Fearless

by Lauren Gilley

  Had it been any other Dog, Maggie could have counted the days before the thrill wore off and the guy dumped Ava on her ass. No muss, no fuss, just a few bitter exchanges and he wouldn’t take one backward glance toward his flavor of the week. With any other Dog, Ava would have been a notch in the belt; bragging rights: I fucked the boss’s daughter.

  But that wasn’t Mercy. Mercy and Ava together – too hot, too close, too beloved, too much of a no-brainer…wrapped up in a scandalous package. Ghost would flip. Aidan would flip. Maggie could imagine the gossip, same as when she’d been Ava’s age: Jailbait, pedophile, sick as fuck.

  But all that was suspicion, until dessert time rolled around.

  Maggie had made white chocolate, dark chocolate, and marble cheesecakes for the dinner, and everyone waited to be served…everyone but Mercy. Where had he been? Maggie wondered. She hadn’t seen him for at least a half hour. Ava neither, now that she thought about it. It was a big house, a big party; easy to get lost.

  But Mercy and Ava stood together over the marble cheesecake at the kitchen counter, Mercy’s tall frame almost curled around her as he looked over her shoulder, smiled at whatever she’d said. His hand, for just a second, was at her hip, too low for casual.

  He pulled it away and turned as Maggie stopped in the threshold, his eyes coming straight to her face, the mask not fast enough in coming down. Naked fear strobed in their black depths before he could catch hold of it.

  Don’t say anything. Don’t take her from me. Don’t you dare. I will fight all of them. Oh, God, it’s all going to blow up, isn’t it?

  Then his face blanked over and he looked away from her, hand going in his pocket, attention going back to whatever Ava was saying to him over her shoulder.

  Maggie saw the little things: the clothes not quite straight, the high color in their faces, the windswept look to Ava’s hair.

  The air shimmered around them, neon with possibility, the chemistry of them this hot, sticky amalgam of complementary metals.

  Mercy had crossed the line.

  Ava had either followed him, or invited him to come across it to her.

  Maggie felt the lump well up in her throat, the sting of tears at the backs of her eyes.

  It was so perfect, and it was so disastrous.

  And they’d be sliced to bits before it was all over.

  Nineteen

  Five Years Ago

  The next morning, Ghost sent Mercy, RJ, Walsh and Rottie off on a run. He announced at the breakfast table that they’d left before the sun was up; he’d called them all and seen to it.

  Ava felt the bottoms drop out of her feet. A swift, painful sense of having been cheated. She had almost a week left of suspension! Already she’d been planning her afternoons, thinking about her stolen time with Mercy.

  “How long will they be gone?” she asked, and hoped it sounded casual.

  Maggie glanced at her from her spot by the stove, her poker face evidencing nothing.

  Ava wanted to squirm in her chair, and not just because she was sore from last night.

  “At least a week,” Ghost said from behind the morning paper. “Maybe longer.”

  She bit her lip and tried to keep her disappointment from showing. Her first instinct was to call Mercy. Fire off a text. She wanted to set the clock back, to at least have a chance to tell him goodbye.

  She stared glumly at her Rice Krispies and told herself a week wasn’t that bad of a wait.

  Maggie watched a moment too long before she turned back to the eggs.

  Ava had been raised a club daughter. She didn’t bother Mercy while he was away; instead, she threw herself into work at Green Hills, into her school work, into her tutoring sessions with Carter. Whatever his intentions had been the night he’d invited her to Hamilton House, he seemed firmly rooted in the friendzone now and didn’t give the impression he wanted out of it. Leah was unsure, at first – “No one that cute is worth a shit,” she said to Ava – but by the end of the week, the three of them were sharing Stella’s takeout over English notes at one of the clubhouse picnic tables.

  One afternoon, Carter chewed dill pickle slices and eyed the two of them across the table, his face coloring self-consciously. “Don’t you guys” – he cleared his throat – “I dunno, doesn’t it bother you the way Ainsley and her friends talk about you?”

  Ava shrugged. “I care that everyone else cares. That they give her that much credit. But people have talked shit about me and my whole family forever. It’s just…I think they must be really bored and unhappy with their own lives.”

