When he moved, he maneuvered both of us so he was sliding his back down the trunk of the tree, sinking onto the ground and pulling me in between his parted legs so my backwas resting against his chest. Drew’s arms slid around my waist, and when I allowed myself to lean back and look up, I saw the true beauty of this place at night. The night was too cold for the insects that normally serenaded us here, but there was the distant hoot of an owl, and the stubborn, sparse leaves rubbed together to keep the night from being completely silent. The twisted limbs of the tree were fascinating when they were this bare. The intricate way in which they wove around each other still gave the impression of shelter above us but allowed me a peek at the stars speckling the cloudless sky beyond.
“I wish you’d quit saying sorry for things that aren’t your fault,” he eventually muttered, his breath falling against my hair as he spoke. “I’m annoyed at myself for not telling you this before now, especially after everything we fought about the other day, and how I pushed and pushed about us being truthful with one another. I just…” His arms squeezed tighter around me. “Shit. I don’t think I’ve talked about Eric for over ten years.”
I rested my hands over his where they lay over my stomach, and dropped my head against his shoulder, tucking myself in under his chin. “When did you see him last?”
“Ten years ago. I was told not to speak about him again, so I didn’t. Not unless I knew it was safe, and there hasn’t been a day that’s gone by since where I’ve thought it’s been safe. If I want to speak my father’s name, I have to make sure there are no rats around. Even in The Hut,” he admitted.
I let that hang in the air for a moment, my fingers rubbing circles on his wrist before I spoke again. “Why were you not supposed to talk about him?”
“Because if anyone finds out where he is, he’ll probablyend up dead within the hour. That’s what they told me, anyway.”
I tried not to react to that, but I knew he’d felt me stiffen when his arms tightened around me. I couldn’t imagine not being able to talk about the people I loved most in the world. Then again, I wasn’t even sure they had been close. Did Drew consider it a loss?
“Bear with me. I have so many questions. If I hit something you’d rather not answer, I’ll honor that. Just tell me.” I sucked in a breath, nibbling on my bottom lip for a moment before I asked the first question. “Were the two of you close, before he left, I mean?”
“In this life, you look up to those you’re told to look up to when you’re young. My dad was the president of The Hounds of Babylon. He was busy. His life was… it was like me trying to live the life I lived before prison, but with a kid and a wife in tow. The guy had his arms full and was up to his eyeballs in responsibility. Did he love me? Yeah. He loved me. Did I love him? Yeah. I loved my old man. Were we close?” Drew took a moment, inhaling slowly again before he pressed his cheek against my head and blew out. “He would have taken a bullet for me in a heartbeat, and I would have done the same for him, but if you’d have asked him what my favorite color was, or whether or not I liked whiskey at fourteen, he wouldn’t have known. He didn’t have time to know. That’s why he had me. I was born to take some of the weight from his shoulders. I was born to be the VP who would become the president.”
“That’s a lot of weight to put on a kid’s shoulders,” I said quietly, lifting my eyes, but only catching the underside of his chin. “If he had it all planned out, though, what went wrong? Why is his life on the line? He obviously planned to be arounda lot longer than he was.”
“You can’t plan properly when you’re at the front of a group of men. All you can do is put shit in place and hope for the best. A leader lives a lot of his life in isolation, even when he’s surrounded by men. You know what you’ve got to do. It just doesn’t always fall in line with what the rest of the club wants you to do. Dad hoped he wouldn’t get in trouble, but then… like things went wrong for me, things went wrong for him. Do you want to know the worst part of it all?”
I shook my head, knowing he would feel my response. It was much safer to let him just talk. Sometimes just having someone listen to what you were saying was needed more than words of advice or encouragement. The airing worked to get that mental weight out in the open so the burden was off your shoulders for at least a little while. His train of thought was on such a definitive track I wasn't willing to derail him, so I squeezed his leg, encouraging him to go on.
“He may as well have been dead all these years,” Drew said calmly.
“Because you haven’t spoken to him?”
“Haven’t spoken to him. Haven’t spoken about him. Have no idea where he is, if he is, in fact, still alive. I can’t remember what he looks like, sounds like…” He trailed off, taking a breath. “He’s not here anymore. He’s not where he was born to be. For a man like Eric, that’s worse than death.”
I frowned out at the night. I knew how he felt in some ways because I felt the very same way about my parents sometimes. Those expressions they wore when they were dancing with one another in the kitchen. The way Dad would look at Tate when he was talking about football. Every little thing that had been so familiar to me was slowly slippingaway through my fingers until I was left with impressions. I was so scared of forgetting, but I couldn’t imagine feeling that way knowing my family was still out there.
“Do you know what he’s running from? Why he’s running? Being gone as long as he has, it has to be something substantial.”
“The less I knew the more chance we both had of staying alive. I know he’s gone. I know some shit went down. I know he had to make the decision to run and that would have been the last decision he wanted to make. Ayda, the reason I never talk about him is because I don’t have anything to say. He’s a ghost now. All that’s left are memories.”
Dropping my hands to his thighs, I rubbed gently, my head falling back so my lips reached his Adam’s apple, brushing over it reverently. My mind was churning, full of thoughts, but I understood that he couldn’t give me much more than he already had because he didn’t know much more. From the way he’d described it, the transition had moved quickly, and that was that.
“Sometimes memories are better. At least we have those to look back on.” I rubbed my cheek against his shoulder like a cat and smiled. “Thank you for talking about this with me, and I really am sorry that I said what I did.”
“If you say sorry one more time, I’m going to flip you over, push you against this tree and do some very unsavory things to you, Hanagan. Quit it.” He pressed his smirking lips to my head and held me in place. “Damn. Now I’ve put those thoughts in my head, I’ve forgotten what the hell we were even talking about.”
I smiled again, this time one corner of my mouth lifting as the imagery came to my mind. He had such a way with wordsand they never failed to make my own imagination rise to the challenge.
“I can fix that for you if you like,” I teased, wriggling my ass against him. Angling my body away from his, I met his eyes and let him know what was going through my mind. Licking my lips, I smiled right at him and said, “Sorry.”
His eyes held mine, darkening as he narrowed them and studied my face. There was nothing more intimidating yet exciting than when he looked at me that way. I could see the thoughts in his eyes. I could hear the low growl rumble in the back of his throat as his hands slid down beneath my ass cheeks, squeezing hard and slow as he gritted his teeth and worked his jaw.
“Don’t make me fuck you in front of Pete.”
The excitement of the shift in mood had pulled deeper anticipatory breaths from me, and as I rolled to my knees to face him, I placed my hands on his shoulders, feeding him back the smirk he so often gave me. “Weren’t you just saying I could blow you in front of an audience?”
Drew raised a single brow, working his jaw hard as he gazed at me. “Demon,” he whispered through tight lips.
“You love this demon.” I grinned. “If you don’t want to give Pete a show, maybe you should take me to the van because I don’t think I want to wait to get back to The Hut.”
I pushed to my feet and bent to grip both sides of his cut, tugging gently.
He continued to stare at me through wide eyes until his hands reached out to grab me, and before I could even tell what was happening, he was pulling me back down to the ground, pressing my back against the grass and rolling on top of me in one swift movement. I kicked out and laughedroughly, but Drew’s body had me pinned, and so did his hands as they pushed the stray strands of hair away from my face. His lips hovered over mine. His hips rotated against me. His nostrils flared as he inhaled and then slowly, ever so dreamily, exhaled and tilted his head to one side.
