They sat down on a park bench, and Mace tried to be calm, but he had no idea why Vic would want to talk to him. They’d made it pretty clear last time that they didn’t have much to say, and he’d been just fine with that. But at that moment, sitting next to his older brother, whose wife he’d fucked, Mace had reached a new level of awkward. Awkward, but he didn’t feel bad about it. It was Joyce who’d initiated it, and even if he could’ve said no, he’d been in love with her his entire adult life. Well, until that night, at least.
“So?” Mace asked.
“Is that the only time you’ve seen her since Christmas?”
“Yeah.” He didn’t feel it was necessary to keep swearing it was the truth. Vic would either believe him or he wouldn’t, and what Mace said didn’t make much difference. “What’s this about?”
“I told her,” Vic said while keeping his eyes on the coffee cup in his hands.
“Told her what?”
“When she’d been all over your ass when you came for Christmas, I told her she was an idiot, that she was probably the only one in town who didn’t know you’d had a crush on her since the first time you two met. We had a fight, and I took off—”
“I’m guessing to one of your pussies,” Mace pointed out.
“Yeah.”
“On Christmas Day?”
“I’m not sure you’re in the position to judge me.”
“I’m pretty sure I am,” Mace deadpanned.
“Either way,” Vic said after a short silence. “The next morning she told me she knew I was cheating on her, that she’d been with you all night, and that she wanted a divorce.”
“What did you do to change her mind?”
“I do love her,” Vic said instead of answering the question, and for the first time he looked at Mace. “I do love her. Just so you know. I really do.”
Mace didn’t know what to answer or how to comment on it. What did strike him, though, was that he didn’t care. He didn’t care about Vic or Joyce, he was most definitely not in love with Joyce anymore, and he couldn’t care less what the two of them did with—or in—their marriage. If Vi said he loved Joyce, who the fuck was Mace to argue with that? In Vic’s own, slightly twisted brain, it might even be true. Either way, Mace didn’t give a shit. He didn’t care about them, and he most definitely didn’t care about what happened to their marriage. If they wanted to spend the rest of their life making each other’s life miserable, Mace was just fine with that.
“Will you… pursue her?” Vic asked. “Try again?”
“Definitely not,” Mace laughed. “You two deserve each other. I’m just sorry you ruined what used to be a great girl. Because you did.”
“I’ve made her happy, too. We had a good life.”
“Had?” Mace asked, and then he shook his head. “Vic… It’s not my business, and I don’t care anymore.”
The Joyce he’d loved the last twenty years had just been an idea of what could have been. She wasn’t real.
“I think I just…” Vic started. “I need you to leave us alone.”
“You’d be surprised how much I don’t give a fuck about either one of you.”
o0o
To no one surprise, Wrench got his top rocker, and that night Mace got stupid drunk and stoned. He wanted—needed—to get out of his own head, and that was one way of doing it. He found a brunette who, in his drunk and stoned haze, looked kind of like Kathleen, and she sucked his dick. It mainly made him think about Kathleen’s blowjobs, which had all been fucking amazing. It was mostly that she seemed to love doing it. It wasn’t something she quickly did to reciprocate when he’d gone down on her, but something she did as much for her own sake as his.
He left the bar after giving the even more drunk and stoned Wrench a ‘welcome to the club’ hug and went into his room to pass out alone.
It took him a while, though, because he his attempt to get drunk enough to get out of his own head had instead meant he was too drunk to stop his mind from wandering, and while piss drunk and alone in his room he admitted it to himself: he missed Kathleen like hell. And he also realized he needed to do something about it. She’d been pissed, and she had told him to leave her the fuck alone, but he could at least make it clear that he did miss her. They’d had something, and he knew she’d felt the same way. It seemed like such a fucking waste to let a misunderstanding ruin that. Okay, it had been more than a misunderstanding, and he’d been an asshole, but she had, too, and she owed him better than a fucking text. It was also very likely that she was halfway out of Greenville already, but he still wanted to try, or if nothing else at least try to have something until she left. He just needed to figure out a way to let her know that didn’t involve him getting a mace between his eyes.
The thought of the irony of him dying by being bludgeoned by a mace made him giggle, but he’d still have liked to avoid it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Something Like That
o0o
“ARE YOU FAMILIAR WITH the term cougar?” James Perkins asked Kathleen with something he probably considered a seductive smile.
James was the basketball player Dan had persuaded to write a column for G.O. This time it had fallen on Kathleen to edit it, and that required her to talk to him. James was eighteen, significantly taller than her five-foot-six, had unruly blond hair, blazing blue eyes, and like all extremely popular and over-sexualized boys of that age, he thought he was God’s gift to women.
“An older woman who’s attracted to, and primarily has sex with, younger men,” she answered. “Are you familiar with the term pegging?”
“Kathleen!” Harold yelled. “Get over here!”
“Excuse me,” she said to James and then walked over to Harold’s desk. “You rang.”
“Leave the kid alone.”
“So the fact that I’ve spent the past thirty minutes having a barely legal guy comment on my tits, hips, lips, and hair… That’s just something I should accept?”
