by Nicole Fox
“Trip … All the club stuff. I don’t want that around Rose. I know how things are—”
“Things are different now, Misha,” he said. “We’re not … we’re not like that anymore. We’ve cleaned up. We keep the town and our own protected. That’s what we do.”
Trip left after that. I figured he was going back home—maybe back to whoever it was he’d been with before Brig had called him over.
I looked around the room.
Honestly, nothing about this had changed.
I let Rose sleep as I undressed. I wanted a shower, hadn’t had one in a while. Trip’s room had an adjoining bathroom, and though I hadn’t been here in years, there wasn’t an awkwardness in allowing myself in his space. He still had towels and everything strewn in the same places, his soaps organized in the sense that there were three different bottles of the same scent in his shower, because he never could remember if he had the right amount in what was left in his shower when he went to the store.
It made me smile in spite of myself, though I had to school it off of my face as I turned the water on, set the heat high, and started to wash. I was here for Rose, not for the nostalgia and not for Trip’s love, if it was even still there. The way he’d reacted to what I’d told him of Holland was enough to know that the thought of my being with someone else hadn’t pleased him, even in those circumstances. Pride boys were just that—prideful to a fault, and especially about their women.
But I hadn’t been his woman in a long, long time, and there were secrets enough in those five years apart that I knew would keep the distance between us.
# # #
The next morning, I woke up with the scent of Trip in my nose. My face was buried in his pillows, so soft, with the lingering hit of his cologne clinging to the fabric. It was familiar, and I sighed as I buried my face further into it. I was taken by that scent, by the memory—until I realized that the tiny weight beside me that I had gone to sleep with was gone.
Rose!
The comfort vanished, followed quickly by panic as I sat bolt upright. Rose wasn’t with me, and Trip’s door was wide open.
“Fuck!”
I shot up. I paid no mind to the fact I was in the short-bottomed, no-bra tank pajamas I had put on the night before after my shower. I knew, in theory, that Rose was safe with the Pride. But mother’s worry and years of always having to worry propelled me out to the front of the bar, my daughter’s name on my lips.
“Rose?!”
“Mama!”
Her yell was a melodic tinkle, happy and unafraid. I rounded the corner from the hall up to the front. A few of the boys were around, and they looked up at me with amused faces. Rose sat up at the bar with them—literally on top of the bar—with a plate in her lap stacked full of pancakes.
I walked over. Travis waved.
“Misha! This li’l girl came out wondering and hungry, so I whipped her up some pancakes. Hope that was okay? She got a big appetite, this tiny thing.”
I sighed, relieved, and feeling a little silly myself over the reaction that I’d had.
“Yeah … Yeah it’s fine. Did you say thank you, honey?”
“Mmhm.” She nodded with a mouth full of pancake.
“She’s a polite li’l thing. What about you? You want some pancakes? Eggs? Bacon? Trip keeps the kitchen locked and loaded; we practically live here.”
I almost declined, not wanting to intrude too much. The growl at my stomach answered for me, and Travis grinned.
“Full plate coming up, cupcake.”
Breakfast came fast and hot. I hadn’t had a breakfast that tasted quite so good in years, though maybe that was because everything I’d eaten back with the Jackals had been taken with a grain of salt and didn’t have the same kind of heart that eating with the Pride did. Whatever the case, I enjoyed my food, and Rose enjoyed hers. There was a little small talk between the boys, talking a run here and there, some business they had in town. I was surprised they talked so freely in front of me.
“I can go, if you boys need to talk business,” I said. “Me and Misha can eat in the room.” After all, it wasn’t like I could forget how the club worked.
“Nah, nah,” Travis said, waving me off. “You’re Trip’s girl. I don’t think he’d care—”
“Morning.”
“Well, hell. Speak of the devil.”
I had already turned at the sound of the voice. Trip and Brig walked through the front doors of the bar, suited up in their kuttes as if they were ready to start business. Brig gave me a narrowed looked, but it was Trip that I focused on instead. When his eyes fell on me, I was reminded of the lack of clothing I was wearing; his eyes widened and roamed over me. It was odd … it’d been so long since I’d really enjoyed the gaze of a man, I didn’t know what to do with the heat that flowed through me, having Trip’s eyes on me like that.
Maybe it’s because it’s him. You never stopped loving him. Never stopped wanting him. That heat was something that I knew all too well and it was only something that Trip had ever been able to draw from me, make pool low between my legs with that uncontrollable need—
But I didn’t need to be having those thoughts. Not about him, not anymore.
Before Trip could come over, I stood, gathering my food and Rose’s . I had a good excuse that would make for a quick escape. Let Trip try to keep me there, I dared him.
“Come on, sweetie. Let’s let them talk, okay?”
