by Drew Elyse
Jack had been my husband for two years, and for the first time, our relationship felt real, flawed in a beautiful way.
“Guy’s a state trooper,” Jager told the room.
We were in church—a club meeting. Prez had come to my room the night before after Quinn and I got back from the garage and announced it.
It turned out the tail he’d asked me to check with Quinn about had nothing to do with her. She had insisted the investigator—because she actually hired a fucking investigator to find me, which made me want to kick my own ass—had been a research man only, no field action. She told me he’d offered, but she’d held firm she just wanted my information. She’d then called the guy. From the half of the conversation I heard, he was either inclined toward being protective of women in general, or he had his sights set on my wife. I’d held my tongue on that one, which was probably part of blowing up at the asshole who wanted her attention at the garage.
Given that development, which I’d informed Stone of right away, Jager had been called up. He’d outfitted the clubhouse with cameras and was able to get a look at the guy’s face. Fuck knows how, but he used that image and his crazy ass computer skills to track him down.
“You’re fucking sure?” Stone demanded.
Jager didn’t bother with the response. We all knew he was sure. He wouldn’t have said anything if he wasn’t sure. He might’ve bailed on church if he wasn’t sure and still been at his computer finding the answer.
Stone, knowing that, cursed again.
“Why the fuck would we have troopers on us?” Tank asked the question we were all thinking.
There was no good answer to that. We didn’t deal in any shit that had us regularly on law enforcement radar, but that didn’t mean all our dealings were above board. We also had an in with the local law, so whatever was happening, it wasn’t there. This was coming from out of Hoffman.
Stone looked to me. “You spoken with Roth lately?”
Roth was an FBI agent who had crossed our paths with the shit that had gone down with Ember and Jager. His hunt and ours led down the same road. It ended up being best for us to help him get his man.
“Not in a couple weeks,” I answered. “Though, nothing was off in that conversation. No reason to believe he’d set anyone after us when we got him his bust.”
Stone nodded, looking as tense as we were all feeling. “We play shit cautious then. Not taking any jobs until we know those eyes are gone. Any parties are people we know only. No outside faces. Don’t care if it’s one of the club girls with a friend on her arm. I want to run this place over with a fine-toothed comb. Nothing under this roof that could get anyone in hot water.” He turned his attention to Jager. “Fights are off too. Know that kid you’ve got on is depending on that income now. He needs it, send him to the garage and we’ll find something to float him until the heat is off.”
Jager ran an underground fighting ring—illegal as fuck with the amount of cash we made on the betting. Dustin started fighting for him not long ago. The kid had some moves and a pretty solid determination to take care of shit since he had a mom and sister at home he was helping provide for.
“Wanted to talk about Dustin,” Jager said. “Kid’s expressed interest in the club.”
“He ride?” Roadrunner asked.
Jager nodded. “Bike’s a piece of shit, breaks down more often than it runs, and he’s got more important shit to focus on than getting her fixed up, but he loves that hunk of junk.”
“I’m takin’ this as you vouching for him?” Stone clarified.
Jager gave a jerk of his chin.
“Get his ass around hanging with the club. And see what you can do about him taking up work at the garage. Get him in there, it’ll be easier to start showing him how to fix his ride up. Can’t have a prospect without a fuckin’ bike. We’ll vote on offering him a prospect patch soon. Yeah?”
The brothers collectively gave our agreement. I’d met Dustin a couple times. Kid could fit with the club.
“Alright, that’s all we’ve got. Eyes peeled. Something’s brewing, and it ain’t gonna be pretty,” Stone said, knocking his gavel on the table to end the meeting.
No one was feeling real chatty after that, but I was still surprised when Sketch was just gone. I looked around for the fucker before I finally asked Roadrunner.
“He took off right away. Why?” When the brother didn’t answer me right off, I tacked on, “Got an appointment with him right after this.”
Sketch was a tattoo artist—a fucking amazing one at that. He’d taken over the shop he’d apprenticed and worked at recently when the owner decided to retire. Sailor’s Grave was where all the Disciples went to get their ink.
“That’ll be interesting,” Roadrunner returned.
“What’re you talking about?” I asked, though part of me already knew. It was easy to notice I’d barely spoken to the brother while I’d been tied up with Quinn, and he was off when the brothers came out to the farmhouse. Not openly hostile, just fucking off. He also hadn’t shown that to Quinn, which would have caused an issue.
“You really need to ask, brother?”
I muttered a curse.
“That about sums it up,” Roadrunner returned. “I’m thinkin’ our boy doesn’t have a lot of pleasant thoughts about your history with that pretty girl.”
“My wife,” I corrected.
“That’d be the problem,” he pointed out.
“This is going to be rough.”
Roadrunner, the fucker, actually laughed. “Don’t be a chicken shit. Go get your ink and deal with it.”
Fair enough. I took off to do just that.
