Knife & Flesh (The Night Horde SoCal Book 4) (7 page)

His eyes flicked up and down, taking her state in, and she thought he was going to offer his help. She tried to decide whether she would let him. She wanted to let him.

Instead, he simply tipped his head in a civil salute, and then he turned and headed toward the building, leaving her to struggle home with her burdens.

Trick flushed the toilet and then sat back against the side of the tub, gasping. He dragged his hands through his hair—he was hot and sweating rivers.

Waking up in a sick frenzy, he’d barely made the toilet and hadn’t had time to turn on any lights. Now sitting in the near pitch dark, the hard, smooth surfaces of his apartment began to morph into the rough, shifting landscape of the Middle Eastern desert.

Before the flashback could get its teeth in him again, he surged to his feet and hit the light switch. The room exploded in silent light, and the bathroom sharpened into reality again. Then he turned on the shower, setting the temperature to tepid on the side of cool. The last thing he needed was to feel hotter than he already felt.

When the water felt right, he stepped in. He had one of those ‘rain’ showerheads, not sanctioned by the complex manager, and he turned his face up and let the spray cascade over him. He opened his mouth and let it fill with water, then spat on the floor of the tub.

Fuck. It was getting worse, not better. He’d thought he could ride out this bad patch, but it had been almost a year now. This wasn’t a patch. This was a shroud.

He’d been diagnosed with PTSD while he was in college. Though his general discharge from the Army disqualified him from the education benefits of the G.I. Bill, he still had his medical benefits, and he’d gone to the VA when he’d found himself sitting in a final during his first semester, having an anxiety attack so consuming he’d almost fucking pissed his pants.

The situation hadn’t been much different then than it was now. He’d started having nightmares and flashbacks within a couple of weeks of his discharge, and he’d held it together for months, through his father’s death, his sister splitting and cutting ties, and his first semester of college. He’d contended with several major triggers and come out intact. And then, sitting in an Intro to Literature final, an exam he’d studied for, in a class he’d aced all semester, he’d just fallen apart.

He was falling apart now.

Then, he’d had the VA, with therapy and meds. Now, he’d have to gut it out. The club had too many secrets. A patch did not go tell his troubles anywhere but the clubhouse. And not there, either. Not really.

In his learned amateur opinion, Demon had PTSD, too. He’d gone through some fucked-up bullshit when he was a kid. But Demon acted out, blew up, got violent. It was okay to be a crazy biker when that crazy could be useful. Demon had torn rooms, and people, apart when he’d gone crazy. Hoosier had figured out how to aim him.

Trick didn’t blow up. The only thing he tore apart was himself.

Demon’s crazy was a tool. Trick’s was a liability. So he kept it to himself.

Not even Connor knew. His friend knew more of his deployment story than anybody else, but he didn’t know about the PTSD. When they’d met, the symptoms had been behind him. He’d been off the meds without their recurrence, and he’d been good. No need to share that he’d ever been so weak.

The club had helped, too; joining had been like finding the last piece of himself. He’d found his little place in life, and he’d found balance there. And shit, he’d had years—
years
—of feeling something close enough to normal.

Until he’d aimed a shot at Allen Cartwright’s head and watched him drop.

But the real falling apart hadn’t started until the beginning of this week. That colossally shitty Sunday, finding out that Dora Vega had a thing for him, and having Juliana shit all over his feelings a few hours later.

He’d taken Juliana’s early rejection of his advances more or less in stride. How he looked, what he did—not every girl was into that. He wasn’t the poster boy for Mr. Right. Hell, until he’d met his fiancée, Connor had built a whole sexual strategy on the fact that tattooed, bearded bikers might fascinate some girls for a minute, but most of them weren’t interested in a relationship. They wanted big lawns with white picket fences, not gravel lots with chain link.

And Trick had fairly high standards for a woman he’d be interested in, anyway. Looks weren’t that important—not that he didn’t appreciate beauty, of course he did. But a pretty face and a sleek body couldn’t keep his interest for long. He liked women who could have a conversation. He liked smart women, women who could do things, who paid attention to the world, who challenged themselves. A woman who could argue—not fight about bullshit; that was different. He liked a woman who could support her opinions and would do so. A lively conversation turned him on much more than a good set of tits.

Spending some concentrated time with Juliana and her amazing little girl had turned his simmering but completely manageable interest into real affection and a sense of…of
need
. Like he hadn’t been a complete set yet at all, and they were the last pieces.

But he’d had no intention of making any further advances. He understood that he wasn’t Mr. Right, and he understood that she had a responsibility to her daughter. He’d have been content to have them as friends.

Hearing her say that he wasn’t even good enough to be friends with, though—that had been some hard shit.

God, was he such a weak suck that
girl trouble
was going to undo him?

No. No, he was not. He shut the water off and yanked the towel off the rod.

When he was dry, he wrapped the towel around his waist and went out to his kitchen, turning lights on all the way. There he pulled a bottle of whiskey from its cabinet and took a long pull straight from it.

After a third pull, he started to feel calmer and more attached to the present time and place. He supposed he’d better watch this self-medicating, too.

He checked the clock on the range for the time. Almost four. There was no way he was going to try to sleep again. He was between builds, so he didn’t have to go into the shop if he didn’t want to. He had no club obligations, either—none he knew of at this time, anyway.

Deciding to blow off the day, he put the whiskey away and went to the living room and picked up his book:
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. That book was his favorite, his happy place. He’d read it over and over again, wearing out three paperbacks. He preferred print to digital books; he wanted reading to be a multisensory experience: the feel and smell of the paper, the weight of the book. He liked to be able to flip back and forth with ease. He liked the physical sensation of underlining passages and jotting notes, making his impression on the page. He liked the feel of the pages leaving his right hand and filling his left, that physical sensation of
progress
that a digital reader couldn’t offer.

