Chapter 17
Cameron
I’d spent the day clearing out the backyard, using Casper’s truck to haul broken chairs, the shot up grill and mangled picnic table to the dump. Even the horseshoes had fucking blood on them, and I got rid of everything. As soon as I’d finished doing that, I’d dragged out Casper’s wheelbarrow and filled it eight times with bloodied dirt, digging into the ground over and over again until every speck was gone from sight. I’d left gaping holes all over the yard, but I couldn’t find it in me to give a shit.
By the time I got back to the club, I had weeping blisters on my hands and my arms were pretty much numb. After I realized Trix wasn’t in our room, I walked slowly over to Dragon’s place.
I was tired straight to my bones. Even my teeth ached from clenching my jaw hard all day.
“Hulk,” Dragon greeted from the porch steps as I reached them.
His hair was in a knotted mess at the back of his head, and his beard looked like he’d been scratching at it all day—the thing was massive.
“Trix here?” I asked, coming to a stop.
“Yeah,” he reached over and tossed me a beer from the six-pack he’d stashed beside him. “Take a seat.”
I looked at the small space between him and the porch railing and dropped my ass to the dirt. I wasn’t sitting on his damn lap.
“How’s she been?” he asked me quietly, jerking his head toward the door.
I pulled out my smokes and lit one, then used my lighter to pop the top of my beer. My lungs were screaming after all the smoking I’d done that day, but I took a deep drag before answering, anyway.
“Quiet,” I told him.
“She looks like shit,” he said bluntly, taking a long swallow of his beer, finishing it off and opening a new one.
“She’s barely sleepin.’ When she does, she’s cryin’ and jerkin’ around.”
“You wake her up?”
“No, she’s not gettin’ enough of it as it is,” I mumbled around my cigarette.
“She tellin’ you anything?”
I scoffed, pulling the smoke from my lips. “She’s not sayin’ shit.”
“When she came runnin,’ I ’bout had a heart attack,” he said, looking over toward the clubhouse. “Fuckin’ déjà vu.”
“How so?”
“Back when I was gettin’ custody of Trix, Bren’s husband showed up. Man was fuckin’ insane.” Dragon shook his head. “Brenna dropped Trix through our bedroom window, told her to run to me so Bren could face the man by herself. Knew she had to protect our girl, did what she had to so Trix was safe.”
I didn’t say anything as he paused. I didn’t think I’d ever heard the man string so many words together at once, and I sure as fuck wasn’t going to interrupt him.
“Trix got to me and she was shakin,’ she was so fuckin’ terrified. Then she’d told me, ‘Daddy’.” He glanced at me. “That’s what she’d called the fucker Brenna’d married. Fuck. That one word was enough to send me runnin’.”
“I don’t—”
“That’s what she was saying when she jumped off your Ma’s porch,” he said gruffly, cutting me off. He lifted the beer to his lips and drank deeply until it was empty. “Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy.” His voice was high pitched and soft.
My stomach turned at the look on his face.
“Not sure what knocked it loose, but she’s rememberin’,” he said softly, sniffing. “Shit we thought she’d forgotten.”
“Fuck,” I breathed, dropping my cigarette to the ground in front of me.
“Just thought you should know,” Dragon mumbled, climbing to his feet. “You comin’ in?”
“Yeah, in a minute,” I replied, staying planted on my ass.
The door closed softly behind him and I rubbed both hands over my face.
Jesus.
I had no idea what I was supposed to do. Trix was wringing me dry at night, but during the day, she wouldn’t even fucking look at me. It didn’t matter what I did. I’d tried talking softly to her, pissing her off, cracking jokes, being mean. Nothing fucking worked.
The night grew darker and darker as the sun set, but I didn’t move from my spot on the ground. I finally climbed to my feet as music started playing inside the house and the living room light switched on.
“Hey,” Leo mumbled, nodding his head slightly as I walked in.
“How you feelin’?” I asked, looking past him toward the kitchen. I couldn’t hear Trix’s voice, but I could hear a couple people moving around in there.
