Greatest Height (New Adult Biker Gang Romance) (Night Horses MC Book 6) (3 page)

One car was there, one car wasn’t. They might be out together, or one of them might be gone.

I hammered on the door with my fist. It hurt. I didn't care.

The door opened so abruptly that I almost fell across the threshold. I heard Bear, my old labrador, bark as though his lungs would burst with excitement.

My mother was there.

Her face was white and drawn. She’d lost five pounds since the last time I’d seen her. Maybe more. She didn’t have that kind of weight to lose, and her cheekbone was sharp as a knife slash across her face.

I registered that in a split second as she drew me in to a wordless, bone-crunching hug.

I didn’t say anything. I simply held her, my cheek resting on her shoulder, and sobbed. All of the frustration, the abandonment, the loneliness and fear I’d felt came pouring out in a great onrush of grief.

She cried, too.

Like I’d never seen her before.

Not when her father died, or when our neighbor ran over Bear and we were rushing him to the vet, Dad driving, me and her in the backseat, holding him close, his blood all over us.

I don’t know what happened to make me lose her, or to make me lose control.

I was still angry, though.

When the first storm of my tears past, I pulled away and sat down on the staircase in the hall.

She shut the front door and sat beside me.

I pulled away.

The sight of her flinch sent a hollow chord of unhappiness through me, but I didn’t scoot any closer.

“My baby girl,” she murmured.

It was the first thing that one of us had said to each other.

It was the straw.

The last straw.

“What the fuck?” I asked her. Shouting. Bear fled back down the hall. “If I’m your baby girl, why did you send me away?”

“We didn’t send you anywhere, sweetheart,” she said. She looked totally stricken. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I know I was out overnight and it was shitty, but I came home and… and… all my stuff was in the yard. How the fuck is that not sending me away? You threw all my clothes in a pile like trash,” I said.

My voice was hard and bitter. I needed to calm down, but I didn’t know how to at that point.

My mother’s hand flew to her face. She was staring at me, shaking her head slightly. I don’t know if I’d ever seen anyone more baffled.

“Honey,” she said, her voice soft and slow, “We got home from work about the same time, and you were gone. Your father and I looked everywhere. I showed up and the front door was open, he was shouting your name. Your bedroom was bare.”

I stared at her.

“That’s not right,” I said. “All my stuff was in the yard, and I saw someone move a curtain in the house. I yelled and knocked at the door, but no one… no one answered.”

She stared at me.

It was as if neither of us could possibly take in what the other was saying. It was too strange. Too completely alien.

I ran away.

I got kicked out.

One of us had to be wrong.

Was I crazy? I suppose it was possible, but… wouldn’t someone have said something? I saw the doubt in my mother’s eyes, the worry, the fear. Did she think I was mixed up in drugs, mixed up so badly I didn’t know what was going on?

I had never taken drugs.

No, wait.

I’d been drugged. El Jefe had drugged me. Multiple times. I still didn’t know what with.

It wasn’t too long after that that I got kicked out - that I ran away - that I moved into the apartment.

Was I still suffering from the after-effects that night? Was I so confused, and out of it, that I’d somehow run away by accident?

Was Merle taking advantage of me?

I saw the worry and anger in my mother’s eyes and knew that that was what she thought.

She thought Merle was the worst kind of man.

I thought he was the best.

One of us had to be wrong.

“I’ve been going to school,” I whispered. “You could have found me there. Why didn’t you look?”

She looked stricken.

“You said in your note that you were eighteen and there was nothing we could do to stop you and if we showed up at your school you’d get a restraining order and have us arrested for stalking you,” she said.

I shook my head on reflex.

“Note?” I asked. “I
definitely
didn’t leave a note.”

“It was on your bed,” she said. She stood up, more heavily than I’d ever seen her. Did my mother get old while I wasn’t looking?

I followed her up the stairs.

“I didn’t… I didn’t change anything,” she said. “I just clean it.”

I stopped on the threshold.

Someone had definitely ransacked my room. There wasn’t a lot left. Even the sheets were off the bed. There was a note in the middle of the bare mattress.