Jess was behind the reception desk when I rolled into Sailor’s Grave fifteen minutes later. She looked like she should have been on the cover of a tattoo magazine. Always tricked out in her full out rockabilly style and covered in ink, she was enough to make the men who walked in want to beg for a shot. She played that up by being charming, so there was no question Sketch would want to keep her behind that desk as long as she wanted to work there.
“Well, look who it is,” she said when I walked in. “I heard congratulations were in order a long time ago.”
Fuck. Being in a club was like fucking high school sometimes.
“Ember or Ash?” I asked, wondering which of them was out spreading gossip faster.
“Ember,” she answered. “Jager was in the other day getting some work done. She gave me all the news.” Figures. “So, where’s the little wife?”
“At the farmhouse,” I told her. “She doesn’t know I’m getting this done.”
Jess went wide-eyed. “Oooh,” she crooned dramatically, before telling me, “He’s back there. Ready for you.”
That first part might have been true, but he was probably hoping I wouldn’t show.
I got more of the same from Sketch when I went back to his station. It wasn’t hostile, but it wasn’t what I’d expect from the brother either. He showed me the drawing he’d done based on what I’d told him—which looked fucking great—then printed it to apply the stencil to my left pec. When I okayed the alignment, he got right to work on the outline.
We didn’t speak for a while, but he made his point anyway. I’d gotten four tats from Sketch before, and two from other artists. None of them stung as much as the one he was doing right then.
“You want to say something about it, or keep taking it out through that gun?” I finally asked.
“Your life, brother. It’s not my place to give you shit about it.”
I’d give him that. We were club brothers, not a bunch of sanctimonious assholes. Brothers lived and let live. Still, that didn’t change the fact that he had an opinion.
“Thanks for that, but I’m telling you to drop the respect and give it to me.”
He sat up from his work, the gun still in his hand, and leveled me with a look. “You have a wife.”
“Yeah, I do.”
He went back to his work, but after a minute, sai
d, “Two years you’ve been here, and you had a fucking wife you left behind.”
I didn’t argue, not that I had any room to. That was the long and short of it.
He didn’t need me to confirm. “You have no fucking clue what I would have done to get my woman back.”
There it was, the real issue. Years ago, after her father and a former Disciple, Indian, died, Ash took off. She and Sketch had been a thing their whole lives by the way club lore told the story, and she left without telling him. She was back now, they were back together, happy and expecting their second child. None of that changed the way those years without her marked him, though.
“I’ll regret walking away until the day I die,” I admitted. “Whether she sticks with me now or not, I’ll always regret that.”
Sketch didn’t respond to that, just kept his focus on the ink he was imbedding in my skin.
While he did, a question hit me I was damn sure I didn’t want to ask, but I couldn’t keep it in. “Did you ever consider not starting things with her again?”
He continued with the line he was working on for a long moment before he sat up. “I don’t know what all went down between you and Quinn. Ash, I knew why she left even when it happened. I didn’t like it. It didn’t make that shit any easier, but I knew. When Stone told me she was coming back, I didn’t think I’d want a fucking thing to do with her. When I saw she had a daughter—a daughter old enough to be mine she never tried to tell me about—then said I might not be Emmy’s dad, I told myself I was done.
“But I wasn’t done. With Ash, I don’t think I ever could be. I can’t say it didn’t feel fucked sometimes how I was trying to win her back when she was the one who took off. Hell, I damn near gave up at one point. Still, that was my woman. I love her. Always have. There’s not a lot she could ever do that could destroy that for me.”
He gave that to me, freely offered that feeling, so I returned it. I told him everything, even the parts I was sure I’d keep from Quinn until the day they put my ass in the ground. I wasn’t making excuses. I had no excuses for the mistakes I’d made. I just had to give someone the whole story for once. He worked on the design he’d drawn for me while I laid it all out, right up to her agreeing to give me one week, a week that was quickly disappearing while I struggled to figure out how to convince her to give me forever.
“You’re afraid she won’t take you back,” he observed the obvious.
“I couldn’t blame her if she didn’t.”
The needles scratched across my skin, and I focused on the feeling to keep myself grounded. Dredging all this up made me want to run after Quinn as if she’d be back at the house packing her things to take off already.
“She will,” he stated, surprising me.
“How do you know?”
“She loves you. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t have given you a week. She wouldn’t have been there in that yard when I met her, at your side and meeting the whole club. She did that shit because, whether she’s ready to admit it or not, she’s letting you back in.”
I hoped like all hell he was right.
Sketch went on, giving me the idea I’d been looking for. “You just have to give her a reason to stay.”
Give her.
Those words made all the difference. All the times I’d thought about how to show her, how to say it…none of them had made me realize exactly what I needed to do. For the first time since she walked back into my life, I felt like I knew the path to winning her back.
“I can do that.”
“When are they supposed to be back?” Max asked.
She was sprawled out on a towel on the back deck, her tank top rolled up so she could get some sun. I, on the other hand, was sticking to my chair by the table the guys had out there. It had a big umbrella I’d angled to keep me out of the direct sun.
