Raw: Devil's Fighters MC (11 page)

“Oh, it was great!” Anna perked up immediately. “Just what I needed. Mexico is spectacular.”

“I’ll bet.”

There was a brief pause.

“Also, I met someone.”

Alyssa grinned at the embarrassment in Anna’s voice. “Do tell,” she urged, genuinely intrigued.

They spent the next half hour discussing the man Anna had met at the resort in Mexico, who turned out to be a cardiologist at Vancouver’s St. Paul Hospital. They had agreed to see each other again, and Anna was predictably freaking out. Given her streak of unbelievably bad luck with men, she couldn’t be blamed for being wary and extra cautious.

“He texted me last night and asked me out for Friday.”

“Great,” Alyssa said. “At the very least, he’s a man of his word.”

“Yeah…” Anna sounded uncertain. “I’m not sure I’m going to go.”

Alyssa blinked, taken aback. The way Anna had been gushing about this guy, she would think her friend would jump at the chance of seeing him again so soon after they had parted ways in Mexico.

“What are you talking about?” Alyssa asked, incredulous.

“Well, you know…” Anna trailed off, letting the words hang in the air.

“No, I don’t know. Enlighten me.”

“Well… Wait, are you sure you want to hear about this?”

“Yes, please,” Alyssa said with a dramatic sigh. “I’m driving through swamps. I need the diversion.”

Anna chuckled. “All right. Well, what if he turns out to be an asshole like the others?” she said bluntly. “You know me; I tend to fall hard. What if I fall for this guy and he turns out to be a dick?”

Alyssa thought it over for a moment. Given Anna’s unfortunate past when it came to relationships, it was a fair question.

“I suppose there’s a risk,” she admitted. “But it’s probably a risk you’ll have to take.”

“You think so?”

“Yep.”

They discussed it at length, and in the end, Anna agreed to go on a date with the doctor she had met in Mexico. By the time they hung up, Alyssa was feeling lighter than she had felt in days. It felt good to talk about normal stuff again, and it felt wonderful to let herself be swept up by Anna’s enthusiasm for such a mundane matter as a date.

Her thoughts immediately turned to Xavier. Much as she tried not to fall into the trap of fantasizing, Alyssa couldn’t help but wonder if they would ever be able to share a mundane life (or
any
life, for that matter). She wondered if they would ever get to the point where they could go on an actual date without worrying about pissing off the president of a violent motorcycle gang. She wondered if they would ever get to the point where their biggest worry would be what movie to go see.

Alyssa didn’t think she was even in a relationship with Xavier.
Something
was going on between them, but she had the feeling it didn’t even resemble a relationship. She wondered if Xavier was even interested in a relationship at all. She wondered if
she
was.

She had not expected him to come back into her life, and now that he
was
back (hopefully to stay), Alyssa had no clue what to expect or what she wanted exactly. She knew she had to get Xavier out of the fighting rings and into a normal, safe life, but beyond that her mind drew up a blank.

Sighing, Alyssa stretched in the driver’s seat and worked out some of the kinks in her neck and shoulders. She had another hour’s drive ahead of her before Pinebrook would finally come into view. It would be a long drive…and yet, somehow, it would not be long enough.

When Alyssa walked in, the house was silent. It wasn’t that it wasn’t supposed to be, it was just that she hadn’t gotten used to the silence just yet.

It still felt odd and surreal in a very heartbreaking way to walk in and not hear soft jazz playing on the stereo in the living room, or the clinks and clanks of pots and pans from the kitchen. It felt very wrong that the lights would be turned off and wouldn’t turn on until Alyssa hit the switch herself. It had been almost three weeks since her parents were killed in a tragic car accident, and it still felt like they should be there, in their house, living and growing old together.

Alyssa endured the sharp pang of pain that always came every time she stepped into the empty and silent house with the long-suffering bravery of a soldier at war, and she made her way upstairs, dragging her wheeled suitcase up with her. She took her time, relishing the slow pace of her activities. She unpacked and took a long shower, willing the hot spray to melt away the knot that seemed to have taken up permanent residency in the pit of her stomach. Unsurprisingly, the hot shower didn’t help.

Once in her robe, Alyssa went back downstairs, toweling herself dry as she went. She would fix herself a quick lunch, she decided, and then she would spend a well-deserved lazy day while she waited for Xavier to come over that night.

Once in the kitchen, it didn’t take her long to notice the note stuck to the refrigerator. It was a bright yellow post-it, but once she had picked it up to read she discovered that there was nothing bright about what it had to say. Initially, she had thought the note might be from Lynn, who happened to have an extra set of keys to the house just in case, but she was surprised to discover that it was actually from Xavier.

It was a short, curt note:

I won’t be there tonight. I have a fight. I’ll see you tomorrow. Sorry.

To Alyssa, it didn’t quite sound like he was really sorry. She put the note on the table and went about her business of making herself something to eat. She didn’t really know how to feel about the message. She had turned on the stereo in the living room and put on one of her dad’s vinyl discs, but not even the notes of soft jazz could do much to soothe her. She felt suddenly uneasy.

As she gave in to her instincts of reaching for comfort food and made herself a grilled cheese sandwich, Alyssa tried very hard not to think about Xavier’s note. In fact, at some point she even snatched it off the table and threw it in the trash. But no matter what she did, how else she tried to occupy herself and her mind, she couldn’t get it out of her head.

She was still thinking about it half an hour later, after her lunch had been consumed and as she sat at the kitchen’s table nursing a much-needed cup of coffee. She thought she would have to be much tougher than this if she wanted to have a chance at getting both Xavier and herself out of Pinebrook, but she still couldn’t help the havoc wreaked by one simple little post-it note.