The thought of my mother cleaning this bare, sad room for weeks and weeks made me almost burst into tears.

I reached out and squeezed her shoulder.

Something was definitely weird as hell here, something was
wrong,
but I don’t think it was anything that she did.

I mean… all of the signs pointed to me leaving on my own free will.

“Why didn’t you text me?” I asked.

“I did,” she said, simply. “You never replied.”

I shook my head again, slowly. Not denying the truth of her words, just denying… I don’t know what. The fact that something like this could have happened, could ever have happened.

“I have a new number,” I said. “My old number… it worked for a day or two, then it stopped. I figured you stopped paying for my line.”

She shook her head.

“I wanted to keep you on,” she said, slowly. “Your father said that you’d made your choice. He was… I’d never seen him that angry.”

I didn’t say anything.

I couldn’t.

The possibility that was forming was so horrible that I really couldn’t talk.

“Are you staying with… with Merle?” my mother asked, suddenly.

“No,” I said. “He got me a studio near downtown. I work in a laundrymat he - his buddy owns in exchange.”

She nodded, slightly.

“That’s good,” she said. “Have you had sex with him? Did you use protection?”

“Mom!” I gasped.

I wanted to look anywhere but at her.

I read the note.

I’m out of here. Fuck you both. If you try and find me, I’ll have you arrested for stalking.

I talked to the principal and he CANNOT give you any information about me or my grades or my attendance. I’m eighteen now, there’s nothing you can do.

If you show up at my school, I’ll walk away and never return. You’ll never hear from me again.

IF you respect my wishes for once in your fucking lives, I might talk to you.

I love him, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

• Megan
  

It was a cruel note. If it had been longer, if there had been more hurt, more explanation, it might have been kinder.

As it was… it was short.

Curt.

To the point.

There was nothing of love, or even of anger.

How must it have felt, to read a note like that? To think your daughter, your only child, never wanted to see your faces again?

That she didn’t even care enough to explain?

I couldn’t look at my mother.

“That’s some note,” I said.

She didn’t reply right away. I heard a small, ragged gasp, as she drew breath.

“It’s not… it’s not yours?” she asked.

I shook my head.

I held it out to her, to look at again.

Silly. I imagine she’d read it a dozen times, a hundred.

Maybe more.

“If I was going to run away,” I said. “I’d be p- I’d be really mad, right?”

She nodded. I saw that out of the corner of my eye.

“So, I wouldn’t take the time to sit down and type out the note and wait for the printer to work and go downstairs and get the note and come all the way back up here and put it on the bed,” I said. “The printer never works the first time, it would have taken forever.”

A ghost of a smile on her face.

“If I were going to run away, I’d take whatever pad was nearby and I’d write out a note. On paper. By hand,” I said. “It wouldn’t be like this, either. It would either be, like, one sentence, or it would be five angry pages.”

I reached a tentative hand out to her.

“I wouldn’t have done this,” I said. Firmly. Finally.

She looked at me.

If anything, she looked even more hopeless than before.

I hated seeing her like this.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “Were you… were you kidnapped?”

The word looked like it felt odd in her mouth, like she couldn’t quite believe what she was asking.

I guess my mother couldn’t really believe that this was our life now. That that was a reasonable and valid question to ask me.

I shook my head.

“No, Mama,” I said. “I told you. I showed up, all my stuff was in the yard, Merle and his friends helped me pick it up, I went away.”

“I watched you, you know,” she said. Her voice was soft. Delicate. Fragile.

I looked at her, a question all over my face.

“I thought you’d be angry, but I had to know you were okay,” she said. “I had to know. So I parked half a mile away, and I walked over, and I stood in the edge of the trees and I watched until I saw you.”

I looked at her.

I didn’t know what to say.

How could I even begin to find the words to make her okay?

“Did you see me?” I finally asked.

She nodded.

“I was so afraid that you’d been taken again. I… I had to be sure you were where you said you’d be,” she said.

“I’m glad,” I whispered.

I can’t even imagine how she would have felt if she had not seen me, if she’d been forced to imagine where I was - or whether I was alive or dead.