by Hazel Parker
“I was mocked and teased relentlessly throughout school,” I began. “I was the fat kid who always got picked on. Chubby, tubby, wubby, you name it, they said them all. I knew that I should be getting respect as a human being, but did I? No. So I tried to join the Savage Saints, but the founder would not let me in at first. Said I wasn’t cut out to be a Saint. Let me tell you, I’d heard that I wasn’t cut out to do so many things in my life that when the last thing I wanted to do was taken away from me, I fucking snapped.”
I snapped my fingers at the same time. Amber was no longer listening to me to critique me on violating her rules. I had her full attention. She had even closed her computer.
“I dedicated myself to fitness. I got what you see now. I got tattoos, including the ones the Saints wore. When I approached the founder, he was blown away. He said no one had ever worked so hard to get into the club. But even then, he still only made me a prospect for what seemed like a goddamn eternity. I took on the most menial of shit jobs here. I cleaned toilets, I cleaned this place after the parties, I did odd runs—you name it, I did it. If not for the fact that I loved the club, I might have quit.
“But I didn’t fucking quit because I wanted that respect that my looks apparently could not afford me. Eventually, finally, the Saints accepted me—the only people in the world to have done that. I cannot say how much I love my brothers, but there may be no better way to say it other than fuck the rest of the world.”
I let out a long, long sigh as my eyes watered.
“And now, after all of that, after all of my efforts, I’m labeled as a thug and a gangster by the rest of the world and a criminal by the state. I don’t think there’s a word I hate more than gangster. I am not a gangster, and the club is not a gang. A gang fights for selfish interests. We fight to protect this goddamn city. We are the furthest things from a fucking gang. And yet…”
Here I am, about to be sent to prison for life because of how I look.
“Fuck it,” I said. “I have to take matters into my own hands.”
“Splitter?” Amber said, concern raising in her voice. “What does that mean?”
She didn’t want to know what it meant. It was going way outside her bounds. It meant doing whatever—whatever—it took.
“It means that I’m going to do what I need to do to defend myself, and so is the club,” I said.
“I know, but what does that mean? What, in terms of actions, does that mean?”
I sighed, crossed my arms, and shook my head.
“I can’t tell you that, Amber,” I said. “That’s going beyond what you would want me to do. And I know you’re great, but you’re limited. The Saints and I are not.”
“Splitter,” she suddenly said with a very stern voice. “What was my first rule? It was to tell the truth and the full truth. I know what you’re implying, and it’s extraordinarily illegal. If you do what I think you’re going to do, you’d better be prepared full well to raise even more eyebrows than before. But I need to know it so I can prepare accordingly, because if I get blindsided in court, I am not going to be a happy woman.”
My emotions were getting the best of me. She already knew that I’d murdered a couple of the DMs before. What was admitting to some intimidation tactics to get witnesses to back down?
But I was too pissed off. This had become less about me versus the state as it had me versus the very fabric of society. Amber could help me on the first, but not the latter. My war to be accepted was not going to be won with lawyers, but with fists and bullets.
Whatever it takes.
“I’m not here to judge,” Amber said, her voice now more reassuring. “I’m here to understand. Please, Splitter. If not as your lawyer, as your friend. Tell me.”
Something about how she said “as your friend” was so very soothing. It was something I don’t think I had ever heard from a woman before, something so tender and kind. It was… unsettling.
Not in a bad way, necessarily. It wasn’t like what Amber had said was hurtful. But it was so unexpected that I felt a little bit shook.
“I… well…” I stumbled across my words. “The truth is—”
And then another brick came through the window.
“Shit!”
I grabbed Amber and covered her on the ground, waiting for the inevitable onslaught of bullets. Of all the goddamn things to happen right now, fucking really?
“Stay down!” I yelled, even though Amber was perfectly obeying me.
But…
Nothing else followed.
“Stay down,” I said, much more softly, my way of letting her know I wasn’t just in this position for the hell of it.
Eventually, after about a minute, I looked back at the window. There was no one there. There were no bullets coming.
For now, we were safe.
“You OK?”
“I’m fine,” Amber said, dusting herself off. “Second night in a row?”
“Yep,” I said, heading over to the brick. Once again, a note was attached. I wanted to make a snarky remark about how the DMs needed to up their creativity, but as I started to read the note, I only felt rage.
“We warned you. More are coming. All will be hurt. Including the lawyer.”
Including the lawyer.
I didn’t wait for Trace to come and read it. He didn’t need the proof. I ripped the sheet up right before me as many times as I could, and then threw it in the trash. It still didn’t feel like enough.
“What was on there?”
I sighed.
“They threatened you, Amber,” I said. “They said that you would be hurt. And, unfortunately, if we’re going to lay low, that’s a very real risk right now.”
I put my hands on my head.
