Phoenix

by Trent Jordan

  “Cole,” Lane said. “As you know, the Fallen Saints are getting more aggressive with each passing day. We cannot afford to sit idly by while they grow stronger and we grow weaker. I... I know that I have treated you poorly in the past. I know that I have not been the kindest, gentlest big brother I could be. And for that, I am sorry. But now—”

  “Sorry for what?”

  Both Butch and Axle visibly tensed and arched their shoulders. I just felt proud—proud that Cole was standing up, willing to cut his asshole brother off and defend himself. Proud that the Gray Reapers will not be the weaker of the two clubs.

  “Sorry for being an ass.”

  “I know that,” Cole said. “I want to know exactly how you were an ass, though.”

  “Cole, c’mon, this is not—”

  “Is it?” Cole said.

  OK, maybe pride was too strong of a word. The tension in the room was dangerously escalating. If we couldn’t control it… as much as I hated Butch and disliked Lane, I didn’t like our odds being on their turf with their men just outside.

  “Do not let your pride get in the way of a necessary reunion, brother,” Lane said without any of the stoicism that had marked his earlier words.

  “It’s a little late to be setting terms like this,” Cole said. “I’m willing to make peace, but I don’t want a peace that lasts five days and then turns back into us feuding forever. Either we become permanent allies, or we continue this dance around each other. I’m not putting one foot in while leaving one foot out.”

  “Christ, are you fucking serious!” Lane said, rising from the table.

  Cole rose to meet him. The rest of us rose with our respective presidents, fully aware that the other side was not going to let their leader get his ass beaten. Here we go…

  “I’ve suffered more casualties in the last month than I have the year before, and you want me to make a list and check it twice? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “I’ve been asking the same question my entire life, Lane,” Cole said. “It will literally take you five minutes to be contrite and say what you did wrong. I’m not asking you to make penance for five years.”

  “Your focus is in all the wrong places!”

  “I’m not here for a temporary solution!”

  “You’re not here for anything but to make me grovel, are you?”

  “Not any different than how you’ve made me grovel for years on end.”

  And that’s when the first punch came.

  With Cole, Lane, myself, and Butch so close together, it was hard to know who threw first. I only knew it wasn’t me. But who threw first paled in comparison to the fact that with the false pretenses of civility off the table, I unleashed the vengeful animal in me, one driven by the adrenaline of an ugly morning, an ugly month, and an ugly life.

  I didn’t so much punch as I drove my fist through peopled, like a bullet going through crumpled paper. I didn’t want to kill; I wanted to maim. I heard people shouting, and I heard Owen and Axle trying to break it up, but what I heard could do nothing in comparison to what I wanted to do. I wanted the blood of Butch and Lane literally on my hands, just as they had the blood of my father on theirs.

  It didn’t fucking matter what my father was to the Black Reapers. Old feelings died hard, and my feelings for my old man were still conflicted at worst and still loving at best.

  BOOM!

  Everyone froze. Explosion…

  What the fuck?

  “Shit!” someone yelled from outside. “It’s the Fallen Saints!”

  In an instant, the four of us, warring combatants fighting to the death, had found our common enemy. No longer were we fighting each other. Fists were dropped, shirt collars were released, and distance was given. Butch was the first to leave, grabbing a gun just outside the church doors.

  Lane and Axle followed immediately. Owen, perhaps on instinct, raced with them. Cole looked at me for half a second before he followed his brother out. Goddamnit, I thought to myself as I followed Cole, having made a vow to protect him at all costs—even if what he did, I thought, was stupid and self-supplicating to his brother.

  But any and all thoughts I had vanished the second we got outside.

  The battle, if you could even call it that, had ended.

  There was no enemy in sight. No Fallen Saint. No bike of theirs.

  Just a single car on fire and two Black Reapers lying about five feet from the car. If they weren’t dead, it would be nothing short of a miracle.

  The Black Reaper officers stood behind a flank of men who had their guns pointed forward into the darkness, but even I could see there was no immediate danger. The Fallen Saints had somehow rigged a bomb in the car, detonating it when two Reapers got near it. The details didn’t matter nearly as much as the fact that two more of us—them, the Black Reapers—were dead. Fucking dead.

  The war was not just on paper anymore. I was seeing it with my own eyes.

  “Clear!” one of the Reapers yelled, a man whose voice I didn’t recognize—probably a new prospect they’d had to rush in due to lowering numbers.

  Butch and Lane headed straight for the bodies. Cole and Owen moved to the side, distant from the rest of the Black Reapers. The heat of the fire was intense, but it paled in comparison to the heat I still felt between the two Reapers.

  Lane looked down at the bodies, raised his shoulders in a sigh, and slowly walked back to Cole.

  “You want to be our friend?” he said, followed by a harsh spit to the side. “Or do you want to be the friend of our enemy? This, right here? This is the norm now. They aren’t afraid of us anymore. We’re...”

  He didn’t finish, but I knew what he was going to say. They’re afraid of the Fallen Saints.

  And that scares me.

