Clutch

by Drew Elyse

  My second option was to take some time to myself and sort out my own head. Of course, last time I left without talking to Gauge first, he had blown up over it. My head might have been messed up over things, but he had to be having a harder time than I was. If I took off without a word, I was just making things harder for him.

  I was well and truly stuck, wasn’t I?

  How much time had passed, I couldn’t be sure, but Gauge came back and found me standing around aimlessly. I’d made it as far as the entryway to the kitchen, staring out at the living room that was becoming less crowded as the guys took off or dragged women back to their rooms for a while.

  “Cami,” he called to me when I hadn’t acknowledged him. I looked his way, but still had no clue what to say. “Come on, darlin’.”

  Since I had come up with a completely blank list of alternative options, I yielded and let him lead me back to his room. Maybe telling him I needed time to process would be enough. It was a long shot, but hope springs eternal. Funny what I was reduced to hoping for.

  We made it into the room and Gauge immediately collapsed onto the bed with a groaned, “Christ.”

  He could say that again.

  I stood awkwardly between the bed and the door to the bathroom. Lying down next to where Gauge was sprawled was absolutely out. Even sitting on the end by his bent knees felt wrong. All I had was standing around like the interloper I was starting to feel like.

  “What the fuck am I supposed to do?” he asked, but it seemed like he was beseeching the universe for an answer as much as he was looking for one from me.

  For whatever reason, given he definitely could not see me with his arm slung across his eyes, I shrugged.

  Thoughts came to me, one after another, forming a picture of what the months to come would hold. I saw myself, sitting in the very room I was in, all alone. Gauge taking Stacey to a doctor’s appointment, then shopping. I saw him coming home, excitement starting to build about the baby he saw on the ultrasound machine, about the cute little things they found for the baby’s room. Oh, the baby’s room. Where would that be? Maybe at first it would be at Stacey’s, but then Gauge would want to be closer to his child. Maybe then he would move Stacey and the baby into his house. His house I had heard about, knew had extra rooms, but had yet to see. Then, in time, the two of them would…

  Really? Was I really going there?

  Someone needed to stop me.

  “What’re you doing over there?” Gauge asked. When I looked over, he was lifting his head enough to see me.

  “Oh, I just…” Wow, that deflection was stellar.

  “Come here.”

  On a scale from one to ten, doing that ranked a solid goose egg. So, tactful, mature woman that I was, I just stood there.

  “Cami,” Gauge called, extending his hand.

  “Yeah?”

  “Come. Here.”

  I looked at him, drinking in the sight of him. He was rough, scruffy, and his clothes really needed to be replaced before they passed worn without collecting their $200 and went directly to destroyed.

  After the silence stretched well past the threshold of awkward, he sat up and got to his feet. In four long strides, he was right in front of me. He did not take hold of me; he met my stare with enough intensity to keep me from looking away.

  “Babe, talk to me,” he said.

  Talk to him? What was I supposed to say? “You’re going to be a dad.”

  “Maybe.”

  Right.

  “You don’t believe her?”

  “Look, I already admitted I slept with her. I was really fuckin’ drunk that night. Maybe I did fuck up. In the year and a half she worked for the club, she never once got with any of the boys until that night between us. She might be telling the truth about only having been with me in that time. I don’t know. Won’t know for sure until the test gets done. Until then, I’m not gonna leave her to do this alone. That shit was what happened to my mom. I don’t want to do that to the mother of my kid. I’ll help until I find out one way or another, then go from there,” Gauge explained it all point blank.

  “What happens if it is yours?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I won’t abandon my child. I’ll figure out shared custody, I guess. Do what I can to be in the kid’s life.”

  “What about Stacey?” I took a few steps back.

  “What about her?”

  “She’ll be the mother of your child. You’ll be seeing a lot of her.”

  He looked at me like the puzzle pieces were starting to fit. “Babe, get your ass back here.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Darlin’, feel free to throw around whatever attitude you want, but you get your ass back over here first.”

  “Um…no,” I answered.

  He did not appreciate that answer. He jolted forward, grabbed me, and pulled me with him until he was sitting on the foot of the bed and I was standing between his legs with his arms around my waist.

