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Hadn’t I made a promise to myself not to ask these kinds of questions? Not to find out anything more about his life without me than was most painfully necessary?
Yes.
But promises were little but empty air between us.
Made and broken too easily.
He blinked once. Twice. Regarded my face. The question.
Maybe he wouldn’t answer.
I hoped he wouldn’t answer.
“Bikers mostly have road names. Usually when you start prospectin’, someone calls you somethin’. It usually sticks. Didn’t want to get stuck with somethin’ fuckin’ stupid. What someone else chose for me. I was already living a life someone else chose for me.”
“You chose it for yourself,” I snapped, unable to stop myself from interrupting, unable to withhold the accusation and anger in my tone.
He nodded. “I guess I did. But it doesn’t feel like me that made that decision. Not the me I was before or the me I am now. It was the decision of a man who found himself inside the gates of hell. Didn’t quite know how to navigate it. Sure as fuck didn’t know I could turn around and walk right back out. So I took the road in. The one paved with good intentions. The journey to hell isn’t one that makes a man. It destroys him.”
I hated how he was explaining things. Like it was tortured poetry. Because it was beautiful as it was ugly. He had a grasp on what he’d done.
“Felt like I was all sharp edges when I found myself there,” he continued. “I felt jagged. Looked in the mirror one day.” He touched his ruined skin. I itched to press my mouth over it.
I didn’t.
“Made sense. I was ripped apart on the outside. Jagged.” He shrugged as if to say, ‘and the rest was history.’
If only that’s what it was.
History.
But history was static. Safely tucked away.
What was between us wasn’t safe. Wasn’t still.
And it wasn’t history.
And I prayed, that after today, it still wouldn’t be.
There were no dramatic goodbyes or declarations.
We’d done all that.
I just stood when he’d slipped on a shoulder holster and put his cut on top. I wrapped my arms around him. He did the same. His guns were pressing into me, the leather of his cut scored through his scent. I breathed it in.
He let me go, brushed a hair from my face and stared. I did the same, I was cataloging him, making sure there was no part of his face I didn’t memorize.
He kissed my head.
His lips lingered for a long time.
Then he let me go and walked out.
Scarlett came in seconds after I decided I was going to crawl under the covers and never come out again.
She was holding two beers.
She was fully dressed, fully made up, in a battle uniform of her own.
I took the beer.
“You better get dressed,” she said, sitting down, obviously happy to watch this happen. “It’s going to be a long few hours.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, draining my beer.
We both looked at each other, pretending we weren’t afraid.
Pretending that it was only a few hours and then it would be over.
Which I guess it would.
Once I showered, had another beer—which Scarlett handed me mid shower, because she stayed, obviously remembering my thing about strange showers, or just not having any boundaries—we both emerged to the common room.
I don’t know why I expected it to be like a crypt or something, in preparation for the ghosts that today would inevitably create, but it was the opposite. There were people, and children, everywhere.
Each of the ladies from last night were scattered around, and all of them gave me waves, hugs, arm squeezes or kisses on the cheek. And I didn’t mind any of the contact. In fact, it felt comforting right now.
There was no sitting waiting, sitting on our hands or wringing those hands pretty much all morning. No. There were children to be wrangled. Food to be made. And in mine, Scarlett and Amy’s cases, wine to be drunk. Amy technically had a child to be wrangled, he was suspiciously well behaved. “I gave him baby cough syrup,” she said with a shrug. “His father is fighting a fucking war with an international criminal today, I don’t give two fucks what the good mothers of America have to say about me drugging my child, it needs to happen.”
I did not disagree with her there. And I also thought her, and every single woman here, were amazing mothers. In their own way, but that’s what made it all the more better.
There were prospects and patched members scattered around the highly secure clubhouse. Also members of the Greenstone Security company, famous in L.A. for being the only place celebrities went to. The owner, Keltan Brooke, was roaming around the place, dripping sexiness and talking in a hot as shit accent.
The club was as safe as any place could be.
