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“I don’t think so. I’d’ve fucked it up. I fucked everything up most of my life. I didn’t even really get that I was doing it—or that it mattered.”
“You’re not fucking up now.”
“I’m trying not to. I guess … I guess …”
“What?”
He cleared his throat. “I guess I had to see how fucking lonely I was before I could see I had to try.”
Turning within his embrace, Marcella faced this contrary, contradictory, conflicted man, this salty old biker who still harbored an innocent boy under a suit of armor made of flesh and spite and pain.
She set her hands on his heavily muscled chest, feeling the curls of hair against her fingers. “I was lonely, too.”
His blue eyes searched her face as he brushed her hair back with callused fingers. “I love you, Marce. I really do. I kept having this feeling like I was having a heart attack or something, but it’s that. I love you so much it hurts. And Ajax, too.”
“We love you, too.”
He leaned close and kissed her. Soon enough, that kiss became more, and they both forgot that they were too stuffed from Thanksgiving to fuck.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Eight did not shop.
He bought his groceries and most of his clothes and house shit at Walmart. On those extremely rare occasions when chipping in some cash to somebody else for a group gift wasn’t possible, he also bought gifts at Walmart. He bought home repair shit at Home Depot. Whatever he needed, he went to the closest, cheapest place that had it, he bought it, and he got the fuck out.
The exception to that, of course, was the Harley store. There, he could browse for some time. In fact, he’d bought clothes there, too, and his best boots. Even some house shit.
What he never did was go to the mall. What he not once ever in his life had done was go to a mall in December.
Yet here he was.
He hated it. Thoroughly. It was crowded as fuck, loud as hell, and aggressively fucking cheerful. Everywhere he turned were Christmas decorations and Christmas carols and store clerks in fucking reindeer antlers and the whole thing grabbed him by the collar and screamed MERRY FUCKING CHRISTMAS in his face.
Eight had never celebrated a Christmas as a kid. Aside from having to sit still twice as long in church, it had been a day like any other. Christmases with the Bulls were pretty good, but he still looked around at all these moms and dads dragging massive bags of toys and shit, and all the little kids in their red and green fancy outfits waiting for Santa, and a maddening thrum of anger knocked against his spine.
Which was stupid. He hadn’t been a kid for forty years.
However, Ajax was with him on his first excursion into a shopping center in December, and the kid was having a great time, so Eight tried to enjoy his son’s enjoyment.
They were spending this Saturday alone together because Marcella and the band were done with the video and in the last stages of finishing the whole album, preparing to release it right after New Year’s. With the holiday week coming up fast, they were knuckling down, and she was busy a lot.
When asked what he wanted to do for the day, Ajax had said he wanted to shop.
So here they were.
In these weeks since they’d come out to Ajax, Eight had spent most of his nights in their apartment. He’d discovered a real enjoyment for not waking up alone—and even more enjoyment for the miracle of morning sex—and his own house seemed lonely and spartan now.
He was thinking he wanted something more permanent with Marcella, but that thought scared the piss out of him, and he didn’t figure she was any readier for a big move than he was, yet. So he kept his mouth shut about that, slept in her bed most nights and left in the morning, went home to shower and change and start his day.
“Should I call her Grammo?” Ajax asked, peering seriously at his list. He’d decorated his gift list like he’d decorated the Top Ten List Eight had on his fridge.
Marcella had told Eight that their son had never made a list of gifts he wanted, but since he was five, he started saving in the summer for Christmas gifts he wanted to give. He was worried this year, since his family had grown so much, so suddenly, that he wouldn’t have enough money.
Eight would make sure he did.
“Do you want to call her Grammo?”
They were talking about Mo. Though she hadn’t been able to have kids of her own, she was the matriarch of the Bulls family, and she considered the second generation of patches and their old ladies her sons and daughters and their children her grandchildren. Zach, the first of the kids to think of her as a grandmother, had been the first to call her Grammo. She loved it, so they all called her that.