  Though a small part of me might have taken a bit of egotistical pride in the Black Reapers’ dismantling, that reality scared the shit out of me. For as long as I had known each side, the Black Reapers MC was the grizzly bear of the forest, and the Fallen Saints MC was the annoying fox that just couldn’t leave the bear alone.

  Now? That grizzly bear was old, wounded, and haggard. The fox, cunning and smart as it was, smelled an opportunity.

  “And when they defeat us, they’re coming for you. Even if you hadn’t helped us in the past, they would still hunt you down. You’re still a Carter, Cole. I… I need your help.”

  “When they defeat us… I need your help.”

  It was almost like I’d gotten dropped in a surreal dream, one in which the normal rules of reality no longer applied. I had no fucking clue how to make sense of any of this. Lane wasn’t… Cole wasn’t…

  Life wasn’t…

  “Brother, I want to fight by your side,” Cole said. I barely even flinched at what was said anymore. I was numb to it all. “But I will not fight under you or before you. If you want help, we do it as partners. As father intended. As co-Presidents.”

  Lane almost opened his mouth but Butch, right by his side, put a hand on his shoulder. The message was evident—shut the hell up and think about it.

  “Damn straight,” I said quietly.

  Not quietly enough, though. Cole glared at me. I actually gulped in guilt. I was letting my pride get in the way of things—much as how Lane was letting his. And this is how shit continues.

  “You know how to reach me,” Cole said.

  Without another word, the three of us departed for our bikes, which had not been damaged in the blast or fallout. But my certainty as to our relations with the Black Reapers had only been muddled. Were they the friends that Cole and Lane had perhaps hoped they could be after an attack like this?

  Or were we really the enemies who had nearly torn at each other’s throats in their church hall?

  Jess

  I held the phone in my hand.

  I needed to make the call.

  I had to.

  But fuck... I was so fucking angry!

  Why did he immediately act like a bratty teenager? Why did
he not say a word to me when he left?

  Why had I expected anything more than I should have from a fucking biker?

  I just...

  I guess sex hadn’t just made me crazy for Phoenix. It had made me fucking crazy, period.

  But now that I’d gotten home and had all day to fume, now that I’d had all day to think about how Phoenix was nothing more than a repeat of my history with men who took me for a ride and nothing more... well, I was both a little bit more clearheaded and a little bit more pissed off as a result.

  Had I ever had a good relationship with any man in this world? Of any kind? Besides regular bartending customers who tipped me to be nice to them?

  I didn’t want to know the answer to that. It probably would have depressed me to no fucking end.

  Which was why I held the phone in my hand.

  To make things right?

  Not between the person I wanted to call and me. I didn’t think that that was possible.

  But between myself and I... maybe.

  It was a fucking long shot of long shots, but what did I have to lose? There were no more secrets, no more big reveals between me and the world. The world of Ashton and northern Los Angeles as a whole knew I was going bye-bye. Might as well just vomit everything out.

  I called. Maybe if my fingers moved faster than my emotions, I could get something out of this before I went completely insane. The dial tone rang once. Then twice.

  And then the pickup came.

  “Jess?”

  “Dad.”

  I didn’t have anything else that I had planned to say. I just... well, a part of me thought that maybe if I made things better with my father, somehow, that would mean I’d stop going for these guys who were macho bros who thought bikes, muscles, and facial hair made them sexy. Maybe I’d go for men who just wanted to be a fucking good human being.

  “Jess!” my father said. “What’s going on? Are you slinging drinks and having great dates? The fruit, I mean.”

  Ah, yes, Father. The one who makes jokes so he doesn’t have to have a real conversation. Maybe it’s what I need.

  “Always, Dad,” I said with an eye roll, but I wasn’t feeling particularly jokey. I was still tense—I had to imagine my blood pressure readings right now would get a normal person sent to the hospital. “I mean, I’m not eating dates, but I’m slinging drinks.”

  “You know, dates are really healthy for you, they’re—”

  “Dad!”

  I yelled. Yes, I yelled.

  Because as my dad continued to crack joke after joke, utterly oblivious to the fact that I was in massive need of help and deeply hurt, I could no longer fucking take it. I could no longer just pretend that everything was all good because he’d stopped drinking. Him stopping a bad habit didn’t let him off the hook for not replacing it with good ones.

  “I can’t fucking keep doing this, I fucking can’t!”

  “Jess?”

  “No, just, shut up, listen to me.”

  I couldn’t believe I was talking to my father this way. Actually, I couldn’t believe I was talking to my father in any fashion. But here I was.

  And now that I was here, there wasn’t going to be any holding back.

  “Dad, just... do you know what it’s like to get used? Repeatedly? What it’s like to go into every date and every relationship hoping that this one will be different, only to realize that no, it won’t be? That every time I end up getting dumped or getting broken up with, I realize I was used for sex and nothing more?”

  Maybe this was too much to hear for my father.

  Tough shit.

  Maybe if Phoenix had tried to have an actual dialogue with me this morning, I wouldn’t be in such a foul mood. But it wasn’t any more Phoenix’s fault than how he’d acted this morning. Everything, like it always seemed to, came back to my father.

  “I feel like I can’t ever have a good relationship with a man because I don’t know how to have a relationship with any man, and damnit, Dad, it’s your fault.”