That note was the first real, actual, concrete evidence of what Xavier did. Hearing about the fights was one thing, but this note put Alyssa in front of the very harsh reality of it all, and she didn’t like it.

She knew Xavier didn’t have a choice, but she still couldn’t help the pang of irrational, childish anger at his standing her up. She knew he couldn’t have picked her up at the airport in New Orleans, not if they wanted to keep their relationship—or whatever it was—under the radar of the Devil’s Fighters. But she had hoped she would still get to spend some time with him tonight. She had hoped he would acknowledge her return in some way that didn’t involve a post-it note on her refrigerator.

More importantly, she had hoped he (she? they?) wouldn’t have to deal with a fight so soon. The night when he had showed up on her doorstep with a wounded fellow competitor was well imprinted in her mind—and not only because they had ended up having sex on the kitchen’s floor.

She had patched Rick up as best as she could, and he was now almost as good as new, but Alyssa still remembered the cuts, the bruises, and the abrasions. She remembered the fractures, the wheezy breathing, and the fear that one of the cracked ribs may have punctured a lung. The thought of Xavier being in the same disastrous conditions one not-too-far-away day scared her more than she would have liked to admit, particularly considering that he had told her that night that Rick had been lucky. If
that
was lucky, Alyssa didn’t even want to try to imagine what “hurt bad” might be.

The ringing of a phone once again saved her from her gloomy reverie. Alyssa walked up to the phone that hung on one of the kitchen’s walls—a very seventies touch that her parents had always refuse to abandon—and picked up.

“Hello?”

“Hey Lyssa.”

Lynn’s voice flooded her ear, warm and friendly and just what she needed to hear. Alyssa sighed in relief. She had not been prepared to deal with anyone from the Pinebrook community that wasn’t her best (and only) friend in town.

“Hey,” she greeted cheerfully, already grateful beyond words for the smile Lynn had just put on her face. “How’s it going?”

“Good. Busy,” Lynn said, and Alyssa could indeed hear the bustling noises and the buzzing of voices from Lynn’s diner in the background. “I wanted to check on you, make sure you got home safe.”

This isn’t my home,
Alyssa thought automatically, but she wasn’t so rude as to voice it. “I got here just fine, thanks,” she said instead.

“What’re you up to today?”

Alyssa shrugged, and then she remembered that her friend couldn’t see her. “I thought I’d have a lazy afternoon,” she admitted.

That was the one luxury she had decided to allow herself; today, she would rest her mind. Tomorrow, she would begin dealing with everything—from the meeting with the real estate agent for the sale of her parents’ house, to Xavier and the Devil’s Fighters. God, but it was exhausting just to think about it.

“Good for you!” Lynn cried. “I approve. Listen, do you want to swing by the diner later tonight? I’m closing early for inventory. We could have a bite to eat.”

“Sure,” Alyssa agreed easily. It wasn’t like she had any other plans; the Devil’s Fighters had made sure of that. “Is seven all right?”

“Seven’s perfect. See you then.”

“See you.”

Alyssa hung up, realizing that she was still smiling. She would be forever grateful to Lynn for all that she was doing for her, most of which was unknown to Lynn herself. Certainly she could have no idea what her friendship really meant to Alyssa, or just how much her carefree nature was helping her get some much-needed breaths of fresh air.

Alyssa picked up her abandoned mug of coffee and brought it with her to the couch in the living room where she set out to enjoy the latest Neil Gaiman release. She thought it was oddly and ironically appropriate that the book would be titled
Trigger Warning
.

Her mind began to wander again even before she had the chance to read the first page of the introduction. Trigger warning. Should
she
be warned? She had already begun to take into consideration the emotional and psychological damage that eight years in the fighting rings might have done to Xavier. Whether they ended up in a relationship or not, she knew that once she got him out, that damage would be her burden to take. “Baggage” didn’t even begin to describe the load that Xavier probably carried with him.

She wondered if he had PTSD. It was a fair question to ask; after all, whatever he had seen over the years had surely been traumatic in one way or the other. Before Alyssa could think about what she was doing, she was putting the book aside and picking up her laptop.

There were a number of websites about PTSD, and most of them dealt with the trauma suffered by soldiers returning from war. It irked her a little. What about other traumas? What about sexual violence? What about the death of a friend? What about all those other sufferings that plagued human kind?

Still, she figured Xavier
was
fighting a war—in a way.

She spent two hours clicking on links and reading about this four-letter acronym that spelled out one of some people’s worst nightmares. She read about symptoms. She read about how random those symptoms were, and about how they could show up again unexpectedly just when one thought they had tamed them. The more she read, the more she wondered how those people suffering from such a crippling experience did it. She couldn’t even imagine.

And then she began to wonder how their family, friends, and lovers did it. Because when PTSD was involved, Alyssa learned quickly through her search, it was never just one person who was affected.

Alyssa read testimonies that broke her heart, but she also read stories that gave her hope.

By the time she closed her laptop, her head was spinning. Perhaps she was jumping ahead; there was no proof, after all, that Xavier may suffer from PTSD. He had never even given her an indication so far that it was possible. But then again, she didn’t know him. Perhaps she had just wasted two hours of her life on a useless read, but at this point, she thought she’d better be prepared for anything.

And that was exactly the thing that was eating away at her (amongst so many other things that it was hard to keep track): Alyssa didn’t know what to expect.

She shook her head and picked up the book again, determined to go on with her plan of laziness.