by Jc Emery
“Was he serious about my kneecaps?”
“Yes,” I say, unable to lie to him.
“When he says I’m going to pay for it, he means with cash, right?” Jeremy asks. “A scratch can’t cost that much to fix, right?”
My eyes nearly bug out of my head, but I don’t say anything. There’s nothing I can say. Jeremy’s fucking clueless about how much it costs to fix that scratch. Granted, I know for a fact that Duke did the work on his Harley himself and he used club tools to do it, so for him it can’t be pricey. But that’s not the point. It’s Duke’s, and somebody dared to mess up something that’s his.
Passing one ranch house after another, on a street that looks exactly the same as every other, I bite my lower lip to keep from letting the pain of knowing that after all of this, that it’s not my attitude that’s screwed it up. I just was not enough.
I’m done with the club and all of this shit. I’m done with the macho crap. I’m done with parties and hooking up. I’m just done, and I need to keep it that way. Duke can have Dawn and every other whore in this entire fucking town. I have my brother and my job, and I remind myself for the thousandth time that it’s enough. But for the thousandth time I still don’t believe it. I only have Jeremy for a little while longer, and pretty soon I might not even have my job anymore. One day I might have nothing. At least when I was a Lost Girl I had the club, in a way. But not anymore. It’s too dangerous, and everything is so fucked up. All it’s done is stress me out, and tear me apart, and make me feel like shit, so I’m done.
Chapter 10
From my position on the sofa in Jim’s living room, I can see Alex at the kitchen table. She’s hunched over a bowl of cereal, and her eyes are down. Looking down at the floor at the collection of tennis balls the dogs have dropped by my feet, I consider throwing one at her. Ever since the fourth of July party the other night, she hasn’t really spoken to me. I guess she’s upset about the finger fucking.
I don’t know why. Her tight as fuck pussy practically broke my finger with how hard she came. Wasn’t right though, but it had to be done.
“Hey asswipe,” Ian says and throws a roll of toilet paper at my head. I narrowly dodge it and turn to give him a disgruntled look. I cast the toilet paper roll a sideways glance and dart my eyes across the room to look at Jim.
“Do you get the sudden urge to wipe your ass while watching TV?” I ask.
“Mom’s run us out of tissues,” Ian says somberly. I nod my head thoughtfully and rub my hands together.
“Still?”
“She feels guilty about Michael,” Jim mutters. Unfortunately, there’s no way around that. When Jim called Church and sat us down, telling us what was going on and asking the club what he did, I couldn’t fucking believe it. I still can’t fucking believe it. The shit we pulled off in Brooklyn to get Alex away from her father and out of danger was crazy, and all that time I spent on babysitting duty really fucked things up for me with Nic—not that I didn’t manage to fuck that shit up on my own again later.
Pumping Mancuso’s house full of bullets was a highlight. If the trip wasn’t so personal it might have been enjoyable. But it is personal. Princess isn’t my family in the way she’s Ian and Jim’s, but she’s Forsaken whether she wants to be or not, and that means something. She was Forsaken the moment Ruby made Jim promise that he’d always keep her children safe, and she’ll be Forsaken even when she’s old and gray and wants nothing to do with us anymore. And even though I voted against it and I was completely fucking pissed that Jim even asked us to risk so much for Ruby’s kid, I don’t regret it. It just took me a little while to remind myself what it means to be a part of this club.
It means I never have to stand alone again.
“No way around that,” I say quietly. I cast a quick glance at Alex. She’s still slowly shoveling cereal into her mouth with her eyes fixated on the table. I look back at Ian to find that he’s also looking at Alex. He almost looks like he’s in pain somehow. Both Ian and Alex have the same widow’s peak at the center of their forehead, which they inherited from their mother. I would have thought that he’d be relieved to have his sister here, but it seems to be fucking him up more than anything. I grab the toilet paper roll and throw it back at him and ask, “You talk to her?”
Without any emotion he says quickly, “No”.