“He’s eighteen, you’re almost forty, so he’s allowed to be a childish brat, and you’re not.”
Kathleen chewed on the insides of her cheeks for a few seconds. “I can handle childish brats, but he’s a skip and a jump from gang-raping some girl.”
“Kathleen!”
“Okay, I might have exaggerated a little.”
“It’s you or Blair for this. Your choice,” Harold said and Kathleen clenched her fists. She could take it, but Blair was extremely uncomfortable around James, and a lot less equipped to handle him.
“I’ll do it.”
“And you’ll behave?”
“I promise to not break his nose.”
“Or any other bone in his body?”
“Or any other bone in his body.”
No matter what she thought about James, he was a lot younger than she, and she shouldn’t have lost it, but it really was the last in a long line of things he’d said to her during the thirty minutes they’d spent together.
“I googled it,” he said with a happy face when Kathleen sat down again. “You’d do that?”
And she instantly hated him again.
The attempt to appeal to younger readers had largely been successful. Even the older readers liked it, since it was still local news. Not even Glenn had complained much.
The article about The Green Kittens, the one that had caused the split between her and Mace, had been in the first issue with G.O.’s new younger approach. They hadn’t really gotten any new subscribers, but the last few weeks they’d received more letters from younger people—obviously in the form of emails, which made Harold slightly stressed—and they had gained two new contributors who didn’t need a walker to move around.
In Harold’s head that was thanks to Kathleen. She’d tried to point out Blair’s part in it, but her next idea had turned her into Harold’s favorite person ever. Glenn had muttered about how ‘all the changes’ made the ‘Observer lose its soul.’ Kathleen muttered that if he loved the old Observer so god damn much “m
aybe you should have a history section in the god damn thing. Shut up so I can finish this.” Harold had missed the last sentence in her statement, and the section ‘G.O. in the Rearview Mirror’ was added. It was basically an ‘X number of years ago we wrote this’ thing. The old folks—and thus Glenn—loved it.
The idea for G.O. in the Rearview Mirror was the only reason Harold didn’t get more pissed at her when she threatened an eighteen-year-old with pegging.
It didn’t, however, mean that Harold wasn’t keeping a close eye on her and wanted constant updates on where she was going and who she was seeing. Kathleen wasn’t used to that. At her old job she’d basically been allowed to come and go the way she pleased as long as she did her job.
She managed to behave herself until James’s column was readable, and she knew she could look forward to doing the same thing all over again every second week for the foreseeable future.
o0o
Kathleen would have liked to think that she hadn’t thought much about Mace since the event she didn’t thought of as an actual break-up—more a cease of carnal activities—but she had. Just the week before, she’d seen him for the first time. It had been outside the courthouse, and since her brain had shut down, her feet had kept walking, and she’d walked right past him and into the ladies’ room for a slight mental breakdown. By the time she’d been in control of herself again and had gone back outside, he’d been gone. She thought she’d seen him once after, too, but she wasn’t sure.
She’d been to visit her parents for a weekend, which was quite possibly the most stupid thing she’d ever done. To be able to handle her family she needed to feel really good about herself. Going there when she was generally questioning her existence was pure masochism. Her mom had called and asked her to come, and out of boredom and some sense of duty, Kathleen had agreed. Ten minutes into her visit she had realized how much of a mistake it had been. It had gone downhill from there until she left a day earlier than planned. To her parents, the main purpose of the meeting had been to ‘set her straight,’ ‘make her stop her foolishness,’ and ‘come home and get into line with the rest of the family.’ Leaving a day early had been self-preservation on her side, not because she thought she’d feel any worse about herself, but because the kitchen knives had started singing to her about stabbing in a very tempting way. She figured that spending the next twenty Christmases alone could be pretty calm and quite nice. It would definitely beat a Keegan family Christmas.
While she was angry with them, she felt herself that she’d given up. She wasn’t fighting, something she’d always done. It wasn’t so much that she’d lost her fighting spirit, but she’d lost her rage. Her entire life she’d felt rage, and she’d used it in her writing. If it wasn’t against her parents, it had been against some part of ‘the system,’ and it had been her biggest drive while working in D.C. But it was gone. She couldn’t muster up enough care about anything to be angry anymore. Leaving her parents instead of fighting with them was probably the biggest sign.
She’d even stopped researching the Marauders. There might be a story there, but it wasn’t her kind of story. Her best stories were always about things she herself had a genuine interest in, and she didn’t care about the Marauders. She couldn’t muster up the energy to dig into it and write about it, and she most definitely wouldn’t have been able to develop a rage that kept her going until she’d uncovered ‘the truth’. Also, she had no idea how to spin it. Another fucking story about how they treated their women, their supposed criminal activities, or how they viewed themselves as outside of society—it felt like beating a horse that had been dead enough to be nothing but bones. It had been done in article after article, and book after book… If she did pick it up, she’d have to find another angle, and she couldn’t think of one. She hadn’t found anything at all that opened up a new door.
