by Cassia Leo
Two Knights are in attendance. They remain outside of the church, standing on guard duty at the door. I recognize Dmitry, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the other.
We all remain standing in the back pews, and none of us participates in the service. I wonder if any of us are closet regular church-goers. I was an altar boy until my father died. I’ve avoided all religious buildings since his funeral. I even find excuses not to attend weddings.
I’m not sure if the rituals have changed during the past couple decades or if it’s because the priest speaks in a foreign language, but the entire ceremony is alien to me. I have no idea what to do and when.
The coffin is moved out of the church by four men from the funeral home. The coffin itself must weigh twice as much as Josette did. Mimi follows. Toussaint holds her hand and scans the scarce audience, pew by pew. Is he sad about how few people attended? The church was full for my father’s funeral. At the time, I’d thought I couldn’t care less, but in hindsight, I wonder if that’s true. How would I have felt if only a dozen people had cared enough about him to show up and stand by his family?
Toussaint’s face lights up when he sees me, and when he passes my pew, he grabs my hand. I enter the short procession with the little boy wedged between Mimi and me. From the corner of my eye, I see Sally catch Slider’s hand, and they fall in behind us. We follow the pallbearers into a tiny cemetery. As we go, I see that Kim, Vic, Suzy, and even Paul, the club’s Haitian maintenance guy, have stepped in behind us. That’s when I feel for Slider. I’ve only been on the undercover job for a few weeks, and I already like this weird bunch. They’re a family. Slider’s been with the Knights for a long time. How does he keep his loyalties straight?
The rest of the ceremony is short, and when it’s all done, I walk Mimi back to her car. I hug Toussaint, and he holds me very tightly.
“I promise you’re gonna be all right, buddy,” I tell him. I’m not sure he believes me, but I know I’m right. The pain doesn’t ever go away, but its weight lightens with age.
When he lets me go, I blink hard. Holding the damn kid almost made me cry. He vanishes in the backseat of the car, and I turn to Mimi.
“Do you want company?” I ask her.
She doesn’t answer but touches my face and shakes her head. “Thank you, David. Thank you for being here with us today.” She opens her car door. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“You’re coming back to work tomorrow?”
“Yes. Tell Slider he should stop searching for a replacement. I’m a sure thing even after the end of summer.”
“But what about college?” I ask.
“That’s one of the things I’ll have to figure out.”
I catch her hand and kiss her palm before letting her go. After her car drives away, Slider comes toward me.
“Mimi asked me to tell you she’s staying on,” I tell Slider.
“Yeah, I figure she’s gonna need to make some serious dough now that she’s got a kid to raise.” Slider watches Sally come toward us after hugging Suzy, who waves at me.
Sally’s a hugger, so of course she hugs me. I think that makes Slider cringe a little. He can deny it all he wants, but if he doesn’t care about her, I’m the Pope.
“Do you think it would have made a difference if we had found her earlier?” Sally asks.
Slider rolls his eyes as if her question was absurd. “Josette was hell-bent on destroying herself. This wasn’t her first overdose. Saving her this time would just have postponed the unavoidable.”
“You’re right.” Sally shrugs. “I know this is going to sound horrible, but I wish she had waited another two weeks. We’re smack in the middle of finals, and I have no idea how Mimi will manage with the kid and all.”
“Do you know when her next exam is?” I ask.
“I’m not sure. We only have two classes in common. I know she already got an extension for a term paper she was supposed to turn in last week. Our other final together is next Wednesday.”
“And you, brat,” says Slider, slapping Sally’s butt. “You’ve got one tomorrow, so I’m gonna drop you off at home so you can prepare before tonight’s show.”
“Anything special about tonight?” I ask Slider before he turns around.
“No, business as usual. I think they’re out of town this week. We gotta figure this shit out before they get their asses back here.”
I watch them walk away. Sally tries to catch Slider’s hand as she did while walking out of the church, but he hides it in his pocket. She turns to stick out her tongue at him. I see his shoulders shake. Laughter?
I kickstart my engine and wonder why relationships are so complicated: Sally and Slider, Lisa and Brian.
Crap, I gotta call Lisa and find a way to see Brian for a bit.
***
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“I hate this stupid rain,” Brian says as he runs under the pier.
“Yeah, it sucks.”
We look at each other the way people do when they haven’t seen a loved one for a long time to ascertain that everything is fine. It hasn’t been that long, just a few weeks, but Brian and I have never been separated for more than a week.
Even in the summers when his father used to take him to live with him, I would hang out with him at the Iron Tornadoes club house. That was our secret—we never even told Lisa. As a kid, she would have told Uncle Tony, and later, when she had learned to hold her tongue, neither Brian nor I wanted to let her loose in that crowd. Had she known then, she would have argued about the double standard and all that women’s lib stuff.
“I saw you at All Saints the other day,” Brian says. “Are you feeling nostalgic about Father Francis?”
“Nah, the old bastard has retired anyway. They have a new principal now, someone with more modern ideas about education.”
