BITTER SWEET BEGINNINGS (The Kingsmen MC Book 5)

by Oakes, Tara

  ~*~

  NOW

  My ma’s place up by the lake is peaceful and quiet, just as she likes it. Years after my pop passed, and I was busy with the club and my own life, she decided to pack up and move out here away from the chaos.

  Pop had left her with plenty of cash, and she gets a pretty healthy income from his stake in club investments… but I pick up the tab for whatever I can.

  She’s made enough sacrifices in her life, and I know my pop wouldn’t have wanted her to do without.

  It’s getting late, with the sun setting hours ago. I pull into the familiar drive as it winds through the woods and up to the cabin. My headlights are bright against the deep colors of night that paint the house.

  The lights are on inside, though, even at this late hour, and the car isn’t even fully turned off before my ma comes flying out in her bathrobe and slippers with her arms outstretched.

  “Finally!” she calls across the lawn as she draws closer. “I thought you’d never get here!”

  I’m careful to close the car door softly, as Brendan was sleeping in the backseat last time I checked.

  “Hey, ma.” I scoop her small frame up and twirl her around as I hug tight. I haven’t seen her in about four months or so, and it feels good to be here. “Sorry. We had to make a few more stops than I thought. The boy’s always hungry.”

  She laughs and slaps my shoulder playfully to put her down. “ ‘Course he is! He’s just like his daddy and his granddaddy! Never could feed you boys enough. Where is he?”

  I lift my chin over to the truck, signaling the back seat.

  She smiles broadly and leaves me, her only child and son, to go get my boy. Because of the nasty shit that went down when Brendan was a baby, his momma didn’t let me or my ma see him much.

  Ma hasn’t seen her grandson in nearly two years. I step back and watch the reunion as it unfolds.

  “Come ‘ere, darlin’. Gram’s here now.”

  She scoops Brendan up in her arms and masterfully works the confusion of buckles and straps to free him from his seat. She’s petite but manages to balance him well as she steps forth to carry him into the house. I stay close by just in case.

  The cabin is just as I remember, with the old brown carpeting and wood-paneled walls. Ma moves right passed the furniture and carries her only grandchild down the hall to the guestroom, settling him on one of the two twin beds that occupy the space.

  I make a movement to turn on the light switch but she quickly reprimands me with a harsh look. “You’ll wake him,” she whispers.

  Brendan’s almost as deep of a sleeper as I am. I doubt anything will wake him up, but I appease her and let her work in the dark to remove his little sneakers. I had changed him into his pajamas a few hours ago at our last stop, so he’s comfortable enough to leave be until morning.

  My ma kisses him on the forehead and steps back carefully, watching over him. I shut the door behind us and we tiptoe back to the main room. Now that my boy has been seen to, she finally turns her attention back to me with another hug.

  “I swear, you’ve gotten bigger since I saw you last, Bri.”

  My mother refuses to call me Clink, as the rest of the world does. Yet, she doesn’t call me Brian much, either.

  “Nah,” I joke. “I think you’re just getting a little bit shorter.”

  She slaps me half-heartedly on the bicep.

  “Go put those muscles to good use and get your bags. I’ll heat up a plate for you, we’ll talk when you get done.”

  I move to leave to follow her direction, when she pulls me in close once more. “It’s good to see you, son.”

  I kiss the top of her head. “You too, Ma.”

  ~*~

  “Have you spoken to her since?” ma asks me as she sits back in her chair. I’ve just unloaded the whole story on her.

  I shake my head, no. “There’s nothing left to say.”

  Ma looks me hard in the eyes. “That’s one way to look at it. Kind of a sad way to approach life, though, son.”

  I take another sip of my beer. “She lied to me. Over and over again.”

  Needing to do something, she takes my empty plate from in front of me and carries it off to the kitchen, placing it in the sink and grabbing two more beers from the fridge. She gives me one and helps herself to the other.

  “Ain’t no love perfect, Bri. You should know that.” She swigs long on the drink. My ma’s not usually a drinker, but gives in every once in a while. “Anyone can love someone when it’s easy. It takes balls to love someone when it’s not.”

  I scoff. “That’s not how it works in this life.”

  “I lived ‘this life’ far longer than you have, son. I don’t need you telling me how it works. Your daddy and me… it took some real hard work to hold that together. I don’t know of one single relationship that don’t work the same way.”

  I defend myself. “That’s just it. Not everyone’s cut out to be an Ol’ Lady, Ma. All those sacrifices you made to make it work--”

  “Right there’s your problem. It’s not just one person who makes the sacrifices. Those patches ain’t a one-way street where a woman is held up high on some Goddamned pedestal to not fuck up and her man gets a get outta jail free card whenever he needs it.”

  “That’s not how it was with you and pop,” I quickly retort.

  She sets her beer down, hard. “How do you know? My marriage was not an arena sport for people to sit back and watch the bloodshed, but trust me, there were blows on both sides. Your daddy and I worked hard to learn to forgive each other and work towards something, together. Your dad was an honorable man and never aired our dirty laundry in the streets. So it may appear that I was the only one who had to sacrifice, but you couldn’t be more wrong.”

