There wasn’t anything else to say or do so I turned and held her hand, making the journey through the overgrown blades of grass I used to hide in when we were kids. Every shaky step I took seemed to hold a memory. To the left were the trees that Pete had made me climb to try and conquer my fear of heights. He’d brought me there for weeks on endand told me to scale those things, one after the other, until I reached the top and shouted down to him that I wasn’t scared no more.
I was always scared. I just didn’t let him see.
To the right, a short jog away, was a small stream that ran the length of the entire field and disappeared into a dense cluster of trees that Pete had told me held the ghosts of all the most infamous buried bikers, just to scare me.
He was such a bastard sometimes, always playing the older brother he should have been to me, and always pushing me to be the best I could be. He wanted me to be fearless, to be formidable, to be unbeatable. He spent so long trying to turnmeinto something unforgettable, he forgot to take care of himself.
With every memory that flashed through my mind, my jaw set tighter and my frown grew more painful. I hadn’t been there since he died. I hadn’t been for years.
All those years were now slamming into me hard, and if it was at all possible, causing more pain than anything my body was feeling on the surface. I was tired, aching and broken, but as I squeezed Ayda’s hand in mine and looked up ahead, I saw the huge pecan tree that had been a part of Texas far longer than any one of us Hounds had been.
“You okay?” I asked as I turned to face her, curling my fingers around hers again.
Ayda was still looking around with curiosity until her face finally swung around and her eyes landed on mine. She reached up with her bad hand, her thumb running over my frown. “This place is beautiful, Drew, and I’m good. Just worried about you. Talk to me.”
“I’m good, darlin’. Don’t worry. It’s why Harry is here.”I smiled at her and stepped a little closer, taking the few final strides until we were just to the left of the tree that stood at the top of the small incline.
I did the same thing I’d always done as a kid. I stood beneath it and looked up, allowing my lips to part and my eyes to widen as I tried to commit every detail of it to memory. It was a relatively cool day, but I felt warm being there. I felt like the boy who’d run in the sun and raced his idol through the blades of grass for hours on end. I felt free.
“We used to come here as kids,” I said quietly, still looking up as I pulled her closer to me. “The two of us, we used to escape the club life for hours on end and just be who we wanted to be. There were no rules out here, no code to follow, no unspoken laws that could be broken. We couldn’t smell anything to do with bikes, leather or smoke.” I huffed, shaking my head as a small smile tugged at my lips. “We were just Pete and Drew—two boys running instead of riding.”
Leaning in, she rested her cheek on my shoulder and followed my gaze up into the tree. “You got to be a kid out here.”
“I did. At first I thought he brought me here for my benefit, but looking back, I think it was for his, too. I was such a burden on him, even though he loved me.” I dropped my head and let it fall to the side, looking down at her from the corners of my eyes. “I saw the responsibility he carried because of me. Tate sees it on you, too. I know how he feels, wanting to save you from saving him all the time.”
Ayda just stared at the tree, her free hand tapping against her thigh until she stepped forward and faced me. “I think that’s a lesson for us both to learn here, Drew. You don’t have to protect me all the time, and those men of yours, they see it,too.”
She brought our joined hands up to her face, pressing the back of my hand against her cheek before lifting her head to look up at the tree again.
I kept my focus on her the whole time, wondering how the fuck I’d survived before her.
“I miss him,” I admitted quietly. “I miss him so much, some days I feel like I can’t breathe.”
Bringing our hands to her lips, she straightened her head again to look at me. “I know what you’re going through, Drew. I know that pain, the hollow ache in the center of your chest that feels like it has glass edges to cut when your mind so much as heads in the direction of thinking about him. This right here, though—this is your chance to talk to him. This is where you feel him, where you’re closest to him. He may not answer, but he can hear you, and if you need me to step away, all you have to do is ask.”
“Don’t go anywhere,” I whispered through a smile, moving my hand away before I lowered my mouth to hers to taste her on my lips. “I know what I have to do. I’ve spent so long trying to bypass the grief stage, beating myself up, putting myself behind bars, taking any punishment anyone has to offer… I can’t survive that way anymore. I need to say goodbye.”
My jaw set tight, even though I felt no anger at all. The reality of the situation was sinking in, and I was about to face the one demon I never thought I’d be man enough to face.
