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“It’s better to get the belt than starve, Lex. You go back outside and if he catches me, he’ll know you had nothing to do with it.”
I should know better than to argue with him, I never win, but I have to try. He’s always taking the blame when it comes to our dad and his heavy fists. He doesn’t even cry anymore, and I think it winds my dad up even more.
He opens the door and shoves me outside and I go to sit on the wall to wait for him. Every second that passes, the ball of sickness grows. Louis’s quick, but sometimes, he’s not quick enough…
“Can I help you?”
A short middle-aged woman stands on the doorstep, and I snap back to reality. How long have I been standing here? Peering down at Rosie, she’s fast asleep.
The woman now living in my childhood house frowns.
“Sorry,” I say, and clear my throat. “I grew up in this house. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
“It’s all good.”
Before I have to say anything else, my memories chase me as I briskly walk away. Dad never let us have a single day where we weren’t afraid for ourselves after Mum left. There have been too many times I’ve wondered why?
Why couldn’t he just love us? Why did he have to hurt us? Mere children a quarter of his size, children that wouldn’t or couldn’t fight back.
By the time I make it back to the house, Tommy is back from school and Louis is working on Evie’s car.
Stopping beside him, he takes a peek at his daughter. Staring at the house, dread fills me at the thought of being stuck inside.
“Can you take her in? I’m going out.”
I don’t wait for an answer, but I hear, “If you’re gonna drink, drink at the club, yeah?”
I hold my thumb up without having to turn around and instead of trying to fight the bad times away, I let them drown me.
Not much has changed at the clubhouse and I’m grateful for it. One thing you can guarantee with these guys is that any type of change is so slow it takes years to see a difference. The red bricks of the main building housing the bar and rooms to stay in are as familiar today as they were a decade ago. The garages where brothers fix up motorcycles and do custom sprays. I’m glad to see it hasn’t changed.
“Hey, Lexi.” Olivia, Chaos’s old lady greets me, and I naturally navigate toward her.
“Hi. Who’s around tonight?” I ask, taking a seat up the bar.
“I’m not sure. I just got here myself. I said I’d meet Chaos.”
She takes the stool beside me, and I give her the once over. She’s beautiful in her boho hippy-style way and I can see why Chaos tied himself to her.
Louis kept me up to date with everything at the club over the years, but I never got photos.
I knew when Chaos fell arse over tit for her, when Mayhem fell for the schoolteacher, and when Riot pulled his finger out and settled down. Her smile grows as she spies over my shoulder. Following her line of sight, Chaos is walking through the door with the guy I slept with last night.
“Here’s my man.”
She lights up having him in her sights and jealousy hits me in the chest. I spent my late teens and early twenties chasing the highs a guy brings when he sets his sights on you, and I thought I’d found it with Matt. He made me feel like a princess. That I’d finally found my prince and that all the crap from my past would cease to exist. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for me and without being asked to do so. Then reality set in and once I asked him to move in, the nice acts of love slowly stopped, and the shows of affection came few and far between. It wasn’t until I met Kelly while in prison and told her about him, that she explained what he was. Matt Connelly was and probably still is a hobosexual. When someone only gets into a relationship with someone because they have their own place. At first, it made me want to escape the bars and locks and find him. Take another bat and finish what I started. But over time and many hours of self-reflection, I found it rather sad. To use someone because of your own failings to be self-sufficient is just pathetic. But mostly I was pathetic. I chased men, putting up with much less than I deserved all so I wasn’t alone in the world. That when I curled up in bed at night, I had somebody warm beside me.
“Who’s the guy with Chaos?”
I keep what happened between us last night to myself. I study his appearance. His beard is kept shorter than most around here. I spy ink creeping up the side of his neck and from what I remember last night, his chest and arms are covered in tattoos too. The bridge of his nose is crooked, no doubt from fighting, but it’s his eyes that I focus on. They’re the darkest I’ve seen, even darker than my dad’s, and I used to think his were so dark because he was a monster.
“Manik. He arrived from another chapter yesterday.”
“How old is he?”
“Twenty-six, I think.”
He didn’t appear so young last night but then again, I had quite a bit to drink before I went up to his room. He and Chaos join us, and I wish I’ll find someone to smile at the way Olivia does at her guy.