“She’s your sister,” I say at a lower volume. Alex doesn’t know she’s Ruby’s kid yet. She still thinks her long lost aunt rescued her. I’ve almost slipped a few times, but we all made a promise that I can’t bring myself to break. If I’d promised Jim, I might be inclined to say ‘fuck it’ because I think she needs to know, but I didn’t.. On our last fuel stop before we hit Brooklyn, Ruby got us all around and begged us not to tell Alex who she is. With tears pooling in her eyes and fear covering her face, I couldn’t tell her no. Ruby’s a good mom, and if she needs time then I’ll give her that, regardless of what I think.
“Do you think anybody has let me forget that, asshole?” Ian says loudly, stands up, and storms out of the house. Alex’s head pops up from the kitchen table, and she watches him as he goes. Standing from my position on the couch, I stretch my back out and look at Jim, who’s shaking his head at Ian’s departure.
“He’s going to have to learn how to deal with this shit,” he says.
“Maybe he needs to get his dick sucked,” I surmise then smile wide at Alex. “Speaking of which—hey Princess! Guess who I met the other night?” Alex’s eyes widen, and she shakes her head. Ever since the party she just hasn’t been the same. Her not talking to me has been ticking me off almost as bad as Nic fucking avoiding me. She said she was done, and damn if she ain’t acting like she is, too. I’m about to rectify that shit, though. Last time I left her alone, I really fucked things up. She can’t trust me right now, but she will.
“Come on—ask. Go ahead,” I prompt and sit down across from her at the table.
“Who?” she asks with zero enthusiasm.
“My future wife,” I say. Alex narrows her eyes then rolls them. I keep a grin on my face despite the fact that I feel anything but. Maybe I can joke this shit out of my system.
“Whoever you marry is probably going to be a skeezy whore,” she says lightly. I find myself tempted to argue with her about it. I’m not real thrilled about the thought of Nic being called a skeezy whore. I’m close to reminding her that I’ve been in her pussy, so what the hell does that make her—but I decide to go easy on her instead.
“You should have seen her, Princess. She was sucking my dick like her life depended on it. Full on suction action. I’m telling you, if Hoover could patent that shit, they’d knock that rolly ball vacuum shit off the market.” Alex just stares at me as I go on telling her about the fantasy I have—Nic sucking my dick so hard I think she’s gonna inhale the damn thing—as if it were real. I’ve used this fantasy to jack off until my dick is sore each night since I fucked up and Nic left me.
“You’re disgusting,” Alex says in protest and scrubs her makeup-free face. Looking down at her bowl of cereal, she takes in another spoonful, refusing to look back up at me. This is a game we play, she and I. Well, she might not be playing, but I like talking to Alex. I’m kind of short on friends these days, and Alex is my kind of people. She says what she thinks most of the time, even though she keeps catching herself and waiting for punishment. I consider our conversations an educational experience for her. There can’t be all that much that she learned under the thumb of her bastard father. Still, she’s not my girl, and that reminder is wearing on me. I need to get my ass reassigned off babysitting duty so I have more time to figure out how to fix shit with Nic.
“You enjoy my company,” I say, flashing her a devastating smile. She looks up, her cheeks heating just slightly, but her face remains flat.
“You’re pretty much my only friend aside from my aunt. Should my social circle expand, you can expect these little sessions will come to an end.”
“Pssh. The only endin
g I want to talk about is a happy one,” I say, reaching out and grabbing her bowl of cereal and pulling it toward me. Alex fights me on it, making a mess before letting the bowl go and practically sloshing milk all over my cut.
“I’m not even going to ask,” she says, shaking her head. I wrap one arm around the bowl, and take a heaping scoop of cereal from the bowl, and shove it into my mouth. I don’t really like cereal, but it’s bugging the fuck out of her to see me eating from her bowl.
“Orgasms, Princess—the ultimate happy ending.” The look on her face is priceless. She’s really good at giving off this innocent vibe, but I know damn well that there’s one wild bitch underneath all of that well-practiced shock and disgust. She stands from her seat at the table, crosses the room, and opens a kitchen cabinet, pulling out a granola bar. She waves the bar at me as she forces herself to keep a smile off her face. “You know all about orgasms, don’t you?”
“I hope you get a VD,” she says and walks down the hall and into her bedroom.
