“Yeah. We’re going to hightail it home.”
“Mav, you don’t—there’s nothing…” She didn’t know how to ask the question, since there was nothing he could really tell her. But she knew perfectly well that the Bulls ran guns for the Russian mafia. She’d grown up in this club. Lots of things got said when people forgot there was a kid in the room. At times like this, when almost the whole club had gone out in different directions all at once, it was a major gun run.
Two planes had just crashed into the World Trade Center. That was terrorism, no question. If Bulls were riding down the interstate today with a truckload of illegal guns and got stopped, they would be fully fucked forever.
Maverick sensed the question she couldn’t ask. “It’s the end of the run, Ciss. We’re just regular citizens. Everybody should be clear.”
“Okay, right. Good. Good. Caleb’s back already.” He’d gone to Nebraska with a shipment. They’d stopped for the night and must have started off early that morning.
“Good. We’ll be back this afternoon. I’m gonna go. I need to talk to Jenny. I love you, Ciss.”
“I love you, too. Be safe.”
“Always.”
~oOo~
“You want a refill?” Caleb waggled the coffee carafe.
Duncan had fallen asleep on the floor in front of the television, and Kelsey was asleep on the sofa. Neither Caleb nor Jenny had woken them when they’d arrived, so now the adults were sitting in the kitchen with the little television on, watching New York City reel. And now Washington, too.
Cecily pulled her empty cup close. “I’ve had three cups in like half an hour, and two cups when this was just a regular morning. If I have any more caffeine, I’ll be wired enough to power the whole neighborhood.”
“Jenny?” Caleb asked.
“No, thanks. I’m with Cissy. I had about a gallon at the nursing home.” Jenny set her handbag on the counter and slunk to the table. She sat and dropped her head onto her crossed arms. “This fucking day.”
In addition to the terror attacks—not only the World Trade Center, but the Pentagon, too—Jenny’s father had died that morning.
Her father’s death barely registered in Cecily’s mind. All she knew was that he’d been horrible—abusive to Jenny and the reason Maverick had spent four years in prison. She and Caleb had sat here watching people jump or fall from the burning Towers, and that took all the brain she had.
“Jesus Christ,” Caleb muttered, still standing at the counter, near the television. “Holy Christ!”
Cecily returned her attention to the television. “What is that? What’s happen—is it falling?”
Caleb didn’t answer. He didn’t need to; she could see for herself. All three watched as the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed in a monstrous rush of smoke and dust. A swelling, rushing mountain of noxious, toxic cloud burst from the site. All those people.
“Were they out?” Cecily wondered aloud. “They had time to get everybody out, right? They had time, they had to have time.”
Jenny raked her hands through her hair. “My God. I can’t do this. I can’t watch this. Caleb, turn it off.”
He picked up the little remote and switched the set off. Cecily stared anxiously at the dead screen—she didn’t want to watch, either, but it felt wrong to switch it off like that. People were dying. They were dying, planes had been hijacked full of innocent people and turned into weapons, and turning off the television was almost like drawing the blinds when there was a man on fire in your yard.
But it was quite obviously too much for Jenny right now, and Kelsey and Duncan didn’t need to know about it, either. Duncan wouldn’t understand, but Kelsey would understand enough to be traumatized.
“I need to go,” she blurted. Jenny looked up, surprise and disappointment shaping her face. “Do you need me still?”
“Uh, no. I guess not. I’m not going anywhere else today.”
“Okay. I’m gonna go.” She stood, not sure at all where she meant to go. Somewhere she could watch television. She needed to be a witness. It felt disrespectful not to stand watch and see.
“Hey—ride with me.” He turned to Jenny. “We’ll come back for her car, that okay?”
Still stunned and exhausted, Jenny nodded creakily.
Caleb caught Cecily’s hand and pulled her toward the door.
~oOo~
On Caleb’s Dyna, her arms around him, her head resting on his back, Cecily found some calm. All around them, Tulsa had slowed. Traffic was light. Through nearly every shop they passed, they saw people standing, all facing the same direction. Even places that probably didn’t usually have televisions going seemed to have scrounged one up.
But life went on, too. People waited in line at the McDonald’s drive-thru and came out of the True Value with bags of purchases.
Wait. Where were they going? She’d thought he’d take her to Maddie and Ox’s place. At the next stoplight, Cecily tugged on Caleb’s kutte. “Where’re we going?”
The light turned green before he answered, and he made a right. Shit. “No, Caleb!”
“Yeah, baby,” he called over the growl of his engine. “Today is the day.”
The clubhouse. He was taking her to the clubhouse.