  He blinked. He’d never thought of it that way.

  “Ainsley hates me because I won’t be one of her bitches,” Leah said. “And because I have better hair than her.” She gave her pink-streaked ponytail a twirl.

  Carter laughed.

  Ava missed Mercy that week. She always did, whenever he was away, but it was different now, more urgent and painful. She felt like she was trying too hard to be normal, to be chipper. It was easy with Carter and Leah, distracting. She felt almost guilty that she was enjoying being seventeen and stupid with them, but they took her mind away from Mercy’s absence.

  At home, though: helping with laundry, vacuuming, dusting, getting her great-grandmother’s china out and hand-washing it so it sparkled in the cabinet. Maggie kept giving her the side-eye about that. Maggie never breathed a word, but sometimes she would respond to an over-enthusiastic question about her work at the Dartmoor main offices with a slow “sure, yeah.” Ava lay awake long into the deep of night, staring at her ceiling, a strange sense of doom creeping up the back of her neck. Her mother suspected. And Mercy was gone, and she just wanted him to kiss her on the forehead and tell her it would be okay.

  She held out contacting him until the Thursday before she returned to school. At eleven-fifty-two, in the shadowed dark of her room, she rolled toward the window and cradled her phone in the covers in front of her face, bit her lip and overanalyzed her text message before she hit SEND.

  Wish you could see the moon with me tonight. I go back to school tomorrow.

  Afterward, her phone screen blacked over and she stared through the slatted blinds, at the almost-full moon bobbing over the hill at the top of the street.

  She didn’t expect a response. She just liked the idea of putting words from her head into his hand, dreaming foolishly that it might make him smile.

  Then her phone dinged.

  She sucked in a breath as she opened the message.

  Still can’t see this Orion you talk about. He only comes out for pretty girls. Hit lots of bitches in the face for me tomorrow.

  Ava grinned until her face hurt. She envisioned him on a blanket roll under the stars, cowboy-style, his great hands folded behind his head, the murmur of RJ and Rottie’s voices in the background as they rehashed their usual Bike Part Debate.

  I love you, she thought, and snuggled down into her pillows.

  “You’re crazy if you think those pipes sound better,” RJ was saying over by the cooler.

  “Bro, have you heard yours?” Rottie said. “Like a damn Fast & Furious Honda piece of shit…”

  A lead they now knew to be false had taken them to North Carolina. Tonight, a campground cleared out for the fall served as a place to crash. Mercy had found enough wood for a fire and they’d built it in a blackened rock pit a camper had left behind. Walsh had bought a Styrofoam cooler at a gas station and stocked it with beer. Dinner had been burgers and fries. They were bedrolling it tonight, old school 70-something MC style.

  Mercy had his head propped on a low fireside bench made out of a split log, the glow from his phone fading the stars above to dull pinpricks.

  He waited a moment, wondering, half-expecting Ava to keep texting him. It was in her nature to talk, not because she needed him to listen, but because she was a writer, and that was how she showed love to the world: writing about it.

  When the phone went blank, he stuck it in his pocket and resumed staring at the s
ky, not sure of his expression, hoping he didn’t look like some kind of smiling, drooling sap. He’d needed that: her two lines of type. This was a shit run that was getting them nowhere, and her voice in the dark was like a hand going down a cat’s back: soothing and stirring all at once.

  Walsh, sitting up and propped against the neighboring bench, just another shadow in the night, was impossible to notice. Mercy had forgotten he was there. His voice, that low English monotone, came out of the dark, direct and sharp-edged, like a knife. Quiet enough the other two couldn’t hear. “Something’s up with you.”

  Mercy glanced over without turning his head. The fire didn’t quite reach Walsh’s face, just a red flicker against his pale eyes. “I’m lying on a big-ass rock and I haven’t showered in days. Yeah. Something’s up.”

  One slow shake of Walsh’s head: not buying it. “You slipped out of dinner the other night.”

  “For a smoke.”

