Page 47 of Freak
Abigail was angry at him, or hurt because of him, or both, or something, and he still did not understand why. His defense of her had torn open a potentially massive problem with the Horde, but it had also, bewilderingly, damaged the bond he and she had formed.
He did not understand, and that felt like an even bigger danger than whatever was going on with Montana.
Abigail was a problem he didn’t need to paper over for the weekend. In fact, it was a problem that could only get worse with waiting, like an untreated wound.
Mel walked straight out of the Hall. He’d be back tomorrow, when the Harvest Festival started and there was too much work to ignore.
Today, Abigail came first.
Chapter Fourteen
Abigail cut her truck’sengine and sat behind the wheel, staring through the windshield at the goat barn without really seeing anything.
Though she felt all her emotions keenly, she’d never been much of a crier—at least not the heaving-sobs kind of crying. She was sometimes sad, sometimes had days that were blue for no discernable reason, always felt compassion and sympathy for the suffering of others, and might tear up or catch a stone in her throat, but she rarely felt deeply downhearted, and never hopeless.
She’d wept hard for her chickens after the rampage in the summer, but that had been grief, not hopelessness. Her feelings this afternoon were more akin to grief as well—or, at least, the keen sense that grief waited on the near horizon. She’d driven home in quiet, alone, her vision a bit blurry and her mind swept up in a whirl of wondering and worry about Mel, and for him, too.
He’d brushed off her concern about his injuries, and they weren’t severe, but still, he’d been fighting, been hurt, because she’d been there. She made sure to think of it like that: not that he’d been hurtbecauseof her, but because she’d been there. That distinction put the onus on Mel, where it belonged, but acknowledged that his misplaced and troubling urge to defend her against someone’s words had been the catalyst. If she hadn’t been there, he wouldn’t have fought. Not for that reason, at least—and she knew he didn’t go looking for reasons.
In the way he’d slammed her truck door and stalked back to the clubhouse, he’d made it clear that he was angry—specifically, angry at her. He was confused, and probably hurt, by her rejection of his ‘defense’ of her. She understood; her way of thinking about such things was likely not most people’s way of thinking, and even more likely not the Horde way of thinking.
But it was her way of thinking, and on matters relating specifically to her she considered it a boundary: she had no interest in being offended by a stranger’s random comment simply so she would feel grateful for someone’s supposed defense of her—because it turned a spotlight on whatever was said and meant that her ‘defender’ was on the same wavelength with the stranger’s thinking.
If Mel had followed her lead and simply kept walking, right past that woman, Abigail would have had no reason to think about her, no reason to give her words a second’s attention. Instead, those words and everything that followed had settled into the center of her mind and begun to ache. Even worse, the cracks that brief moment exposed now threatened to dismantle the very good thing she and Mel had been building, and they’d barely had time to lay the foundation.
Maybe it was as simple, and as difficult, as the truth she’d always felt: she didn’t fit with the Horde. Their way of being in the world was not her way. The men who wore the Horde’s patch created the Horde way of being in the world. Mel was one of those men; thus his way of being in the world was not her way.
Could two people so fundamentally different make a whole? How would it work?
When she had pressing questions her mind would not sort out, she used her cards to clear a path through the thicket. But this thicket was so dense she wasn’t sure she could form a proper question.
Well. The best way to make one’s thoughts settle was to leave them to themselves. She had a mountain of work to do before the Harvest Festival began tomorrow. One nugget of good in this afternoon’s muddy morass of bad was that socializing with the Horde would have meant a late night for her, and now she could get her work done in the daytime.
As she climbed down from the truck and greeted her dogs, Abigail gave the heaviest worry a hard shove to the back of her head: the thought that all this really meant she was not compatible with the Night Horde MC, and thus not with any of its patches. Not with Mel.
Maybe she’d have to face that eventually, but for now she wasn’t sure it was true. No point fretting over it yet.