  I study her as she tells me of this new twist to my parents’ relationship. There’s pain behind some of her words, pain I’ve never heard before.

  “You want to see what a one-sided marriage looks like? Look at Butch and Marie. They fell apart because the two of them couldn’t work together. Even Vince and Jean were close to splitting before they figured it all out,” she recounts a list of club relationships.

  I nearly spit out my beer. “Vince and Jean? What are you talking about? They never split.”

  Ma rests forward on her forearms. “See how naïve you are about how it works? Your lady, Charlie, how old is she?”

  I tell her.

  I can see her doing the quick calculations in her head. “Yup. That’s about right.”

  “What are you talking about, Mom?”

  She grins that familiar grin that moms have when they know something you don’t. “When Jay was about two years old, Jean and Vince got into a terrible time. They split. Vince stayed on the road most of the time, working for the club, doing runs back and forth between Atlanta. Rumor had it that he found himself a little rebound comfort in some college girl. Nobody thought anything of it at first, thinking it was just a fling, you know, some goody-goody, preppy girl from the right side of town meeting a bad-boy biker. Soon enough, though, as we all predicted, Jean came to her senses and agreed to work it out with her Ol’ Man. The girl showed up at the clubhouse one night looking for Vince. She ran into a couple of the Ol’ Ladies instead and was pretty much told how it was gonna be. I was there that night. I saw the look in her eyes when she figured out that she and Vince were never going to be together. Jean found out about the girl and told Vince the only way it was gonna work between them was if he never went back to Atlanta again, never saw the girl again. He agreed.”

  Wow. So that’s how it happened? I think back to my lunch date with Charlie and her family, where I had personally met this now-grown college girl. I can’t picture Regina with her sophisticated demeanor and respectable appearance ever getting with a biker, but it must have been so.

  “Things must be getting pretty interesting down in Chisolm these days,” Mom sips on her almost-emptied beer. “It’s getting late, son. If that boy of yours is an
ything like you as a kid, he’ll be up at the crack of dawn with the roosters. I’ll need my rest to keep up with him.” She stands and kisses me on my cheek. “You think about what I said, now. Ain’t no use throwing a perfectly good relationship away because you got your pride hurt.”

  ~*~

  Fuck… could this couch be any more uncomfortable?

  The cabin’s been quiet for hours, with both ma and Brendan sleeping in their rooms. I know there’s an extra bed in there with Brendan, but I have a feeling this is gonna be a restless night… I don’t need to ruin Brendan’s sleep just because my own is shot to shit.

  I haven’t gotten more than a few passing moments of actual sleep since we left Chisolm. It just don’t feel right to sleep without her by my side.

  My skin actually aches without hers touching it. My dick throbs without her body around it. It shouldn’t be like this… I mean, it wasn’t the last time, with Brendan’s ma.

  Back then, I remember I celebrated my freedom by plowing my way through a clubhouse full of pussy.

  But not this time.

  Somehow, I just know I’ll never get another night of sleep alone again. And yet, I have no desire to find another to warm the space and try to take her place.

  Why can’t it just be like last time? I ask myself the rhetorical question, when I already know the answer.

  It’s not the same because she’s not the same.

  She’s like poison in my fucking veins, cursing me, and it’ll never be the same again.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THEN

  “You’re not taking my boy.” I threw my words at her.

  I’d been on a run for the last few days and came home to a moving van in my driveway and a shitload of boxes in my house.

  “What did you expect, Clink?” she paused in her packing, dropping the stack of dishtowels into the empty box, before placing her hands on her hips. “For me to just stay put and shut up while you’re out fucking your way through the east coast?”

  I rubbed my chin, taking in her words. “You know the deal. I said I’d take care of you, of both of you. I’ve been holding up my end of the bargain.”

  She laughed bitterly. “Well, maybe that’s not good enough for me anymore. You come home and play daddy whenever it’s convenient. You plop me on the back of your bike whenever you need to put on some little show for your club and you fuck me whenever you’re too tired to go find some club whore.”

  “So? It’s not like you have it bad! You have it better than most women could hope for.” I knew I had a losing argument.

  She was right. I did whatever necessary to keep busy outside the house, and the main reason I came home at all was for Brendan. He was only a baby and didn’t really understand when I was around or not, but I knew he needed his pop.

  “You don’t love me anymore, Clink.” She relaxed her shoulders and lowered her voice. “I don’t know if you ever really did. But,” she swallowed hard, “I deserve that much. And so do you. I want you to be happy. I want you to let me go.”

  I bit hard, clenching my teeth together. “My boy….”

  Beth stepped closer. “He’ll still be your son. You can see him whenever you want. I’ll even have him come stay with you when he gets older. But…” she shook her head, “you know he belongs with me. We could do this the hard way—you know a judge would give me that. Your life isn’t for kids, Clink. He’ll be better off with me.”

  She was right on one point. A judge would probably have given him to her, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t make it damn hard for her. I had enough resources at my disposal to tie her up in court for years. I could have bankrupted her and made her life a living hell.

  Part of me wanted to do that, to hurt her the way she was hurting me. I had tried my best to do right by her. She was nothing but a little wannabe Sweet Butt when I gave her a few nights of my time. She told me she was pregnant and I promised to take care of her.

