Homecoming

by Tara Lynn

  I went for them again, but he held me back.

  “That doesn’t bother you?” he said.

  “What?”

  “That I’m your stepbrother.”

  The word echoed in my brain, building strength each time I played it: Stepbrother, step brother.

  Step.

  Brother.

  Everything went crystal clear.

  “You’re serious,” I said.

  I finally registered the wide eyed look he had. My heart went from pounding to a near stop. “Oh my god, you’re serious.”

  “Yeah.”

  I shoved him out of the seat. “You’re Damon? You’re the one who left?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  He might have said something. I didn’t wait for an answer.

  “Oh my god,” I said.

  I jolted up and tore away from him. My eyes nearly watered with embarrassment.

  I thought he was different, someone better than the guys in Freemont, but no. The first time I’d let a man come that close and he was freaking related to me.

  His fingers had been tracing me, nearly in me. I could just feel the heat of his palm on my abdomen, shifting lower.

  I shook the memory from my head, before it had me throwing up.

  Truckers looked up bleary eyed, as I stormed around the bar. I grabbed my purse from the cabinet under the counter, then opened the door to the back room.

  “Donna, take over. I gotta go. I’m sick.”

  “What?!” her voice screeched out, but the door shut on it.

  I needed to get out of here. I made for the exit, but Damon cut me off. I warded him from my body. I didn’t want any less than a canyon of air between us.

  “Hey,” he said, leaning in. “It doesn’t mean anything. We were just messing around a bit.”

  “Please don’t say any more,” I said, unable to even lift my eyes from the floor. Those stupid organs of mine might see the same grizzled hunk before me. I couldn’t trust them to respect my disgust.

  “It’s not that big a deal,” he said. “I had no idea the old man remarried, and you had no idea who I was. I guess you didn’t look too close at the photos. Hell, I don’t think we’ve even met each other.”

  He stuck out a hand. I chanced a look at it. My brain, perversely, fixed on how thick and strong his forearm looked.

  I shook my head fierce enough to etch out my thought. “I gotta go,” I said. “Please let me go.”

  He unblocked the path to the door and I shoved out. Traffic whooshed on the darkened highway, just across the divider. The wind from it kicked out my hair and washed away some of my panic. I high stepped it to my car, cranked the old thing into gear and whirred out of the lot.

  Five minutes down the country roads and my chest finally came loose. I took a wheezing breath. Exhaustion filled my body as the stress left it. I took stock of my situation.

  I was on Fawcett road, heading back to the ranch house. I’d just left the bar, where a man who claimed to be my stepbrother had been kissing me and feeling me up. Nothing else had happened.

  Maybe I just didn’t have the energy anymore, but I saw those facts as just that now. It was the past. A thing that had happened.

  Had it happened?

  I drove in silence, trying to figure out what cosmic coincidence could possibly allow for a situation like that. It didn’t make any sense. Maybe he’d been joking.

  I remembered his eyes wide and dark like cold-forged steel from one of my fantasy books. That didn’t look like a pranking look. And unless he’d seen me reading fantasy and banked on some weird incest fetish, he must have known it would cost him sex.

  I really would have given him anything he wanted.

  My throat clenched with a new wave of nausea.

  Maybe it was some weird prank. Some people could deadpan real good. My dad had been able to. I tried to remember one of the jokes he’d played on me as a kid. He would sit at the dinner table and act as if we didn’t know each other.

  Then his face was replaced by Damon’s. I remembered the way he had been studying me across the booth - so calm, so composed. Dad had never done that. My stepbrother -

  My stomach clenched. No, no more thinking about family. No thinking about any of this. I’d just go sleep and forget the whole thing.

  I rolled down the windows, blasted the radio on the trashiest pop station I could find, and roared on home.

  The living room light was on as I ground up the long gravel driveway, towards the house. The front yard was ten acres on its own, but that was just a small fraction of the two hundred or so that Lorne actually owned. Crime paid well.