  His brows went up. “You need to be very careful, brother. If you like young ones, that’s your business–”

  Mercy put a bite into his voice, one Walsh would know wasn’t bullshit. “Yeah, it is.”

  “ – but Ava, that’s a whole other issue.”

  Mercy glared at him.

  Anyone else would have caved and looked away, but not Walsh. “I’m just saying, is all. I’m the first one to notice. But I won’t be the last.”

  Mercy rolled his head back, swallowed hard and searched for Ava’s Orion among the firefly specks above him.

  Her first day back. The principal – Mrs. Mullins – had a windowless office crammed full of inspirational kitten posters, live ferns, and a thermostat that must have snapped off at fifty-five degrees. She was a bulky woman – not fat, just wide and solid and substantial – and Ava would have been disappointed had she been anything other, given her profession.

  Ava sat beside her mother in the two visitor chairs facing the desk; the guidance counselor, a milquetoast librarian-type named Mr. Freeman, sat on Maggie’s other side, sideways so he could see all involved parties, sipping coffee in noisy slurps.

  Maggie had dressed the part: black skinny jeans, spike-heeled boots, white button-up blouse, very fitted, and a black blazer; her hair was messy, honey-colored perfection, her lipstick and fingernails bright red, her gaze narrow and her jaw tight. She was this wild, vital creature, cooped up in this dead room; she looked dangerous and ready to strike.

  Ava had gone for demure – as demure as her closet would allow. Bootcut jeans, low ankle boots, black hoodie, sparse makeup. She sat on her hands to keep them warm and shivered inside her sweatshirt, anxious to get this over with, anxious about going out into the school.

  “The Millcotts,” Mrs. Mullins began in a voice too large for the room, “took quite a lot of convincing not to press charges against your daughter, Ms. Lowe.”

  One corner of Maggie’s mouth twisted at the slip. Mullins had been the principal when she was in school. The lingering disapproval was a palpable thing. “Mrs. Teague,” she corrected. “And yeah, I guess we have you to thank for that?”

  Mullins tucked her chin a self-congratulatory way. “I persuaded them that this was a childish skirmish gone wrong, and that it wouldn’t help their daughter to have yours arrested. I also assured them” – sharp glance toward Ava – “that there would be no more incidents, of any kind between the girls. The zero tolerance policy is firmly in effect. One more act of aggression, and Ava will be expelled.”

  Tight smile from Maggie. “Don’t worry, ma’am. I’ve instructed her to just let the bitch beat her up next time, and then we’ll sue the Millcotts for the medical bills.”

  Mr. Freeman choked on his coffee.

  Mullins aimed a wagging finger at Maggie. “That attitude right there is why Ava’s having trouble getting along with her classmates.”

  Maggie fired back. “That attitude is the only thing that gives my baby hope that she isn’t alone when it comes to dealing with the spoiled Mean Girls who run schools all across this damn country. You can run this place, Mullins” – she gestured to the room around them, the school – “but you can’t run my family. You keep Ainsley Millcott away from my Ava, and you and me won’t have a problem.”

  She hid it well, but that got under Mullins’s skin, intimidated her a little. She’d never approved of Maggie – smoking in the bathroom, condoms spilling out of her pockets in the middle of Biology – but Maggie’s connection with the Dogs gave her pause. It gave everyone pause.

  After promising not to make more trouble – it was all she could do not to roll her eyes – Ava was released back into the jungles of the school.

  Maggie kissed her on the forehead just outside the main office. “Be brave, baby, you can do this.”

  And when she turned around, just as first bell was ringing, there were Leah and Carter, her bodyguards and support system.

  “You’ve gotta see the bandage on Ainsley’s nose,” Leah said, grinning. “So not in vogue.”

  Ava took a deep breath and plunged in.

  Twenty

  Five Years Ago

  Panic. This was panic. Not forgot-her-homework panic, not dented-the-truck panic, not even OSS-affecting-her-future panic. This was cataclysmic, life-altering, oh-God-no panic.

  Ava pressed her palms to the closed bathroom stall door in front of her and shut her eyes, drew in a deep breath of stale, bathroom-smelling air.

