Everything in me says, ‘Stay, get closer, don’t walk away.’
But wanting something doesn’t make it mine to take.
Deek finds me in the kitchen forty minutes later while I’m washing out my mug. He doesn’t say anything immediately, which is unusual enough to be suspicious. He pours himself a fresh coffee, takes a long drink, leans against the counter, and looks at me like he’s been lining something up in his head and has just decided now’s the moment to say it.
“Sooo,” he drawls out like he’s about to plot something inconceivable.
“No,” I say.
“You haven’t heard what I’m going to say.”
“I don’t need to.”
Deek ignores me, as he does most things that inconvenience him. “She brought you a snickerdoodle.”
I keep washing the mug. “She brought a tray of snickerdoodles. For theclub.”
“She put one specifically on the counter right where you were sitting. With a napkin folded under it. A folded napkin, Will. That’s intentional. You don’t fold a napkin for just anyone.”
“Deek.”
“I’m a details man. This is my gift to the world, and I use it responsibly.” He tilts his mug in my direction. “Three weeks.”
“I’m aware, the fact you keep telling me doesn’t change it,” I say, with more flatness than I intend.
“You’ve been aware for two years, and awareness alone is doing absolutelynothingfor you, brother. At some point, awareness needs a companion strategy.”
I set the mug down and turn to face him.
Deek and I came from the same father and somehow turned into completely different people. He’s louder than me, wilder,and walks through life with this reckless confidence that makes it seem like embarrassment has never once touched him. Part of me has envied that over the years. Most of me just learned to accept it as pure Deek.
But underneath all the bullshit, the nonstop commentary, and the aggressively annoying optimism, he’s still my brother. Which means he knows me in that deeply irritating blood-brother way where privacy stops existing, whether you like it or not.
“Three weeks,” I say. “Then I’ll handle it.”
Deek searches my face for a moment. “She was scared last night,” he says, and his voice has lost most of its performance quality. “The guys were talking after the sweep. She held it together, but she was scared.”
“I know.”
“And you drove her home.”
“Yeah… I drove her home.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he finishes his coffee, sets the mug in the sink, and straightens off the counter. “Will, don’t let her think she’s handling whatever she’s carrying by herself. You can hold the line and still let someone know you’re on the other side of it. Everyone knows you guys are gonna fuck like rabbits once you get your patch… but it doesn’t mean you can’t be here for her in the meantime.” He slaps my shoulder, the biggest shit-eating grin on his face, then he leaves as quickly as he came in. I stand in the kitchen and think about what he has said for considerably longer than I mean to.
By early evening, the clubhouse has settled into the comfortable, slightly rumbling warmth that it always finds after a high-alert night. The threat hasn’t gone away, none of them ever fully do, but the machinery of the club has absorbed it, filed it, distributed the response across the appropriate channels, and the ordinary rhythms have reasserted themselves with ease.
Marley is at the bar with Millie, the two of them leaning together over something on Marley’s phone, their heads tilted close. Marley’s laugh rings out, and Millie covers her mouth with her hand the way she does when something catches her genuinely off guard, her shoulders shaking. Something in my chest does a slow, involuntary thing in response to the sight of her like that, unguarded, bright, and entirely herself.
Nitro is beside me.
He doesn’t say anything.
He doesn’t need to.
Nitro’s silence is a different animal from Dad’s silence. His silence is bedrock. Nitro’s silence is the kind that has thought about what it wants to say and decided the saying isn’t the point. He stands at my side, arms folded, his attention shifting between Marley and the room with that steady, alert ease that is uniquely his. He’s already clocked it, what I’m seeing, what it’s costing me.
He doesn’t comment.