  The last thing I wanted to see was my mom or Lorne himself. As much as I hated everything that man stood for, he was an amazing human lie detector. A couple questions and he’d have me spilling the whole story.

  Actually, this might be more embarrassing for him than for me. The President’s stepdaughter and son nearly screwing each other? Maybe his lackeys would turn on him.

  Probably not. It wasn’t worth it. I wanted this night buried where no one would ever find.

  I parked next to Mom’s pickup and tiptoed up to the front door. I stopped between the two cacti framing it and listened. There was nothing. Very slowly, I slipped into the house. The TV chittered with laughter down the hall. Just from the timing, I could tell it was one of the shows Jason liked on Comedy Central. He must be the only one around.

  I sighed in relief and went down the hall to my room, when suddenly he stepped into view at the far end.

  “Hey,” Jason said. “You’re home early.”

  He had on his loose sleep clothes. They made him look like a kid again, despite his military buzzcut. It helped that he was cradling a carton of ice cream fresh from the fridge.

  “Yeah, I just didn’t feel great.”

  “Oh, that sucks. You want some of this? I’m just watching some Adult Swim.”

  “No, sweetie, that’s fine. I’m gonna go lie down.”

  “Alright.” He crossed the hallway and disappeared into the living room.

  Sometimes I forgot what a cool kid he could be. He was only thirteen, even if the thing he mostly talked about now was becoming a biker.

  A biker like my other brother.

  I hurried into my room and threw myself on the bed. My stomach churned again, but I fought back the panic.

  No, I decided. Not like my other brother. I had one brother and he was watching TV in that room. That guy at the bar was a stranger who said he knew my stepdad. He claimed to be Damon, but I’d only seen a couple pictures of Damon. They didn’t look much like that bearded mountain man at the bar.

  I practiced in the dark until I felt comfortable with that story. It was the truth. It was the past.

  I had class tomorrow. Maybe storming out wasn’t the greatest thing for my bank account, but at least I could use the time to study a bit more.

  I flicked the lights on and washed up. My skin looked a bit whiter than usual, but I ran a hand over my round little face and marked out all the unique features of it. Features my mom and Jason shared, but not Lorne or his dead-eyed lackeys - never mind any offspring. Most of all, I saw the traces of Dad: my honest amber eyes and the low dimples in my cheek that showed up as I forced a smile.

  It was hard to keep a smile up with Dad on my mind though.

  Why did you leave me?

  The bar had been my one refuge, and now even that was tainted. I was in a place that didn’t even feel like home. None of this should have been my life.

  I’d never been religious but I’d been a mess when Dad was killed. I’d gone to church with him and Mom once in a while. Mom had stopped, but I went in alone once to ask the minister why my father had been taken. It was a kid’s question, I know. But hey, I was still a kid then and I wasn’t thinking straight. The minister helped me. Not with any actual advice, but he had stroked my shoulder and said this:

  “Don’t mourn for h
im. He has been liberated from earthly bonds.”

  Liberated. Yeah, that was the sort of freedom Lorne’s crew offered.

  Liberation from life. Liberation from right and wrong.

  I switched out into my PJs and pulled out my math textbook. Numbers would be a good distance from my emotions. The more of this I studied, the more credit I could get to skip the harder university courses when I finally joined. Tonight was a firm reminder that I needed to get out.

  My notepad sat bright and white and empty to fill up with equations. After fifteen minutes, all it held were random doodles. My brain had absolutely no ability to think on anything that didn’t stress me out.

  I sighed and set it all aside. I briefly considered texting Sadie up in UC Santa Cruz, but it was a Friday night. She’d be occupied.

  Instead, I brushed, switched the lights back off, and lay under my sheets in the dark. The shades were open and a crescent moon hung crisp in the night outside.

  For all of Freemont’s problems, it did at least sit in some of the prettiest land in the country - maybe the world. There wasn’t anything wrong with this place, just the people that occupied it. Tonight, I’d just found one more person to add to that list.

