Monk by Ivy Black

Chapter Fourteen

Monk

The place is half full as I sit at the table in the corner near the back of the coffee house, surveying the room. There are some people with their faces practically glued to their laptop screens—probably students. Others sitting there just talking to each other, and a couple of others who look as out of place as I do.

The sun is beginning to set beyond the plate glass windows on the front part of the shop. The scattered clouds in the sky overhead are cast in vibrant hues of red and orange. It’s cool outside, but pleasantly so. It’s a beautiful sunset, and I very much prefer to be on the road, riding along the coast, watching it, rather than be cooped up in a coffeehouse. But this is where she said she wanted to meet, and so here I am.

She’s fifteen minutes late at the moment, and I’m trying to keep my temper in check. Some people will have already thought of being stood up, but I know Kasey’s doing this to make a point. This is her power play, and I suppose I can’t be too mad about it. After all, fifteen minutes is nothing compared to ten-plus years.

A few minutes later, I see her walk through the doors. She’s in blue jeans and a white button-down shirt, her long red hair pulled back into a ponytail. She’s still as striking today as she was when we were together. Maybe even more so. The years between then and now have been very kind to her, and she’s grown into a genuinely beautiful woman.

She spots me as I give her a wave and heads toward the table. Kasey’s walking a little stiffly but is doing her best to cover it. That’s always been her way. She’s never been one to show weakness and will always put on a brave face. It’s something I’ve always admired about her.

“Caramel macchiato, soy milk, extra caramel drizzle,” I say as she takes a seat across from me.

Kasey looks down into the mug in front of her, her mouth half open.

“Is there anything you don’t remember?” she quips.

“No, I pretty much remember everything.”

“Well, that’s sweet and all, but you assume my tastes haven’t changed over the years,” she fires back.

“Have they?”

“That’s not the point. The point is you’re making assumptions about me when you haven’t deigned to speak to me—to not even let me know you’re alive—in more than a decade.”

I shrug. “I was just trying to be nice.”

“Turning over a new leaf, are you?”

I grin at her. “If your drink’s not to your liking, I can get you something else.”

She sighs and picks up the mug. “No, I guess this will be fine.”

I get the feeling her tastes haven’t changed and she just wants to bust my balls a bit. That’s fine, I’ll play the game for now. She deserves to blow off a little steam. Her eyes meet mine and she quickly looks away, the smooth, alabaster colored skin of her cheeks flushes for reasons I can only guess at as she looks away. Kasey covers her discomfort by taking another drink. She sets the mug back down on the table gently, careful to line the base of the mug up with the liquid ring.

“Thanks for the coffee,” she says.

“Least I could do.”

She rolls her eyes. “The very least you could do. Like the absolute, rock bottom, bare minimum.”

“I get your point.”

“Still, I appreciate the drink.”

“Of course,” I murmur.

“Where’s your little leather vest?” she asks.

“It’s called a kutte.”

“Sorry, where’s your kutte?”

“At home. I thought I’d do my best to look a bit more… civilized… this evening.”

She nods, a faint smirk playing across her lips. “So, a biker, huh? Not exactly what I expected to find.”

“What did you expect?”

Kasey shrugs. “Had no idea. It wasn’t that, though.”

The anger is wafting off her like heat radiating from a bonfire. It’s so thick, I’m practically choking on it. She raises those sparkling green eyes to me, and I find they still hold the same appeal, packing the same emotional punch today as they did all those years ago. Back then, all she had to do was turn that emerald colored gaze on me, and I would have done practically anything for her.

“So, I figure since you’ve been waiting so long, I should probably let you go first. Say whatever you need to say,” I tell her.

Her expression sours. “How magnanimous of you.”

“I do what I can.”

She glares at me, apparently not appreciative of my attempts to keep it light and inject a little levity into a tense situation. But then, maybe I need not be trying. She’s had a decade of hurt feelings to build upon, and sarcastic remarks probably aren’t going to do much to defuse those.

“Why’d you do it? Why’d you disappear like that?”

Drawing in a deep breath, I hold it a beat, then let it out slowly. This is a position I never expected to find myself in—having to explain myself to her. I honestly never thought I’d see her again. But she’s right. She deserves some answers. Kasey is somebody I cared about a lot. Somebody I loved with everything in me. And I can see she’s still hurting about the way everything went down at the end, so if there’s a way I can alleviate that pain, I’ll try.

I may be an asshole, but I’m not that big of an asshole.