He’d read until the sun came up, and maybe then he’d crash for a few hours on the futon. If he got to feeling human at some point, maybe he’d take a ride. Or maybe he’d just go float in the pool.

If any of his brothers asked after him, he’d just tell them he was hung over.

~oOo~

After he’d called in, everybody left him alone, so he spent the day in recovery mode—which actually did look a lot like his hangover recovery mode. He hung out on the futon, reading and napping. He made himself a cheese quesadilla for lunch. He sketched for a while, starting to feel some direction for his next project. Then he went out to the pool.

The design of Kendall Drive Apartments was efficient and perfunctory: three large, two story buildings, each housing forty apartments of varying sizes, from studios to two-bedrooms. Each building was actually two identical buildings, facing each other and joined by a catwalk on the second level. All of the apartments opened inward, toward the center. In the resulting ‘courtyard’ (a euphemism if ever there was one) between each pair was a laundry room and a pool and hot tub. The complex was fenced and gated, with a remote-controlled, cantilevered gate to the parking lot and carports, and a gate near the mailboxes for foot traffic. That gate was operated by passcode, either at a keypad near the entrance itself or from individual units installed in each apartment.

Since people couldn’t just drop by unless they were already residents, the complex stayed quiet most days. Only on weekends, when the pool got a lot of use, did things get rowdy. The apartments didn’t have patios or decks, but there was a grilling area in with the pool. Almost every day of every weekend, people were barbecuing, and whoever showed up seemed welcome. A different Trick at a different time in his life would have enjoyed that loose atmosphere and gotten involved. The Trick he was, however, preferred the pool like it was now, on this Thursday afternoon, when he was alone, just floating on his back in the water. With his ears under the surface, he could feel totally closed off from everything. His head got quiet and listened to the muffled movement of water and the insignificant sounds of the world around him.

His shoulder grazed the side of the pool, and he opened his eyes. He’d floated to the far end. Instead of just pushing himself away, feeling refreshed and miles better, he rolled over and dove under, then swam back to the shallow end.

He stood up, dipping his head backwards to slick his hair out of his face. It was long enough that he could get dreadlocks again if he wanted. But he wasn’t sure. There had been a compulsion for rebellion when he’d started wearing dreads after the service. He’d had some high-minded feeling that he was making a statement. They’d distanced him from his Army life, as had his ink and piercings.

He’d let most of the piercings heal once he’d had a patch. Facial piercings weren’t a great idea for a guy who fought a lot. Sherlock had managed to keep his all intact, but then Sherlock was not often in the fray. Trick always was. One ring ripped from his eyebrow was enough to convince him to pull the metal out of his face.

Losing the piercings hadn’t much affected him, but he’d fucking mourned his dreads. More than ten years, he’d had them. They were part of who he was, the man he’d fought to be. But when he’d picked up a sniper rifle again, he’d lost that man. Turned out he was still just a killing machine.

With that thought sinking its claws into his head again, he wiped the pool water from his face and opened his eyes. On the other side of the fence, her little face pushed between the metal staves, was Lucie, grinning at him.

“Hi Trick! I knew it was you under the water because you have pictures like a color book on you. Mami got me early, and we’re going swimming, too!”

Juliana came up just behind her, a leather bag, a little backpack, and a few canvas grocery bags hanging on her arms. She was stunning, dressed in a black and white plaid skirt and a red sleeveless blouse. Her hair was done up in a high ponytail, like a Greek goddess. Athena.

She frowned when she saw Trick, then looked down at her daughter. “Oh, Lulu. We should swim another time. We can get the art stuff out instead.”

“No! I did art stuff already at school. I want to swim.”

Trick walked to the pool stairs. “It’s okay. I’ll get out.”

“No!” Lucie exclaimed again. “I want to play. I have toys that you throw and dive. You can play, too.”

Trick met Juliana’s eyes. She looked stressed and something like scared, and he decided that he should be the one to say no. Better if Lucie was disappointed by him than by her mother, even if he shared that disappointment. He was insignificant.

He climbed out of the pool. “Sorry, Lucie. I can’t stay. Have fun, though.”

“Did I make you mad?” Her little lip pooched out in a pout.

God, this sucked. “No, Luce. Not at all…”

Before he could say more, Juliana reached out one laden arm and put her hand on Lucie’s shoulder. “Trick’s just busy. Come on,
mija
. The ice cream sandwiches are melting.” When a dejected Lucie let go of the fence and turned away, Juliana lifted her eyes back to Trick. She gave him a slight smile, and a grateful nod.

He didn’t respond. Grabbing his towel off a nearby lounge chair, he dried off while he waited until Lucie and her mother were in their apartment. Then he left the pool and headed up to his place.

Most of his day of recovery had been undone by that little exchange. Yeah, it was girl trouble that was going to take him down.

~oOo~

“Hey, Trick.” Connor’s fiancée, Pilar Cordero, smiled and leaned in. He bent into the doorway and kissed her cheek.

“Hey, Cordero. Sorry to horn in on your night.” She stepped back, opening the door, and Trick came into their living room. He felt guilty; Cordero was a firefighter, and he knew she had to be at work the next morning for a long shift.

“No sweat. We’re arguing about wedding guests. Fisticuffs were on the horizon. You’re saving his ass.”

They were getting married soon. She wanted a big Catholic wedding, and since Trick was standing up with Connor, they’d both had to get fitted for suits. Suits. With ties. Trick hadn’t had a suit on his body since his father’s funeral, the last time he’d worn his dress greens. Connor had never had a suit on in his life. But for his old lady—and her grandmother—they were putting their necks in the noose.

After the tailor, they had gone and gotten extremely drunk.