  “I’m not leaving you, Cami. And I won’t fuckin’ sit by and let you push me out over this,” he stated firmly. “Yeah, this is going to be a mess. I know it. But Stacey doesn’t mean shit to me. If that’s my kid, she’ll be the mother of my child. She won’t be my woman. That title’s yours.”

  I tried to pull away, but barely managed to make his arms budge an inch. “Gauge, I need time to think about all of this.”

  “You can have time. You can think about it all you want. I won’t say a fuckin’ thing about it until you’re ready to talk. But you aren’t walking away, even just for a bit. You’re here with me while you work through it. End of.”

  No, he did not just tell me what I was going to do. “You can’t order me around.”

  “The fuck I can’t,” he replied. “I don’t want to control you, Cami, but you try to leave me over something we don’t even know is true yet, I’ll do what I have to.”

  “Don’t be an asshole, Gauge,” I snapped. “You can’t turn into this self-righteous prick every time something goes wrong and expect me to submit to your will.”

  “No. You’re right. I can’t,” he said as his arms released me. I took the opportunity and stepped back only for him to rise to his feet. He didn’t come after me, though. He went over to the closet. He shuffled around inside, digging into the pile of crap he had on the floor before emerging. “I can’t control you,” he continued, “and I don’t want to. What I want is for you to be at my side willingly. I want you to believe I’m in this and this shit doesn’t mean I’m going to leave you for Stacey. I had a shot at that if I’d wanted it. I didn’t. With you, I didn’t even have a real shot, and I still fuckin’ fought for the chance. What does that say?”

  He came back to me until he was right in my face again. I tracked the plain, brown shopping bag in his hand until he was too close to do so. “I was waiting to give you this some other time. I didn’t want to do it in the aftermath of my being a dick yesterday, but I think you need it now.” He lifted the bag and handed it to me.

  There was no tissue paper or nice wrappings inside. It was a plain bag with a dark mass within. I reached in and froze the moment my fingers registered it was leather. Even as I felt the smooth texture and lifted it from the bag, I doubted what my mind was screaming at me. I was desperately telling myself not to jump to conclusions, to set myself up for a letdown I wasn’t prepared to deal with. Still, the hope built in those infinitesimal moments. A hope that was overtaking me. A hope that told me in my hand might be the one thing I had always wanted, even when I had convinced myself it wasn’t.

  I let the bag fall from my grip, leaving the mass of black in my grip. With shaking hands, I spread the leather and saw the sewn edges of a patch appear. I nearly dropped the damn thing, suddenly unable to open the folds of fabric further.

  Gauge took it from me, grabbing it between his two hands and holding it up so I could not hide from what it was. There, on white patches sewn onto black leather, was “Property of Gauge” in red script.
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  “Holy crap,” I gasped.

  He rotated it in his hands, holding the vest open for me. I looked at his face, his nearly black eyes, the slightly puckered scar under his left eye, his rough beard I had grown extremely attached to. He was gorgeous and an incredible man once you got beneath the rough, asshole exterior. He also might be a dad soon.

  Did that have to matter? Was that cause to throw in the towel?

  No. No, it wasn’t.

  Without a word, I turned around and let him slip the cut onto my shoulders. He leaned in, ran his nose up the slope of my neck, and nipped at the lobe of my ear.

  “Mine,” he whispered.

  I was his. But…

  I turned in his arms, running my fingers along his cheeks, feeling the tickle of his facial hair. I tapped his lips with my finger. “Mine,” I echoed as I moved in to replace the touch with a kiss. He yanked me in and deepened that kiss.

  When he stopped, I expected him to take me to the bed and…well, take me. Instead, he went over to the closet and brought out a duffle bag. My duffle bag. I tried to stay firmly confused rather than worried, but I was slipping quickly.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Pack your clothes, but leave some stuff here,” he said. “We’re getting out of here.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “My place. ‘Bout time I took you home.”

  Gauge’s place was an apartment about an hour from the club. It was in a nondescript complex made up of half a dozen or so buildings. When we pulled into a parking spot in front of one, my eyes immediately went to the car parked next to us.

  I climbed off, handing Gauge my helmet, and said, “Is that a 1970 Chevelle?” Without waiting for an answer, because I knew it anyway, I started to circle and inspect the beauty.

