Page 104 of Where We Ended

Every chance that I got. Waking hours, nights I should be sleeping. I watched, and I waited.

I couldn’t go inside the Stone Riders club unless I was clever and slipped on one of their cuts. They didn’t know any different as long as I hid any ink that I carried, identifying myself as a Death Raider. I’d done it once, gotten close enough to sit at the bar in their clubhouse and watch her.

She stuck to the shadows, smiling and laughing with the white-haired woman in the kitchen. No one seemed to talk to her or bother her, which put my concerns to rest. She seemed safe…and more than that, she seemed happy.

She liked going to the library when she managed to get a ride into town. She’d do a loop, library, coffee shop, and then the fountain in the town square. The woman she liked to cook with didn’t always drive a truck, occasionally she rode on the back of her man’s bike, leaving Natty without a ride.

The next day I bought her a yellow moped with a note attached:

Galeam gere tuum cerebrum meum est tertium ventus de te mea res clara, sponsa pulchra. Wear a helmet - your brain is my third favorite thing about you my bright, beautiful bride.

I watched as she traced each word, smiling so bright that my chest nearly burst. That was when she looked up, and her eyes landed on me from across the road. I stood, wearing my cut, a t-shirt that exposed me to the remaining chill in the air and way too many eyes on my ink, but I merely allowed her to see me while I was able to see her.

She smiled at me, and I smiled back. It felt like time stopped, and we were frozen, unable to move forward or back. Just stuck there in this divide.

The next night I had a text on my phone with a drawing that was eerily familiar. A circle with an arrow…the symbol for the grove that we used as kids. Then she dropped coordinates.

I’d gone that next day and found a wooden box with a lid attached with a simple nail. Inside was a note.

Quod primum de me amas?

What is the first thing you love about me?

I smiled, then looked around just to see if she was near, but there was no one. We were a ways outside of her club, past the boundary line. She must have found an easy way to get back and forth, but the notion that it was unguarded didn’t sit well with me.

I wrote her back and set the note inside, knowing this was dangerous for my heart but also knowing it was only a matter of time before she was in my arms again.

Animam tuam, Caelum. Anima mea ventus est de te.

Your soul, Caelum. Your soul is my favorite thing about you.

Natty rode her moped with pride, and in turn, it made me proud. She finally applied for a job in town, which I liked because it made her less reliant on the club. They paid her for things, but I knew it was tight, and she didn’t do enough work to really bring in enough of an income, especially when she was getting her food and living costs taken care of.

This job was at a coffee shop—a bakery where she was in the kitchen, out of sight from the public, making baked goods. It seemed to make her happy.

That’s what I had to settle for, I realized.

Watching her from afar as pieces of her hair fell to the page of the book she had started reading in the library. Being enthralled by the way the sun would cut through the windows and catch in her hair as if she was merely an extension of it.

I watched as she grocery shopped for herself but always took back a bottle of classic Coke for that guy Brooks that she liked. He seemed like a good guy from what I had observed.

The Stone Riders went to a picnic at a local lake, and while my own club was raiding somewhere, I was there, on a river rock, watching as Natty sunk her feet into the water, closed her eyes and tipped her face up to the sky.

I’d never seen her so free or so happy, at least not since we were kids.

Tears came when she crouched down, inspecting a frog hopping from stone to stone. She laughed, and it reminded me of a poem. If her laugh could create constellations, then at least ten would have been birthed. Joy was a good look on my wife, and I realized it was an addiction to allow her to keep it.

Time went on where I became her shadow, a dark wraith obsessed with her light.

She knew I was there. Always aware of me, but never able to talk to me.

She’d ask in her letters if I would come for her, and how long I was going to wait.

Each time she did, I’d take the note and leave no response because my mind would go back to her standing in that lake, smiling at the sun. She was safe. She was happy, and she was free.

I knew deep down I loved her enough to let her stay that way.

TWENTY-EIGHT

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