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Was he a testosterone-poisoned douchebro? Or was he something special?
He reached out and took her hand, lightly, experimentally, and left the three feet or so of space between them. “Hey—I’m sorry. I don’t want to fight.”
Gia kind of did want to fight. This dudgeon was focused and pure, and as it swept through her it gathered all the indistinct wisps of hurt and guilt and disappointment that had been catching in her corners like cobwebs.
She snatched her hand from his. “The club thinks they’re in charge of Signal Bend, but it’s women who run it—women run almost all the biggest businesses, and they hold more than half the town council seats. Fuck, Adrienne and the other old ladies run the clubhouse, too. The Horde are just glorified security guards.”
Oh, look. Now Zaxx was pissed, too. He stepped back to lean on the island and crossed his arms. “That’s painting things with a pretty big brush. We’re a lot more than fucking security guards. Yeah, okay, women own most of the big businesses, and they do the social shit, but the Horde’s really running the town. The mayor comes to Badger, not to Adrienne. When people have problems, or somebody makes trouble, it’s the club they come to.”
“That’s only party true. You don’t see all the people who come to my mom, or Shannon, or Tash, or Adrienne, because you’re not looking in that direction. You see what men do and think that’s everything.”
Zaxx raked a hand through his hair and looked away, fixing his attention for a few seconds on the porthole window over her tiny sink. Gia stood and watched him, feeling clear and straight for the first time since she first stepped into this house.
She wasn’t really angry at Zaxx. Oh, she was aggravated that he was caveman enough to blithely discount the significant contributions of a whole gender, and that first burst of potent fury had her blood at peak flow, but he hadn’t said or done anything she found unforgiveable. She loved arguments like this. By the time it was over, she would have opened his eyes, or he would have dug his heels in. Either way, she’d know more about him. And she’d have blown out a bunch of gunk from the grooves of her brain.
When he turned back to her, he was calmer; his expression showed bemusement more than anything else. “I do not understand how we ended up fighting over feminism or whatever. Why are you making a big deal about this? And why are you doing it now?”
“Feminism or whatever?” Okay, maybe he was going to say or do something she couldn’t look past.
“I didn’t mean it like that.” With a big sigh, he dropped his head. His hair fell forward, and he let it hang there. When he looked up, his expression had changed again. Now he seemed earnest. “I’m not sure I can say I’m a feminist—I’m not sure that’s a thing a guy can say. I guess I could say I’m an ally.”
“You guess you could say? You don’t know for sure?” She set aside the observation that a true ally would not have discounted women in the first place; she could use it later, if this argument became a fight.
“I’m not sure how to say it so you won’t look for a reason to get madder.”
“I’m not looking for reasons.”
“You’re not? Because it feels like it to me. It feels like you’re trying to break all this apart. If you want me to go, I’ll go. You can just say it.”
Though she’d been alive for a quarter-century, Gia continued to be thrown by how many people skittered away from lively debate as if disagreement meant hostility. Some things he’d said had pissed her off, yes, but she wasn’t angry at him as a person (yet). She was fighting back against wrongheaded ideas. She’d been raised to have and to take her say. More people should have been raised like that. Resentment and contempt grew in the silences between people. Arguments were how the rot got cleaned out.
“I don’t want you to go, Zaxx. I’m not mad at you.”
He grunted out something like a chuckle. “Okay. Then what the fuck have we been doing for the past five minutes?”
“Having a slightly heated discussion. You said some shit that pissed me off, but that’s not the same as being pissed at you.”
“It’s not? Sorry, G, but I’m confused. I said something, you got mad, but that’s not being mad at me?”
He’d shortened her name to her initial, something people who were close to her did all the time. Whether he knew it or not, without moving, he’d taken a step closer. Now she took the same step in reality.
“No. Mad at your opinion isn’t the same as being mad at you. Unless you dig in and don’t hear what I’m saying.”
“So I have to agree with you. If I don’t, that’s when you kick me out.”
“Depends on what we’re disagreeing about.” She took another step and picked up his hand. He looked down, studying his hand in hers, and didn’t pull it free. “Right now,” she continued, “if you say you don’t think what women do in town matters, then yeah, we’re not gonna get along, and you should go. But I want you to agree—like, honestly agree, not just say it to back me off.”
The unformed seedling of a smile pushed one corner of his mouth up. “I do agree. I was talking about the Horde, though, and that’s all guys—the patches are all men, I mean.” Before she could respond, he added, “I do see how much women here do, and how much they’ve achieved. I just wasn’t thinking about that in the moment. I was focused on the club.” He lifted one side of his kutte, demonstrating his belonging there. “I also wasn’t thinking about the hard shit the club dealt with when they were hardcore outlaw. My point was about how much bank they made, not whether it was worth it. You gotta admit that there’s a noticeable difference in lifestyle between the guys that were around twenty years ago and guys like me, who weren’t—but you’re right, I didn’t figure what the old ladies bring into their families.” A bright grin burst suddenly across his face. “What you’re telling me, I guess, is if I want to get ahead around here, I need to get with a strong, smart, ambitious woman and make sure I keep her. Know anybody like that?”
See? This was why it was stupid to ‘go along to get along.’ They’d had their argument, and now they were finding common ground—ground that was stable because they’d found the cracks and filled them in.
Gia closed the remaining space between them and set her hands on his chest, pushing under his kutte. She could feel his strength beneath her palms.
She made her tone gentle as she delivered her final point. “You live in a rented trailer, but you also ride a thirty-thousand-dollar bike and drive an eighty-thousand-dollar truck. You’re doing okay.”
He set his hands on her hips. “I know. I said I was. But I won’t be buying land anytime soon. And my folks barely keep their own shit together. They couldn’t build me a whole house and fill it with furniture and food and dishes.”
That observation felt like a poke, but Gia liked where they’d landed and didn’t want to shove them off a cliff now. Still, she couldn’t let that assumption go unchallenged.