  I moved her into my place and set her up so she wanted for nothing. I even tried to love her. For my kid’s sake, I tried to love her, but it just wasn’t there. She knew something was off, and was itching for me to put a ring on her finger… even tried to trick me into knocking her up again to get the job done.

  When she finally figured out that wasn’t gonna happen, she started to get damn bitter about it. Coming home to her was no fucking picnic, and I did whatever I needed to do to avoid it.

  “I don’t know what to say.” It was true. I didn’t know what to say.

  She taped up the box and began working on the next. “I’m not looking for you to say anything. I’m leaving. I’m not asking for your permission.”

  “When?”

  She looked me dead in the eye. “Two hours. I left my new address and number on the fridge.”

  Fuck. This is really happening.

  “Where’s my boy?”

  For the very first time since I stepped through that door tonight, she actually had the decency to show some hint of emotion. “He’s napping.”

  I didn’t stick around long enough for the temporary bit of humanity in her to affect me. The path was littered with boxes and shipping containers, but I managed to sidestep them quickly and opened the shut door to the nursery as quietly as I could. I shut it behind me to ensure that the next few moments were private.

  Brendan was the soundest sleeper I’d ever met, especially since everyone had warned me what a nightmare babies could be in the that department. He could sleep through the night at a month old and was never one to wake easily.

  I knew I shouldn’t stir him, but instinct took over and I needed to hold him once more. I needed to protect him and comfort him as best I could for those last few moments.

  I remembered my own dad, how I idolized him, how he could do nothing wrong in my eyes. Looking down at the small child in my arms with his chubby little cheeks all flushed from sleep, and his round legs dangling from my arms, my heart was bursting with so much emotion.

  The rocking chair over in the corner by the window was comfortable enough, as we moved back and forth. I stared at my son. I could see my nose, which was in fact my ma’s nose. The pointed little peak of hair by his brow was just like my own grandad’s. The shape of his tiny fingernails were boxy like mine, too.

  He was of my flesh, my bone. He was the greatest gift the universe had ever given me, and I didn’t deserve him… I knew that now just as I had known it then.

  I had failed him.

  I could have tried harder. I could have done a million and one fucking things different, I’m sure.

  “Hey, bud,” I whispered into the dark to the sleeping child in my arms. “I know you’re not going to remember all the things I’m gonna tell you. The first moment I saw you, screaming your lungs out in the doctor’s hands, I knew you were my boy. That night, when we brought you home, I sat with you in my arms in this very chair and I talked to you just like this. I told you all the things we were gonna do, all the ways I was gonna be the dad to you that my own pop was to me. I was gonna make you proud to call me your dad. You were gonna grow up with everything you needed to become whatever you chose. I promised you that, and I’m still gonna keep those promises. But, it’s just gonna be a little different now.”

  I swallowed hard. “I’m not gonna be there every day. I won’t get to know you the way I wanted, the way you deserve. But I swear, I will never let anything bad happen to you. And all you have to do… is call me and I’ll be there for you in a flash. I know this isn’t goodbye—it’ll never be goodbye for us.”

  I lift him to kiss his warm little forehead. “We’ll be together again, I swear it to you. And until then, I’m going to work every single day to deserve to be the guy you call pop.”

  ~*~

  NOW

  I step over to make room for Ma to reach into the wooden drawer I had been unintentionally blocking. She rummages through it with the metal clanking echoing from the boxy space.

  “No cwusts, Gwam,” Brendan calls out from the ro
und kitchen table where Ma and I had our little heart-to-heart last night.

  The pink rollers in her hair make me smirk as we lock eyes, laughing silently at his request. I never liked crusts myself as a kid, and would just stare at the sandwich on the plate until the situation was fixed. My boy is getting a head start by specifying his preference early.

  Smart kid.

  I leave Ma to her cutting, turning to the little wooden key rack on the wall nearest the phone. The single silver key hanging on an old, worn, black leather Harley Davidson key ring calls to me.

  Ma sees my look from the corner of her eye. “Be safe,” she says.

  I kiss her on the temple, under the largest of her plastic hair rollers, and clasp my fingers around the cold metal. Brendan wiggles anxiously for his egg sandwich in fresh clothes and damp hair from his bath.

  I thread my fingers through his cold, shaggy hair and shake them around. “Be good for your Gram, son.”

  I know the two of them have a lot of catching up to do, so I leave them to it. Ma’s gonna spoil that kid something fierce.

  The late morning sun is bright and warm on my skin. The light breeze picks up around me and brings with it all the scents of what makes this place great. The freshly mowed grass, the colorful flowers in Ma’s garden, and the wild ones further away. There’s a small fishing pond just down the road, and you never think the natural scent of it would travel this far, but I swear I smell it.

  I breathe it all in deep, the freshness and simplicity of it that I want my boy to soak up while we’re here.

  The old wood of the barn even has its own unique smell to it. I swing open one of the large doors and let the old, worn hinges do the rest. They creak and moan as the aged door is stretched wide. The gravel crunches under the foot of my riding boots as I slowly step forward.