Breaking away from her, I turned to face the tree, holding onto the very end of her fingertips until distance tore us apart and forced both our arms to fall down by our sides. Knowing she was close was enough, and as I hitched up the knees ofmy sweat pants and struggled down into a crouch at the base of the trunk, I let my eyes fall to the ground. With one arm resting over my thigh, the other reached out to touch the grass my brother and I had sat upon a hundred times before. There wasn’t an inch of this tree we hadn’t touched. It was such a part of our history, I felt like I was embracing an old friend as my fingers reached out to trace the ridges in the bark.
The words didn’t waste time in finding their escape. They’d been held prisoner for half a decade. They were tired and defeated. They needed to breathe as much as my suppressed grief did.
“How do I even begin to say what I need to say to you, brother? Where do I start? With apologies? Regrets? With all the things I did wrong that you would have done right? How do I find an order to my thoughts?” I swallowed the painful lump in my throat, bringing the tips of my fingers back down to run over the blades of grass. “I have so many things to say sorry for, but I know how you always got about me making excuses for my fuck ups. I’m not stupid enough to think you don’t hear the shit that goes on in my head in the middle of the night, either. I may not have been here before, but I know you’ve been to me a million times over.”
My face scrunched together, every muscle in my jaw flexing as I tried to fight off the pain in my chest.
“I thank you for that,” I whispered. “I thank you for all those moments you’ve come to me when I’ve needed you. You never let me down when you had breath in your lungs, and for so long, I thought that once your body stopped working, it meant you were gone for good. Call me stupid, thickheaded, or just an idiot, I don’t know, but I realize how wrong I was about that now. Those ghost stories you used to tell me, Ibelieved them all so easily, but I refused to believe that you could be one yourself. I guess that’s what this fucked up world of the MC does to us. It makes us cynical, non-believers. If we can’t feel the flesh beneath our fingers or see the blood drip from our knuckles, it can’t exist, right? I hadn’t realized what a non-believer I’d become. Not until recently.”
Darting my tongue out to the swollen part of my lip, I pressed it against the wound in an attempt to make the pain there worse than it was anywhere else, but it didn’t do anything. Lifting my hand to the bridge of my nose, I pinched it tight and closed my eyes, dipping my chin to my chest as uninvited tears started to form behind my eyelids.
“Don’t make me cry, you fucker,” I croaked, flaring my nostrils as wide as I could. “If I start crying over you now, I’ll never stop, and Ayda didn’t sign up for that.”
I could almost see the look on his face as he towered over me and watched as I fell apart, the small smirk, the shake of his head, the roll of his eyes and the flick of his thumb across his nose. I could hear the words,who knew I’d be the first person to break your heart, Tucks,before he barked out a rough laugh and dropped down to tap me on the chin with his fist.
The thought of that image was so powerful, I opened my eyes and looked to the side to see if he was there, but when all I saw was the open field and the endless memories running past me, I let my shoulders sag forward.
“I thought I’d figured a lot of shit out when I was in prison, Pete. I thought I had all the answers and every problem could be solved with violence again. All I wanted was revenge, to earn my respect back and to kill who had taken you away from us. I kinda got that in the end, only it tooksomething, or should I say someoneelse to get me there. I know you know all about her, and I swear to God, if you spy on her in the shower, I will find you in the afterlife and we will go ten rounds like the old days,” I whispered, my smile breaking free as I narrowed my eyes and looked up to the clear blue sky. “There’s a part of me that can’t wait to see you, to get to that place where we can be free again. No shackles, no history or bad blood. If it hadn’t been for her, I would probably have given up in the warehouse and let them kill me, I needed to see you that badly. I love my brothers and my club, Pete, but only you and Ayda have ever known me better than I know myself. You left me. You left me like the bastard you are. I swore for so long you did it as some kind of test again. But that test was too much. Watching you take your last breath wastoomuch. I didn’t have a reason to live before I went to prison, I didn’t have a reason to live while inside, and I didn’t have a reason to live for the first few hours after I came out. I had reasons to survive, sure I did. I had responsibilities. I had people I loved who were relying on me. I had things to finish. But reasons to live, reallylive…”
