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Jay hated the idea because he didn’t want Zach to leave—to leave him, specifically. On the other hand, Zach considered some separation between them to be among the reasons he should go. His little brother needed to stand on his own more.
Before either he or or Jay could say more on the subject, the door to the bays flew open, and Dex ran in. A couple steps from the door, he froze, his face pale and his eyes wide, holding his phone in his grimy hands. He just stood there, staring at them.
Then Gun came in behind him. He hooked an arm over Dex’s shoulders and grinned at Zach and Jay. “He got the call. Gotta get papa to the vet clinic, so he can collect mama and help her get the baby out the oven.”
Dex looked at Gun as if he’d spoken a language he didn’t know. It was like his brain had gone offline. He’d had a similar look, though a hell of a lot angrier, that night he’d beaten Zach for being a good friend to one of his best friends. Who happened to be Kelsey, who was apparently about to pop their first kid out.
“Alright!” Jay cheered and hopped down from the counter. “Let’s do this!”
“You need to stay and man the shop, Jay,” Zach said. “And call in a hangaround to cover the pumps.”
Jay turned and gave him a lethal look, but he didn’t fight it. There wasn’t anything to fight about. He was the newest patch on the premises. Christian was on a job elsewhere. When there wasn’t a prospect to do the shit work, the bottom of the club roster got the job.
“Man,fuck,” Jay whined and headed around the counter. Zach passed him as he came around back. “We need fresh meat in this joint.”
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~oOo~
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It was tradition forthe Bulls family to convene at the hospital whenever one of their own was in it. As long as Zach could remember, from the time he was little, he’d spent probably more than a day’s worth of hours each year with his ass going numb in a waiting room chair. He’d worried about loved ones being treated for countless kinds of violent injuries, serious illnesses, in surgery, in testing rooms, in the ER. He’d grieved the deaths of people he loved, and cheered the recovery of others.
Awaiting a new member was definitely the best reason to be stuck in a waiting room all day. But Kelsey didn’t make anybody wait. By the time most of the Bulls arrived at Osage General, the baby was born.
Zach’s mom had been an L&D nurse before she’d been promoted to administration, and Zach knew most of the doctors and nurses on this ward. Most of them treated him like family, in fact, like their nephew or even their kid.
As soon as Otto, one of the nurses, saw Zach in the waiting room, he waved him over and made Zach the contact point. Mav and Jenny, and obviously Dex, were back with Kelsey, and so was Zach’s mom. None of them had peeled themselves away from the little bean long enough to tell anybody in the waiting room anything. All they’d done, apparently, is send out word to inform Grammo and Grampa D, first on the scene, that the baby was born. Nothing more, not even what flavor the kid was.
Kelsey had some opinions about that part, actually. Opinions Zach had found kind of surprising. Like, that the sex didn’t matter and gender wasn’t anybody’s call but the baby’s.
It surprised Zach because he’d known Kelsey his whole life, he loved her like a sister and knew her like one, and she’d never expressed much of a political opinion about anything. The whole gender thing seemed political to him, at least as far as what he saw about it on social media. Zach didn’t pay that much attention to shit like that because it seemed like everybody was just yelling at each other and not actually trying to understand anyone. For his part, he didn’t give a fuck how other people lived their lives, as long as they didn’t try to make him live their way. If somebody born with a dick felt like a woman in their heart and wanted to live that way, he didn’t see how it was his business. But what could a baby know about all that?
Kelsey had always had opinions, of course. She just never asserted anything very controversial out loud. The girl bent backward to keep things positive. She had a reputation for being basically a Disney princess; that was too reductive and superficial a characterization for the deep and layered girl he knew, but it wasn’t exactly wrong. She was the gentlest person he knew, and as pretty as Sleeping Beauty.
However, maternity had exposed a steely streak in her. Definitely a mama bear. She hadn’t wanted to know the sex of the baby in advance, hadn’t wanted one of those gender-reveal things, wanted everything gender-neutral. And enforced it firmly.
Zach saw Otto and went over, “Hey, man. Got news?”
Otto grinned. “She had the baby on a gurney in the ER—there wasn’t time to get ‘em upstairs. Mom and baby are doing good. Dad’s okay, too. He looked like he was gonna be a flopper—you, know, passing out or barfing when the baby crowns—but he did good.
Dex was a stone-cold killer. Zach had seen him do some deeply, deeply fucked-up shit to people the club had told him to hurt, and he’d never seen him even break a sweat. But he’d been a nervous wreck about the baby from the moment he’d known one was coming.
For his part, Zach thought he’d probably be a flopper. As the son of a L&D nurse, he’d been taught the birds and bees deal with some scientific specificity, but the thought of a whole human being coming out of a woman, of that part of a woman, freaked him the fuck out.
“Boy or girl?” he asked, hoping maybe Kelsey had lightened up on the no-gender thing now that the baby was here.
“Girl,” Otto answered. “Dad’s coming out with her as soon as she’s prettied up.”
“Okay. Thanks, Otto.”
The big nurse slapped his arm. “You got it, kid.”
As Otto headed back into the ward, Zach returned to the waiting room, where all the family who could get here had massed in a mob in the middle of the room.
“It’s a girl,” he led with, because everybody else in the family had been dying to know for months now. The big knot of Bulls family cheered; Zach waited until they quieted down to say, “Sounds like Dex’ll be out here soon with her.”
“You think they’ll give her some fruity PC name?” Eight asked with a grin.
