by Jessie Cooke
6
Chance gave his name to the receptionist and waited at the door for the nurses to answer the buzzer. He was going to see Sharon but decided to check in on the little man first. As he waited, he peeked in through the little window, and his heart almost exploded. Sharon was sitting in the rocking chair that he’d sat in the night before and she was looking down at the baby in her arms. Chance thought she was beautiful the first time he saw her over a year before...but in all that time, he’d never seen her look as beautiful as she did that moment. They say that pregnant ladies glowed, but the look on her face just then practically lit up the entire room. He couldn’t just see the love in her blue eyes, he could feel it from the other side of the door.
He watched her for several minutes, and then deciding he didn’t want to interrupt her beautiful moment, he turned to leave. He’d just made it back to the double doors where the buzzer was, when the door behind him opened. “Mr. Le Blanc?”
Chance turned back around. The nurse was about Sally’s age and she had a big, blonde bun on top of her head, and kind, brown eyes. He smiled at her and said, “Yeah, that’s me. But I’m going to wait and come back later, I think...”
“It’s okay to come in now. The hospital allows both parents to visit at once.”
“She deserves some alone time with him,” he said.
“She saw you through the window and asked me to come out and get you.”
“Really?”
The woman laughed softly and said, “Yeah, really. I’m guessing whatever the problem was before she gave birth to your handsome little man is forgotten. If you want to wait, I’ll get you a gown and gloves...” Chance smiled at her and nodded, and she disappeared back behind the door once again. She was gone for a few minutes before coming back out with his gloves and gown. He donned them, and when she opened the door, Sharon’s dark blue eyes were already on his face. She wasn’t smiling, but she didn’t look mad either. He started toward her and the closer he got, the more her lips curled upward. When he was right in front of her, she said:
“They let me feed him.”
“That’s great, baby. How are you?”
“I’m okay. Chance, I’m so sorry...”
He shook his head. “No, please don’t, baby. If anyone knows what you’ve been going through it’s me. I should have been more sensitive.”
In a soft voice, with tears swimming in her eyes she said, “I love you so much. I just don’t ever want you to feel like you’re trapped in a situation you don’t want to be in.”
Chance got down on his knees. When he was close, he got a whiff of that brand-new baby in her arms and he stopped to gently brush his lips across the baby’s forehead. Then he looked up at Sharon and said, “Nothing about being with you, and our family, makes me feel trapped. I’m sorry if I’ve been insensitive...you know, I just suck at this feelings stuff...”
She put her free hand on the side of his face, and he leaned into it. “You haven’t been. I know I’ve been crazy lately, and I’m sorry.” He leaned over the baby and pressed his lips against hers.
“Me too, baby. But let’s forget all of that and move forward, okay?” She smiled as tears rolled quietly down her face and nodded. “I love you,” he said. Then looking back down at the baby he said, “And him too. I had no idea how much I could love him until I saw him last night. It fills me up, consumes me.” She was nodding. He kissed the baby again and then said, “What’s his name?”
Her smile grew broader and she said, “I thought maybe Billy Ray. We could call him Bubba.”
Chance spent two hours with Sharon and Bubba before her nurses insisted she go back to her room and eat something. He wanted to stay with her, but Blackheart was right, he needed to deal with Poppy and hopefully by the time Sharon and little Bubba got to go home, he could give them all the fresh start they deserved.
He went to the hotel, but after ten straight minutes of knocking on the door without an answer, and dirty looks from her neighbors, he left. He was just getting on his bike when he saw his sister getting out of a little blue car on the other side of the lot. He got off the bike and jogged toward her before she could cross the street and make it into the hotel.
“Hey, Poppy! We need to talk.”
“I think we said everything we had to say yesterday, don’t you?”
“No. We didn’t solve anything. Poppy, I need you to get it through your head once and for all that I didn’t hurt our brother.”
“I’m just here to pick something up, I have a meeting with the coroner of St. Martin Parish.”
“Why?” The hell they had grown up in was on the outskirts of St. Mary’s Parish; St. Martin was close but the two were separated by Iberia Parish. When Bubba first went missing, Chance and his friends, and then the Jokers and the investigator that Blackheart hired, had searched the Iberia Parish area but as far as he knew no one had searched the St. Martin area, thinking it was a little far for a kid Bubba’s age to run.
“I don’t want to do this here,” she said, looking around the lot. There were a lot of cars in it, as always since it was right in the French Quarter and next to the Mississippi River, but there wasn’t anyone close by.
“Then let’s go to your room and talk,” he said. “I’m not leaving until we hash this out once and for all.”
“They have a body,” she snapped.
Chance’s breath caught in his throat and his voice was shaky as he said, “You think it’s Bubba?”
