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Again, Eight was struck hard by the kid’s unadorned, innocent frankness. There was something going on inside him, and it fucking hurt.
But he didn’t want to lose it.
He went to the passenger side of the truck to make sure Ajax could climb in without help, then went around to get behind the wheel. As they buckled in, Eight asked, “You want Hideaway again?”
“Actually …” Ajax paused and looked out the windshield for a few seconds. “Would it be okay if we went to the clubhouse place you talked about? Where the Bulls are? Could we order pizza for delivery?”
Well, that sent a bolus of adrenaline through Eight, like he was hunkered down in a firefight. He hadn’t told the Bulls that he had a kid. The only people in the Bulls family who’d ever known were Becker, who was gone, and, now, Mo, who stayed away from the clubhouse most of the time.
He couldn’t imagine what his brothers and the others attached to the Bulls would think if he brought a ten-year-old boy into the clubhouse and announced that boy was his own son.
“Uh … damn, kiddo, I don’t know. I don’t think your mom would—”
“I talked to her about it,” Ajax interrupted, “and she said ‘we’ll see,’ which is what she says when she’s going to say yes but she has to think it out first.”
Eight picked his phone up from the console. “I tell you what. Let me call her and see what she says.” This was not a question for a text. Eight pulled her up in his phone and initiated a call.
It rang for a while and went to voice mail. Not sure how to leave a message about this, he said simply, “Hey, it’s me. Got a question for ya. Gimme a jingle.”
Ajax watched quietly until Eight set his phone back in the console. Then he turned his baby blues on him—just like Eight’s—and said, “Can we? Pleeeeeease, Dad? I’ll be good, I promise. I always try to be good.”
And in that way, at the very least, he was nothing like his father.
It was a bad idea. He wasn’t prepared for whatever the Bulls would make of this development, and he couldn’t begin to guess what that would be. He could very clearly imagine how Marcella would react to him taking their son into the heart of the Brazen Bulls MC on the very first time he’d had the boy to himself, and her reaction would be, well, explosive.
It was a terrible idea.
But his son was practically begging. And calling him ‘Dad,’ and Eight didn’t want to tell him no.
Consequences be damned had practically been Eight’s philosophy of life since he was a kid. He was trying to be better, to care about how what he wanted affected other people, to make better decisions.
But just now, damning the consequences was familiar as an old blanket.
“Okay. Let’s go to the clubhouse.
~oOo~
Eight parked on the lot beside the clubhouse. Ajax sat quietly beside him and didn’t make a move to open the door when the engine cut out.
“Change your mind?”
“No.” He turned to Eight. “It’s different than I had in my head.”
“What’d you have in your head?”
“Like, aclubhouse. This is just a building.”
Throwing his head back, Eight laughed.
“What?” Ajax asked, ready to be offended.
“Nothing. Just had an image of a treehouse with a sign, NO GIRLS ALLOWED. That’s what you imagined?”
With a small shrug and a smaller smile, Ajax muttered, “Maybe.”
“No, bud. It’s just a building, where the Bulls hang out. We’re a club, and this is our house, so … clubhouse.”
“Yeah, that was a dumb thing to think. What’s in there?”