The biggest proof of her uncharacteristic disinterest in them was her home office. It was empty. Not one paper on her desk, and no pictures, post-its, or notes up on the wall—nada! She’d tried but had ended up with a picture of Hawk Barlow on her wall and nothing else. It made her feel like a teenage girl lusting after a rock singer, so she’d taken it down the next day.
She’d lost her drive, and that scared her more than anything, since it had never happened before. She’d lost her lust to dig, too, and she’d started to think she might never get the hell out of Greenville, and that she would die while writing a column about the upsides of using cotton yarn to knit hats. It was terrifying, and she had no fucking idea what to do about it.
Her biggest issue was of course that the corporation she was working for wouldn’t give her a chance without the story of a lifetime, and she truly didn’t think another news corporation would touch her with a ten-foot pole no matter what story she had.
That night, Kathleen had forced herself to go into her, mostly empty, home office. Since she took down the picture of Hawk, she’d barely sat her foot in it, but now she sighed and took out her file on the Marauders. No matter how dead she thought the biker horse was, it was still something a lot of papers liked and wrote about on a regular basis. Maybe she should just get off her high horse, since it was starting to look as dead as the biker horse.
She flipped through the papers and pictures she’d collected and quickly went past a picture of Mace, but then she went back to it again. It was his rap sheet, and she’d read it more than once. It had been over ten years since he’d been arrested, and that time it hadn’t led to anything. He’d done time inside, but none of that bothered her. It wasn’t like the fact that he was biker didn’t give her some basic clue about what kind of a background he had.
She turned the paper over and shook her head to get back on track.
One thing she’d briefly thought about was writing about what it was like to grow up in a biker club, but not about Scott Barlow—or Dawg, as he was called—but about Eliza. She’d struck Kathleen as a smart and truly happy girl. Mace’s reaction, which she assumed was an extension of Wade Baxter’s anger, had made her even more interested. Just the mere thought of Eliza somehow being exposed in the media had driven her father into a frenzy. In combination with Mace’s comment about how nervous he’d been when Eliza’s play premiered, it made Kathleen think he was a very protective father. She liked it. It could’ve made her suspicious, but Eliza was much too outgoing for someone who was kept in a golden cage. That protective frenzy was why Kathleen wouldn’t, though. Not because she was particularly scared of him, but because writing about underage kids without their parents’ permission was something she wouldn’t do, even if it had been legal.
Still, Eliza and the kind of girl she was would’ve made it a great story. A simple, but straightforward story about things not always being the way people thought they were.
Kathleen was a big fan of simplicity in all its forms. No matter if it was the angle of a story she wanted to write, a book, or music. Straightforward and easily grasped subjects made it easier for people to get the message and take it to heart. An editor she’d had on one of her first jobs had at least once a day yelled ‘Find what you want to say, and say it in the easiest and most direct way possible.’ It was often directed at her, since he’d thought she tended to dance around the subject in an attempt to not offend anyone. ‘Your job isn’t to not offend, quite the opposite. Shove the shit in peoples’ faces and make them react.’ She’d quickly learned that simplicity and a clear message was a lot harder than she’d expected. He’d helped her a lot, though, and he was definitely the one who’d taught her the most about journalism. She still followed his advice to dive into a potential story with an open mind, do her research, but before she started to actually write, she knew what she wanted to say. He was also the one who’d taught her that the closest a journalist could get to objectivity was subjective objectivity, that the objective objectivity was lost the very second a journalist chose what story to write.
And therein lay the problem with the Marauders. She had no fucking idea wha
t she’d want to say with a story about them, and she didn’t think she could even reach subjective objectivity, since the only purpose would be getting her the hell away from The Greenville Observer. That wasn’t a very clear subject and most definitely not the kind of ‘straight arrow’ that would hit anyone in the chest.
An hour later, she gave up again and returned the file to the cabinet. There was no use, the only angle she could find was the children of the members, and she couldn’t get to them.
She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down to sort though her mail. It was mostly bills, but among them was a lime green envelope with an invitation to The Green Kittens’ premiere of their Medusa play.
There was a note attached to the invitation with a thank you for the pictures, and all the girls had signed it. She’d definitely go, and she’d make damn sure Jonathan went to take some pictures, too. He was a lazy asshole, but he was a decent photographer for living in Greenville, and The Green Kittens needed more pictures for their website.
o0o
“Holy mother of god, those are Manolos!” Blair hissed next to Kathleen. “I’m considering killing you and stealing them.”
“They wouldn’t fit.”
“I’d stuff the toes,” she groaned with her eyes still glued to Kathleen’s shoes. “Soooo pretty. How can you afford the shoes you have?”
“I don’t have many pairs, and I used to make a lot more money than I do now.”
While Blair kept talking about shoes, Kathleen looked around and noticed Jonathan sulking in a corner. She started towards him, trusting that Blair would follow.
“What’s going on?” she asked him.
“A crazy dude called me a fucking perv and told me he’d shove my camera up my ass if I tried to take pictures of the girls.”
Kathleen sighed. “Shit.”
“Why perv?” Blair asked.
“Young girls, old guy with a camera apparently adds up to perv to these guys.”
Speed of Light (Marauders #3.5) Page 9