  Either someone maintained it with loving hands or they restored restored it to perfection recently. The body flawless, the leather seats unmarred, the white racing stripes perfectly bright against the black paint. Lord, did I want to get behind the wheel of that car.

  “Sure is,” Gauge said as I stopped by the driver’s door.

  “This is a gorgeous car.”

  “Thank you.”

  My head shot up, almost expecting someone else to be standing there, thinking maybe I had mistaken the voice for Gauge’s. Nope, just him standing there with a mix of pride and hunger on his face.

  “This is your car?”

  “Yeah. You keep looking at it like that, we’ll be driving that out to the middle of nowhere and christening it, too,” he warned.

  I looked at the perfectly waxed hood, and through the window to the bench seat in the back, wondering which would be a better surface for making that happen. A low growl was the only warning I had before Gauge turned me around and pressed me against the door.“You got a motor fetish I need to know about?”

  “No,” I squeaked out. Though, that car…

  “You sure about that?”

  “Um…” Maybe I wasn’t anymore. Not with the vehicles Gauge collected.

  He looked absolutely predatory as he held me trapped there. “You want to fuck in this car, you tell me and I’ll make it happen. But right now, I need you to get your cute self upstairs before I do it and we risk getting popped for indecent exposure. Feel me?”

  “Right,” I said, then sealed my lips. If that didn’t confirm I was definitely awaiting a rendezvous in that car, only all-out begging would.

  Gauge stepped back, allowing me to move away from the orgasm on four wheels—though I did so only under the threat of possible incarceration. As I led the way up the steps to the entry of the building in front of us, he landed a solid slap on my ass.

  “Jesus,” I muttered, rubbing where it stung a bit.

  “No,” Gauge answered, “I’d knock him out if he did that.”

  “You would punch Jesus?”

  “I’d lay out any motherfucker who put a hand on your sweet ass.”

  “Gauge,” I scolded.

  “My ass, darlin’. No one else touches.”

  “I hate to be disagreeable,” I started, prudently ignoring his snort of derision, “but I think it might my ass, seeing as it is attached to me.”

  “Mine,” he stated. “No question.”

  I looked back at him from the top of the steps, only to take notice of the surprising number of bikes parked near the building, some of which looked very familiar. “Wait a minute. Do a bunch of the guys live here?”

  He followed my gaze for a moment and then looked back to the door, producing his keys. “Yeah. Four of us in this building, then Daz grabbed a unit in the next building over when he got out.”

  “Did you get a group rate?” I asked, still looking at the three other bikes parked there at the moment, but it was too dark to place whose they were.

  “Come on, smartass.” He was holding the door open for me, so I stepped through and moved to the side so he could lead on. “No, we did not get a group rate. Slick and Deni rented here a while back, then Jager took over their place when they got the house. The apartments are nice—real nice—and the rent’s cheap for what you get. Just ended up attracting a few of us.”

  He led me up the stairs to the second floor, stopping at 206. While he unlocked it, he tilted his head across the hallway toward apartment 205. “That’s Ham’s place.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “Not at all.”

  “He lives right across from you?”

  “Sure as shit. Fucker moved in after me. Had the choice of that one or one on the third floor,” Gauge explained, “he decided to be right up my ass all the time.”

  “You should move.”

  “You won’t be saying that in a sec,” he said as he pushed the door open.

  He was right.

  The apartments were recently renovated. The walls, floors, molding, all looked practically brand new. The living room was spacious and had four big windows that would let in plenty of light during the day along one wall. The kitchen was elegant and modern, though it also looked rather untouched—not that that was surprising. The bedroom was large, though under decorated on Gauge’s end. It had two big windows he had covered with dark curtains to keep out the morning light. The furniture he had added to the space was a combination of grey and blacks, and it was minimal to say the least. Of course, that was with the exception of the huge flat screen mounted on the wall. It definitely looked like a guy lived there alone.

  He set my bag on the ground by the open—and atrociously disorganized—closet and led me to the bed.

  “I want you here from now on,” Gauge said, laying me back on the soft mattress. “I know you’ve been looking at apartments, but I want you to move in.”

  The reasonable, levelheaded response would have been to think about it, consider the situation we were in and whether adding moving in together was wise—I did not do the logical thing.

  “Yes.”