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And, hell, once you learned to lock those emotions down for long enough, they stopped really coming up at all. That calm you used to fake became your new normal.
"He doesn't give a single fuck," the brother declared, smirking. "Maybe we can call him Virgin."
It wasn't until a couple years later that I realized the name could be seen in a negative way, that I would have to keep explaining it for the rest of my criminal career. But it was mine. I kept it.
"How did you and Sugar end up in Navesink Bank?" Freddie asked, ripping me out of my memories for a moment, realizing for the first time that it had been a long time since I thought of those things. My mom, the room I lived in, the neighbor who had been my only sliver of warm and soft, my crazy grandmother, meeting my dad for the first time, finding my best friend in the world.
Heroin gang to cocaine gang to enforcing.
It was the third club when we finally grew up, got bigger, stronger, meaner looking. We got licenses that allowed us to run more errands, to become useful to the older members of the MC.
The inevitable happened around then too. Phil got locked up on a two-year stretch, leaving Sean fatherless. My father was in and out of jail more than he was around, taking the fall for the men who were actually at fault for the things he went down for. But that was what you did. Whatever the president wanted you to do. Even if it meant giving up some of your freedom.
It was then that it all changed for us.
We were allowed to do something we had never been able to do when our fathers were around. We got to prospect, work our way into being actual club members, not just annoyances hanging around.
By the time our fathers were back, we each had cuts, had patches.
We weren't technically adults yet, but according to the club, we were.
There was no more of our fathers protecting us from things, shielding us from some aspects of the club.
We were given drinks, access to the clubwhores, did jobs.
In fact, we were given more jobs than our own fathers were. Not because of their age, but because of our own. Because we were underage. Because if we got caught, we would merely go to juvie for a short spell, not a couple years upstate. It was a smart move to risk us instead of the more established members of the club.
And, inadvertently, it also pushed Sugar and I closer than ever. We were part of a brotherhood, sure, but he and I, we were our own sort of brotherhood. All we had was each other when we were out on jobs, taking on enforcing all by ourselves. Often outnumbered. Expected to do the damage, get the money, keep the club afloat.
Sugar was the one there to pour alcohol on my bleeding, aching knuckles. I was the one in a seedy motel room in a town we didn't know using tweezers and a cheap sewing kit from a convenience store to pluck a bullet out of his flesh then stitch him up. He pulled my unconscious body out of a bad situation by the back of my shirt. I hauled his battered body over my shoulder like a soldier in a war to escape a hailstorm of bullets.
That was our life for years.
Then Phil had a heart attack when we were in our mid-twenties.
A year later, while Sug and I were out of town doing one job, my father caught a bullet on another, taking his life before I could get a chance to say goodbye, to thank him for taking me in when he didn't have to, for giving me a life free of hunger, for giving me skills as a kid that would help me as a man.
"I'm sorry," Freddie said, voice a little thick, reaching across the table to put her delicate-looking hand over my big, scarred one.
"It was a long time ago," I hedged, not liking the feeling that came up at those words. I'd never heard them. Not even right after his death. Sug had clamped a hand on my shoulder, and we had both bowed our heads in silence when we got the news.
If someone had apologized, it would have implied something bad happened. Dying for the brotherhood, that was seen as something to be proud of.
By the time we got back to the club, the body had been buried, the booze had been poured. It was business as usual.
"Still. That couldn't have been easy," Freddie insisted, only pulling away because the waiter came back to the table with our entrees.
"Life usually isn't," I agreed.
"So what happened then?"
It was life as usual. We stayed in the club that was home for all intents and purposes, that was the only family we had left.