So, I tell her about what happened that day I left home, sparing nothing. She asked for answers, so I give them to her in excruciating and graphic detail. As I relay the story, I watch her face. She’s aghast—to say the least. A myriad of emotions scrolls across her face as she listens to my story of enlisting and volunteering for an infantry unit—one in which I was guaranteed to see action.

What I’m not expecting to see, is the sympathy etched into her features. She looks at me with a mixture of horror and compassion on her face. That throws me a bit. But I quickly recover and finish my tale of woe.

“Anyway, I thought you’d appreciate it if I kept my homicidal urges away from you.”

She stares at me, wide eyed and slack jawed for a moment. But then, she clears her throat and sits back in her seat, taking a drink of her coffee to cover her shock. She sets the mug back down and looks at me.

“So, you decided to control your homicidal urges by… killing people?” she asks.

“Bad guys. I killed bad guys. Terrorists, enemy combatants and the like.”

“But still… you killed people,” she repeats, her voice low and thick with sadness.

“It was my job. It was war, Kasey. I’m not a sociopath.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“I haven’t killed anybody since I rotated home.”

“Gold star for you.”

She scrubs her face with her hands, taking a moment to gather herself. Apparently, to somebody who has no urge to kill another human being, the idea that somebody else might relish the opportunity is monstrous. I don’t want her to see me as a monster, but that’s out of my hands now. She wanted answers, and there’s nothing I can do about how she reacts to the ones I’m giving her.

“You hurt me, Jacob. You’ll never know how badly you hurt me.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t know. How could you? You were the one who left, not the other way around.”

Though she isn’t screaming, her voice is a bit louder than normal. Loud enough to draw the eyes of a few people sitting at a nearby table. I give them my best biker face and they quickly turn away, deciding that minding their own business is probably the better idea.

“You’re right. I’ll never know. If you want an apology, I’m sorry, Kasey. I’m sorry I hurt you. But I had reasons.”

“Yeah, you couldn’t trust me to share what happened with your dad. Instead, you ran away from me and from everything we were building together.”

“It’s not that I ran from you,” I try to explain. “I was running away from everything bad in my life. Unfortunately, you got caught up in that.”

She shakes her head. Obviously, my answer hasn’t mollified her in the least.

“I didn’t tell you, because I knew if I called you before I left, you would have talked me out of it. And I needed to go. I needed to enlist because I can guarantee you that if I hadn’t, I’d be sitting in prison right now. If I hadn’t left, I would have killed my father at some point. In which case, I would have had to leave you anyway,” I explain to her.

“At least I would have known what happened.”

“Yeah, I could have told you all about it when you came to visit me in San Quentin,” I explain. “You deserved better than that, Kasey. You deserved better than me.”

“Don’t you think that was my decision to make?”

“No. It wasn’t.”

Her mouth falls open and she stares at me. “How dare you, you arrogant, presumptuous asshole.”

“That can’t come as a surprise to you.”

She looks about ready to pounce. “No. It doesn’t. It pretty much lines up with everything I’ve thought about you for the last ten years or so.”

She rolls her eyes and lets out a low, grumble, her frustration with me evident. The one thing I can say, is that my story seems to have taken a bit of the wind out her sails. She doesn’t have quite as much bite as she did when she walked in here. Kasey’s still pissed, but she’s tempering it.

That isn’t what I want. It’s not my goal to tell her what happened the night I left. I don’t want her pity. I don’t want anybody’s pity. I take ownership for my life—and that includes owning up to my own fuckups. I am simply trying to give her the answers she wants.

“I didn’t know things with your dad were that bad. I mean, I knew your home life was rough, but I didn’t know what happened or why you left.”

“How could you? I didn’t tell you,” I say. “And I’m not looking for your sympathy. I just want you to understand that it had nothing to do with you, or with anything you did or didn’t do.”

“Yeah that might have been nice to hear a while back. I spent a long time thinking I’d done something to drive you off.”

“You should have known better than that. You were the only good thing in my life. You were the only thing about my life that was good.”

“Yeah, well, how could I? As you so astutely pointed out, you didn’t tell me.”

“Touché.”

A long moment of silence descends over the table. I take a drink of my coffee and watch her closely. Kasey’s grappling with everything I’ve told her tonight, and I can tell she’s not sure what to make of any of it. She’s obviously had one image and one construct in her mind about me all these years. And it’s just as obvious everything I’ve told her has destroyed that same image and construct.

I don’t know what I can do for her now. I’ve told her everything. Given her all the answers she was looking for. Whether she chooses to accept them is up to her. So is what she chooses to do about them. My only hope is that it brings her some sense of peace.

