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“I’m afraid of small spaces,” he admitted in a low voice. “Of being locked in somewhere. Trapped somewhere. My room at the clubhouse is barely big enough to keep me sane.”
I digested that information, my body rebelling at the thought of him fighting against panic by just living in his room at the club. I held onto that information tightly, wanting to tattoo it somewhere so it could be mine forever.
“Why don’t you live somewhere else, then?” I asked him. “Somewhere bigger.”
“Because there’s nowhere else for me to go. The club is my home.”
My heart spasmed at this admission, at the vulnerability in his tone. The club, for whatever reason, whatever was in his past that I wasn’t brave enough to ask about, was all he had. And I was jeopardizing that. Me wanting him could take that all away. Swiss was a more established member of the club, he had more rights. That’s what I assumed at least.
“How old are you?” I asked the question that would make things all the more difficult between us. I knew he was older. The lines in his weathered skin told me that, the silver in his chocolate hair told me that. But ‘too old for me’ was a vague concept and I needed to know numbers. Not that it would make any difference.
“Thirty-five,” he said without hesitation, his tone hard.
I sucked my teeth. There it was. The number. Sixteen years between us. My mom had had me by that age.
Not that it mattered to me. If anything, the stretch of time, how it made this all the more forbidden, it made me want to sink my nails deeper into this. Into us. Yes, that was fucked up, but I didn’t give a shit.
We didn’t speak for the rest of the drive, but he was there. I could hear him breathing against the sound of the rain.
“Elden,” I whispered, putting the car in park. “Why did you call me?”
The rain poured on the roof of my car as I waited for his answer.
“Because, baby, you don’t like to drive in the rain,” he murmured. Then he was gone.
I sat in the car for a long time after that. Maybe even would have all day if Sariah hadn’t come up with a leopard print umbrella, knocking on my window.
“Bitch!” she called through the glass. “You better not be letting those burritos get cold, or they will never find your body.”
So then there were burritos. Henri made margaritas. We watched movies and got drunk. I fell asleep on the sofa. Ollie woke me up at three in the morning on one of her trips to the fridge.
I stumbled to my own room, collapsing on the bed, only then remembering Elden’s last words to me with the patter of rain on the roof.
I had not heard from Elden since the day it rained. My Mom and Swiss came to visit exactly one month, to the hour, since I called them.
Mom took me shopping, and Swiss fixed things around the house while Sariah followed him around asking about brothers and cousins.
My roommates were vaguely obsessed with my mother and stepfather, which made sense because my mom was amazing as was Swiss. Together, they were something else entirely.
It was our final night, out for dinner, just the three of us when Mom shared the news.
I had suspected since she was constantly nursing a glass of wine, slyly handing it off to Swiss when she thought I wasn’t looking. Then there was Swiss being extra protective of my mom, which was saying something. He threw a fit when she walked in with her arms full of shopping bags.
But I’d wanted Mom to have her moment.
So I let her take us out for a nice dinner and watched her shift nervously in her seat as she worked up the courage to tell me. She was likely rehearsing some kind of script in her head.
But by the time the waiter came with iced waters, she just blurted, “I’m pregnant.”
I didn’t
Visibly react.
Swiss tried his absolute hardest not to chuckle.
He failed.
Mom hit him in the bicep, which likely did more damage to her hand than his arm.