“I don’t know. All I know is they have a prepubescent male John Doe. He has been sitting there on ice for over a year, unclaimed. They had one of those sketch artists do a sketch,” she said, her voice catching in her throat. “It looks like him, except they got the hair all wrong. Bubba’s hair was curly...” The tears that began to flow out of her eyes tore at his heart. He reached for her hand, but she pulled away from him and then defiantly wiping at her face she said, “I’m going to give DNA so they can compare the two.”
“Shit.” Chance ran a hand through his own hair. He got a picture in his head of their little brother then. He did have crazy curly brown hair, and the biggest brown eyes that Chance had ever seen. But it was his smile that pulled people in; it was nothing but goodness and innocence. Chance fought back his own tears and said, “I’ll go with you.”
“No. I don’t want you there.”
“I don’t care. He’s my brother too.”
“I’m surprised you remembered.”
“Jesus Christ, Poppy you have to stop this. I’m not the evil one. I was never the evil one! I was a kid just like you and I did my best to protect all of us. You know how much I loved him...”
“It’s things like that...you always talk about him in the past tense. Why is that, Chance?”
He was losing the battle with his tears as he said, “He’s been gone too long, Pop. No trace, no contact...do you honestly believe if he was alive that he wouldn’t have found a way to reach out by now?” Chance was trying desperately to stay in control, but his head was being flooded with images of that night...images he’d spent the last five years tamping down as far into his psyche as he possibly could. He didn’t talk about that night, with anyone. The only people who knew were Gabe, because he’d been there through it all, and Blackheart, who he had to tell in order to become a part of the club. He’d never even told Sharon. That fucker did nothing but hurt everyone around him. He tormented children. He ruined Poppy...but still, Chance hated that he had that blood on his hands. He’d never even spoken to Poppy about it. She’d come home, but they’d both been so intent on finding Bubba, that his killing that cockroach had gotten relegated to the bottom of the pile of things they had to worry about. When Poppy didn’t answer him, he said, “I don’t want him to be dead, but you know as well as I do that we rarely get what we want. I killed a man that night, Poppy. Yes, he had it coming. He was nothing but scum and I pray every day that he’s burning in hell for what he did to you, to all of us, but mostly to you...but damn it, Poppy, a
seventeen-year-old kid doesn’t come out of that fucking normal. I tried to find Bubba. I wanted to take care of him. I wanted to take care of everyone...” Poppy held up her hand then and said:
“Fine. You can go with me. Just stop, okay?”
Chance felt his hurt turn to anger. “Just stop? What’s wrong, Poppy? You don’t want to hear about how I killed the devil who tortured you for years?”
“You did it for me?” she asked. Her voice was deep and low.
“Of course I did.” She looked away and he said, “Poppy, look at me...” When she turned to look at him her green eyes were filled with tears, but they didn’t look sad, they looked angry.
“Four years, Chauncey. That’s how long he made his ‘visits’ to my room at night. Your room was right across the hallway...do you really expect me to believe that you never knew what was happening? You expect me to believe that Bubba never told you?” The tears were flowing down her cheeks and Chance was torn between wanting to comfort her and wanting to throttle her. How could she believe that he knew and had never done anything? She’d said she had forgiven him, but that was a lie. Her face was filled with accusation and it broke his heart. How did they come to this...his little sister, the person he’d been closest to in the world, suddenly hated him? How did that happen?
“Bubba knew?”
“Excuse me?” A big man wearing a Confederate flag shirt and Bermuda shorts stepped out of the big pickup next to Poppy’s car and he was glaring at Chance now. “Is this guy bothering you?”
Chance took a step toward him, suddenly aching to relieve himself of all that anger in his chest. Poppy wiped her face and stepped between the two of them. “No. He’s my brother. We’re just having a disagreement about what to buy Dad for Father’s Day.”
The big guy finally took his eyes off Chance’s face and looked down at Poppy. He looked at Chance again. He had to see the resemblance, at least in their eyes. “You sure?” he asked Poppy.
Poppy winked at him, and Chance rolled his eyes. But no one was paying attention to him anyway. The big guy’s attention was all on Poppy now and Chance watched his sister’s body language change in an instant. Suddenly she wasn’t his tortured little sister, she was a flirtatious little vixen. She tossed her light brown hair over her shoulder and with a dazzling smile she said, “I’m sure, but thank you for being such a gentleman. My big brother is a huge asshole sometimes, but you know how it is...you gotta love your siblings anyways, right? We’ll get past this. I might even let him have his way this time. That’s more than most men get out of me.”
The big guy’s smile was huge, and his eyes were filled with lust now. Chance wanted to kill him even more and Poppy must have sensed it because he felt her lean back into him, just slightly, warning him with her body to stay put. “Well, I doubt any red-blooded male could leave a pretty lady like you in distress.” He gave Chance another dirty look and then to Poppy again he said, “I’m staying across the street there at the French Market Inn. I’ll be there all week in room 301 if you need me.”
