I did this once a month, and each time, I made myself sick with wanting. Once a month, I would stop by on my way home from the monthly meetings to discuss their health and happiness, and once a month I would torture myself by stopping by to see what I’d left behind.
But it was the only way. The only way to protect her from a life that she wasn’t meant to live in. Protect her from my father and mother who would like nothing else but to ruin it and everything in it—including my wife and child.
I watched as she broke. Watched as she railed. Watched as she dropped to the floor in the middle of our kitchen—a kitchen we had danced and sang in once upon a time—and broke down completely.
I bent forward and threw up the entire contents of my stomach.
This would be the last time I’d see her this close. The last time I’d do this to myself.
But I was lying. Both to myself and to her.
The only difference was that she didn’t know it.
The cat, the bane of my existence, and the one thing that my wife held at night as she cried herself to sleep, hissed at me from the tree.
“Fuck you.”
Then I walked away, and only looked back twice.
This vicious cycle would continue, year after year, for five more years. Five years of seeing, but not touching.
Until, one day when I arrived after that monthly meeting to find a man in my house. A man standing next to my wife, pinning her against the counter, and everything changed.
Chapter 2
Needy AF.
-T-shirt
Mina
Six years ago
“I need a med check, please,” I told the charge nurse. “Will you…”
“Mina?”
I looked up, startled to see Loki and Silas standing there, both of them staring at me with various shades of sorrow shadowing their features.
“Oh, no,” I moaned. “Did he get hurt again?”
Tunnel was always getting hurt. It never failed, he’d hurt himself at least every three months. It was getting on that time again, and I just hoped it wasn’t worse than it was the last time—the last time he needed thirteen stitches on his forearm from a suspect pulling a knife on him.
Silas’ face shut down, but it was Loki’s expression that was making me feel terrified. Very, very scared. Chills broke out all over my body, and the meds that were in my hands fell to the white tiled floor.
I heard the glass shatter, saw the liquid spread out all over the floor, and I swallowed thickly.
“Silas…Loki?”
Silas held his arms open, and my throat started to swell.
“Tell me,” my voice quivered, but my spine was straight and stiff.
I needed to hear the words. I needed him to tell me exactly what was going on, and I needed it now.
“I’m sorry, honey,” Silas said. “But he got really hurt this afternoon…he didn’t make it.”
I didn’t hear the rest. I was in midst of dying inside. Literally dying. If there was a way that one could feel their own death while still being alive, this was it. This was definitely it.
Silas’ hand touched my shoulder, but I pulled away.
Tunnel would never touch my shoulder again. He’d never give me soft kisses on my nose. He’d never give me a hug or rub his beard along the sensitive skin of my neck just because he could. He’d never wake me up on Saturday mornings—his only day off—by placing wet kisses on every inch of my face. He’d never tell me anything. Not ever again.
Because he was dead.
I closed my eyes, dropped to my knees, and I cried.
***
There was a knock at the door, and I looked at it warily.
I didn’t want to answer it.
Answering it meant having to put on my happy face, and putting on my happy face wasn’t something I wanted to do at that moment in time.
But I knew they wouldn’t go away.
I’d, of course, tried ignoring them before. They didn’t go away. In fact, they found their own way inside when I did.
Which was why I walked to the door with heavy feet, shuffling my socks on the carpeted floor as I went.
I’m sure I looked like a two-year-old child who was just told to clean up her toys.
I wanted to see the people on the other side of the door about as much as I wanted a root canal.
I knew after it was done it would feel better, but the pain in the interim didn’t always seem worth it.
But I opened the damn door and was rushed by no less than twenty people—all there to make sure that I wasn’t spending the day alone with only my dark and morose thoughts to keep me company.
“Mina!” Rue cried. “You look so different!”
I guess I kind of did. I had lost weight since this all started, weight I couldn’t really afford to lose. I looked like a shadow of the woman I used to be. Though, if I had to make an assumption, I was assuming she meant that I looked different due to my new haircut and style.
I imagined that my husband was probably rolling over in his grave. My hair was not as long as he liked it when he was alive, but this was easier on me.
He loved my hair. Loved the length. Loved when he wrapped it around his fists while he…I shut down those thoughts.
I couldn’t deal with those kinds of emotions anymore. I didn’t have anyone to work those feelings out with, and I wasn’t willing to work them out on my own. It would only ever be Tunnel for me, and that was that.
“Yeah,” I smiled, even though it didn’t reach my eyes. “I cut it. Braided the length of it into a bracelet kind of thing and put it on Tunnel’s grave. I hope this one doesn’t get taken like the last present I gave him, though.”
“I looked into that,” Loki said cryptically. “Apparently, it’s the graveyard staff. They clean up the graves every so often so that stuff doesn’t collect. Like dead flowers, for example.”
I could see that. I would hate for the graveyard where my husband’s remains lay, to be anything but perfect, I had to admit. The graveyard was one of the best in the city, and the grounds were absolutely stunning.
The first time I’d seen that graveyard had been the day I’d laid my husband to rest.
I’d picked it offhandedly, almost as if on autopilot, but the day I’d seen it in person—the day that we said goodbye—I’d been speechless.
And I knew that Tunnel would love it. He had a thing for nature, and the beauty of that place was nothing less than spectacular.
I remembered the funeral. Remembered that terrible day like it was just yesterday.
***
“You aren’t expected to say a word here, Mina,” came Cleo’s rasped reply. “You could literally sit there and not say a word, and nobody would blame you.”
I gave him a look that clearly said ‘not happening’ and walked up to the podium.
My eyes caught on a large picture of Tunnel that I’d taken off of our wall at home. It was of him the day that he became a police officer. He was dressed to the nines in his Benton, Louisiana Police Department’s finest. He was even wearing the hat that I rarely, if ever, got to see him in, and the smile on his face lit up the room. He was so handsome. So beautiful.
Oh, God, I missed him.
I walked up to the podium, glancing over my shoulder at Sienna, who was being held by the president of the MC himself, and steeled myself.
I could do this. I would do this. It would be okay. I’d let every single person know what kind of man this world had lost.