Breaking Hammer (Motorcycle Club Romance) (Inferno Motorcycle Club Book 3) (20 page)

"Yes," she said.  "A long time ago."

"How do you get past it?"

"You don't," she said.  "It's just becomes a part of you, woven into who you are."

"It never gets any better, then."

"Pain dulls," Meia said.  "Maybe it's not as sharp as it used to be, yes?"

"Maybe," I said.
 It still felt pretty damn sharp, even after two years.  "Sometimes I don't think I can take it anymore."

"Suffering is a part of life," she said.
 "So is loss.  Struggling against it, not accepting it, does not change it."

"Accept my wife's death as fate or some shit?"
 I asked.  "You're going to tell me it's God's will or something?"

"Nothing so trite, I hope," she said.
 "But accepting the inevitability of the suffering that comes with life makes it less difficult.  Because then you are not struggling against reality."

"Shit, talking to you is making me more depressed than I was before."

Meia was silent, and for a minute I thought she might have hung up the phone.  When she finally spoke, her voice was soft.  "It will pass," she said.

"What will?"

"What you're feeling right now," she said.  "It will pass.  You will keep waking up and one morning, you will find that the darkness is not quite the shade of blackness that it used to be."

I didn't know if I could do it.
 I didn't know if I could just keep waking up, if I could keep putting one foot in front of the other.  "Is that what you did?" I asked.

She was silent for a long time before she finally spoke.
 "No," she said.  "I embraced the darkness."

I hung up the phone, my mind still reeling after talking to Hammer.
 As if I somehow knew him.  I didn't know him.  I needed to remind myself of that fact.  Listening to him talk about his dead wife, the one who was murdered - it didn't mean I knew him.  Just because he had lost someone important didn't mean I understood anything about him.

It didn't mean anything.
 It meant only that he understood loss.  And he knew nothing about me.  I had talked about my loss like it happened a long time ago.  My sister's suicide had happened long ago, but my loss was ongoing.  That I hadn't told him, afraid of getting a man like that involved.

And darkness,
I thought.  That he understood, too.  He was calling because he was steeped in it.  It was a crisis.  I didn't understand the crisis exactly, but I knew that much.  I understood desperation - blackness- when I heard it.  I'd been there so many times before.

I
walked out of the bathroom, my phone in my hand, and set it on the nightstand.  Aston rolled over, mumbling something incoherently in his sleep.  It was risky, unfathomably so, taking Hammer's call, speaking to him in whispers in the bathroom.  I stood there for a moment beside the bed, looking at Aston’s sleeping form.  He looked peaceful, lying there, his chest rising and falling with each breath.  Like he had nothing weighing on his conscience.

Conscience.
 As if he had one.  He had no conscience, nothing to worry about, that much I was certain of.

It would be so easy to kill him, right now.

If not for Ben.

Aston rolled over onto his side, then propped his head up on his hand, letting his eyes roam the length of my body.
 He trailed a finger down the middle of my back and over my rear, and I shivered at his touch.

"Meia," he said.
 "Your body is perfection."

I closed my eyes,
murmured something unintelligible in response.  I didn't want to hear Aston talk about my body.  Instead, I pretended to still be dozing, while all the while my mind was preoccupied with thoughts of him.

Hammer.

There was something bizarrely comforting about listening to Hammer talk.  I'm not even sure why I gave him my number, except that there was something...wounded...about him, like a dog that had been abused.  But it was more than that.  There was something more than sadness behind his eyes - there was anger.  And
that
I was familiar with.  That was a look I recognized.  I'd seen it in myself countless times.

I wasn't sure why I kept talked to him on the phone.
 He felt like a kindred spirit.

Of course, I also couldn't help but think about how he'd looked at me that first day we met, that fire in his eyes that sent a surge of arousal through me.
 That wasn't exactly something I was familiar with.

Aston's touch jolted me back to reality, his fingers between my legs, inching their way forward, touching me.
 "You're wet," he whispered.

But it wasn't because of Aston.
 It was the thoughts of Hammer that were making me wet.

I rolled over onto my side, looked into Aston's eyes.
 And as his hands began to roam my body, touching my breasts, then his fingers slipping inside me, I found my thoughts wandering like they always did.  It was the same thing I'd done since I was a child, back when I'd been forced to endure what I'd had to endure.  I was an expert at drifting away, to a fantasy place in my mind.

But this time, for the first time, I thought of someone else.
 
Hammer.

And that fact sent a rush of fear through my heart.
  I didn't need anyone to make me think of the possibility that there might be more than this for me in life.  I didn't need to put anyone else in harm's way.  I already had my sister's blood on my hands.  I had failed to protect her.  I was responsible for my son's life now.  That was the most important thing.

I embraced the darkness.

Meia's words echoed in my head.
 Embrace the darkness.  Not fight it.  Maybe it was part of my nature.  Maybe it was fighting against it that was killing me inside.

So I started embrac
ing my own darkness.  By data searching Meia.  She’d told me to leave it alone, but I couldn’t.  I wanted to know who she was, and whether she was safe.  I wanted to know why she was with Aston.

I wanted to know everything about her.

But with all my skills, I’d basically found nothing.  She was a blank slate before she was with Aston.  She'd been photographed on his arm a number of times over the past two years.  But prior to that?  It was like she'd never existed.

I wanted to know why.

I think it was also because I couldn't sit there anymore at night, alone, thinking about April being gone.  I couldn't sit there in the darkness, thinking about where I'd gone wrong with my daughter, about whether or not she'd ever be okay, or whether she'd be depressed forever.

I told myself it was out of concern for Meia that I did what I did next.
 And that I didn't tell her.