Stand (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 7)

by Susan Fanetti

  Ironic that in the end, it was the club that had done the most damage.

  She shook that thought away and drew her fingers through Caleb’s marvelous hair. “I think that’s why you fit so well with the Bulls. Gunner found you, right? Not the other way around?”

  “Yeah. I knew Gun from racing. He invited me to a party, and it was like they were already checking me out to see if a Bull would fit on my back.”

  She nodded; she’d overheard her dad and Uncle Brian talking about Caleb once, discussing the merits and risks of bringing an ‘outsider,’ someone who hadn’t been hanging around for a long time, into the fold. They’d been pretty desperate for manpower, but not sure such an unknown was worth the risk. They’d been impressed with him, though—how quiet and thoughtful he’d been, and how he’d taken everything he’d seen in stride.

  “They saw that you were like them. They’re all misfits.” She laughed. “And when they have kids, they make more misfits. You can’t be a Bull, or a Bull’s woman, or a Bull’s kid, and be normal. Clara is trying, but it won’t work. She grew up the same way I did.” Setting the trophy back in its place, she turned into Caleb’s embrace and looped her arms around his neck. “Anyway, what you told your grandpa was right. Being a Bull is protection. It’s a way a misfit can move through a world that hates difference and demand the conformists make way.”

  Under a lightly furrowed brow, his dark eyes studied her face, and she wondered if she’d said something wrong.

  Then he said, “I love you,” and she knew she hadn’t.

  “I love you. Will you play me something?”

  “Sure.” Grinning, he let her go and sat on his bed, setting the guitar across his lap. He pushed his new black leather cuff back a bit on his left wrist. Hand-tooled with the Brazen Bulls patch—her birthday gift to him. That and the sonnet she’d written in his birthday card. “What would you like me to play?”

  “Anything. I just like to watch and listen.” She’d known few things in her life as alluring and peaceful as watching Caleb play guitar. His strong hands on the strings and frets, his forearms flexing. His hair hanging, moving with his body. His beautiful mouth forming the words. His soft baritone voice wasn’t especially practiced or powerful, it probably wouldn’t carry before a large audience, but it was tuneful and lovely, and it suited the ballads he played most often, in settings casual or intimate.

  He began to play something, but he stopped after a couple bars. “Would you grab me a pick? They’re in the front pocket of my gig bag.”

  She got up and went to the corner, where his soft bag was sort of wadded. Digging into the front pocket, past papers and packets of strings, she caught a pick between two fingers and pulled it out.

  Some papers came up with her hand, and she stuffed them back in. As she did, she noticed pink ink on one sheet. It caught her eye as funny first, because Caleb’s biker machismo was powerful enough to make him grumpy riding bitch, so the thought of him carrying around a pink pen was worth at least some shit-giving.

  Then she saw the words at the top of the page. ‘Nowhere Girl.’ His handwriting, not hers. But her words. A coincidence? Had he written a song with the same title as her poem, a poem that had been too personal and painful to send out to journals or show anyone at all?

  She drew the paper out and dropped the gig bag. No, not a coincidence. Her poem in his handwriting. Her pink pen. Along the side, in black ink, were notes, letters and numbers, like some kind of code. She didn’t understand them. His notes on her poem. Taking over her poem. Her poem. Hers. Her fucking poem. Her fucking head. HERS.

  There was nothing he could have done that was worse. Nothing.

  “Ciss?”

  She could barely hear him. Inside her head was a riot of echo and whine and her thumping, turbulent heart. Her hands shaking, she turned the paper around so he could see the writing.

  His expression slackened completely. “Shit, Ciss, I—”

  “Fuck you.”

  He tossed his guitar aside and stood. “Baby, let me—”

  “Fuck. YOU.” She wadded the paper up, threw it as hard as she could at him, and tore hell out of that room.

  “Cecily, wait! Please!”

  He chased her all the way out to her car. He pounded on her window as she revved the engine and spun her tires backing out of the jagged driveway. He ran with the car, tried to hold on, but she left him standing in the road, his wet figure washed red by her taillights, shouting her name in the rain.

  She couldn’t hear him. Everything was echo and whine. And end.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Don’t fight her, and don’t give in. Stay calm. Cut through her barbed wire. That had been Maverick’s wisdom for dealing with Cecily. She feeds her rage with rage.

  Caleb jumped into his Monte Carlo as quickly as he could, but it had been closed up in the garage, under cover, and he’d lost ten fucking minutes getting it out onto the road. By then Cecily, who drove like Mario Fucking Andretti when she wasn’t on fire with rage, was probably halfway back to Tulsa.

  There were only two places she would probably go: To Maverick’s, or back to Ox’s. If she was at Maverick’s, he had to prepare himself for another broken jaw, so he followed a more hopeful instinct and headed to Ox’s, flying down OK-11, deking around slower drivers, not caring about solid yellow lines.