“I’m sorry I dragged you into this,” I said. My mind and my words went concurrently—she shouldn’t be a part of us. It’s one thing if she can defend me, but she doesn’t need to get killed. It’s one thing to flout ethics by having a romance with me. It’s another to put her life on the line. “You’re not safe as long as you’re with me. The Mercs must have seen something that told them you were with me. Maybe your car…”
In a panic, I quickly grabbed a gun and ran out the door, ignoring Amber’s cries for me to be careful. Once I got there, though, I saw her BMW was unscratched and undamaged. They’re either too stupid to realize that or they’re just smart enough to know they’d pay for it.
But the psychological damage was done.
“Amber, before, I thought that you and I was just a question of professionalism and maintaining objectivity,” I said as I walked back inside. “I thought that it was a matter of feeling comfortable with me. There was nothing about me that worried about your safety, though, because you were with me and because not even the DMs are dumb enough to strike at women. But it seems those fucking pricks want to make things more painful for all of us by threatening you.”
Of all the fucking things… any of the Saints were fair game, but the women?
First, they took Jane. And now they threatened Amber?
Oh, we were going to kill all of them. But so long as they still lived…
“You should remove yourself from the case.”
Amber reeled as if she had literally been pushed back.
“I’ve dealt with hardliners like this before, Splitter,” she pleaded. “I don’t—”
“Not like this,” I said. “Thugs associated with a movie star aren’t going to do shit. There’s too much money involved. Here? It’s all ego and pride. Forget your career, Amber. Think about your life. Do you want to put your life at risk?”
I felt like I was making the right move. When things settled down, we could try again.
But I also felt like the boy in school who could never maintain a relationship, even if I had gotten one. I knew that I was avoiding the toughness of the issue right now. Of course Amber had dealt with threats, maybe even death threats, like this before.
It was less about her and more about me,
a startling revelation that had seemed to come out of nowhere. My emotional outbursts, my strong displays of anger… they were all a front so I wouldn’t have to deal with the real emotions. Even my crying, my swings into the depths of sadness, were something of a mask, a ploy to draw pity… maybe not in such strong words, but they definitely conspired to keep me from feeling what I really needed to feel.
You’re pushing her away because you’re afraid. You have the most beautiful woman you could ever imagine before you, and you are afraid to face her. You are afraid that if you lose her by the hands of the DMs, you’ll never recover.
She can handle her own, but if you push her away, it won’t be so bad if something happens to her.
But you’ll always wonder what if.
“I’m going to my car,” Amber said. “But I’m not leaving. We both need some time to cool down.”
It felt like a good enough answer. Amber left before I got the chance to argue.
Which was just as well. I had a lot of things I had to face up to that didn’t involve Amber right now.
Chapter 12: Amber
I sat in my car, a little stunned at what had just happened.
Though he hadn’t said as much, Splitter had basically just fired me. I had never been fired from a gig in my life, ever—even before my legal career started—and it felt from so far out there that I didn’t know how to take it.
I wasn’t kidding when I had said I had gotten death threats before. This was far from the worst that I had ever dealt with, although it wasn’t like it was pleasant having to face the possibility of death. Rather, I had actually had people come up to my face and threaten to kill me and my loved ones if I did not help their cause by stopping aide for my client.
I did the same thing I always did. I ignored it.
Threats were easy to make. All it took was a few seconds of a person’s time, some breath, and then the “courage” to make the threat.
Actual violence was a lot harder. It had a way of coming back to someone, and the amount of energy and effort it took to commit murder was often too much to handle. Even if someone went through with it and they were a sociopath, free of the guilt of murdering someone else, there was too much that weighed on them from a logistical standpoint.
The only times I ever saw people kill others and feel fine was in the pursuit of a higher cause—for a country, for a club, for a family, whatever the case may be. In Splitter’s case, I could see it in relation to the Savage Saints and the DMs. I didn’t know anything about his real family other than him being a mama’s boy, but I suspected that he was much, much closer to the Saints than he was to his real family.
I guess I appreciated what he did on some level. He acted out of protection, but…
There just seemed to be something more to it. Something that Splitter was not telling me, not so much because of legal questions or whatever, but something to do with him as an individual. I’m not even sure he could recognize it in himself if he wanted to. It was a very deep part of him that he had turned a blind eye to or made himself blind to.
But regardless, right now, I was just hurt. I had just come back… and he pushed me away?
Did he really like me? Was that the truth? Or was…
Was it all something of a lie? Was it just the thrill of the instant attraction of the lawyer-client relationship gone heavy and romantic, and now that the unsexy truths were coming out, it turned out to be nothing more than a chase? What was Splitter’s true intention?
I began to feel emotional. Not only had the good in my life fall apart, even the short-term pleasures that had just come my way were kicking me out the door.
And that was not an exaggeration to say everything. I had busted my tail in undergraduate and law school, sacrificing my social life and opportunities to date, to stay faithful to the boy I grew up with and the career I aspired to have. I had left behind so many men who would go on to be successful businessmen or rising politicians, all because I had my faith and my guiding light to get me to where I needed to go.