“Where’s Cecil’a?” Leo asked, ignoring my question.
“What?” I turned back to him in surprise.
“She hasn’t been by.” His face was so swollen that I could barely understand a word he’d said.
I opened my mouth to answer him, then closed it again. I had no idea why my sister hadn’t been by to see him. I knew both Farrah and Casper had stopped by at different times as they traded shifts at the hospital with Lily, and I guess I’d just assumed that Cecilia would have come with one of them.
“Haven’t really seen her,” I finally replied, watching him deflate a little.
“No big,” he said, turning his face away from me.
Slender arms wrapped around my waist from behind, and I sighed, leaning back slightly into Trix as she laid her head on my back.
“Pop said you were here,” she said against my cut.
“You ready to go home?”
“To the clubhouse?”
“Not safe for you on the outside yet.”
She stiffened behind me, so I turned to look at her. For a few moments, things had felt almost normal between us, but the instant I got a look at her face, I knew that had been an illusion. She was still wearing the fucked up mask of complacency she’d been hiding behind for days.
“Maybe I should stay here,” she said, glancing at Leo. “My brother is—”
“You belong with me,” I interrupted, cutting her off.
“I’m just saying—”
“Trix,” I warned, losing my patience.
Her eyes shuttered and she nodded jerkily, leaving the room. I stood by the couch and listened to her say her goodbyes in the kitchen, then watched her walk out and whisper something to Leo, making him nod.
I followed her out the door and we walked back to the clubhouse in silence.
I didn’t know what the fuck to say to her.
She was hurting, I knew that. We were fucking mourning, all of us. But that was the thing—we were all mourning. Slider and Vera had helped raise me. I’d lived with Gram, she’d driven me to get my driver’s license, and when I was a teenager, we used to stay up at least once a week playing cards and bullshitting. I loved her like a mother. I’d been there when Mick had taken his first steps and I’d been the one to take the training wheels off his bike when he was three years old. I was hurting, too.
She didn’t get the monopoly on fucking grief. It didn’t work that way. I understood that she was messed up from all that had happened, but I was, too, goddammit.
I’d just spent the day cleaning up after a fucking massacre, digging my family’s blood out of the ground, and she didn’t have one fucking ounce of comfort for me. Not a single word. Not a single touch.
Resentment burned in my gut.
“How you feelin’?” I ground out as we finally made our way into my room. We hadn’t talked about the baby at all, and even though I knew she was glad for the reprieve, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut any longer.
I thought about our kid constantly. It seemed surreal that he was safe inside her—the one person I hadn’t had to worry about in the entire fucked up situation.
“I’m fine.”
“Baby, too?” I asked, pushing her.
“I’d assume so. Everything feels the same.” She began to undress, and I leaned against the wall as she stripped down to her underwear and slipped one of my shirts over her head.
“You need to see a doctor,” I finally said after she’d crawled between the sheets.
“I’m fine, Cam.”
“Didn’t say you weren’t. You still need to see a doctor.”
She didn’t answer me, just rolled over so she was no longer facing in my direction.
I clenched my hands, opening and closing them over and over again until I had my anger under control. I tried to tell myself that she just had to work out whatever it was she was dealing with, that she’d figure it out and start acting like the woman I’d committed to.
But when I got undressed and climbed into bed beside her, all of my understanding flew out the window as I tried to pull her in against me and she jerked away.
I rolled onto my back and breathed heavily through my nose as I pushed down everything I wished I could say to her.
* * *
When I woke up the next morning, Trix wasn’t in bed with me.
I reached over to her side of the bed and found the sheets were cold. She hadn’t reached for me in the night like she usually did, and I didn’t remember her having any nightmares, either. I lifted my hands and looked at my palms. Shit. They were tore up and oozing from the shovel I’d used the day before. I should have worn a pair of gloves or something.
“Hey, Cam,” Trix’s nan, Amy, called out when I came out of my room a while later. As much as I wanted to lie in bed and sleep the entire day away, I had shit to do. Cars still needed to be fixed and I needed to go see my baby sister at some point.
