“Oh yes, some Italian restaurants and a couple of cafes. Nothing as fancy as the ones you’re no doubt used to in San Francisco,” mom boiled water in the kettle as she spooned instant coffee into two mugs. I smiled at her lovingly.
“Italian it is then. I hope you like meatballs!” I exclaimed, and she laughed.
“I’m so happy, baby, you have no idea. I knew you’d pass that exam. You were always a smart girl,” mom commented from her position at the kitchen counter, and I tucked in some of my red hair behind my ears.
Her fridge door was covered with magnets from San Francisco that I’d sent her over the years. She’d framed a few of my photographs, and they were scattered around the walls of her kitchen.
“I knew I had to do it, and I’m happy that I passed. I figured that I’d come over and spend some time with you here before I started applying for jobs,” I replied, as mom carried over the two mugs of coffee to the table. We smiled at each other as she sat down across from me, and I reached over and squeezed her hand. I could see for myself now how weak she’d gotten, and it was beginning to break my heart.
“How are you mom?” I asked her, and she nodded her head. She was never the kind of person to complain or spend time feeling sorry for herself.
“I’m perfect, and I’ve never been happier than I am today!” she exclaimed, and I took a sip of the coffee. It used to taste fine when I lived here, now it tasted bitter and watered down. I gulped it down hurriedly, hoping that mom didn’t catch the expression of disgust on my face.
“And how is everyone else?” I asked casually, and mom shifted in her chair, getting ready to give me all the gossip she had been holding onto for the past ten years.
“Oh, where shall I begin? You know Janie is on her second pregnancy,” she said, and I raised my brows.
“With Brian?” I asked, and mom shook her head.
“Some guy from Orange County. As it turns out, even the first kid wasn’t Brian’s,” mom was chattering away happily.
“Oh, and Sally O’Shea’s husband died last year, gun to the head, flat out killed himself. What a shame, of course, their son…you know, Max, is in prison for the third time now. Or is it the fourth?” mom thought as I forced myself to drink some more of the coffee.
It was good to hear her voice, which wasn’t distorted by the phone. I allowed her the thrill she got from spilling all the gossip, stories that I wasn’t really interested in anymore.
“And Jackson…oh, I guess they call him Glock now, has turned into a strapping young man, baby. You should see him these days, taller than his father used to be and such a handsome face,” I heard her say, and I could feel the muscles in my belly tighten. I was afraid of this happening, and I kept my head down, avoiding mom’s eyes.
“Did you tell him you’re coming back? Have you seen him?” she asked and I forced myself to look up at my mother. Her eyes glowed as she looked at me and I took in a deep breath.
“No, mom, I haven’t been in touch with him. I haven’t seen him, and I’d appreciate it if we didn’t talk about him,” I said, trying to control the mix of emotions that were swelling inside me. Mom looked confused, but she smiled weakly at me and nodded. She had always been on Jackson’s side, I knew that even though she had never openly voiced her opinion.
“So, tell me about what’s going on with the Lamberts. How many of them are still living here?” I asked, in an attempt to change the subject.
Chapter 3
Glock
Two hours ago, I’d walked into The Brass Cock, with enough fresh dollar bills in my wallet to buy everyone drinks. I was on the job and on the prowl, but to the regulars at the bar, I was just a friendly talkative Bad Disciples member who was foolish enough to keep buying them drinks.
The Brass Cock had a reputation of being neutral territory. It opened early in the morning and was shut probably no more than an hour every day. They had good music, an unlimited supply of alcohol and women, and members of some of the local gangs and smaller MCs hung out there on a regular basis.
It was the best place for me to go when I had information to gather. No other member of the Bad Disciples, with their aggressive body language and ability to whip out a gun at a moment’s notice; would have been welcome here. I was friends with everyone. Or so they thought. I’d shoot anyone in the face if Axel instructed me to, or if they did anything that might harm my brothers.