  I dreamed often of getting away from here. I promised myself again that I would. I’d travel all over, and maybe I’d never return.

  As I drifted off though, I remembered that Damon was one of the few people who had ever left town.

  And he’d still come back.

  *****

  My head throbbed when I finally rolled out of bed. I might want away from Damon, but my brain clearly did not. He had popped up again and again in my dreams, sometimes in excruciating detail. I’d woken up a half dozen times in a cold sweat, and once in an uncomfortably warm one.

  Unlike my head, the house lay blissfully still. Maybe Lorne was out on one of his trips to the other chapters. Mom might be with him. I didn’t care - she was a lost cause. When I passed Jason’s room, his snores snarled out through the door. That made me smile. Let him sleep his way out of this house, untouched.

  I slogged through a bowl of mushy cereal. My brain lay blissfully numb, but I needed it awake for classes. I brewed coffee, but put in a cup and didn’t touch until I’d gotten my bag and everything into my car and started down the driveway. It was a clear summer day in the Central Valley and each sip made things brighter and brighter.

  With the windows down and the morning news playing, everything from the night before felt like a bad dream. Things were just as good and just as bad as they’d ever been.

  The rolling green hills and I split company as I turned into downtown. I passed our flat modest little city hall building, the high school and then a couple stores. On the surface this place looked very Norman Rockwell, but I knew how the money flowed around here. The Liberated had tendrils in everything.

  I bought another cup of coffee at a drive through, then pulled in to Freemont Community College. It was a miracle this place even existed. Despite the name, Freemont alone wasn’t big enough a town to justify the cost. People fifty miles out came here cause it was the only option. Other than the Last Stop, it was the only place in town where I could truly escape from the Liberated, though only in daytime.

  Ruby was waiting for me in the front row of the small musty lecture hall. She beamed and waved excitedly. Normally I’d be flitting my hand right back and rushing up to squeeze her arm. But I was so not in the mood right now. And, for once, I didn’t feel like sitting in the front row. It felt way too visible.

  I took an aisle seat near the middle and beckoned. Ruby scrunched up her face, but gathered her books and wound around to me.

  “What the matter with you?” she asked.

  A wave of spring freshness settled around her. She looked like a flower herself, with her dandelion blond hair that drifted down to join her bright red top and navy skirt. It almost hurt to look at with my tired eyes.

  “I didn’t sleep well.”

  She patted my hand, and peered in deep with her warm brown eyes. “Trouble at the bar?”

  It felt like she might just meld with my brain, so I shook my head. “Just bad dreams.”

  “Dreams always mean something. You’re stressed.”

  “Maybe it’s about class?” Our professor had just walked in and was in the midst of erasing the board for his daily quiz problem. Those always were a rough start to the morning.

  Ruby studied me like I was a psych textbook and shook her head. “No, that’s not it.”

  I threw up my arms. “Ok, I don’t know. You just tell me.”

  “It’s family trouble.”

  “Wow, what an amazing shot in the dark.”

  “Did your stepdad do something?”

  “Probably. But no, he’s been leaving me alone the last few weeks.”

  Lorne put on a good family man act, but I never bought it. I’d suffer through a ‘family dinner’ now and then, but he couldn’t get me to speak. It might have been a petty resistance, but it was all the effort I wanted to spend.

  Ruby stared at her own armrest and shook her head. “I know he and my dad are up to some new crap.”

  “Oh geez, Ruby,” I said. “Just let them be. We’ll be out of here in a year or two and they’ll still be up to the same stuff. Why do you let it get to you?”

  She glared, all her warmth now condensed into heat. “He’s my actual father. I can’t just turn my back on what he’s doing.”

  Her dad was the town pharmacist. There had been a couple others, but Lorne and his Liberated MC had driven them out of business. Of course, the Liberated didn’t hand out favors. Ruby’s dad somehow managed to get hands on tons of legal amphetamines and narcotics that the Liberated then distributed. I didn’t know the details of whatever latest compound Ruby had caught her father with, but I could imagine.