Just as Alex’s bedroom door shuts, the sliding glass door at the other end of the hall slides open, and Ryan, who the club nicknamed Trigger for his tendency to shoot first and ask questions later, steps into the house. Despite his best attempts to play it off like he didn’t just time that shit, his eyes keep traveling to the closed door as he stalks my way and sits across from me in the seat Alex just left. He says nothing, but sits there with his cold eyes fixated on mine. Trigger’s been the closest and longest friend I’ve had, but after the shit I pulled the other night, I have no doubt he’d put a cap in my ass if I gave him half a chance. Not that I’m entirely pleased with the shit he did at the clubhouse. End of the day, it wasn’t his fault though. I fucked up, and that shit is on me—nobody else.
“What?” I ask. I know what his problem is, but I want him to say it. It’s been increasingly obvious the last few weeks how attached he is to Princess and after that shit he pulled at the clubhouse, he and I have some shit to sort.
Even before he started calling her Cub, I noticed it. He stays away, but whenever he knows where she is, his eyes will continue to travel there. His face always contorts in some kind of emotional discomfort. It looks like he has to take a shit, but he can’t—a feeling I get all too fucking well. I’d call him a pussy and tell him to man up, but the longer Nic goes on avoiding me, the more I feel his pain. I need her to talk to me.
We were building something, and I was about to have Jim call a vote to see if one day the club might consider voting her in. Only Ruby and Mary have been voted in. Barbara never wanted it, and Layla’s been too damn sick to stay clean long enough to be a mother, let alone be an Old Lady. But Nic—she’s the perfect Old Lady, even if she doesn’t know it yet, and I’m damn determined to make her mine.
“You need to back off, brother,” he says in a voice that’s meant to be menacing. It would be if he hadn’t deserved that little show in the field, but he did. Every time I slid my finger into Princess’s pussy, I practically laughed knowing he was watching. It was killing him, and it’s killing him now.
“You don’t wanna share, brother?” I ask and raise an eyebrow at him, letting the comment sink in. Despite the fact that he and Ian have no blood relation, they were raised as brothers and that much time together has given them, at the very least, similar mannerisms. His shoulders hunch in, and the muscles in his arms grow tight with the desperate need to fuck something up royally. He won’t hit me here in the house, if only for the fact that Ruby has a no-violence indoors policy. She’s lost too many lamps to that shit.
“She’s a kid,” he says in dismissal of my suggestion, but I won’t let him off that easy.
“Oh no she’s not. I’ve been in her pussy, man. She’s tight and slick. No meat curtains or nothing—just a perfect fucking cunt.” I’m pushing it and enjoying myself way too fucking much, so much that I can’t stop the smile that spreads across my face.
He doesn’t even flinch. The only indication he gives that he heard a word I’ve said is the constricting of his throat. The less he reacts, the more he’s internalizing it. I waited a long time to pay him back, and I can finally say we’re one hundred percent good.
Slowly, Trigger reaches into his vest and pulls out his .38. He can’t shoot me without getting himself shot in the process. It’s in the club bylaws, and if there’s one thing he gives a shit about, it’s the club. He unclicks the safety and places the gun on the table. I smirk and say, “Do what you gotta do, brother, but we’re good now.”
It takes him a moment longer than I expect it to, but when he realizes what I mean, he shakes his head. “This is about Nic?”
It’s like he forgot what he did all those years ago, and maybe with the blow he’s been doing lately, he has. But that shit from the other night? No fucking excuse. He hasn’t forgotten what he did.
Still, some debts had to be paid, and now that they have, I can move on. I just had to wait until he gave enough of a shit about someone. He won’t say it, but I don’t think this thing with Cub’s going to go away. He looks so much like his dad, and Alex looks so much like her mom. I see Jim and Ruby and can easily predict seeing that be Ryan and Alex in a few years—with their own bastard son fucking up some young girl.
“How long has it been since I fucked her?” he asks. I fight the looming tension in my shoulders. “Doesn’t matter. It’s not like I made you watch while I did it.”