If she fought him while they rode, she could bring the bike down. So she took her arms from around him and held onto the seat instead.
He pulled onto the gravel lot beside the clubhouse, and Cecily jumped off before he’d killed his engine. She stomped toward the street. No, she would not be bullied or tricked or manipulated. She’d spent a single hour with the Bulls at the hospital barely two weeks ago, and she was not ready to go into that building. He wanted too much, and she fucking hated that he meant to use this day to force her hand.
She’d thought he’d been saving her, riding her away on his big black Harley.
“Ciss, wait!”
“Fuck you!”
She heard his boots crunching on the gravel as he ran toward her. All her angry instincts demanded that she run, but she was not fucking about to run away from him like a scared Chihuahua.
He grabbed her arm and wheeled her around. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
“I’m walking home.”
“To Ox’s? It’s five miles.”
“Good thing I’m wearing Chucks. Fuck you for this, Caleb. This is so shitty. You know I’m not ready for this.”
“You’re never going to be ready until you go through that door.”
“Oh wow,” she sneered. “You’re so wise. Is that some kind of Osage proverb from the Sun God or something?”
Thunder filled his face and drew his brows together, and Cecily reeled back. That had been alarmingly close to a slur about his heritage. Maybe it had actually been one. She had to take it back, and she tried to do so right away. “I’m sorry.”
“Fuck you, baby.” He let go of her arm with a shove. “Walk your ass wherever you want.”
He turned away from her and stalked back through the parking lot, toward the side door of the clubhouse. In all their fights, all her fighting, he’d never turned from her before.
But she’d never been so completely awful before.
“Caleb!”
He walked on. Cecily stood where she was for one more beat, and then broke and ran toward him. “Caleb, wait! I’m sorry!”
He stopped, but didn’t turn back. She ran up to his side and grabbed his hand. He let her hold it but didn’t hold hers.
“I’m so sorry. I’m a dick. I didn’t mean…the words were out before I heard how they sounded. I just lashed out.”
Finally, he met her eyes. Oh, she’d really hurt him. Fuck.
“I can take your claws just about any way they come. But don’t go there, Cecily. Don’t ever do that again. It’s fucked up.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Do you think that shit? About who I am? Where I come from?”
“No, I swear. When I get mad like that, my mouth
digs up all the shittiest things it can find. I’m interested, and curious. I have questions. I want to know. But I don’t think shit like that, I swear.”
He believed her, and softened markedly. “I told you, you can ask me anything.”
“Some of my questions you can’t just answer. Some, I need to see.”
“At home, you mean. You need to see my home.”
She nodded. “Where you come from.” She’d never know him truly until she knew where he came from. Where she came from, he knew intimately. The patch on his back might as well be her family crest. In fact, it was.
He was trying to push her into her own house.
He sighed and dropped his head with a shake that made his hair swing. “You come into the clubhouse with me today, and I will take you to the Osage for my birthday.”
“That’s not until October.”
“That’s my terms. And now you owe me, iňloňka.”
“My father died in there.” Her father had not been the perfect man she’d thought, and she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to reconcile the man she’d known and loved with the things she’d learned about him, but he would always be her father. Her daddy. She would always love him. And he’d died in the place Caleb meant to force her to go.
His fingers tightened around hers. “I know.”
She looked past him and stared at the side door, the one the patches used most often. It would bring her in through the kitchen first, and the storage room. She could work her way to the party room, prepare herself for that.
“Okay. Let’s go in.”
~oOo~
It was just the clubhouse. It looked exactly as it had the last time she was here—not counting that drunken night more than two years ago. It looked exactly as it had the last time she clearly remembered being here—when her father was still alive. The Christmas she’d seen her mother and Eight making out in the hallway.
No. That memory had been dealt with, and she wasn’t going to think about it now.
There was a hard, heavy quiet about the place. A couple of girls were in the kitchen, making some kind of food—Cecily didn’t bother to give them enough attention to know what kind—but they worked without talking. The only sound she heard was the television, the stunned voices of news anchors wafting around the corner, down the hall from the party room.
They got as far as the end of the hall, and Cecily needed to stop and gather herself before she stepped into the room where her father had taken his final breath. Caleb waited patiently. She could hear the television clearly now, news people speaking in mourning tones about New York and Washington.
While they’d been riding to the clubhouse, or maybe while they’d been fighting in the parking lot, the second tower had fallen.
“Jesus,” Caleb breathed, hearing the same words she had.
They stepped into the room. The whole club wasn’t there—some were still on their way back from a run—but there were Bulls everywhere, sitting on the sofas, the chairs, some wearing Sinclair greens, all of them wearing their kuttes, all of them facing the big projection television. No one spoke. They all watched, intently.