We sit in the sand with our backs to the large wooden post, and Brian hands me a beer can. I open it and savor the freshness. I’ve been waiting for him for a while, and it’s hot and muggy. A normal Floridian spring day.
“You didn’t answer my question,” he says.
“I was picking up a kid.”
“Anything I should know about?”
“Maybe, maybe not. I’m not sure. He’s ten, and his mother just died of an overdose. His aunt is in the process of adopting him, but she’s in college, and she’s got finals this week, so you know…”
“No, I don’t,” Brian says. “Which one do you care about: the kid or the auntie?”
“I like them both,” I answer without having to think about it.
“Figures.” Brian’s wearing an insolent smirk. He’s been waiting for me to fall the way he’s fallen for my sister, and I thought it would never happen.
“He’s a nice kid. He never knew his dad, and now he’s lost his mother too,” I explain.
“Oh, so a darker version of your childhood?”
I laugh ’cause Brian’s reflection is funny. “Darker for sure. The kid’s from Haiti.”
Brian smiles.
“But there’s another similarity,” I say. “You remember how weird it was for me to look at Tony? Well, Toussaint must be living the same shit ’cause he’s being adopted by his mother’s twin.”
“What about her?”
“Nice girl,” I say and shrug.
“Girl?”
“Girl, woman, don’t get technical on me. She’s twenty-five.”
“So her sister was a mom at fifteen?” Brian notes. “High-school sweetheart love baby?”
“Don’t think so. I don’t know the specifics, but the other night, she said something that led me to believe her sister never knew who the father was.”
“This doesn’t sound good. I hope at least it was consensual. There’s this one girl I met from another chapter. She got pregnant after falling to rival gang rape and never even wanted to look at the kid.”
“What happened to the baby?” I ask.
“It turned out for the best. The old lady of the president of a
West Coast chapter couldn’t have a kid, so they adopted it. The girl says that one of the things that helped her get over her nightmares was the kick of knowing the son of a Knight was being raised as an Iron Tornado.”
“Bittersweet revenge, I guess.”
“So you got yourself a package deal?” he says.
“Nah, it’s just a temporary situation until she finishes her term and figures out something for the coming year.”
“Not doing her?”
“For fuck’s sake, Brian, she’s in mourning!”
Brian raises his hands in surrender. “Just asking.”
The man is obsessed. While we were in the army, he screwed his way through anything fluffy that moved and looked pretty. That’s one thing we share—we favor fleshy over skinny.
The difference is that I have to care for a woman before I have sex with her; he doesn’t. He’s simply “taking care of business.” So when I told him I was skeptical about him thinking Lisa was the only one for him, and he’d simply said, “I do what I can until I get my dick and my heart in the same place.”
My growing affection for Mimi makes it hard for me to understand how he operates. Since I’ve met her, none of the strippers do anything for me no matter how hot their numbers get. What gets to me is watching Mimi’s sweetness with Toussaint. I loved the way she tucked Toussaint in on Sunday night when she came back from the library. I’d taken the kid to the beach in the morning when the sun was out, and when it rained, we went to a movie and an early dinner before coming back home to do his homework. I never knew being a father figure could be so sweet.
I shrug and ask, “What’s up with the MC?”
“Cracker has his moments,” Brian says. “He’s lucid enough to realize he’ll need to retire soon, and he’s trying to play Everest against me.”
“That’s stupid. Unless your brother’s about to quit the force… Is he?”
“I wish I knew,” Brian says. “I’d love to have him on board. He’s a great people reader, and that’s something we could use at the sex club. I could have used him for our last PI job too.”
“The runaway kids?”
“Yep. They had been brainwashed by that pervert into believing anything he said. It was scary. I think Everest would have had some idea about how to handle those kids so they wouldn’t have serious trust issues for the rest of their lives. We were clueless. We knew to bring them back home but not what to tell them.”
“Raising kids seems like a difficult business to be in,” I say.
We chat for a while about other members of the MC I know. They’re like distant cousins I used to visit every so often. Some are idiots—but every family needs an idiot cousin or two to make the rest feel good about themselves—some are downright vicious, and some are regular good people. MC families are just like all other families; they just get stuck with a bad rep.
Soon it’s time for me to go pick up Toussaint from his track practice. Last week I got there a bit early to watch him run, and I was happy to see him coming around and acting social with his schoolmates.
Today I get there just in time. I leave the engine running, and Toussaint hops on the back of my bike, trying to act cool as if he’s been riding all his life. While I wait for Toussaint to strap on Lisa’s helmet, which is just the right size for him, the coach frowns and squints in our direction. The man’s vision ain’t what it used to be, but he can still spot that I’m not the right color to be the boy’s dad. He makes a time-out sign and approaches us.
“Hey, Coach, long time no see,” I say.
He stares at my face, and I can hear his mental Rolodex flipping in his head.
Quickly enough he says, “Mayfield.” Looking around, he asks, “Where’s your shadow?”
“Not far, sir, but I’ll tell him you remembered.” I’m amazed he remembers Brian and me.
“As if I could forget the two good-for-nothings who forced me to shave my beard,” he growls.
“You did what?” Toussaint asks, a new respect for me showing in his eyes.