  Mercy had been gone for almost three weeks. According to her dad, he and the others were due back this afternoon.

  She should have started her period a week ago.

  Panic.

  The bathroom door swung open with a squeal and small footsteps pattered across the tiles. “Here,” Leah’s voice said, and a package in a Walgreens bag was shoved under the stall door.

  Ava’s hands shook as she took the bag and pulled out its contents: three pregnancy tests. Three different brands. Leah had been thorough.

  “You know,” Leah said from the other side of the door, her voice echoing off the porcelain sinks, the tile, the mirror, “they don’t keep those things on a shelf. They’re under glass. Locked away. I had to ask Mr. Ross to get them out for me.” She made a disgusted sound at the memory of the seventy-two year-old pharmacist who’d worked the Walgreens counter since they’d both been in diapers. “Now he totally thinks I’m knocked up, and the worst part is, he didn’t even look surprised about it. Like he expected me to get pregnant–”

  Somehow, the process of peeing on all those sticks was less embarrassing with Leah chattering away out there.

  “Not that I disagree. Of the two of us, I woulda thought it’d be me. But – totally not the point. God hopes he doesn’t go down the street and tell my dad I came in and bought them. I hope you know what a great friend I am.”

  “The greatest,” Ava said, only half-sarcastic. She zipped up and opened the door.

  Leah stood with arms folded, studying her neon reflection; she turned as Ava came out, all her test sticks held flat on her palms. “What do they say?”

  “Not ready yet.” Ava laid them on the rim of a sink and washed her hands. She was trembling all over. She’d felt pasty and sick all day, just thinking about it. She knew that another student could come into the restroom at any moment, but she wasn’t sure she cared. Thanks to Ainsley’s nose, the popular crowd hated her. The people who’d been indifferent toward her were either secretly thankful the Boss Bitch had gotten her face smashed, or wary they’d be Ava’s next target. Mostly, she just got avoided. A rumor that she was pregnant couldn’t kill her reputation any more.

  “If you are,” Leah said, voice becoming careful. “What are you going to do?”

  Ava shook her head; her hair fell down around her face and she stared through the tunnel it made at the sticks, laser-focused. She could hardly breathe. “I’ll have to tell him.”

  Leah’s hand was soft and careful on her elbow. “What will he say?”

  “I dunno. Guess I’m about to find out.”

&n
bsp; All the tests were in agreement.

  Positive.

  Maggie heard the bikes come in. It was a Wednesday, almost three weeks since Mercy had gone north on his drug-dealer hunt with Walsh, RJ, and Rottie. Through the wide, unadorned window of her office in the central building, she watched the boys come swooping onto the Dartmoor property in effortless, bird-like formation.

  She picked Mercy out of the four of them; his long legs. As they parked, she stood and walked to the door, stepped out into the autumn sunshine and propped herself in the threshold, waiting.

  She felt like a traitor, like a rat, like someone so unlike herself. But this wasn’t about the club – not mostly. It was about her baby.

  **

  Mercy registered the still, golden silhouette of Maggie at the main office, and decided not to look her way. He had this sinking feeling, as he swung off his bike, that she was looking for him.

  “God, I want my bed,” Rottie muttered. “That’s all I want, for three days: bed.”

  “With the kiddos jumping into it with you?” RJ asked with a laugh.

  “Babysitter. Bed and a babysitter.”

  The central office was an unimpressive thing, a cinderblock-walled square with just enough room for office space, a bathroom, and minimal file storage. Each Dartmoor business had its own office, but Ghost liked having a hub, a place where copies of all the books were kept on file, where a master computer tabulated each month’s combined income totals. A center point, a nucleus for the beast that was Dartmoor. Maggie ran the day-to-day; Ghost had the final say.

  It was a hundred feet from the clubhouse, set back from the bike shop parking lot. It didn’t have a porch, so Maggie stood in the full sunlight, hair blazing, shades masking her eyes. Her body language said serious, and her gaze, even from behind the glasses, he could tell was trained on him.

  But he was going to ignore her. She was an old lady – but just an old lady. She wasn’t his boss; he didn’t answer to her.