Caleb led her through the room, toward the gathered Bulls, and Delaney saw her and scooted over to make room for her on a sofa. She sat at his side, and he hooked his arm around her shoulders. Caleb sat on the floor at her feet and hooked his arm around her legs.
They all sat together, these men who were her family, and she was in the bosom almost before she’d noticed.
Slick was crying. A few Bulls had wet cheeks and red eyes. They all wore shock and sorrow on their faces.
On the screen was horror she could make no sense of, but in this room, she felt safe. She fit here, with these men. With Uncle Brian’s arm around her, she could face the painful images on the television and the memories they evoked.
In her sophomore year of college, in the days when her life had been much less complicated and she had been much less angry, Cecily had spent spring break with her dorm roommate’s family in Manhattan. Jordanne’s father was some kind of stock exchange guy, and they had an apartment that she’d called a ‘classic six’ on the Upper East Side, with a doorman and everything.
That had been the best week of her life. Still was. Jordanne had played tour guide, and they’d gone all over the city on their own feet, or in cabs, or on the subway. Cecily had loved the subway—all those people, all that life, all the grit? A writer could find herself drowning in inspiration.
They’d gone to all the museums, and all through Central Park, and to all the famous stores and buildings. To the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty. The World Trade Center. Her senior project—a chapbook of thirty poems published by her English department and shelved in the University Library—was called All the Way from Tulsa and was a poem cycle about New York, inspired by that single week of her life.
There had been a time, only a few years ago, when she’d thought she’d be living in New York City right now, the most magnificent place she’d ever been. She’d imagined herself doing her MFA at Columbia, finding a job as a writing professor, living in a SoHo loft.
She felt the devastation of this day and the loss of that unlived life in her soul.
The spring-break memory dislodged a reality. “Jordanne!”
Caleb looked back at her. “What?”
“A friend from college. She lives in New York. Her father—her father works at Morgan Stanley! I have to call her!” She hadn’t talked to Jordanne since the end of their junior year.
“You can’t get through, Cissy,” Delaney said at her ear. “They’re asking to keep lines clear for emergencies. Slick has a brother stationed at the Pentagon. We’ll get word when we can.”
“Is this all we can do? Sit here?” she asked, not expecting anyone to answer.
“For now,” her Uncle Brian said. “For now. But there will be work to do, gingersnap. And we will do it.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Caleb and Cecily spent the whole day in the clubhouse, with a rotating crowd of Bulls family. Delaney closed down the station. The Bulls still out on gun runs got back without incident. Old ladies who’d been working came in. Sweetbutts showed up, hangarounds, neighbors. People who wanted to feel safe with the Bulls while the news rolled on, showing endless scenes of devastation in New York, Washington, and a field in the middle of Pennsylvania.
Mo came in and got the women organized to keep food and drink going, picking up where Tyra and Janelle had started. She wrangled all the women, even Cecily, and by lunchtime, they had a full spread cooked up, like she’d have done for any family party. But this was no party. It wasn’t even a wake. A wake celebrated a life. On this day, there was only death.
Not all the Bulls stayed long; some had family, kids, who were better off away from the clubhouse on this day. When the southern run crew got back, only Terry, their new prospect, stayed to hang out. Maverick and Rad had a quick beer and sat quietly in the party room, then took off to be with their old ladies and kids. Simon went straight home to be with Deb and their brand-new boy. Apollo took off quickly when Jacinda, home on bed rest with her pregnancy, called for him.
The rest of the family clustered together, close and quiet.
Caleb called his brother to check in. Levi said he intended to go up to Pawhuska and be with Grampa after he got his work on the ranch done, and asked if Caleb was coming home. Caleb leaned on the bar and looked around the party room, at the men and women sitting quietly, beers in their hands and paper plates on their laps, at Cecily standing at the other end of the bar with Mo and Leah, and told his brother no.
He was home, right here.
~oOo~
Back at Ox’s house late that night, Caleb came out of a long, hot shower and found Cecily in bed. She was propped against the headboard, the covers tucked around her bare chest. Not reading, or watching television, or anything else but staring at some point in the middle of the room.
He sat on the side of the bed, at her hip, and
her eyes slid toward him. He brushed her hair back, behind her ear, letting it lie over his fingers like bright flickers of flame. Fire in his hands. “What’s going on in there?”
She offered him something approaching a smile. “Everything.”
“Do you need to write it down?”
“No, not yet. I’m…afraid to turn this day into words.” Her smile strengthened, and she played with the ends of his wet hair. “How do you feel?”
Stand (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 7) Page 20
