Chapter Two
81
“No flowers today, baby.”
Falling into the soft grass, my eyes fall to the fallen purple petals.
“Feels like a thousand years since you took yourself from me, baby. A thousand years of pain, drugs and club sluts. I take two steps closer to the light but before I know it, I’m a thousand steps away again, forced to look in front of me as my soul walks behind me with you and your thousand different faces looking back at me. Your fingers linked with mine, as your ghost and different smiles haunt me as I am forced to walk without you. Forced to stand alone, not beside the real you.
Broken mirrors paint the floor of my home, as I can’t stand to see you in my eyes. My reflection has you in it always. My mind has you dancing inside it. It’s a cruel, twisted place to live. I can’t seem to let any of this numb, twisted pain out, and I am forced to stand here and scream at you after yet another nightmare, another assault from memories that pull me into the dark grasp and taunt me, eat at me and rip through my soul. Why did you do what you did? Can’t you see I’m dead without you. I’m a haunted shell of the man I was with you. Yes, it wasn’t perfect, but it was us. Yes, it was messy, but it was love. Yes, it was a nightmare, but it was our dream, baby. Fuck! Baby.”
Whispering out over the falling day my fingers run over the names on the headstone. The dates, the descriptions. I had to catch my breath for I realized just how painful it is to live in this life without her, them.
“I’m not coping.” Tears fall from my eyes as the stone-cold body I built broke away. A weeks’ worth of emotions spewing out onto the grass, my vison is blurry and my heart empty.
Ghost has it with Timberly, Blue, baby, well she has it with Knox. Bray, fuck he had it and now Raven’s back, that’s a new shit storm. But they will have it again. I did have it, and in a flash of anger and a hotshot she burnt it all to the ground.
“Thought I would find you here.” Not even needing to look up I know that voice.
“Not now, brother.” I close my eyes and rest my back against the cold stone.
“You have drug me up when I didn’t want it, woken me up when I had drugged my soul and as much as I didn’t fucking want to come find you, I did. So, suck it up and talk.” His dark voice matches my own. I know how much it would have taken for him to get on his bike and come here. The outside world leaves him jagged and longing for sweet temptations. Dragging my fingertips through my hair, I pull at the strands. Blowing out a massive breath, I try so damn hard not to break.
“How long you got, brother?" I ask. My eyes burning into his.
“As long as it takes.” His hand finds my shoulder, squeezing it as he settles in next to me, his back resting on the other side of the shared headstone.
“The taste of her still lingers on my tongue. Just as the soft silk of her skin haunts my mind. She told me that she loved me, but it was all a game. She fucked other men and thought I would wait around. Well no, I got me another lover in the form of a needle and a line of fucking speed. You know this, you boys seen just how fucking deep in the addiction I got.
She took my soul while she set fire to the rain and pulled us both down with her.
Just about pulled the club into her fuck fest of sex, drugs, lies and carnage.
She was an addiction, the storm inside a teacup that I had to bear. She was a ride I didn’t want to get off, of.Even when you all told me too. Took me away from her, took her from me. I came back, she came back, and I messed it all back up. She fucked with my head and drowned my senses.
She was the devil dressed in women’s clothing, a hit so hot that it burned your veins and made you feel the sick taste of death. That’s what we were, death killing each other slowly.” I looked at Ghost, his eyes were staring into the space where the headstones meet the sky. He rolls a cigarette round in his fingertips the bright ember hue dancing in the wind as its catches the smoke sending a trail out in front of him. Taking a smoke from my own pack, I light it and take a deep drag the taste hitting me deep in my lungs a feeling of yes 81, you’re still alive.
“She was yours though brother, and that’s all you seen. We had seen it, the love you had that turned toxic the more punches you took, the more hits you lined up, the more she broke you down. It was still your love story though and who are we to judge and stop it.” Blowing out a lungful of smoke, water was pricking at my eyes as his words smashed into my mind.
“I found her when I was more fucked up than I am now.
She gave me a false taste of what it could have been like.
I never thought I could or would, nah scratch that. I didn’t want to get clean but fuck, I did, brother. I did. You fought with my demons for that and seen me fall, spew, sweat, scream and lose it. I am now clean two long, hard years. But clean I am and it’s because of you and the boys not once leaving me.”
His breath hitches as he tries to stay calm, he feels it, he does. He knows it and he’s fading being here living a past with me that so raw.
“Like you’re doing for me right now, brother. Stone cold fucking sober and still fighting the taste of the devil.” His words ring true in my ears. I know he’s right. I’m giving him what he gave me, the true bond of a brotherhood. No judgement, no questions, just strong-ass hands to tie your ass down until you sweat and shake out the effects. You’re dragged to the edge of pain and a dark illusion that life isn’t a drug-laced coma with nothing but death and destruction.
“It may be clean veins but still death and the haunting images of her, him, them and the old me still linger.The me I wish died with her that night so long ago.
She died on a bed of nails, with the fire in her eyes and a vision of a cross with no comfort form a god. He had wiped his hands of us the moment the needle kissed our veins.
You know I cry out to god to seek forgiveness but it’s the devil who screams back to me.
I created my own prison, it’s a decision that I made, so it’s a place I have to lay.
I am no longer Gods son. I am now the keeper of the gates to hell.
