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At that, Gia’s mother laughed. It was a short, choppy sound, harsh but with a softer coating Zaxx sensed but couldn’t understand.
“You’ll hurt her, Zaxx. And she’ll hurt you.”
Spoken with such dire certainty they sounded like a fortune told, the words came at him with violence, but he stood firm and took the blow. “No. You can’t know that, and you’re wrong.”
She crossed her arms and popped her hip. “Do you know that Gia never had a real friend, somebody not family she could bond with as a friend of her own, until she left town? She had to leave home to make a friend. She had to leave home to have a boyfriend, too. I know that’s about her dad and me, what people think of us, how we’re known, more than anything else, but there’s nothing we can do about it. We are the parents she’s got. Gia has been trying to get away from Signal Bend since she was old enough to know there was any other place to be.”
Zaxx had lived in or around Signal Bend since his parents bought their place here. Though he hadn’t been born here or even lived most of his life here, this was the place he considered his hometown, and he’d been familiar with the Night Horde and its history as long as he’d been familiar with Signal Bend. He knew the outsized reputation of the club, and particularly of its older members, like Gia’s dad.
But he barely knew Gia, because she’d barely been around. She’d left town as soon as she could and stayed away as much as she could.
None of that mattered; she’d told him only this morning that she was here, and would be for the foreseeable future. Trying to rein in a burgeoning anger, and a quiver of doubt, he told her mother exactly that.
Lilli listened, and then she smiled. Zaxx saw Oh you sweet summer child in the curve of her mouth. “I’m not saying any of this because I don’t like you, Zaxx, or I don’t like you with Gia. I think you’re a good guy, and I think Gia gets to decide who she wants to be with. But I do want you—both of you—to think. She’s working on her dissertation. At Northwestern. She passed her orals with great distinction. When she’s done with her diss, she wants to be a professor, and to do that, she’ll need to be able and willing to go where the jobs are, wherever that is. Gia has wanted away from here all her life, and she has a chance to do it, and do it with a big splash. Say you two work out. Say you get serious, fall in love. Do you really want to be the thing that ties her here so she can’t reach her dreams?”
That punch, Zaxx couldn’t stand firm against. He actually stumbled back a step while doubt and guilt ran him down.
Gia’s mother reached out and gave his arm a maternal squeeze that felt more than a little condescending.
“So what does that mean for what happens now?” he finally asked, forcing his voice to sound normal.
Lilli cocked her head and narrowed her eyes, and Zaxx felt a powerful sense of an image laid over its copy, like a 3-D photo. Gia made exactly that gesture in the same kind of circumstance. It was, he realized, their What are you after? look.
“I guess that’s up to you and my daughter. I’ve said my bit and don’t intend to meddle more. But right now, you should continue on your way. I’ve convinced Isaac to stand down for now, but I guarantee you he’s watching from the kitchen window and looking for a reason to storm out here and tear your arms off. I know you got called in, so I guess what happens after that is whatever you decide to do with what I’ve said and what Badge tells you.”
That wasn’t very helpful. Zaxx looked toward the main house, to the area he thought the kitchen was, but glare from the sun on the window made it hard to see anything.
Turning back to Lilli, he said one last thing. “I’m going to tell you what I told Gia last night: She warned me her dad would be angry about this, and I didn’t need the warning. We all know Gia is supposed to be ‘off limits.’ But I followed her lead, not the other way around, and I told her I’m not scared off. I’m not.”
Again Lilli gave him that searching squint. Zaxx held fast and let her look. When she was satisfied, she sighed. “That’s admirable, and I’m not surprised. Like I said, I think you’re good, Zaxx, and I know my girl is spectacular. But it’s not me you should be scared of, and it’s more complicated than an angry father—or her whole passel of protective uncles.”
A chuckle escaped him before he had a chance to consider how she’d take that. “Nolan got in my way last night, so yeah, it’s occurred to me.” The next words on his tongue were She’s a grown woman, in fact they’d become a chant in his head, but saying those aloud to her mother would not be wise. Instead, he simply repeated, “I’m not scared off.”
That was true: Isaac didn’t scare him enough to dissuade him. But what Lilli’s words had him shook. He knew enough of Gia—fuck, Gia herself had told him enough—to see nothing but truth in her mother’s perspective. Gia didn’t want to sink her roots in Signal Bend.
His roots sank deep here and were snarled with his sister’s and their parents’.
Half an hour ago, he’d thought that a future where Gia’s dissertation was complete was too far away to worry about. Now, though, he understood that if he and she started to build something real together, it could very well change the course of that future. Or, at the very least, leave them shattered when it didn’t.
He didn’t want to do anything that could hurt her. And he didn’t want to be hurt, either.
Lilli smiled and squeezed his arm again. “I like the way you say that—not that you’re not scared, just that you’ll withstand it. It makes me believe you won’t be reckless here with her or with yourself. I’ll do what I can to soothe the savage beast. But fuck, Zaxx. On top of everything else, your timing is absolute dog shit—Gia got home yesterday, after half a year away. Then she blew us off last night and came home with a guy for the first time ever. There is more than anger going on in her father’s head.”
“There’s some shit going on in Gia’s head, too,” he said—and then clamped his teeth together. Fuck, he should not have said that. Not his place. At all.
She gave him another curious, suspicious squint, and Zaxx prepared himself for another psychic blow. But Lilli finally said only, “Yes, I know. That’s what I’m talking about.”
~oOo~
This early on a Sunday, not even nine o’clock yet, the clubhouse should have been mostly a ghost town, with no work on the books for the day, the patches who’d crashed here last night still unconscious, the club girls starting to stir and get coffee and breakfast going. But Zaxx rode onto a lot that was more than half full.
He parked and went in, surprised to find most of the patches awake and powering coffee into their gullets. Several boxes of doughnuts from Marie’s were scattered across the bar and half picked through already. Saxon’s family bought the restaurant when Marie retired, and one of the great perks of having a patch own the town diner was an endless stream of excellent free food.
This looked like a day when there was club work. In addition to their construction work, which most but not all the patches did as their straight jobs, the club freelanced security and protection jobs, which ranged from escorting expensive goods through Missouri and into Illinois or Kansas or Oklahoma, or working event security in Rolla or Springfield, or something like a stakeout when a town farmer or other business had trouble.
None of that was on the books for this weekend, and he couldn’t imagine that kind of job coming up as an emergency. This couldn’t all be for him, right? He wasn’t going to have to face a tribunal or some other gauntlet for having consensual sex with an adult human woman. Right?
The way Darwin, Thumper, Cox, and Mel were eyeing him, all wearing some kind of smirk, he thought maybe.