  More than forty-five minutes after she’d seen that goddamn sheet of stupid paper, Caleb pulled onto Ox’s driveway, beside her Trans Am, which still ticked with engine heat. The house was mostly dark, but a soft glow in the windows around the front door suggested that lights were on deeper inside, in the kitchen, maybe.

  He tried the door first, but it was locked. “Cecily!” He pounded the side of his fist on the door, above his head. “Ciss! Baby, please! Talk to me.”

  Nothing. But she was in there, and he wasn’t leaving. He ran around the side of the house, to the gate, but it was locked, and the fence was smooth redwood planks eight fucking feet tall. He didn’t have the ups to get over a fence more two feet taller than he was. He went back to the front door and tried again.

  “Cecily! I’m sorry! Let me explain!”

  The lock turned, and the door swung violently open. Cecily stood there, her eyes bright red, her mascara smeared, but no longer crying. Her face was a steel sculpture of furious hate.

  And she had a gun in her hand. A snub-nose .38, a little black Ruger. Something Maddie might have kept in a desk drawer or somewhere like that.

  She lifted the revolver and held it in both hands, shooting-range style. Her father had taught her well. Caleb backed off, holding his hands up like they could stop a bullet if she chose to shoot.

  “Baby. Baby, I’m sorry.”

  “Get the fuck away from me.” Her voice shook hard. “I hate you.”

  “I love you. I’m so sorry.”

  “That was mine. It was mine, and you took it and undid it and made it yours. That was me.”

  The poem was so beautiful and painful and real, and he’d wanted to make it into music, where he could feel it fully. He’d meant to share it, to know her through it, not make it his own. “I was trying—”

  “I don’t care! It was mine. It was me. You shoved your hands in my head, inside me, and pulled it out!”

  “I’m so sorry. Please put the gun down. I will make this up to you.”

  “You didn’t tell me. You didn’t ask, and you never said. All this time, you had a piece of me I thought was my own. Why are men always stealing pieces of me when I’m not looking? Why do you think that’s okay?”

  “It’s not okay. I know it’s not okay.”

  “You know that thing you keep wanting to apologize for? This is worse. This is the worst thing. I loved you. I trusted you. And you stole this part of me and let me think I still had it.”

  In such a short span of time, an hour at the most, her feelings for him had become past tense. Caleb’s heart and stomach were turning to slag. “You do have it. It’s yours. It can’t b
e anybody else’s. Ciss, please. Please put the gun down. Talk to me. I’m so sorry. That poem is so beautiful. I kept it because I couldn’t let it go.”

  “I’m not yours to do what you want with.” Her arms sagged, and Caleb had half a breath to relax, but she turned the muzzle toward herself, staring into it, and that was more terrifying than facing the gun himself.

  “Cecily, Jesus. What are you doing?”

  “I’m so tired of losing pieces while my back is turned. Pretty soon, there won’t be anything left.” The scene froze for a thousand years, Cecily staring into the barrel of the gun, Caleb too afraid of what she’d do to speak or move. Finally, she let the gun sag to her side and focused on him. “Go away, Caleb. You’ve taken all you can have of me.”

  She went back into the house and locked the door.

  Caleb’s knees gave out. He dropped to the grass and let his head fall forward, to Ox and Maddie’s manicured front lawn.

  When he thought he could speak straight, he pulled his burner from his kutte and dialed Maverick’s number.

  He answered at once. “Yeah.” Caleb heard the soft sounds of the television in the background, a sitcom laugh track, and imagined the Helms enjoying a quiet evening at home, snuggled together on the sofa.

  “It’s Caleb. I fucked up bad, Mav. You need to get to Cecily. She’s freaking out.”

  “What the fuck did you do, boy?” The words came like a glacier, slow and icy, and Caleb felt the chill finger of death. Maverick was going to kill him.

  That didn’t matter, but he didn’t know how to explain what he’d done. “I fucked up. She just pulled a gun on me, and then turned it on herself, and then she locked herself in the house.”

  “Holy shit. At the Sanchezes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t you fucking leave until I get there.”

  “She won’t let me in.”

  “I heard you. You stay put and don’t make more trouble, but if you hear trouble inside, you get your ass in there, any way you can. I’m on my way. You son of a bitch. I’m going to turn you inside out.”

  ~oOo~

  Maverick was off his bike almost before he had the stand down. He stormed to Caleb and punched him in the face.

  Caleb was expecting the blow, but it still knocked him off his feet. But Maverick held out his hand and helped him up. ‘We’re not done, kid, but right now you tell me what the fuck is going on. What did you do to her?”

  Massaging his jaw, Caleb answered, “Nothing physical, I promise. I didn’t hurt her like that.”

  “Did you fuck around on her?”

  “No, man. No. Nothing like that. I…I took one of her poems.”

  “What?”