The two of us had been hanging out since the boys had “church”—which I thought was a very weird thing to call a meeting for a bunch of bikers. Max had been at Ham’s place the night before and somehow managed to get him to stop with her at the store to grab nail polish.
“I didn’t even ask him to go to Ulta or something. Just Target. He still stayed outside and had a cigarette while I got these,” she’d explained in an exasperated tone when she’d arrived and showed me the six—yes, six for two people—colors she’d gotten. “Men are ridiculous.”
Hours later, we both had pretty fingers and toes, and were outside killing time. I was on my computer, looking up local libraries and seeing if any had openings. I didn’t tell Max this, though. What it would imply was something I wasn’t ready to talk about. I wasn’t even ready to actually apply for any jobs I found. I was just looking. For now.
“I have no clue. Ace just said later,” I answered her.
“Well, that’s helpful,” she groused.
“I’m not his keeper.”
She sighed. “No, you’re his wife. Which is the same thing.”
“I feel so bad for your future husband.”
“Dear Future Husband,” she sang.
I laughed while she kept on humming through the song.
“Speaking of futures,” I segued, “what are you doing about your job?”
She groaned, throwing an arm over her face. “It’s possible I no longer have a job. It’s also possible that when I called his highness the day I drove here to tell him I wouldn’t be able to work the next day, he told me I could show up or be fired, and I told him to eat a dick.”
I had a speech right at the tip of my tongue, but I swallowed it back. What was the point? Max did what she wanted. The fact was, issues with her manager being at least equally her fault aside, that job sucked. It wasn’t headed anywhere. Having the recommendation for another job might have been useful, but that position wasn’t her future, nor was it going to be pivotal in opening the doors for anything else. And anyway, a lecture was going to do nothing to change her dramatic exit.
“Good job,” I told her instead.
She laughed, reading the silent speech anyway.
“What’re you thinking now?”
“That kind of depends on you,” she answered.
“Me?”
She flipped onto her stomach, her arms crossed to lay her head on as she looked up at me. “If you’re going to pack up and move in with your sexy ass husband, I’ll probably have to come. I mean, what are you going to do without me?”
“Are you serious?”
She shrugged her shoulders, jostling her head a bit in the process. “Why not? I’ve got friends and shit in Eugene, but no one I couldn’t just see on occasion. I don’t have a job or a man or anything. Why not come here with you?” Before I could answer, she tacked on, “Besides, Ham is hot. And really good in bed. Like cosmically good. He definitely does not disappoint in the size department. So, coming here means orgasms for however long that lasts.”
She was so full of it. She might have been enjoying Ham, but they’d barely met. He didn’t factor into her decision at all.
And speaking of decisions, “I don’t know if I’m moving here.”
“Are you thinking of asking him to move to Eugene? To leave the club?”
“No,” I answered immediately. I still had a lot to learn about the club and what Ace being in it meant, but the past few days had clearly shown me, if we were going to work, I would have to be the one to relocate. After all, with Max making it plain she would come along, the only thing I really had tying me to Eugene was a job. I could find another library to work at. Me leaving Eugene wasn’t the issue. I focused on the ring that had been on my finger for all but a few days over the last couple years—a ring Ace returned to me like it had been missing since the day he left. “What if coming here, starting over with him, isn’t a good idea?”
Max did not answer right away. She sat up, cross-legged, and focused on me with intent before asking, “What makes you think it might not be a good idea?”
It was a difficult question to answer. The fact was, even with figh
ting, the weight of our history, and even the fact that we were both different people than we had been when we started out, the time we’d had together was good. I just didn’t know how to reconcile that with the past. Things had been good then too. At the time, even with Damien’s accident, I’d thought they were perfect. I thought we were building something that would last, until the foundation crumbled right beneath my feet.
“He left,” I said, and that said it all.
“I want you to really think about this, because your answer makes all the difference in whether it’s worth it to keep going,” she preluded. I gave her a nod to encourage her to continue. “Is it possible for you to move past the fact that he left, or will it always be an issue?”
She was right. If there was no way for me to move on, then there was no point in trying.
I shouldn’t have listened. I should have known he was lashing out like he always did. I should have let it go and moved on. Instead, I did exactly what he wanted and fucked up everything good I had. I fucked us up.
I remembered those words from Ace, remembered the agony that bled through each one. He had hurt me. He’d inflicted wounds that had stayed open, raw, and bleeding for two years. But for every day I suffered that, he had too. For all the pain I’d felt, I was coming to understand he’d experienced more. He’d been living with the knowledge that what we both felt by being apart was his fault. He’d spent most of that time convinced being together might actually be worse.
Maybe it was acceptable for me to hold on to my pain. Maybe no one would blame me if I turned a blind eye to his because he’d been the one to hurt us both. I couldn’t do that, though. He wasn’t alone in fault. He was a victim of the hate he’d been handed because of his father’s mistakes. He’d been unfairly burdened with guilt over Damien’s accident—guilt his brother should never have reinforced. Assigning blame entirely on him wasn’t fair.
