“Spare me your pompous bullshit, Kaitlyn—”
“ENOUGH!”
I had not expected my roar to cut through the entirety of the noise. Not only did the two nurses shut up, but so did everyone else around me.
Honestly, I was yelling at myself, to try and cut off the flashbacks in my head, the voices that were coming to me, reminding me of that awful day in Ramadi. I was trying to tell the inner demons that I’d had enough. But since the nurses were contributing in their own way and the general chaos of the shop was maddening enough, I wasn’t exactly apologetic about the current situation.
“You’re all still alive,” I snapped. “Every single fucking one of you. We only lost one person, and it’ll stay that way if you just do your fucking jobs. You know what it’s like to lose way more? Way fucking more? And we’re here arguing about if someone isn’t supposed to be here or not? What the fuck is... what the fuck...”
My voice trailed off when I realized that every question I was asking could be answered in the affirmative. Yes, multiple people in that room knew what it was like to lose multiple people in one night. Hell, such a night for Lane is what had led to him and Cole turning into the modern-day Cain and Abel. Anyone who had fought against the Fallen Saints had witnessed multiple nights.
And as for the nurses...
It was all too much. My PTSD, it seemed, had led me to believe that I was special. But I wasn’t fucking special. I was just a shithead who yelled when things got stressful. I was just a child who wore the mask of a charming adult.
Looking around in silence as everyone stared at me became too much. I put my hands on the back of my head, bowed, and walked out. I wasn’t on the verge of tears by any means, but I felt utterly crushed—reality had beaten me down. It had won.
I wasn’t special.
I wasn’t the only person to have lost friends to combat.
I wasn’t the only member of my unit to have survivor’s guilt for what happened that day.
I wasn’t the only man in this building that knew what profound loss felt like—in fact, with Lane standing right there, I was probably not even the one who had suffered the most.
I slowly walked out the front door, my hearing fading out. I think someone may have called my name—Lane, maybe, or perhaps Axle, I didn’t know. I heard something, but I wasn’t listening. Not even close to it.
I went outside to the night sky, where the smell of the Fallen Saints’ oil and gunfire still lingered in the air. It was funny in a really fucked up way. Though we both drove gasoline-powered motorcycles that used the same oil, it was as if I could just ever so slightly smell a difference between Fallen Saints’ bikes and our own. It was like the Saints’ just lingered a little bit more of death. I couldn’t tell you in a sophisticated way why that was. It was more of just an intuitive, gut feeling.
It was like smelling that death had come.
I sat on a bench, looked up at a sky with a few clouds here and there, and just shook my head. Some soldier I was. I’d joined the Black Reapers because it reminded me of the military, but if I’d acted this way in the military, I’d have gotten my ass thrown out faster than I could have asked for it.
In fact, right now, I was beginning to wonder if Lane would even want me around. I certainly wouldn’t want me around.
How fucking stupid of me. How awful of me.
I just sat in silence for what felt like an eternity. In what sounded like the recesses of my mind but was actually the back of the clubhouse, I could hear the nurses working. I could hear club members yelling in agony as treatments got applied.
But I didn’t hear anyone do what I had done. I didn’t hear anyone panic.
“Michael.”
Only one person who was in this building would have called me that.
“What do you want, Kaitlyn?” I said.
My voice wasn’t quite accusatory or rude, but it definitely wasn’t inviting.
“To understand,” she said. “To understand what’s going on in your head.”
I laughed at that, but the laugh was trying to push away the fear that I had of actually telling that story. There was nothing funny about her request or what the story would entail. Losing one’s brothers to a stupid death wasn’t the kind of thing that you punctuated with a “lol” at the end.
“You don’t want to know,” I said. “I don’t want to know. I’ve been trying like hell to forget for so long.”
“But if you can’t forget it, then maybe it makes sense to share it,” she said, very cautiously taking steps forward as if approaching a wounded but still ferocious lion. “Shed some of the burdens that you carry in your head. Let me, if not others, help you carry it.”
Again, I laughed. Again, the more I laughed, the more uneasy I felt.
