Caleb shrugged. “I’ve had a couple beers. My gut’s not full speed yet.”
Gunner took that information without challenge. “Ox, man. If a guy like him can go out like this, I guess it doesn’t fucking matter what we do, you know?”
The words were slurred and fast, but not too far gone to be understood. “What do you mean?”
“I mean Ox, he was a fucking physical specimen. Strongest fucker I ever knew. Never sick a day in his life, until… And he didn’t start shit, either. He was slow to get his back up. Smart and quiet. Me, I spent my whole fucking twenties running headlong at the Devil, and here I sit, with all my parts. If Ox can die like he did, living smart, what’s the fucking point?”
Yeah, Caleb still wasn’t following—or if he was, he didn’t want to be. “He was fifty-one, right?”
Gunner nodded.
“Slick was twenty-nine. A year older than me. I don’t want to die in my twenties. I just figured out what I want my life to be. Ox got to live his life.”
His stomach and heart—all his innards, really—did something weird, and he put his hand on his chest, like he could settle things down with a push.
“You okay, bro?”
“Yeah.”
But he’d figured something out. Had an epiphany or whatever. The phantom pain, the thing that had held him back since the Panhandle, left him a step from the center of the club, even as Cecily had found her way all the way in—he knew what it was.
He’d almost died. That mad scene in the Panhandle had almost killed him. He didn’t want to die. He’d been standing with his feet in two worlds and only just found what he wanted, and he didn’t want to die without a chance to have it. To have it all, everything.
Cherish every day. Hold each other close.
“I got to go.”
“What? You can’t leave, brother. We’re here for Ox.”
“I have to go. I’ll be back first thing in the morning, but I have to go now.”
~oOo~
It was a fucking cold ride to Bixby on his bike, and if he’d been smart, he would have grabbed the keys to the club van for this grand gesture. It was probably the worst possible timing in the history of time, but he couldn’t fucking wait. No more waiting, no more holding off. He’d asked Cecily what they were waiting for, and yet they were still moving in half measures.
Gunner was wrong. Ox’s death, and Slick’s, Caleb’s wounding, and Delaney’s, and all the death and horror the Bulls had known—it wasn’t an excuse to chase death. It was a demand to chase life.
All the windows of Mo and Delaney’s house glowed bright, looking festive even without the holiday decorations that had festooned the place the last time he was here. He pulled up at the curb behind Cecily’s Trans Am and sprinted up the sloped lawn as if he were running late. Because he was.
Standing under the bright porch light, he rang the bell and knocked on the door. He was about to ring again when Mo opened up. She looked tired—and shit, he hadn’t thought. Alarm replaced the fatigue on her face.
“What’s wrong? Is it Brian?”
“No! No, Mo, I’m sorry. Nothing’s wrong. I just—I need to see Cecily.”
She gave him a narrow, considering look, and then she smiled and reached out to pat his kutte. He’d made one stop on the way. Her smile became a grin. “Oh, Caleb. What do you mean to do, lad? Come in.” He stepped up, over the threshold, and Mo grabbed his hand. “You are a wonder, Caleb Mathews. Whatever happens, I’ll tell you that now.”
Jesus Christ, how did she know what he planned? He’d just figured it out.
Mo led him to the kitchen, where Maddie, Joanna, and Cecily sat with glasses of wine.
Cecily stood up. “Hey! Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m good. I just….I need to talk to you. Can we…” he took her hand and nodded toward the dining room.
“No, love. I think this needs witnesses.” Mo sat beside Maddie. She took her friend’s hands. “It needs these witnesses.”
For an awkward second, Caleb thought he’d lose his nerve. He was ninety-percent sure he’d get the response he wanted, but he had not thought all this through. Impulsive wasn’t his nature, and yet here he stood, sweating, with Cecily’s mother, and the two women who might as well be, staring at him. And Cecily holding his hand, frowning with confusion.
He sucked it up and dropped to one knee.
“Holy shit,” Cecily whispered.
“Oh my God,” Maddie gasped.
Joanna gaped.
Mo chuckled.
“Okay, so, we decided to get a house, you know? And you have my flame, and I have your name, and I was talking to Gun and he was like, ‘what’s it even matter,’ and I thought that was nuts and didn’t make any sense because it all matters”—holy fuck shut up, dude. Shut the fuck up and think about the right words.
He cleared his throat. “I love you, Ciss. Goddamn, I really do. You know that. I never feel stronger than when I’m with you. I know who I am when I’m with you. I know what I want. And I don’t know why we’re waiting for any of it. I want to marry you, and I want you to have our kids. It won’t be hard for them because we won’t let it be hard for them, and if Grampa and Levi can’t deal with it, then fuck them because I am done trying to find a way to be that makes other people happy. I know what makes me happy. You. This family. Even when your claws are out, even when shit is bloody with the club, I know where I stand. I know who I am. I am tired of waiting. I don’t want to die without having everything I want. I want to die like Ox—”
He was getting ahead of himself again and hadn’t meant to cause Maddie pain now of all times. But when he cast his eyes her way and said, “I’m sorry, Maddie,” he saw she was crying but also trying to smile, and she waved his apology off.