  I couldn’t even think of what I was going to say now. It just all spilled out. I didn’t care if it was accurate or not. It was how I felt.

  “I don’t know how to interact with this world. I know how to flirt to get tips, but I don’t know how to behave otherwise. I don’t know how to make smart judgments. I feel like all I got was a raw deal. I’m moving, again, and running away, again, because I’ve burned all my bridges here and it’s not fucking safe! And you know what it all comes back to? You treated me like shit when I was a child, Dad, and you’ve never done a goddamn thing to fix it. You’ve never apologized. I’m happy that you’re sober now, I really am, but you just deflect difficult conversations with stupid humor. You laugh and make terrible jokes without ever actually engaging with me, and you know what? I’m fucking sick of it! You never face the truth, Dad. Well, let me make you face the truth right now. You were awful. I hated you. I don’t hate you now, but I don’t like you. I can’t ever be honest with you, not until now, at least. I... I... ”

  I ran out of steam. The tears that came made my words blubbery, and I just began to sob uncontrollably. I couldn’t make complete words, let alone complete sentences, but I’d made my fucking point. My father finally knew how I felt.

  And for what felt like a good two minutes, I just bawled into the phone. My father didn’t say a word as I let every tear out of my body. If this was cathartic, then being cathartic hurt way fucking more than I ever would have anticipated.

  It felt like I was crying not just for my current self, but the fourteen-year-old self who had run away. That little teenager had never really had the chance to stop and cry much; she was too busy trying to stay above water and keep her shit together. In the few moments that she did cry, she had to stop shortly after, either because she had a shift she had to put a pretty face on for or because an angry man was coming who wanted something from her, and it wasn’t tears.

  It was small wonder, then, that the tears that fell weren’t just the tears of a sad, dumped woman, but an angry, heartbroken little girl who wanted something that the passage of time had ensured she would never have.

  Finally, when my sobbing slowed down to once every few seconds instead of several per second, I heard my father’s voice. And he said three words that shocked me—but also convinced me he was starting to understand me.

  “You are right.”

  I almost started bawling again when I heard those words. Certainly, I was far too overcome with emotion upon hearing my father admit culpability to reply. It was the first time... aside from my father saying a few phone calls ago that I could visit him…it was really the first time he’d done anything nearing seriousness and depth in conversation.

  “Jess, you’re right, and I am so, so sorry,” he said.

  His voice was cracking now too. God, we both just sounded like blubbering messes.

  “My single biggest regret in life... it was losing you,” he said. “In many ways, Jess, you are the reason I became sober. I was stupid and selfish and foolish back then. I never thought you’d run away. It just never entered my mind. And when you did, and I lost the one person I loved in this world...”

  And back came the tears.

  “I did not know if I would ever see you again. Frankly, the idea of a fourteen-year-old running out into the world on her own, without my help or even the help of a big sister, terrified me. I fought to believe I’d hear from you again, but... well, regardless, I knew I needed to get better. I told myself that if I ever crossed paths with you again, I’d be better. But that doesn’t change the fact that I was so bad to you, and I am forever sorry and apologetic for that.”

  I just...

  Dad...

  “Why?” I choked out. “Why did it take until now for you to say that?”

  My father sighed. He didn’t deserve to. For how much he had fucking hurt me…

  No, he did. Now it was me who was acting like a bitch in the face of someone baring their soul to me. Small wonder
, it seemed, that my father would recoil in the face of such harsh questioning.

  “Because it’s scary,” he said.

  Those words blunted my tears and got me to sit up. This was so unlike my father.

  “It’s scary to face how badly I failed you,” he said. “It’s scary to see how much of a mess I was. It’s scary to analyze all these things. Most especially when it’s your only child. At least if someone I was dating left me, I could find someone else to date. But there’s only one of you, Jess. You’re my only little girl.”

  I shook my head, not because I disagreed, but because my father was going to make me drown in my tears.

  “Thank you,” I choked out.

  I heard sniffling on the other end of the line. My cheeks were now more stained than if I had run through a thunderstorm.

  And you know what? It felt kind of nice. It felt kind of good to get some of this out there. Even if it had taken so much longer than it ever should have.

  “Thanks, Dad,” I said.

  “I’m sorry it took so long, Jess. You have every right to be mad at me and hate me.”

  “I don’t hate you,” I said with a laugh. “I just... it’s been a tough day. And you happened to be my target.”

  “But everything you said was true.”

  I grimaced.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s OK, it needed to be said.”

  A brief pause came where I finally had the chance to catch my breath. And boy, was that breath needed.

  “Do you want to talk about what happened?”

  I had sincerely forgotten that the way Phoenix had treated me this morning was why I was calling my father. At first, I wanted to just dismiss my father’s offering as something that would be too awkward to talk about with him; that wasn’t a conversation that the two of us needed to have.

  But then I recognized the whole point of us chatting right now. It was to break through those self-imposed conversational barriers and get to the actual point of our dialogue. It was to have the tough but necessary conversations.

  And frankly, at the risk of sounding too crass for my own good, who better to talk about bad relationship endings than my father?