I’d grown up with a bunch of these guys, we all came from the same neighborhood around town; so, there was a relationship of relative trust amongst us.
I was sitting at the counter now, buying drinks for Mickey and Dave, who were already beginning to spill their guts.
“Bullshit, man, absolute fucking bullshit. It’s like if the Dark Knights are around, I’m outta there you know? Fucking unpredictable bastards,” Mickey was saying as he drank his fifth bottle of beer. I was on my second, while Dave stood between our stools nodding his head. Mickey and Dave ran a small-time operation of stealing cars in the neighborhood.
I shrugged my shoulders.
“You said it, man,” I said encouragingly, and Mickey was pleased that I agreed with him.
“And the way they shot at you guys that night!” Dave added and shook his head in dismay. I didn’t really care for their support or sympathy. I wanted to know what they knew, that was all. But it would have to be coaxed out of them, no matter how drunk these guys got, they were always on high alert. They had to be. Just like me, their lives depended on it.
“Retaliation,” I said and took a small sip of my beer. The key here was to give the appearance of drinking like a fish, and not actually getting drunk.
“Bullshit! They shouldn’t be rounding up local women and then selling them off!” Dave commented, and Mickey shook his head.
“I’ve told my sister, yo. Stay inside the house after dark. Can’t believe it’s come to this. Even my sister isn’t safe. You guys gotta do something about them,” Mickey continued, and I took in a deep breath and shrugged my shoulders. I half smiled as I took another swig of my beer. The Bad Disciples have been known to take care of problems around Long Beach. The Dragon Knights were quickly becoming more than just a small problem with our club. They were starting to affect the entire city.
“We’re trying, but they keep rising up,” I said.
“From ashes like a phoenix,” Dave supplied, and I smiled at him, even though I didn’t want to. What did he think he was? A fucking stand-up comedian?
“Heard anything?” I asked them, drinking from my bottle so that they didn’t catch my eyes as I asked them that.
“About the Dark Knights? You know they don’t hang around here. Whatever information we get is from crazy P,” Dave said, and I nodded my head encouragingly at him. Crazy P wasn’t exactly reliable, but at least it would be some information to chase.
“What did he say?” I asked, and Mickey interrupted Dave before he could say anything.
“What he did say was that Sage red-hot Campbell is back in town,” Mickey said, and I felt like my breath had been knocked straight out of me. I gulped down the beer in my mouth and turned to Mickey.
“What did you say?” I asked and gripped my bottle tighter.
“Sage Campbell, I know you’ve not forgotten her. She had that cute little booty and wore really short skirts. Remember that one summer she dyed her hair pink and wore black lipstick like she was some Goth or something?” Mickey was laughing with Dave, who laughed too.
“Still hot though,” Dave added and I felt like the ground was moving underneath my feet.
“She’s back in town?” I asked, and Mickey shrugged his shoulders casually.
“That’s what I heard. When did she leave?” Mickey asked, squinting his eyes.
“Ten years ago. She was seventeen,” I replied, in a deep hoarse voice.
“Ten fucking years. Didn’t she go to San Francisco or something? As far away from Long Beach as she could fucking get,” Dave said, and Mickey laughed again.
&nbs
p; “What is she doing back here?” I heard myself ask, even though it felt like my brain wasn’t really functional anymore.
“She’s become some big fancy lawyer now I hear. Big fancy Sage red-hot Campbell!” Mickey replied and took a swig of his beer.
I stood up from the bar stool with a jerk, slamming my half-drunk bottle down on the counter.
“Gotta go,” I said and dished out a handful of cash and left it on the counter.
“You serious? It’s only noon. Where the fuck are you going, man?” Dave threw his hand up in the air. With me gone, they’d have to start paying for their own drinks, which wasn’t something that either Dave nor Mickey looked forward to.
“I have to go. Sorry man,” I said and thumped Dave’s back as I started walking away from them.
“Hey, come back here, Glock, you didn’t listen to what Crazy P told me!” Dave called out, but I was already weaving through the crowd towards the bar door.
