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“And then my old man got a bug up his ass. He’d settled down, got himself a wife. Don’t like to trash-talk women, but she was the kind who had a perpetual stick up her ass. Always saw herself as better than others. So she didn’t approve of my mom’s job, and my exposure to it. Decided my old man needed to come after her for custody.”
“That’s not fair.”
“No, it wasn’t. And in that time, he’d built a company, got a lot of money and stability. Could afford the best lawyers. He knew my mom couldn’t do the same, and he came full force. There was nothing she could do.”
“Did you never get to see her?”
“I did. One weekend a month, if that. My dad was good at coming up with excuses for why he couldn’t bring me there, or why I couldn’t go. And I got to go for two weeks over the summer breaks.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah. But I’m sure my step-mother came to regret the decision to force my dad to get custody,” I said, smirking. “I was a fuck of a handful. Figure she likely blamed me for the divorce.”
“And your dad?”
“Eh, he threw himself straight into a mid-life crisis. Red, penis-shaped car, too young of women, the whole thing. I kind of raised myself from thirteen on.”
“We both kind of did that,” she concluded. “I mean, I had my dad. But he… he had his limitations.”
“You turned out pretty good, I think,” I told her. “Your terrible taste in music, aside,” I teased. “Are we more equal now?” I asked.
I didn’t talk much about my childhood.
The guys I called my closest friends already knew the details of it, had seen a lot of it play out. And it just didn’t feel necessary to tell the newer guys shit from so long ago.
As for women, well, shit never got more serious than completely casual. A couple nights here or there, barely enough to know full names, let alone shit from childhoods.
Oddly, it felt good to share my past too.
“Yes,” she decided. “Do your parents know?” she asked. “About this,” she added, waving at the clubhouse as a whole.
“Yeah. I mean, I don’t think my dad gets it. He’s on his third divorce, followed this last one out to Vegas. So he’s not around much. My ma… she knows I’m a biker, but I don’t give her the details. Don’t need her worrying about me.”
“I get that. What is she up to now?”
“She found a guy, one of her former customers, actually, who’d never had the balls to ask her out until she quit and he ran into her again. Rich as fuck. She lives a nice, comfortable life with a guy who worships her. Couldn’t hope for more for her.”
“My mom didn’t want me,” Murphy said, surprising me. “I mean… I was an accident. But she didn’t want to be a mother. And I think especially she didn’t want to be with my father. He said she was always trying to change him, or saying she needed more from him. But he didn’t… he didn’t have more to give,” she said, shaking her head. “He gave all he had. It was just… not what she needed. She left when I was four. I never saw her again.”
“It’s her loss, sweetheart,” I assured her.
Then, not trusting myself any longer if I stayed so close, I released her hand, and climbed off of the bed.
As we both got ready for bed, me flicking off the lights, her choosing a show to put on, I couldn’t seem to shake this strange thought.
That this, her, me, us, felt… I don’t know… right.
But that just seemed so damn uncharacteristic of me that I pushed the thoughts away.
I didn’t do the whole ‘we’ and ‘us’ thing when it came to women. Save for the fact that we were both going to have great orgasms and that the casual nature of that worked for us.
As I drifted off to sleep, though, I had to admit to myself that there was nothing casual about the way I was starting to care for Murphy.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Murphy
At first, it felt as though the club was tiptoeing around me, trying to ease me into their being there, despite the clubhouse being their residence, not mine.
Maybe they knew I was so accustomed to being alone, that it was a big transition to have people all around.
When I took the dogs downstairs in the early morning, Coach was already outside, doing yoga or meditating. I could see the red-headed Morgaine letting out her chickens or toying with her garden.
When I made it back inside, Detroit was putting together breakfast.
But everyone introduced themselves to me one by one, giving me time to adjust, to get used to the rhythms of the place.
It was the fourth day staying there when I was coming down from the unfinished third floor that I’d set up as a work station, so I didn’t have a bunch of distractions, when I found Morgaine alone in the kitchen, holding a big mug between her hands, a half-eaten chocolate bar on the island.