“Hey, Amy. How’s Poet doin’?” I asked as I grabbed a cup of coffee from the end of the bar. “And where is everyone?”
“He’s being an ornery old goat, but getting better,” she said with a tired smile. “Pretty much everyone headed home today—”
“What?” I snapped, glancing around the room. “You serious?”
“Patrick sent word. Not sure what’s going on, but he told Dragon that it was okay for everyone to split, as long as they stayed vigilant.”
“That’s what they fuckin’ said before,” I mumbled angrily.
“You’ll have to take it up with him.”
“So, why are you still here?” I asked as she pulled her robe tighter around her body.
“Feel better in here with Patrick still laid up,” Amy said with a sheepish smile. “I know everything is probably fine, but I’m not ready to go back to regular life yet.”
“Yeah, I hear you. Trix and I aren’t leavin’ yet, either.” I leaned against the bar top and sipped my coffee, grimacing when my palm brushed against the hot mug.
“What did you do to your hands?” she asked sharply, moving toward me. “Holy hell, Cameron. You idiot!”
I looked at her in surprise as she pulled my hand out in front of me.
“Come on, I’ll clean these up.”
“They’re fine,” I replied, shaking my head. “You seen Trix today?”
Her mouth firmed for a minute before she looked up from my hand.
“She went over to Brenna and Dragon’s.”
“’Course she did,” I grumbled, shaking my head.
She ignored my words, but went silent for a moment before saying, “Come on, kid. I’ll get these hands patched up.”
As soon as my hands were disinfected and wrapped, I made my way to the garage. I had a couple of cars I could work on while the place was mostly empty, so I cranked up some music and started. Just because we were in the middle of shit didn’t mean the work stopped—we needed the legal income.
Running illegal shit may pay the bills, but it didn’t give us clean money to report to the IRS, and fuck if I was going down for tax evasion.
A couple hours later, I heard slow footsteps come into the garage, stopping next to where I was crammed underneath a car.
“What’s up—” I asked, rolling myself out. “Will?”
“Hey,” Will said, his mouth pulling up in a half-grin.
“When’d they let you out?” I asked happily, getting to my feet. “How you doin’?”
“All right,” he replied, closing his eyes as his voice cracked.
“Fuck, man. I’m so sorry about Micky.”
“Yeah,” he whispered huskily, nodding his head and looking over my shoulder. “Yeah.”
“How’s your mom?”
“She’s hangin’ in.” Will’s body began to sway and I took a nervous step toward him.
“Let’s sit down,” I said calmly, waiting for him to get himself together before I led our way into the clubhouse. I knew he wouldn’t want me to help him, but it was fucking slow going as he shuffled toward a chair and sat.
“Shoulda spoke up sooner,” Will stuttered as we settled in. “Shoulda said somethin’ about those boys when I first started buyin’ off them.”
“You couldn’t have known, brother,” I replied calmly, watching him closely.
The day before Gram’s party, we’d all been called in to the clubhouse for a meeting. Turned out that Will knew the people that had been fucking with us. He hadn’t put the two together at first—it had taken him a while to figure it out.
The guys he’d been buying his steroids off of for the past six months had decided to branch out. That’s what they told him. Apparently, they’d thought he had some sort of allegiance to them because they were supplying his ’roids. They’d asked him to help them—be their muscle. It just went to show how completely fucking naïve the boys were.
There was no way Will would ever turn his back on the club. Even if he’d wanted to leave the only family he’d ever known, the brothers would never let him.
When we’d realized that the little shit–the slashed tires, the bike accident and the shady informants–were the work of some college students, we’d been relieved.
Christ.
We’d been fucking ecstatic. We could deal with a group of snot-nosed punks with too much time on their hands and not enough money. They were a fucking joke. All the stupid shit they’d done had made sense—it wasn’t the work of men like us trying to fuck with our heads, it was immature posturing by a bunch of boys.
We’d agreed to handle it after the weekend, no one wanting to mess up Gram’s birthday.