“She won’t,” Chance said. The man ignored him and still to Poppy said:
“Name’s Jimmy Calloway. I’m in town for a gun show. I’d love to take you out for a drink sometime.”
Chance opened his mouth again but Poppy’s elbow in his ribs stopped him. Still with the smile plastered across her face she said, “I think I’d like that, Jimmy. I’m Patty. I’ll look you up.” The big guy winked at her, threw one last ugly look in Chance’s direction, and then with a nod at Poppy, he jogged across the street.
“You’re not really going to go out with that big slob, are you? The guy had on socks with his sandals for Christ’s sake.” Poppy turned back toward Chance and ran her eyes over his kutte before arching an eyebrow and saying:
“I’m not so sure you’re qualified to judge a man’s wardrobe, and I don’t need you to worry about me. I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time now.” Every one of her words cut him like a knife. He took a deep breath and said:
“Alright, Poppy, if you don’t want my help...”
“I have to get something out of my room. I’ll be right back. We need to get on the road. I’m driving.” Chance didn’t have a chance to respond before she jogged across the street and disappeared through the front door of the hotel. He sighed and took out his phone. Women confused the shit out of him.
“Hey, Sally, it’s Chance, can you do me a favor and check in on Sharon and the baby for me later? I have to take care of some...family stuff...and I’m not sure what time I’ll be back.”
“Of course. As soon as I get done here at work, I’ll go by there.”
“Thank you. Sally?”
“Yeah?”
“Will you tell her that I love her, and Bubba too?”
“Bubba?”
Chance smiled. “Yeah, that’s our boy. Billy Ray Le Blanc...Bubba for short.”
7
“I’m tired, Chance.”
“Please, Poppy. Look, I’ve tried like hell to understand how you could possibly think I’m a horrible enough person to kill our little brother. I know it’s not about me, Poppy. I know after everything you went through that you would have to have a hard time trusting anyone. But this is me, Poppy. This is the person you told...” He was about to say “everything,” but she hadn’t told him everything. He might not know to this day what happened to her if he hadn’t heard that argument between his parents that night. “Poppy, please, just for tonight can we put away all those hurt feelings? This is my family, now your family. This is your nephew.”
The trip to Martin Parish had been uncomfortable, to say the least. But after they’d both given DNA samples to the coroner’s office and Chance had seen the photo reconstruction they’d done of the skeleton, they headed back to New Orleans and in an effort to get the face in that photo out of his head, Chance told Poppy about the baby. His stubborn sister tried to act disinterested, but he could tell she was only pretending. As fucked up as their lives had been, family was ridiculously important to them both. He didn’t tell her that Sharon had been raped – he thought that might hit too close to home for her – but he told her all about her otherwise, and the twins, and the baby. He knew it was dirty pool, but when it was beginning to look like she would stick to her guns and flat-out refuse to go and meet them he said, “The baby’s name is Billy Ray.”
Poppy was good; her face showed no reaction. But he knew her well enough to know that her posture told a different story. They’d driven another half an hour before she finally said:
“Fine, I’ll meet them, but I can’t stay long.”
Chance smiled. “Thank you. This means a lot to me.”
“Mm-hmm,” was all she said, but he kept smiling. Her meeting his old lady and his baby was at least a step in the right direction. He missed his little sister and even though he had his brothers in the club, and Sharon and the kids, he’d still felt lonely without his siblings. He wasn’t confident that they’d ever know what happened to Bubba, and he was convinced he’d never see him again, but at least he needed the only sibling left on his side.
Poppy dropped him in the parking lot across from the hotel where he’d left his chopper. She was already pulling out of the lot when he turned the key...and got nothing. Cursing out loud, he motioned Poppy back. She looked annoyed, but when he told her the bike wouldn’t start, she said, “Fine, I’ll drive you back after the hospital. I don’t want this to be an all-night thing.” Chance smiled again. It earned him another dirty look from her, but he didn’t care. She acted tough, but he knew she was coming around. He also knew that no one with even a little bit of a heart would be able to look at his little Bubba and not turn into a pile of mush. He was sure that his baby would be the great equalizer...or at least he hoped.
“Higher, babe,” Grayson told the woman underneath him. “Come on, get that leg up higher.”
The long-legged brunette was dry, and he was having a hard time getting his cock in and out of her. That was
unusual for this one; she was the closest thing to a nymphomaniac he’d ever met, and, in the past, she’d always been ready for him. “It hurts,” she said.
“That’s because you’re so fucking dry. What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I think we need more lube.”
He rolled his eyes. His cock was already sticky with the K-Y she’d slathered over the condom he was wearing. It had dripped down between his legs and he felt like the skin was being torn from his balls every time he pulled back out of her. “No, no more of that sticky shit. You get on top.”