“Don’t you dare put such stupid ideas into that young boy’s head!” Coach threatens, but his smile says that in hindsight, he thinks our prank was pretty funny.
The poor man had been napping in the shade on one of the bleachers after fixing some shaky benches when Brian and I walked by. We couldn’t resist using the leftover quick cement to attach his beard to the bench. Then we sat in the distance, waiting for him to wake up. The only reason we had gotten caught was that Brian was laughing much too hard when Coach finally found a way to pull the plank from its base and walk to the locker room with an enormous piece of wood hanging from his beard.
“It was good seeing you again,” I say.
“I wish I could say the same,” he snaps, but his benevolent tone tells me he’s happy too.
***
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
As I drive Toussaint home, the sky opens. By the time we get home, we’re soaking wet. We rush up the stairs, and when we get inside, Mimi sends the kid under a hot shower. My leather jacket weighs a ton. I hang it on the back of one of the kitchen chairs, and when I turn around, Mimi is holding a large towel.
“Bend over,” she says.
I do so with a smile, thinking how much I’d like to be the one giving her that order. While she towel-dries my face and my hands, I imagine her bending over the kitchen table and me behind her, my hands on her hips and—
“Your pants are all wet!” she says.
Actually no, they’re on fire. I just say, “Don’t worry about it, sweetheart. I keep a dry pair in my saddlebags and at the club just in case I need to change.” One evening spent with the contents of a drunk’s stomach on my legs taught me to be prepared.
I catch her waist and pull her against me. I love the way her body molds around mine, the way her breasts press against my chest when I kiss her. I adore the little mewing sound she makes when my hands fall on her butt and the way she shivers against me. I think I could spend hours kissing her, and it would never grow old. I slide my hand down the front of her pants, and my fingers find her folds. I tease the little nub with the tips of my fingers, and her breathing quickens.
Just as I’m about to bring her to the edge, the building’s plumbing loudly signals the end of Toussaint’s shower, and she lets out a frustrated growl. I pull away and look out the window. There’s a respite in the rain. I should take advantage of it to get to work.
“When?” I ask. I don’t have to be more specific—she knows precisely what I’m talking about because at this very second, sex is the foremost thing on her mind too.
“Soon,” she whispers.
I have no doubt she means it. She wants me as badly as I want her, but in a couple hours, the good girl side of her will have taken over. Well, not in a couple of hours, because that’s when she’ll be stripping in front of dozens of hungry eyes, but later.
She reads the doubt in my eyes. “I mean it. I’ve asked my friend Marie, and she’ll let me know when Toussaint can sleep over at her place.”
Of course, I could make her stay after hours and do her in the girls’ dressing room before I lock up. That would be good if I just wanted a quick fuck, but I want more with her. I want to hold her between rounds and lose myself in her arms. The dressing room won’t work.
So whether we do it in her place with its paper-thin walls or in a nice hotel, we need overnight baby-sitting. I’m starting to understand what Brian was saying about the sex club not being just for kinky stuff but also for married people in need of privacy.
“You’re worth the wait,” I tell her as I turn around to grab my jacket. It’s soaking wet. “Do you mind if I leave it here to dry?”
“Of course not,” she says. “I’ll see you in an hour or so. I’m not sure what time Marie is coming tonight.”
I give her one last hug and rush down the stairs, hoping the clear skies will hold for my ride. It doesn’t, and I’m thankful for my windbreaker and my extra set of clothes at the club. What
I need is a new form of Hail Marie… so that Mimi’s widowed friend who works odd shifts at the local hospital agrees to keep Toussaint for the night. Soon!
When I get to the club, Slider’s waiting for me by the bar. He follows me into the back room and gives me an earful while I pull down my pants, throw my soaking clothes in a plastic bag, and get into my dry jeans commando. If he doesn’t mind watching my ass as I get dressed, I don’t mind either. The army’s collective showers washed away any modesty I ever had.
“We’re in deep shit,” he says. “The Wizards are coming here tomorrow to celebrate whatever the fuck they have to celebrate.”
“How many of them?” I ask, trying to make up a strategy to minimize damages.
“How should I know! Why does it matter?” Slider sounds exasperated.
“If it’s five or six of them, we could ask the girls to help. You know, stall them when they want to go upstairs or give them a lap dance and steal their keys.”
“Zach has a weakness for Sally and for Mimi because they don’t usually do laps.” He says the word “laps” as if it leaves a bad taste in his mouth. “Would Mimi do a lap dance for you?”
“I don’t know. I’ll ask.” And I won’t enjoy asking, that’s for sure.
“Right, it’s not as if you have anything to lose,” he says, testing me.
“And you’ll ask Sally too,” I retort. Two can play that game.
His jaw clenches as he spits out, “Sure thing.”
He’ll be just as happy watching Sally do a number on Zach’s lap as I’ll be watching Mimi do one.
“Now that that’s settled, we need to get organized,” I say.
“What about sleeping pills?”
“What about them?” I’m curious. If he has a plan, I’m all for it.
“That would help with knocking them down.”