“Aw, but Mama, Travis was gonna tell me about his eye!”
“Another time, baby. Come on.”
If I hadn’t known any better, there seemed to be a disappointed flicker in Trip’s eyes as I took Rose by the hand and led her away.
# # #
I kept my eyes on her, until she was gone. I frowned watching after her; why the hell had she gone? And that little girl … fuck. Made me feel some type of way just getting another look at her.
“Aye, lover boy.” I looked over at Travis, who was, for some reason, waving a piece of bacon in my face. “You gonna eat before we get into work, or nah?” I grumbled at him.
“Shut up. Meet me out front and round up everyone. We got work to do.”
Work that day was simple. There were some thugs harassing Big Mama up at the diner that needed cleaning out, and rumors of a drug den somewhere in the backroads. Shit that the cops were legally responsible for, but tended to not be able to legally handle on the radar.
So, that fell to us.
I hadn’t lied when I told Misha things weren’t the way they were when we were kids. The violence, the showmanship—back then it had just been to see whose dick was bigger. We were no better than a gang, really. Now, we had a purpose. I had made sure of that after Misha was killed, or after I thought Misha had been killed.
If you couldn’t protect your own with the power you had, what was the point of having the power?
We rolled up to the diner at noon, about when Trixie said that the assholes usually showed up. Their bikes were parked out front, but they weren’t an MC like the Pride. The Pride wouldn’t invite themselves to sit at other people’s tables and eat their food, grope their girls, and use fear to keep people from saying shit and doing shit about it.
There were five of them. Not a lot. We had three extra guys on them. There was one, a big guy I figured was the leader because all his little goons sat around him while he had his arm around some woman that didn’t look like she was all too willing to have him touching her.
“What say you, sweet cheeks, huh? You hop on my bike and I show you a good time?”
“I—I don’t think that’s what I want—”
“Come on, ain’t you ever heard of me? Roy Jackson, I’m pretty big around here—”
“Please, I was just here to eat—”
“Is there a problem here?”
I walked over, flanked by Travis and Brig. The others moved around, placing themselves near the other fuckers there in the diner, making a nuisance of themselves and getting into people’s busine
ss where they didn’t belong. The big one looked up at me and scoffed.
“What do you want, whippersnapper? Can’t you see I’m busy here?”
“Can’t you see you’re not welcome here?”
The man’s lip twitched beneath an impressive mustache.
“Who the fuck do you think you are?”
Rather than tell, I decided to show. I walked up to him, took that big dumb meaty head of his in my hand, and slammed it against the table. His boys tried to stand but mine kept them at bay. The man was too slow to react, and I did it again, and again, spraying his food over his table from the force of everything.
“I said, you’re not welcome here. Get the fuck out and don’t show your face again here, or there’s more Pride you’re gonna be dealing with, asshole.”
The man tumbled out of the booth, sputtering, but he wasn’t fighting back, either. He and his guys left in a scramble, and we watched and made sure that they were long good and gone. When they were, a voice called to us from the kitchen.
“Y’all done made another mess, ain’t cha?”
I turned and saw Big Mama come around. She was a huge woman, almost as tall as me, but with a lot more meat than I had stuck up on her bones. She was intimidating to a lot of people but she was a good woman, and I appreciated her. She always had good gossip and always knew where to point us in the direction of trouble when it was headed toward the town.
She lumbered over and eyed the mess on the table, and the shaken woman that had been victim to that fat-fuck’s harassment.
“And y’all done shook up one of my customers! You all right, cupcake?”
The woman nodded.
“Y-yeah. I just didn’t want that man sitting with me. He kept trying to get me to leave with me to do … stuff.” She turned her head up at me with a bit of a teary-eyed smile. “Thank you, though. I don’t know if I’d have been able to tell him no.”
“Aye, don’t worry about it.” I was already fishing into my wallet, pulling out a decent handful of bills. I handed them over to Big Mama. “For the trouble—”
“Boy, now you know I don’t want or need none of your damn money. It’s enough you cleared those wannabes out of here. Now go on, git, before I changed my mind.”
I laughed as she hobbled away, but I set the money down on the table in front of the woman.
“For your troubles.”
Chapter Three
Trip
If I’d thought shit was going to go back to the way it was when Misha showed up, I’d beendead-ass wrong.
She hadn’t changed in looks, but she had changed, nonetheless. She didn’t drink anymore. Didn’t party hard. She used to cuss like a sailor and now I barely heard a blip out of her mouth, especially when Rose was around. She used to put herself in my space, used to flirt and bat her eyes at me—even sometimes at one of the boys, just to rile me up and make me jealous just so that I would do her rough the way that she wanted and liked it.