I sacrificed so much personally so I could have what I wanted professionally.
So much so, in fact, that I began to fear that I had never really asked myself what I really wanted.
My marriage with Jacob had more or less just felt inevitable after the first year of college; once we’d survived me going to New Haven and him staying in South Carolina, we knew we could triumph over the next few years. For some reason, I had never seriously questioned if he was the person I actually wanted to marry—probably because if I looked at it sincerely, realized the gap in what we wanted out of life, and thought about if he wanted children or not, I would have realized it wasn’t going to work.
At my age now, that would have been something I could have moved on from, as I had. But in my early twenties? There was no way. I would have been too scared of the blowback.
So…
What did I actually want personally?
Did I want to get married again and have a family? Did I want to be with Splitter, or was that another Jacob—a great guy who, in the long run, wasn’t going to work out?
Even my faith feels like its being sacrificed right now.
I valued the stability it gave me, the sense of community it gave me at church and the belief in a better world. But it was certainly fair to say that right now, I was feeling a little unstable and confused.
I realized that if Splitter was hiding some things, some personal things, the only way to drag them out was to confront him. Speaking from a distance as we had this morning would only serve to provide false hope; things had a way of sounding really good on the phone or email that did not in person. There would be none of that here—I had to confront him and we had to have a fully honest talk.
I got out of my car, not even pausing to contemplate my actions, and went inside the warehouse, crossing my arms. Splitter was behind the bar, nursing a drink. I stood on the other side.
“What was that all about?” I said sternly.
“What?”
“Kicking me out,” I said. “You didn’t do that because you were afraid of me dying. I mean, you might be, but that can’t be it.”
Splitter looked like he was about to say something back, but perhaps realizing I was on to his games, he shut up.
“You know, I once had a man hold me at knifepoint outside my office telling me that if I didn’t stop defending my client, he would kill me himself. And you know what? I never stopped defending the client. You know why? Because people don’t follow through on threats so easily. It’s not as simple as just taking a gun and shooting someone. There’s a lot it takes.”
I then walked around the bar so that there would be nothing between us.
“I think you pushed me away because you don’t want to see where this can go.”
Splitter took a gulp his drink, sighed, and put it on the bar.
“Have you ever been told that you should be a therapist as well as a lawyer?”
I arched an eyebrow but did not respond. I supposed, like a good therapist, I needed him to speak what was on his mind and let his words fall out.
“Yes, I’m scared. I have never had a relationship like this. And you are not only the most beautiful woman that I would ever have been with, but you are one of the most accomplished. You are beyond what I can put into words. And I don’t think I’m good enough for that. I’m just a mechanic at Peters Auto Repair and a member of the Savage Saints. I put up fronts with my anger to look cool to the rest of the Saints, but that anger has become so much a part of me, I have difficulty turning it off sometimes.”
He sighed.
“Amber, I don’t know what to do. I do not want to see you hurt. You realize the Devil’s Mercenaries are far beyond anything that you have probably dealt with, right?”
“While that is true,” I said, “I’m also not scared of them. It would take a lot of guts to kill a public figure like me.”
That was perhaps too cocky and too brash a statement to make,
but between Splitter and me right now, I did not want anything other than the unvarnished, unpolished truth to come out.
“Put the DMs to the side. How do you feel about me? What do you want?”
“I want stability and security,” he said.
There we go, I thought. It was a truth that he had not really acknowledged before.
“And yet, I recognize most of my life goes in the opposite direction.”
Self-awareness. Very good.
“When I saw you, I think maybe I liked you—and still do, by the way—in part because of what you represented. You represented that ‘normal, successful’ life. You represented the girl who could bring me some peace, calm down my inner demons, all that jazz. But then, maybe, when I started to bring you in and I saw some of the same chaos in my world coming into yours, I realized that maybe it wasn’t going to be such a great idea to keep you around. That to have you in my life would corrupt you. I don’t know; I’m just blabbering too damn much right now.”
“No, Splitter, it’s fine,” I said, the defiant, confrontational tone a little more subdued now. “If it makes you feel better… I think I can say the same for me. This whole time during my divorce, it’s been pressure, pressure, pressure. Pressure from the outside world to find a man worthy of my stature. Pressure from men of power to sleep with them and join them. Pressure from my family to not embarrass them. Ironically, one of the few people who did not put pressure on me was Jacob, but obviously that’s not important since he and I are as separated as two strangers can be.”
I sighed.
“You were one of the few people I have ever met whom I felt no pressure around. You are a man who is free to almost do whatever he wants. I know, yes, that you have this trial going on and there’s pressure with that. But you and your motorcycles are free in a way that I will never be. If you want to help a charity, you can. If you want to tell your mother you love her, you can. But if you want to speed at over a hundred miles per hour down the 405? You can. If you want to have a massive party on the beach? You can. You can be free. I cannot. Because of the nature of my job, image matters.”
