I didn't know what the protocol was for this. I didn't know why the fuck I was so nervous. I'd never been nervous about anything in my life, and I felt my heart race as I stood there. "Why did you agree to meet me?"
"Why did you ask?" She sat on an overstuffed chair, crossed one leg over the other, looking around the room and then back at me. She picked at something on the arm of the chair, her eyes focused away from me.
"I don't know," I said. "I don't know what I'm doing anymore. I'm lost lately."
She looked at me, her gaze direct. "We're all lost."
"I didn't used to think I was," I said. "I used to think I knew where I was going."
"Death changes things," she said. "It alters our course." She looked up, tucked her hair behind her ear. The gesture was tentative, nervous, at odds with the in control version of her that I kept seeing glimpses of.
"Is that what happened to you?" I asked. "Is that what altered your course?" I wanted to scream, why are you with Aston?
It was cagey, the way she avoided saying anything about herself. She had this way of making me feel comfortable talking about myself and before I knew it, I was the one who had done all the talking. Each time I hung up the phone, I wondered where the time had gone. But I wondered if it was deliberate, if she deflected everything with me. It gnawed at me, that I couldn't find anything about her.
She shrugged. "You can't control your destiny," she said. "For better or worse, sometimes it chooses you."
"I felt that way once," I said. I sat across from her, my elbows on my knees, leaning forward, looking at the ground. Why the fuck did I feel compelled to talk to her like this, like she was a goddamned priest and I was a parishioner at confession? "After April was killed. The things I did, I thought they were my destiny. I thought killing the men who murdered her would give me peace."
"And now?" she asked.
How did I feel now? Like something was still missing. Like I no longer had a rudder. "Empty," I said. "It feels empty."
"A man without a home," she said.
Yes. That is what I had been missing since April died. It was the thing that Mackenzie must have sensed was missing as well, the reason that she felt so displaced. I just didn't know how to change it, how to feel that way again. Not with April gone.
I felt naked under Meia’s gaze, suddenly vulnerable. She seemed to have the ability to see right through me. It was how I'd felt before when she looked at me, only a hundred times more so right now.
"It is difficult," she said "To feel like you don't have a home -when you lose someone, and your family is taken away from you."
"You know how it feels to have your family taken from you," I said. It wasn't a question. I somehow knew she understood that loss. There was a reason she had no history that I could find. There was something terribly wrong that she wouldn't tell me.
She nodded. "You think I'm weak, being with Aston," she said. "You don't understand the story. I can't leave. I have to stay with him."
"Men like that don't stop hurting you," I said.
"No," she said. "I don't think he will. He may end up killing me." She said it casually. A statement of fact.
I rose to my feet, my breath short in my chest, the same as it was when I was gearing up for a fight, blood pumping loudly in my ears. "Then let me help you," I said. "Let me get you away from him. Why stay?"
She smiled, her expression sad. "He has taken something from me. Something very precious that I need to get back."
"I can help you," I said. I stood inches away from her, this intense feeling of possessiveness taking over me. Since April died, I hadn't had that feeling about anyone else, the need to have someone be mine. April had always been it for me, my refuge from all of the bullshit that inevitably came as part of the club. And from the storms that raged in my soul. I had told myself that there would never be anyone else who could make me feel the same way again, and the fact that I was feeling this way about Meia, a girl full of secrets, terrified me.
"No," she said quickly. "I said something I shouldn't have. I misspoke."
"You didn't," I said. "What does he have over you?"
"No," she said. "I'm beyond helping now."
There was something in the way that she said it that gripped me. I grabbed her by the arm, pulled her to me, my hand on the small of her back so that she was tight against me. Bringing my mouth down on hers, I felt her lips part. I kissed her gently, holding back even as I felt my cock swell in response to her tiny body pressed up against me.
And just like that, I felt an overpowering sense of guilt and shame at the thought of kissing someone other than April. At the thought of taking advantage of this girl who was in a bad situation. What the hell kind of man was I?
I must have hesitated, pulled back for a moment, and she felt it. "Hammer," she said. "I can't do this. Even if I wanted to."