“You got a beef with me, you take it out on me,” I say, standing up and getting right down in his face, leaning into his personal space. “But you fucked with my girl, and that was a bad move. Just because you can fuck her up like that doesn’t mean you should have. Be a fucking man and take your shot at me, because get this, brother—cut or no cut, history or not, I won’t turn a blind eye again. The next time is the last time. Do not test me,” I growl.
Without another word, he stands and leaves the way he came. I push the cereal bowl away and rub my eyes until they hurt. Trigger didn’t make me watch, but he sure wasn’t quiet about it.
xxx
“She was tight, dude—like virgin tight,” Ryan says in excitement. “Do you think she was a virgin?”
“I don’t know,” I say. This is the last thing I want to talk about—Ryan sleeping with Nicole. He knew how I feel about her before he did it. She’s hot and funny, and every now and then she rides to school on the back of her dad’s Harley. He’s a member of the Forsaken Motorcycle Club with Ryan’s dad. She looks good on the back of a bike. I just wish she were riding on mine.
One day it will be mine.
Ryan’s nowhere near being a virgin, and Nicole’s so much younger than us. He had no fucking right going after her at that party—not after I told him I was going to ask her out. Plus, she’s barely a freshman, and we should be graduating next year. Well, we would be graduating next year if we’d passed all of our classes. I’m behind by four, and he’s behind by five. My mom’s pretty mad, so mad that she’s threatening to take away my car. I think if I flash her a big enough smile she’ll give me a few more weeks to bring my grades up. It won’t do any good, but by then maybe Ryan and I can convince his dad to let us prospect at the motorcycle club. That’s been the plan since we were kids, and we’ve never deviated from it. Unfortunately, Mom doesn’t get it, but one day she will. One day Mom will see that the club’s the best option. College is a fucking joke, and it’s not like there’s many great jobs in this town. One day she’ll see, and then Ryan and I will officially be brothers. Patched in life and patched in death.
Chapter 11
As I pull up to Butch’s house, I realize I have no fucking clue what the hell I’m going to say to Nic’s brother when I see him. It’s been too damn long, but I’ve had shit to take care of in Nevada. Whatever I decide, it just needs to get the point across that he fucked up and remind him what it means to fuck with Forsaken. I don’t know what the fuck his sister’s doing about his attitude, but it’s not up to her anymore. His ass was mine the second he screwed up my pain
t, and, as my woman, her problems are my problems.
The small ranch house’s yellow paint is so faded and chipped it looks almost gray. The lawn is overgrown and flows into the street, driveway, and walkway to the front door. The house never looked like this before Butch went down for that shit in Oakland. That was one thing about Butch Whelan—even after his Old Lady left town—he made damn sure his kids had a good home. How Nic and Jeremy were going to figure shit out without him was one of his biggest worries when he went away. A man like that—one who gives a fuck about this kids—is one I can respect. Unlike my own father, whoever he may be.
I turn off my bike, kick the stand down, and dismount, then walk to the door. I make a mental note to make one of the prospects come by and mow the lawn. When we have a clear enough forecast, I’ll set it up for them to paint the exterior.
The house is quiet, but I know damn well they’re home. Neither of them is a morning person, and Nic’s car is in the driveway. I slam my knuckles against the wooden door with enough force that the sound it creates could wake the dead. And still, the house is dead silent.
“Truancy Office,” I shout and continue to knock loudly and obnoxiously. It’s a Friday morning and I know Jeremy’s taking summer school. Fucking punk. With any luck, Nic won’t recognize my voice.
“Goddamn it, Jeremy!” she shouts from inside the house. Her voice is raspy from sleep. Even as irritable as she sounds, I still like to hear her talk. “If you skipped again, I’m not going to save your ass!”
The front door flies open, and I smile at the sight before me. Nic’s bleached blonde hair is in a messy, falling bun atop her head, which tells me she slept on it like that. Letting my eyes travel down her too-fucking-skinny frame, I realize she’s wearing a faded black tee-shirt that’s about ten times too big. The large collar droops over her shoulder, exposing her bare shoulder blade and the corners of a tattoo of vines and roses that trails down her arm to her elbow. She blinks rapidly, squinting from the late morning sun that’s shining in her green eyes. Recognition dawns on her face, and her bewildered surprise morphs into an angry scowl.