  “Yeah, family makes things complicated.”

  Her irritation evaporated. “Is it your mom then? No, no. Your brother right?”

  It didn’t seem like this would let up, so I nodded. “Yeah, it’s him. He keeps clamoring for Lorne to teach him how to shoot.”

  Ruby groaned in disgust. “God, and I bet Lorne’s eager to get another little foot soldier right?”

  “He’s not looking for a soldier. He’s looking for a blood heir. Mom’s been able to keep Jason from club business, but that’ll only hold up for so long.”

  My caffeinated brain filled with new worries. My fears about Jason’s future were way more real than anything with Damon. Once the MC had a wrap around a new recruit, it was hard to ever get them free. Worse, Jason was eager to join. Like all the other guys around here, he saw it as the highest honor possible.

  But…maybe if Damon really was back, Lorne wouldn’t need to build a new son from scratch.

  To my surprise, I didn’t feel sick at the idea that Damon might actually be in town to stay. Thank god, it hadn’t occurred to me last night though. The idea of seeing him again still gave me a shiver of regret. If him being here kept my brother safe, I would do anything.

  My annoying mind started to think about what ‘doing anything’ might mean when it came to Damon. I rattled it clear. Ruby shot me a fresh burst of concern, but I focused on the board.

  The professor cleared his throat. Ruby leaned in and whispered, “I want to hear all about it after.”

  I nodded. The lie wouldn’t be difficult, but now my mind had stirred up another question. I’d actually asked it last night, but I’d never gotten an answer.

  Why was Damon back?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Damon

  Nothing says freedom like a couple fingers of whiskey at ten in the morning.

  Do that too many days in a row though, and it feels more like surrender.

  I was somewhere in between those two states, sitting here on Baxter’s couch in day three. Baxter had left for the garage hours ago to take care of some club affairs. Alone in the dust cloud of his living room, I was veering steadily into the second lane. />
  Things had gotten complicated in Freemont. Lorne’s strength ran everywhere. I’d been hoping to get the Liberated to find operations that didn’t mingle with the town. Turned out the club and Freemont were now one and the same.

  To Lorne’s credit, things hadn’t been bloody inside the city limits for years. I had no doubt, though, that soil was getting bathed red somewhere else.

  Baxter might be the one full-fledged member who didn’t see that as a cause for celebration. I’d been right to trust him, but it wasn’t long odds. We’d seen eye to eye since we were kids, despite our differences.

  Baxter had been a wonk when we met - still was, really. He was good with numbers, but not with others. I’d been good with people and awful with numbers. We’d lifted each other up. Both of us ended up in the Liberated MC for different reasons - me by birth, him cause he was he looking for a family. But we both had vision. We saw beyond what was to what should be.

  Though, I’m sure Lorne could say the same damn thing. And hell, he’d achieved his vision. He’d even got himself a nice new family.

  That had been about the first thing I’d asked Baxter to fill me in on. I still couldn’t wrap my head around how Lorne had gotten Lisa Everman of all women. What mind games had he worked on her head? Had he sold the lie about what happened in the convenience store that well? Truth must run in painfully short supply in Fremont.

  Baxter had gotten me the name of the girl too - Christina. I had a blur of memory of her from high school. It’d just been a passing glimpse and a sudden burst of stiffness in my pants. I sure wasn’t feeling it now - knowing her last name might well be my own.

  I couldn’t guarantee that feeling wouldn’t change if she was in front of me, though.

  “Shit, shit. Fucking shit,” was the summation of my words after Baxter had filled me in. My body burned. Now I understood why Christina hated Lorne so much. She had every right to.

  I still wasn’t sorry for what happened with her, though. Hell, that was just biology.

  But if word got out, it would crush my plans before I even solidified them. Getting in the club was one thing. Lorne would give me my cut back if I asked nice enough. But the Liberated had lost their whole direction. They had a level above membership, now: partners, they called it. I had to get there to have any real sway.