I clenched my hands at my sides. We’d underestimated them, and had no idea how many of them were left to fuck with us.
“You couldn’t have known,” I repeated as Will’s eyes filled with tears and he turned his head away.
“Fuckin’ pain killers,” he mumbled, slowly reaching up to swipe at his eyes.
“Got nothin’ to hide with me,” I said softly, averting my eyes. “You know that.”
“Sorry about that shit in the forecourt,” he said suddenly. “I was bein’ a fuckin’ idiot.”
“You wanna kiss and make up?”
“Fuck you,” he snapped, a small smile pulling at the side of his mouth.
“All forgotten,” I said seriously, leaning back in my chair.
“Can’t believe Micky’s gone,” he mumbled softly after a few moments, his face screwed up in a grimace. “I mean, I saw it. I was right there, but fuck. I see Tommy and I automatically look over his shoulder for Mick.”
I didn’t reply. What was there to say? His baby brother was dead, shot down at fourteen in a war we’d barely known we were fighting.
“My mom’s still pretty out of it—they’re keeping her doped up. What the fuck is she gonna do when she realizes he’s gone? She’s gonna fuckin’ lose it, man.”
“Grease’ll take care of her.”
“Who’s takin’ care of him?”
“She will.”
“That doesn’t even make sense,” he murmured tiredly.
I thought about the space between Trix and I. We weren’t taking care of each other. In my mind, I knew that’s what was supposed to be happening—her leaning on me and me leaning back. That’s what Casper and Farrah were doing. Holding each other up, even though with Lily in the hospital, it meant they only saw each other in passing. But Trix wasn’t doing shit for me, and she wouldn’t let me close enough to help her, either.
“You’ll get it when you find the woman you wanna be with,” I finally said.
“You and Trix okay?”
“Yeah, we’re fine.”
“Where is she?” he asked curiously, looking around the empty clubhouse.
“Over at Dragon’s with Leo.”
“He doin’ okay?”
“Best he can, I guess.”
“Yeah.” Will sighed and then pushed himself slowly to his feet. “Should probably get over there to see him.”
“You sure you can make it?” I asked, only half joking. The guy looked like he was going to fall over.
“Got my mom’s car. I’ll drive,” he replied ruefully before turning to walk away.
I stayed seated as he left, then dropped my head into my hands once I knew I was alone.
I was so fucking tired. So overwhelmed.
I’d been pretty good at tamping all of the shit down tight, getting things done that needed to be done and pushing everything else away. But the longer it went, the harder it was to keep the burn in my chest at a manageable level.
I knew what was going to happen. I was going to snap.
They didn’t call me Hulk for no reason. Poet gave me the nickname when I was just a prospect after a crazy fight I’d had. Another club had come to visit, men we’d been friendly with for longer than I’d been alive at the time. Everything had gone like normal at first. Parties and barbeques and shit, just spending time with guys who held the same beliefs as us.
But there was one fucker, I couldn’t even remember his name anymore, who had it in for me. I was used to getting fucked with—that was the name of the game during the club’s probation period—but that didn’t mean I had to take shit from someone who wasn’t a brother.
I’d kept my mouth shut every time he’d made a fucking mess just to fuck with me, or made comments about what a piece of shit I was. My dad and the other guys were clearly having a good time with the other club’s members, and I wasn’t going to tattle like a pussy. So, it had just built and built, my body growing tighter and tighter as I’d dealt with his shit, until the night he’d had the bitch who’d been sucking him off in the main room of the clubhouse spit his cum on the floor and had loudly ordered me to clean it up.
I beat the hell out of him.
And the two brothers that had tried to step in.
From then on, I was Hulk. Mild-mannered and quiet until I just couldn’t keep that shit locked down any longer.
And I was getting to that point. The point of no return.
I wasn’t going to cry like a baby. I wasn’t going to piss and moan about shit—it wouldn’t change anything.
But all that emotion had to go somewhere. It had to get out somehow. And I knew that soon, it was going to push to the surface. God help the fucker that set it free, because I sure as hell wouldn’t be able to.