I knew I should have stayed and listened to what they had to say. I was supposed to be doing my job, but now I couldn’t. Not after I knew that Sage was back in town. If she was really here, everything was going to change.
***
Sage red-hot Campbell; was what all the guys called her. She used to be a petite young thing, with quickly growing breasts and endlessly long legs. The red was in her hair, and as a spark in her personality. Sage always spoke her mind, and she didn’t mind throwing a few punches either when any of the guys got on her nerves. She had large hazel eyes, shifting color from green to brown depending on the kind of light she was standing in. She had pale skin that refused to tan and every summer, her taste in clothes changed.
To her, throughout our childhood, I had just been one of the neighborhood boys who always got in trouble. To Sage, I was Jackson. I stole from the local stores, started drinking when I was twelve and got high with my buddies in the junkyard behind the school. I bet she would laugh now when she heard I went by Glock, my MC nickname instead.
Sage looked down on me from over her sharp pointy nose. She’d judged me all my life, just like she’d judged all the other guys I hung out with. But to me, she was the girl of my dreams. I went to school only so I could catch a glimpse of her in class. She always had a book stuck in her hands, and I had rarely ever seen her talk to the other girls. She didn’t dress like them, she didn’t speak like them, and it seemed like she didn’t share their interests either.
I used to dream about her at night. When I kissed Mary Anne Murphy in her bedroom, my first kiss, I had thought about Sage and imagined kissing her instead. I’d spent all my childhood and most of my teenage years, fantasizing about the girl who thought I was a violent good-for-nothing troublemaker. I knew I didn’t deserve her, but it didn’t stop me from dreaming about her either.
On her seventeenth birthday, I found her lugging two big bags of groceries from a store. I crossed the street and picked up the courage to say something to her. Sage looked surprised at first and had her brows crossed when she stared at me. I’d offered to help her with her bags, and she looked like she was going to refuse. I expected her to snap at me and say that she could carry the bags herself.
Instead, she handed them to me without a word, and I followed her home. Her mother wasn’t in, and she invited me for a cup of coffee, offhandedly, like she was doing me a favor. As far as I was concerned, my fantasy was coming true.
In her kitchen, we sat drinking our coffees silently, till she stood up, walked over to me and kissed me right on my lips. It was a Sage thing to do, but I wasn’t expecting it. I kissed her back, my hands quickly flying to her breasts but she jerked herself away from me.
“You can come back tomorrow, and we can watch a movie together,” she said and quickly picked up my coffee mug from the table and walked to the sink and drained it down the sink.
Our relationship lasted three weeks and even as I thought about it now, while I walked from The Brass Cock towards my apartment, those could have been the happiest three weeks of my life. Sage kept her distance, speaking very little to me, but she allowed me to hold her hand. We’d kiss in her bedroom, or on the walk back from the grocery store to her house, but that was as far as she was going to let me go and I was happy with that. No other girl had made me as happy as Sage did.
Even her mother, Mrs. Campbell, who I now knew as Tracy, was happy with the budding relationship. Spending time with me had given her some relief, it appeared to me. Tracy had worried all her life that Sage was unhappy, that she was going to be miserable all her life; but being with me made her mother believe that there was still some hope for her.
Three weeks later, Sage was gone. I arrived at the Campbell house in the evening to pick her up so we could go for a walk together. I found Tracy in the kitchen, her face in her hands and her cheeks covered in tears.
“She had her bags packed when I came down for breakfast,” Tracy cried, as I sat with her and tried to console her. I needed comforting too, but I was a man or at least I was trying to be. It felt like someone had pushed a knife straight into my heart, and that someone was Sage.
“Did she leave me a note or a message? Is she coming back?” I asked Tracy, and she must have heard the desperation in my voice. She reached over and squeezed my hand, wiping away the tears from her cheeks.