  “Before we were together, the night we pulled her out of the house off 11th Street. There were poems and notes scattered all over the table. I was keeping an eye on her, killing time, cleaning up around the house, and I read her poems. I liked one a lot, so I wrote it down and took it with me. I put it to music. But later she told me she didn’t let people read what she wrote, so I lied and told her I didn’t.” He spat a wad of phlegmy blood. “Tonight, she found out about the lie.”

  Maverick scrubbed his hand over his head. “A poem. And she’s waving a gun around over that?”

  It was more than that. It was everything that she’d lost over the past few months, the past few years. But her poems were all of that. “Her writing is how she figures herself out. I know that now. All her insides are laid out on those pages. I never would have taken that poem after I knew her better.”

  “Okay. Get out of here, kid. I’ll clean up your mess.”

  ~oOo~

  Delaney unexpectedly called everyone in for church around noon the next day. Maverick, who’d been off and planning to spend the day with his family, was one of the last in, trailed only by Apollo, who was coming from the hospital.

  While Apollo accepted warm support from his brothers, Caleb pulled Maverick aside. “How is she?”

  “She’s at my house again. Jesus, Cay, all this over a poem.”

  “Broken trust is what it’s over.”

  Maverick nodded. “Yeah, it is. You need to stay away for now.”

  “You told me not to give up.”

  “That was before. Now, you stay the fuck away.”

  “For how long? Mav, man. I love her.”

  That was the thing—as heartbroken as she was over what he’d done, he was doubly broken over it. It was his fault, he couldn’t fix it, and he’d lost the first thing in his life that had made him feel like he could put both feet in the same place and stand steady. Cecily was his bridge. He couldn’t explain it even to himself better than that, but with her, he saw all his worlds come together and make one place to stand. It rocked wildly where she was, but it was safe nonetheless. He could hold on.

  “I can’t lose her. What I did, taking that poem, I didn’t mean to hurt her. I didn’t see that it would, not until it was too late.”

  “It caught her blindside, Cay. Right now, she hates you as much as anybody. So you need to stand back and let her decide what she needs.”

  “Fuck.”

  Maverick slapped his hand on Caleb’s shoulder—too firmly to be entirely brotherly. “Take it from me, brother. Pushing a woman who’s wound this tight over something you did? That’s a way to end up worse off than you already are. I learned that the hard way. Take my lesson and save yourself some grief. Give her time.”

  What other choice did he have? “Are you gonna call me into the ring over this?”

  “Not sure yet. I guess we’ll see where Ciss lands when she calms down.” Maverick dragged him forward. “C’mon. We got something up, so let’s take our seat and see what.”

  ~oOo~

  Delaney opened the meeting by asking Apollo for a report on his family, and Apollo smiled. “Athena’s doing good. She’s three weeks old tomorrow, and she’s gained almost half a pound. The doctors say we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, but she’s fighting hard. When they let us hold her…shit. Skin to skin, man. Her heart gets steady and strong, and she tries to take these deep breaths. You can just feel she knows who’s got her and she’s safe.” He swiped at his eyes. “Anyway, she’s tough.”

  “How long does she have to stay in the baby slammer?” Gunner asked.

  “They say ten to twelve weeks total, at least. That’ll get her to her due date, and if everything goes right, she’ll be strong as any newborn by then. So around the holidays.”

  “That’ll be a good present,” Rad said.

  “Yeah. Yeah.”

  “And your lady?” Simon asked.

  “She’s good. Mostly healed up. She’s at the hospital all day, and you know, that’s no picnic. She’s about sick of her mom, too.”

  A rumble of laughter went around the table. “That woman is scary as fuck,” Becker chuckled.

  Apollo nodded. “You don’t want to fuck around with Barbara Durham, and that’s a fact. She could break your balls with a look. She’s decided she likes me, finally. I guess she thinks I’m good with Athena.”

  “Did she ever get word about her friend?” Wally asked. “The one who was in New York?”

  It took Caleb a second to catch up, but then he remembered: Jacinda’s friend had been in the city on 9/11, and she hadn’t been able to reach him after the attacks. That stress had had something to do with her early labor.

  “Ryan, yeah,” Apollo answered. “He wasn’t at the towers when they were hit. It took about a week for them to connect, and almost another week for him to get back home, but he’s fine.”

  “Is it too soon to put you on a run, brother?” Delaney asked, and the table settled back to business.

  “Honestly, D, I’m not going to want to leave Tulsa until my family is home. Shit could go south fast with Athena. But if you need me, I’ll go.”

  “Not sure. I know I need you for some intel and planning. You and Simon can put it together. That might be all we need either of you for.” The president moved h
is attention to the whole table. “Irina wants us to meet with the Bone Wolves and the Tezcat Kings, both, and she wants us to do it on the road.”

  “I thought we were laying low with the Russian shit,” Gunner said.

  “We are. She saw the sense Apollo laid out for her. This isn’t a transport run. This is a meet. Alexei will be there, too. And we’ve got to do it quiet.”