, Mom never came back for me. I never knew why she left. One day she was there, the next she was gone.’
‘Did you...try to find her?’
‘Yeah, but I was only sixteen. I wanted to go to the cops, see if they could find her, but I’d got a name for myself by that stage and I didn’t want to draw attention. Plus...’ I grimaced as I cracked the eggs into the pan. ‘Mom was a whore. The cops don’t want to involve themselves with that if they don’t have to.’
‘No, I understand,’ she said quietly. ‘So what did you do?’
‘I’d already started prospecting for the Knights so they took me in, helped me out. Looked out for me. They became my family.’
‘Do they know about the reading thing?’
I slapped some bacon down beside the eggs. ‘No. Smoke’s maybe guessed, but we’ve never talked about it. I can write my own name and sign shit, so that’s not a problem. I can dictate texts on my phone and it reads them out to me, plus I can do the same with emails on the laptop. I’ve got a system worked out so it’s fine.’
‘But you never wanted to learn? Not once?’
I stared at the cooking food, pushing it around with a fork. I’d always told myself it didn’t matter that I couldn’t read. Sure, it was fucking annoying sometimes, but I’d managed to get through life without so far. Why bother learning when I was fine?
You know why you haven’t learned.
‘About a year after Mom left, I got a letter.’ The words were out before I could stop them, and now they were out, there was nothing for it but to go on. ‘It was addressed to me and I recognised the handwriting. It was from Mom. She’d tried when I was younger to teach me a few basics of the alphabet so I could recognise a few things, like my name and stuff. But I couldn’t read a whole letter and she knew that.’
Behind me there was silence.
I pushed around the bacon again, watching it sizzle. Fuck. This was harder than I’d expected. ‘I wanted to throw the fucking thing away, tear it up, but I didn’t. I carried it around with me for months. I thought about getting someone to read it to me, but that would mean admitting I couldn’t read it. Also I just...’
‘You were angry at her.’ Summer’s voice was soft.
She’s not wrong.
I gritted my teeth. Yeah, okay. Maybe I was. ‘The next year I got another one and then another. I kept getting them. So now I’ve got this pile of letters upstairs and I still haven’t read a fucking word.’
There was another long silence.
I flipped over the eggs and made sure the bacon didn’t burn, trying not to think about those goddamn letters and how much I didn’t want to know what was in them.
Because you don’t want to know why she left in case it was your fault.
It wasn’t my fault. I hadn’t done a goddamn thing. She was the one who’d left me. Without a fucking word. Not even bothering to tell me where she was going and taking Tommy with her, too.
I used to tell myself I didn’t care, that it didn’t touch me. But of course it had. I’d never forgiven her, not after everything I’d tried to do for her. Protecting her from the pricks that would have hurt her, getting some part-time work under the table and giving her the cash for when things were tight, looking after Tommy so she could work...
Then she’d left. Thanks for nothing, Tiger.
The food was ready so I slid the eggs and bacon onto some plates and carried one over to her, getting out a knife and fork for her, too.
She gave me a quick glance as I put the silverware down before glancing down at her plate. ‘This looks delicious. I could read them for you, if you like.’
She said the last sentence in exactly the same tone as the first and I almost missed it. Then I heard. And I had to turn away, going for the coffee maker, because I didn’t know what the fuck to say.
Okay, that was a lie. I knew.
‘No.’ I pulled out a couple of mugs from the shelf. ‘I don’t want to know.’
Another silence.
Then she said, ‘I didn’t think you were a coward, Tiger.’
I snapped my head around, a surge of anger going through me, and met her blue eyes. They were clear and direct, and didn’t flinch away even though I must have been snarling. ‘No one calls me a fucking coward,’ I growled. ‘No one.’
Her chin lifted a little. ‘Then why haven’t you got someone to read them to you?’
‘Because I don’t need to know what the fuck is in them.’
‘Bullshit,’ she said sternly. ‘I think you do. I think you’re desperate to know. But you’re afraid of what you might find.’
‘I’m not—’
‘You’re afraid you’re to blame, aren’t you?’
I don’t know how she saw through me, right the way through to my goddamn shrivelled-up excuse for a soul, but she did. And this time I was the one who had to turn away, using making the coffee as an excuse not to have to deal with the look in her eyes.
‘I know what it’s like, Tiger,’ she went on, clearly not picking up on my ‘shut the hell up’ vibes. ‘I know what it’s like to blame yourself. I mean, wasn’t that what you told me about my own mother just now?’
I stalked over to the fridge for some cream. ‘It’s not the same.’