“No, honey, she said nothing about you…I wish it were different, I wish she had. I know how good you’ve been for her, Jackson. You’re a good boy,” Tracy said in a whimper, and I clenched my jaws and tried to smile.
“So, she had it all planned out?” I managed to say, and Tracy nodded her head.
“Yes, but she didn’t tell me anything, she didn’t tell you anything! I hope she’s happy and safe, that’s all I can hope for her, Jackson, my little baby girl,” Tracy was crying in pain again, and I patted her hand.
“Yes, I wish the same for her too,” I said.
Since that day, three weeks after Sage’ seventeenth birthday, nothing was the same again. I could have gone after her, I could have gone to San Francisco and begged her to let me be a part of her life, but Sage wouldn’t have wanted that. Still, all these years later, I was just glad I had those three weeks with her.
Chapter 4
Sage
Ever since my mom spoke about Jackson, well I guess Glock now, I couldn’t stop thinking about him. Would he even recognize me now? The last time I saw him, we were both seventeen, and he was sitting beside me at the docks, just staring out at the dark waters. The next day I was gone, and I hadn’t left him a note.
My first phone call to my mom had been a week later when I lied and told her that I had found a lovely place to stay near Nob Hill and had a part-time job bagging groceries at a local store. She’d tried to talk about Glock, urging me to write to him or call but I’d quickly changed the subject. She got the hint and hadn’t mentioned him since.
Over the past ten years, I was under the impression that I had forgotten him. After all, I had only really known him for three weeks. We had grown up around each other, in the same neighborhood, but our paths had never directly collided before that day he offered to carry my mom’s groceries.
Before that, he had always just been the guy I had a crush on. He had shaggy brown hair and green eyes. He was tall, already taller than the other guys and his hair fell over his eyes while he smoked his stolen cigarettes. I used to try my best to not stare at him when I walked past, but he was just so hot. He was my teenage crush, the guy I wrote in my diary about, and it was never supposed to be anything else.
Especially since I was planning to run away. My plan of going to San Francisco had started taking shape when I was fifteen. I started collecting money for it, making plans and researching ideas for the move. It had taken me two years to come up with the final plan. I didn’t want to turn into one of those teenage horror stories of running away from home and ending up in a ditch somewhere. I wanted to be organized and have my shit together before I actually made a run for it.
So, Glock’s appearanc
e in my life seemed to have thrown all of that into chaos. The date of my departure was fast approaching, and here he was, holding my hand and kissing me and listening to me complain about our neighborhood and his friends.
Glock wasn’t like the other boys I knew. He was sweet and polite to my mother, and smarter than he realized. He was funny too, and he was the only other person, other than my dad who had died when I was ten, who could make me laugh. In those three weeks, my crush on him had turned into something more.
I stayed up most nights thinking about a future with Glock, imagining leaving Long Beach together and starting a family somewhere else. But that couldn’t happen. Glock had his family and his friends here. He was getting more seriously involved with the gangs here, and as much as I hated that aspect of his life, I knew it was where he belonged. I couldn’t stay though. I had seen too much that frightened me, and I knew that I had to get out. I had a plan, and I had to execute it. So, I left.
I didn’t leave him a note because I didn’t want him to have any hope for us, I had none. Once I was gone, I was going to be gone forever, and he needed to know that.
So, I had spent the past ten years in San Francisco, searching for the guy who might make me feel the way Glock had, but he didn’t exist. Nobody else could replace how Glock had made me feel.
***
I was outside the same store where Glock had first offered to carry my groceries. I had two big bags full of stuff just like I did the last time, and I was getting ready to make my way back to my mom’s house just like that day.
It was late evening now, and the streetlights were all coming on along the road, and I stepped onto the pavement with a sigh. I could picture the scene from ten years ago like it was happening right now. I had stopped in my tracks when I saw Glock crossing the street. He was making his way straight towards me, and I felt like all my limbs had frozen. When he spoke to me, I couldn’t say anything back. I didn’t need him to carry my groceries, but for Glock, I would have agreed to anything.
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