Rituals (Cainsville 5)

"I'd completely forgotten that was--"

"I know. And I knew it was coming. I've always known it was coming, no matter how much you doubted it. But I wasn't ever going to be ready. I see that now."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't, Liv. Please. You have nothing to apologize for, and it only makes me feel bad, knowing you feel the need to say it. You don't. So I'm just going to talk for a few minutes, okay?"

I nodded.

"You and I..." He shifted on the log. "I don't know where we were going. Nowhere, if I'm being honest. If I look ten years down the road, where would we have been? Me as leader of the Saints, and you as the wife of a motorcycle gang leader, with the stigma of that, the danger of that?" He shook his head. "It isn't the life for you, and you'd be miserable. So what's the alternative? I quit the club? You'd never let me do that because then I'd be miserable. Where we were? It was fucking fantastic. But it didn't have a future."

He looked at me. "What we have now is just as good, and it has a future. I'm gonna miss what we had. I do miss it, every damn day. But I'd miss not having you in my life a hell of a lot more."

"Ditto."

He smiled. "Good." A quiet moment. Then he glanced over. "Do you regret it? Us being together?"

"Never. We had to try. We had to know."

"That's what Arawn never got. He knew Matilda loved him, a

nd he knew it wasn't in the same way she loved Gwynn, yet he couldn't help thinking it was only different because Gwynn got his chance, and if Arawn had, things would have been different. He was wrong. Matilda wanted to be with Gwynn. You want to be with Gabriel. You aren't her, and he's not him, but what you each are feels the same way. If that makes any sense."

"It does."

"So..." His gaze dropped to my ankle and I knew he was thinking of the tattoo there, the moon for Arawn, for him. "I'll understand if you want that removed."

I looked at his forearm, where he had a small tattoo of the sun and moon entwined. Matilda's symbol. "Do you want yours removed?"

"Course not. I knew when I got it that I almost certainly wasn't going to keep you. It's a marker in my life, for something significant. You were. You still are. I hope you always will be. The tattoo stays."

"Ditto," I said. "To all of that."

--

Gabriel had cleaned the parlor while we were gone. We were in there now, with coffee and Rose's cookies, talking about the sluagh and Seanna and where we'd go from here. It wasn't until it began snowing--in the parlor--that I realized I'd drifted off to sleep.

In my dream, we were still on the sofa, me sitting sideways with my back against Gabriel, Ricky in the opposite corner, sprawled with his head propped on a pillow as he talked. And it was snowing. Not pretty little flakes but huge gobs of snow, and I was getting annoyed because it was piling up, and then I couldn't hear Ricky because, well, snow.

When I reached out to brush the flakes away, my fingers touched paper instead. Small scrolls rained down like clumps of snow. I unrolled one to see a name.

"Greg Kirkman?" I said. "Who's Greg Kirkman?"

"That's the question, isn't it?" Gabriel said, almost muffled by the paper piling around him.

"Um, yeah, that's what I said." I took another scroll, opened it, and read the same two words. And then another and another.

"Who the hell is Greg Kirkman?" I said.

Gabriel sighed, setting the paper fluttering. "Yes, exactly."

"No, really, I'm asking you guys."

Ricky brushed the drift of papers away from his face. "Um, no. That's your job, right? You were supposed to--"

"Shit!"

I jolted awake, my hands brushing aside imaginary papers. "I forgot to research Greg Kirkman."