“I want to die like Ox, holding my woman’s hand, knowing we had everything. If that’s tomorrow or in twenty years or forty, that’s what I want. And that’s you, iňloňka.” He fished in his kutte for the box Mo had detected. That woman was fucking eerie.
“I just bought it on the way here, so if you hate it, we’ll get a different one.” He opened the box. “Marry me, Cecily. Buy a house with me. Have kids with me. Let’s make each other happy as long as we can. Let’s stop fucking around.”
He turned to Maddie. “Cherish every day, right? Hold each other close.”
Fully weeping now, Maddie nodded. “That’s right, baby. That’s right.”
Cecily watched Maddie for a few seconds, then turned back to Caleb and took the box from his hand. The ring was pretty, he thought, a square diamond solitaire in platinum that had cost enough to make his balls shrink, but jewelry shopping wasn’t something they did, and she didn’t wear all that much. She’d liked the locket he’d given her for Christmas, though. And the salesgirl, who’d had a look kind of like Cecily’s, had said it was her favorite style.
“Since when are you the crazy one?” she asked, taking the ring from its satin bed.
“Since tonight, apparently. And that’s a question, not an answer. My knee is starting to hurt.”
Cecily slid the ring on her finger. She took his hands and pulled, and Caleb stood.
“I love you. Let’s start living. Yes.”
She wound her arms around his neck, and he pulled her close and kissed her, and they were surrounded by an audience of weeping women.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Her father died in the summer of 1998.
For a solid three years thereafter, she’d let the loss of him tear her life apart.
On the day of Ox’s funeral, conducted in the clubhouse, so much like her father’s had been, memories pummeled her. The call from Aunt Mo—Mo had called to tell her her father was dead; her mother couldn’t manage it—while her room was full of friends, gathered to watch The Crow on video. She’d been pelted with popcorn while she’d heard the news that she didn’t have a father anymore.
Losing her shit in front of all those people, and her summer roommate shooing them out, the
n trying to hold her. But Cecily hadn’t wanted to be comforted. She’d shoved her away, screaming, fighting.
Calling Clara and screaming while her sister blubbered. Just screaming.
Her mother never called either of them. They were back in Tulsa before they’d interacted with her at all regarding the destruction of their family.
After what she’d seen at that last Christmas, Cecily had already been furious with her mother. Her zombified distance when she and Clara had come home to bury their father, her utter inability to offer them comfort, had broken their bond with her.
Cecily had embraced the distance. Clara had done what Clara always did, and made the circumstance what she wanted it to be. She’d wept and clung to their mother and managed to draw some kind of response from her.
People had tried to hold Cecily, everybody had seemed to want to paw at her that weekend, but she’d not been able to stand any touch. She’d been on fire, walking through the world like live flame, hating everything she saw, everything that came near her. Everyone. Her father was dead. He’d been killed in the Bulls’ clubhouse. In their safe place. By one of their own.
She’d gone home from that horror show—home was school after that, not the other way around—and done her last year of college on fire. From the Dean’s List, she’d dropped immediately to Academic Probation, and barely graduated. Instead of graduate school and an MFA and maybe a job as a creative writing professor, she’d had nothing but working at her mother’s shop to look forward to.
She’d gotten drunk every day, swigging vodka like water, and picked up her old habit of taking on any dare, doing anything anybody suggested, trying anything. Being the girl who didn’t give a shit. She’d cultivated that attitude as an aesthetic in high school, embracing her mystique as a Bull’s daughter. After she no longer was a Bull’s daughter, it had become a means to survive.
Or so she’d thought. Instead, it had nearly burned her hollow.
Caleb had shown her that. What he’d rescued her from, the lowest pit of her despair, had shown her that.
That she’d called the Bulls for help had shown her that she was still a Bulls’ daughter. It had taken her awhile to see it, and longer for her to want it to be true, but that had been the moment she’d come home.
So she could stand in the Bulls’ clubhouse on this day, not ten feet from the place her father had lain in death, and watch her mother—back at last in this clubhouse she’d avoided for years—give all the support to her grieving friend that she’d been unable to find for her daughters in their grief or her own. Cecily watched and felt only shared love and sorrow.
She was home.
Uncle Ox was home, too. His big casket lay on the Bulls’ table, and the chapel door was open, so that mourners could pay their respects. Cecily went in with Caleb, but she didn’t stay long. She’d known Ox Sanchez her whole life; he’d been at the hospital on the day she was born. There was a photo in her baby book of her father holding her in the midst of a bunch of grinning Bulls, Ox towering over his brothers.