But she didn’t do any of that anymore. If anything, it seemed she went out of her way to stay out of my path. She was reserved, like it was a crime for her to have fun or cut loose anymore. Then again, it wasn’t like I was a hard partier anymore, either. I had goals … But she was back now, and it was odd that things didn’t just fall in how they used to be. It was frustrating, and I hadn’t been in this dealing-with-a-woman-properly-thing in the five years she’d been gone; I had no damn practice on it.
It’d been about a week and a half since Misha came back. She stayed at the bar, in the back, where my room was. My home away from home, as it’d always been, where we’d made memories that only teens could even think of. I remember that we had smoked our first joints in that room, back when Bobby was still running the place and I was still a stupid little shit.
It was odd to think that now she was in there with my daughter. I hadn’t even known she was pregnant. She said that she had planned to tell me, but I had seen the way she’d tugged her ear. She didn’t realize it, but it was always a sign she was lying, or at least holding something back from me. She hadn’t planned on telling me, at least not then, if at fucking all.
But that was beside the point. Maybe she’d had a reason—though I didn’t know what the hell reason that was.
Kids were never something that I wanted, but that little girl was definitely mine. The boys saw it too when they saw her, no one had a doubt that I’d made that. It was fucking terrifying. If those damn Jackal bastards –
I sat in my office, thinking about all this. I reminded myself like I had the last couple of weeks to calm down about the whole thing. I’d called off all operations that had to do with the Jackals, for now. They hadn’t killed Misha, just fucking kidnapped her,. Five years under Holland, and then the shit that Rigger put her through.
I needed to think.
I had been working on bringing down the Jackals slowly, methodically, for the last five years for Misha’s death. I’d not heard word or fucking tale of Misha being with them, so clearly Holland hadn’t wanted me to know about her and the fact that he had her. Rigger had even kept that information to himself. Maybe he’d been biding his time until it was the perfect opportunity to bring her out of the woodwork.
See here? The woman you were pining over, she was always us. Had our hands on her, all to ourselves. And your daughter too.
There was a bottle of Jack on the table, and a glass. I’d already thrown back two, and I poured me another. This was a lot of shit to take in. As I drank, there was a knock on the door.
“What?”
There wasn’t an answer. The door pushed open, and in sauntered Trixie. She’d been around a few times since I’d left her at her place the night that Misha showed up, but I hadn’t given her much attention aside from a pat on the head and a promise that I’d get to her.
It was a lie, of course. I couldn’t even think about sticking my dick in her while Misha was under my roof.
“Hey, T,” she said. She jutted her chest out a little, as if her tits needed the help with the tiny ass tank that she wore, cleavage hanging out the top. “I’ve missed you. Brig says you been holing yourself up in here lately and I thought you could use the company.”
I didn’t need to ask her what kind of company she meant when she scooted my chair back and situated herself in my lap. I sighed. I didn’t have time for this shit.
She stuck her face in my neck, kissing and grinding up on me. Usually there’d have been some interest stirring in my cock by now; I could feel the kitten heat of Trixie’s pussy through my jeans, but there was nothing else going on down there to say I had a ready and willing woman in my lap.
I pushed her away.
“Not right now,” I said. “I’m busy.”
She pouted, poking out one of those pink lipsticked lips of hers.
“Come on, baby. Let me make you feel better. I know it’s gotta be hard. That girl came back and—”
“Her name is Misha,” I said harshly, putting my hands on her shoulders and shoving her ass off me. “And I’m not in the fucking mood for you. Get the fuck out.”
“What the hell is your problem, T? You never act like this—”
“Well, I’m acting like it now. I said I don’t want you, now get out.”
I felt bad the instant that I looked at her face, but she was gone before I could apologize. I didn’t want her right then, but I could have … fuck, I didn’t know.
“This is bullshit.”
“Bad time?”
I started. Standing in my doorway now wasn’t Trixie and her sad expression, but Misha. She wasn’t looking at me. Her gaze was cast down the hall, presumably in the direction that Trixie had cried off to.
“It’s been a long day.”
“You’ve got the Jack out, so I would say it has been. There enough in there for me?”
“Always. I thought you weren’t the drinking type anymore?”
“It’s been a long day.”
I smirked.
“Using my lines,
I see.” Maybe some things hadn’t changed.
I poured her a drink and she perched herself on my desk. Five years gone by, yet she still sat there with her legs crossed like she always used to when we’d come in here when Bobby ran the joint. I’d pretend to be the president, and she’d pretend to be my old lady, back when we were still little squirts that didn’t know real shit about old ladies. She’d always had the notion of being my ride or die.
Five years … that changed a lot. We’d changed a lot.
I cleared my throat, drinking on my own glass as she threw back a good portion of her own. I decided to bite the bullet.