For me, it’s stirred up a lot of shit. All of the old ghosts I’ve worked so hard to stuff down and snuff out of existence have come crawling back. Feelings I thought I’d abandoned long ago are now rushing back to the surface. Truth be told, my feelings for Kasey have never dissipated. Not completely. But that’s my cross to bear. That’s something I’ll have to spend the next decade dealing with, I suppose.

The silence between us lingers and the air between us crackles with an awkward tension. Kasey glances at her watch and frowns. I can tell she’s getting ready to go, but I find myself wanting her to stay.

“Nothing else you want to say to me? No more barbs you want to throw at me? Nothing snide you want to say?” I ask.

She smirks. “I have plenty I want to say, but it would hardly be sporting. It almost seems like kicking a man when he’s down. Let me just say that although I’m still pissed and hurt, hearing what you went through gives me a different perspective.”

“Is that you saying you forgive me?”

“I’m not sure yet,” she replies, a sly smile on her face.

Forgiveness wasn’t something I was seeking. It’s not why I told her everything I did. But I’d be lying if I said the thought of her forgiving me didn’t lift a weight from my shoulders that I didn’t know I was carrying. Suddenly, I feel lighter than I did before.

“Anyway, I should go,” she says and gets to her feet.

“Right. Yeah. I’ll walk you out.”

“Not necessary.”

“No, but I’m still going to walk you out.”

“Crime’s not a factor here.”

“No, but I’m still going to walk you out.”

She throws her hands up, apparently giving up the argument. Kasey turns and walks toward the doors and I fall into step behind her. We get out to the sidewalk and walk to the parking lot, neither of us saying a word. Not that I even know what to say at this point.

“This is me,” she says, pointing to a black Range Rover.

“Nice ride.”

“Gets me from point A to point B.”

“Husband buy that for you?”

Her expression darkens for a moment, but she doesn’t say anything, not rising to the bait. I cut a glance at her hand again and see that she’s still not wearing her ring. It’s possible that she’s lost it, or is having it cleaned, but something tells me she’s not with him anymore. Given her tan line, it looks like a recent separation.

“Thanks,” Kasey says. “For explaining things to me. It was… enlightening.”

The feelings flowing through me are lighting me up inside in ways I didn’t expect. Seeing her again—being close to her again—is heady. It’s overwhelming. Without stopping to think about it, I step forward, pushing Kasey against the side of her car, holding her by the waist. Leaning down, I kiss her. She seems taken aback, her body tensing, but Kasey’s lips part, allowing me to slide my tongue into her mouth.

Our tongues swirl languidly, the heat and passion undiminished from the last time I kissed her. She melts against me, gripping my upper arms as she kisses me back with just as much zeal, her soft whimpers lost in my mouth.

But then, she suddenly straightens up. Kasey’s entire body is rigid, and she abruptly pulls back. Her eyes are wide, her mouth hanging open, an expression of stunned disbelief on her face. Frankly, I’m as surprised as she is that she kissed me back. It had been nice—until she pulled away, anyway.

Kasey surprises me again when she hauls off and slaps me. Again. The sharp report of flesh meeting flesh echoing across the parking lot. Her expression shifts quickly from shock and disbelief to dark and angry in a heartbeat.

“You don’t get to do that. Just because I understand why you took off, it doesn’t mean I’m not still pissed at you,” she snarls at me.

“I imagine you are.”

She looks like she’s about to say more but seems to opt against it. She hits the button on her key fob, unlocking her car. Kasey quickly jumps inside and slams the door behind her. Her mouth is moving, but I can’t hear what she’s saying. I’m sure it’s nothing but her cursing up a blue streak and calling me every name in the book.

As she starts the Range Rover and drops it into gear, I take a step back, not wanting her to run over my feet either accidentally, or more likely, on purpose. Her tires chirp on the pavement as she shoots out of her spot and guns it out of the parking lot. She disappears around a corner and out of sight a moment later, leaving me in the parking lot with the faint memory of her kiss and the tingle upon my lips.

For a moment there, I got the idea that she was enjoying it. She felt like she liked it and wanted more, but had held herself back, eventually coming back to her senses. Regretfully. But still, it’s a crack in her self-control if I choose to exploit it. And that isn’t something I’ve decided on yet. The situation is complicated, to say the least.

I walk over to my bike and mount up, buckling the chin straps of my helmet and putting on a pair of yellow-tinted glasses to better see the road at this time of night. I drop my bike into gear and pull out of the parking lot, bound for home, a pensive look on my face.

As I cruise along the road, I savor the feeling of the cool air on my face. It takes some of the heat out of me and helps me think a bit more clearly. This night has not gone the way as expected.

It might not be a good thing, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing either.