Uncle Ox. The biggest man she’d ever known. A mountain. Strong as an ox. Quiet and kind.
The gaunt figure inside that box wasn’t him. The kutte he wore sagged on his body. Even his hands seemed smaller. Inside that box wasn’t the man she’d known her whole life, just as the lifeless figure inside another box hadn’t been her father.
She wiped the tears from her cheeks. Caleb pulled her into his arms and held her, quietly, then led her back out into the party room, among the mourners.
~oOo~
Though the club rituals for Ox had been painfully familiar to her, they diverged when it came time for the burying. Ox had been Catholic, and he had a large blood family. After the Bulls carried his casket from the clubhouse to the hearse, they, and an enormous procession of bikers, followed it through the snowy streets to a Catholic church.
Slick had been Catholic, too, but Ox’s blood family did something Slick’s had not; they welcomed everyone into the church. The sanctuary was packed to the farthest pew, and three rows of leather-clad mourners stood behind those. Cecily knew that Maddie’s relationship with her in-laws was complicated at best, but on this day, they seemed at peace with each other, focused together on mourning and burying a man they all loved.
At the gravesite, it was the same—a large crowd who might otherwise have been divided, all united in this one purpose.
There was comfort in such a press of people. Cecily had been too much afire to see it or feel it when they’d buried her father, but here, she understood. To have so many people, hundreds of people, who might never had encountered each other before, or who might even have avoided each other anywhere else, all together, all the same, quiet and subdued, mourning the same loss, respecting the same man. It made them all family, for this brief time. And it showed how deeply, how indelibly, Ox had mattered.
When the priest was finished with his words, Maddie stood from her seat of honor. She walked to the big black casket, scaffolded over the hole it would rest in, and she bent down and laid her head on the box. She didn’t cry—though she’d wept often in the short time she’d been back, on this day Cecily hadn’t seen her shed a single tear—but she didn’t move, either. She stayed like that, folded over her man, until Rad stood and gathered her in his arms.
As he had throughout these days of mourning, taking peace from her and offering it back as well, Caleb stood at Cecily’s side, his fingers woven with hers. She turned to him now and tucked her head on his shoulder. When she felt his lips on her forehead, his breath through her hair, she closed her eyes and let her own tears fall.
~oOo~
“Thank you for taking such good care of the place, baby.” Maddie reached over and squeezed her hand. “It helps a lot.”
Cecily smiled and squeezed back. She didn’t deserve the thanks. Her first few months in this house, she’d behaved like a squatter. Probably because she’d felt like one. But since she’d been with Caleb, and her mental ship had been righted, they’d taken good care of the place. Caleb had fixed all her dents and dings and the other signs of her neglect. She’d brought the plants back from her disregard and Maverick’s benevolent drowning. The maid service and yard service and pool service had everything else under control. Maddie was getting her house back in the condition in which she’d left it, and Cecily was so glad her time as a human trash fire was over.
Maddie hadn’t been upstairs yet, but Cecily had never really gone up there, so she wasn’t worried about that. They stood now at the foot of the stairs. Maddie gripped the newel post and looked up. “Our bedroom was his favorite room.”
“I know. You told me. I never went in there.”
“Jesus, this is hard.”
Cecily wished her mom was there. And Mo. Maddie’s best friends. But she hadn’t wanted a big production the first time she’d stepped into this house as a widow.
“Do you want me to leave you alone, Aunt Mad?”
“Do you mind, Cissy? I need…” She didn’t finish the sentence, but Cecily understood enough.
“Of course I don’t mind. I’ll go finish packing up.”
“I’m sorry to be pushing you out.”
“You’re not. This is your home. I’m so grateful that I had the time I had here.”
Maddie offered her a sad smile. “I’m glad it didn’t sit here empty. It feels lived in, and that helps.”
Cecily kissed her cheek. “I’ll just be in my—in the guest room. If you need anything. And I’ll get out of your hair as fast as I can.”
Maddie nodded, and Cecily turned to go down the hall. Behind her she heard Maddie murmur, “Oh, boo. How am I going to do this without you?”
~oOo~
“Fuck, that was so hard. Seeing her like that.” Sitting in the middle of the front seat of his Monte Carlo, Cecily curled closer to Caleb, and he raised his arm and hooked it around her shoulders. “It scares me.”
“Scares you how?” He slowed into a right turn. To the clubhouse woul
d have been a left. To the highway that would take her to her mother’s house would have been straight on.
“Where are we going?”
“Something I want to show you. Scares you how?”
“You know. Loving somebody that much, needing them that much, and having to go on without them. It scares me to think of losing you. And you know, maybe we won’t get almost twenty years. Maybe something will happen like the Panhandle and we’ll only have a few months.”
“Then we make them count. Every day. Right?” He turned his attention from the road and stared hard at her. His black eyes reflected the dash lights back in the dark. “You having second thoughts?”
Stand (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 7) Page 32