‘You said that already. But it is. We both had people leave us and we both don’t know why. God, at least your mother reached out to you. I would have given anything for a letter from mine.’
The wistfulness in her voice hit me like a hammer to the back of the head, making me stop dead.
You tool. Sulking over some fucking letters. She’s right. You’re being a pussy about this, not to mention selfish. At least you can find out what happened to your mom. She can’t.
Slowly I resumed walking to the fridge, pulling it open and getting the cream out. Then I carried it over to the counter where I’d left the mugs of coffee and splashed some in. I stood there for a second looking down at the coffee mugs, my chest feeling tight. Wanting to put my fist through a wall or get on my bike or pull apart an engine or just carry Summer up to the bed and fuck her into the middle of next week.
Basically, do anything but think about those letters.
But they wouldn’t let me alone and neither would her accusation. Yeah, fuck. She was right. I was being a pussy about this.
‘Tiger, is that the reason you never learned to read? So you didn’t have to find out what was in those letters?’
I blinked down at the mugs, the question bouncing around inside me like a pinball in a machine, hitting things, lighting things up.
Fuck, was she right?
‘No,’ I growled, denying the thought and trying to make it sound less like the lie it was. ‘What the hell kind of pussy would that make me?’
‘It wouldn’t make you a pussy at all.’ She sounded very patient. ‘That stuff is...hard. And you’re trying to protect yourself.’
‘I’m not a fucking kid,’ I ground out, her tone irritating me. ‘I’m not trying to protect myself. And I don’t care why she left.’
‘I think you do care,’ she disagreed, unfazed by my shitty temper. ‘Why else have you still got them? If you didn’t care, you would have thrown that first letter away. But you didn’t. You kept it. And then you kept all the rest, too.’
Jesus. Maybe she was right. Why had I kept them all this time? I didn’t even know. I just knew that every time one came in the mail, I stuck it in the box with the others, closed it up and went on not thinking about them.
You kept them for a reason, douchebag.
Something curled up tight in my chest, a cold, uncomfortable feeling. It was familiar. The same one that had dogged me ever since I’d sat on my mother’s bed in that empty apartment, listening for keys in the lock and the opening of the front door. Listening and hearing nothing but silence. Waiting all night for someone to come home, the cold feeling in my chest getting colder and colder, heavier and heavier as I realised that no one was coming home.
No one was ever coming home.
They’d left me and I didn’t have the first fucking clue as to why.
So find out.
Ah, fuck.
‘You told me that I wasn’t to blame for my mom leaving,’ Summer said after a moment. ‘Which means that you can’t blame yourself for yours.’
I shut my eyes, tension crawling along my shoulders.
Maybe I really was afraid of what those letters would tell me and not being able to read was just a convenient excuse. Whatever, she was right about one thing: I needed to know once and for all what had happened to Mom and Tommy, not pretend the issue didn’t exist the way I’d been doing for the last fifteen years of my life.
Summer had been able to face the stuff to do with her father, so what the hell was my excuse? I was a goddamn enforcer for the Knights of Ruin MC. I was a badass motherfucker. Yet I didn’t want to read a bunch of letters from my own mother?
Fucking hell. What a dick I was.
You could find out where they are. You could see them.
Yeah, that was maybe a step too far. I was too angry, no point in denying it now. Fucking angry. I’d been telling myself for years that she must have had her reasons for leaving, for not telling me where she was going, and that I was okay with it.
But I wasn’t okay with it. I never had been.
And one thing was for sure; I’d never be okay with it until I found out the truth of why she’d left and put the whole goddamn issue behind me once and for all.
I opened my eyes, picked up the mugs and strode over to where Summer sat, putting one down beside her. She watched me, her food untouched, blue eyes full of concern. Full of caring.
She shouldn’t look at me like that. I wasn’t her business.
‘Eat,’ I growled. ‘And then you can read me those fucking letters.’
She blinked. ‘Are you sure?’
‘No. But you’re right. I’ve got the chance to at least find out why she left so I should take it.’
Her expression softened, her mouth curving into the most beautiful fucking smile. Christ, she was like sunshine, sitting there in my shitty apartment, about to eat the meal I’d cooked for her. A ray of perfect sunshine, lighting the whole place up, making it brighter than it was before.
Making everything brighter than it was before.
That cold feeling in my chest began to fade away, melting like goddamn snow, leaving behind it heat.
I wanted to pull her across the counter, put my mouth on her, taste her sweetness. Have all that sunshine on me, covering me. Get it inside me somehow, so that cold feeling would never come back.
Dangerous, dumbass. She’s not for you.
No, she wasn’t.
But maybe for the next few hours she could be.