One
“There are no facts, only interpretations.” Friedrich Nietzsche had said that. A professor who’d been too smart for the school, and too underappreciated by his students, had lectured her on Nietzsche. She’d been neck-deep in her English studies, but those words had resonated, sticking somewhere in the back cobwebs of her mind.
No facts. Only interpretations.
So much of life was all about perspective.
She’d held that sentiment as a child, had carried it with her to college, down deep in the soles of her boots, never expecting to run into it again, in the words of a long-dead philosopher. She’d expected her five years at a major university to change that perspective of hers, to lend new verses to her interpretation. She felt older, felt wiser in the ways that only a young woman of twenty-two can feel and express with the bald honesty of a girl. But she was unchanged.
Because her interpretation – it was tainted with the laugh lines framing Daddy’s eyes, the lipstick kisses Mama pressed to her forehead, Aidan’s rich laughter, the smell of hot asphalt and leather, and the cacophony of tailpipes. All those tailpipes. All those nostalgic, tradition-steeped moments in which she’d felt the earth shake and known she was a part of something that had begun before her, and would endure after.
Her perspective would always be that of Ghost and Maggie Teague’s daughter, Aidan Teague’s little sister. That of a girl raised by outlaws.
And her interpretation was no one’s but her own.
“Nobody’s going to tell me to squeal like a pig, are they?”
Ava rolled her eyes behind her sunglasses. "Only if you ask Troy to play the banjo." She stole a glance at Ronnie as she piloted the truck around the next turn, and watched his Adam's apple work in his throat. "They're bikers, Ron. Not inbred hill people."
His chuckle was nervous. "There's a difference?"
She snorted, but inwardly she wondered how he'd ever survive the first handshake with her dad. Ghost could take a joke, but there were some things you just didn't say to the VP of an outlaw motorcycle club.
“They’re just regular guys,” she said, and for the moment, believed it. She came to a halt at the next red light, behind a minivan with a stick figure family decal in the back window: a dad, a mom, a boy with a little stick figure baseball glove and a girl in a stick figure ballerina tutu. There was a dog, and a cat, too. “They’re my family,” she said, smiling to herself as she traced the decal with her eyes. She thought the things were more than a little ridiculous, but they held a certain charm; the people inside that minivan were proud to be related to one another.
She turned to glance at Ronnie, at his dark gleaming hair falling across his forehead where his gel had given up, his narrow aquiline nose, the sharp, cutting blue of his eyes. He had the most generous mouth for a man, his lips full and always upturned in the corners, touched with laughter. He was, quite honestly, a dreamboat.
That’s what her grandmother would have said. Grammie Lowe, Maggie’s mother, had been repulsed by Ghost, and all the MC boys, from the get go. “Trash,” she always said, even within Ava’s hearing, something which Maggie and her mother had fought about endlessly. “They’re Ava’s family,” Maggie had hissed. “Don’t you dare try to turn her against them, or make her feel ashamed of where she comes from.”
Maggie had never felt shame, not once. Not when she’d been barely legal and climbing onto the back of an outlaw’s black Harley. Not when that same outlaw had presented her with the son by his first wife, and asked if she would help him raise it. Not when she’d found herself pregnant. Ava had no illusions about the timing of her conception; her mother didn’t believe in lying within the family. Ava knew she’d come along, and then had come the diamond and the wedding bells.
But Grammie, she had never stopped grieving. “I raised you better than this,” Ava had heard her tell Maggie once. And because she couldn’t influence her daughter anymore, Grammie was going to try and guide her granddaughter’s romantic endeavors. Grammie would have loved Ronnie. She would have hugged him, bussed his cheek, and asked Ava when the wedding was.
Ronnie, sun-gilded in the passenger seat of her truck, filled out his Dockers and Izod polo with the lean musculature of the tennis player that he was. Even off the court, he possessed a lithe grace, an athletic way of moving that was natural and effortless as breathing. That was where she’d met him the first time: on the court. He’d played for UGA’s college team and Ava’s friend, Sierra, had dragged her to a match one afternoon with the intent of spying on one of Ronnie’s “super hot” teammates, a curly-headed senior who looked like one of the kids in One Direction. Ava hadn’t understood the attraction – she liked her men post-pubescent, thank you very much – but on her way to the concession stand, she’d bumped into Ronnie. Literally. He’d spilled her soda all down the front of her sweater when they collided, and he’d spent fifteen minutes apologizing and awkwardly trying to help her mop up the spill without touching her boobs – a feat that had proved impossible.
He’d blushed, those aristocratic cheekbones of his coloring, and he’d finally asked her if he could have her number. As a way to make this up to her, he’d assured. He had to be on the court in five minutes, but would she please stay and watch him play? And would she please let him take her out to dinner and buy her a new sweater to replace the one he’d ruined?
Her sweater had been cheap and machine washable, but something about the afternoon sun haloing his dark head – something about the unexpected flutter in her chest when his fingers grazed her breast – had her nodding and agreeing. She hadn’t been on a date in – ever. She hadn’t slept with anyone since – No. No, she couldn’t think about that. Those old wounds would rip open again and start bleeding if she dared to let her thoughts wander back to the last time. The very last time. How did the saying go: the best way to get over a guy was to get under another one?
Ronnie had proved to be ace on the court, charming at dinner, and competent in the bedroom. She hadn’t thought, at first, that she could force herself through the motions without bursting into tears, but then he’d caressed the back of her neck and told her how beautiful she was; he’d trailed his lips down her throat and sucked, so gently, at her collarbone. Slowly, slowly, he’d warmed her skin, every inch of it, with his mouth. And when he’d been inside her, she hadn’t been so sad – no, not really. Time was helping. Time would keep helping, of that she was sure. In Ronnie, she’d found a chance for normal, for healthy. She didn’t want to lose that chance, which was why, before she started grad school at UT in the fall, and before he made any decisions about his own master’s plans, she wanted him to come home and meet her family. She needed him to, really, if she was honest, with a sort of desperation that sent warning signals flashing in her head.
He watched her now, his nerves plain in the pale rigidity of his handsome face, and she offered him the warmest smile she could muster given her own nerves.
“They’re a part of me,” she said. “If you can love me, then the people who raised me can’t be so awful, can they?”
He tried to return her smile, but his mouth lacked its usual quick grace. He swallowed and she saw his throat work. “No, they can’t.” He glanced out through the windshield. “The light changed.”
“Oh.” She faced forward again and slid her foot off the brake. The minivan was accelerating ahead of her, its stick figure family shrinking down to white squiggles against the glass.
Bye, little family, she thought. My stick figure family would eat you guys for breakfast. She grinned, allowing herself that one little moment of outlaw-reveling, then she shoved it back where it belonged, well beneath this new college graduate version of herself. The Ava Teague who’d come home this time was a stronger, more stoic, better educated version. She would live up to that. Even if this city was electrifying her in the way that only home could.
Home.
Knoxville, Tennessee. Between Interstate 40 and the Tennessee River, it flourished beneath a veneer of Southern pride and university spirit, lying in the shadows of the blue humped backs of the Appalachians. It had the privilege of being both a bustling city, and a college town. There was orange everywhere. A bright Vols orange. The football games pulled in a certain amount of tourists, as did the vibrant bar scene, the shopping, the restaurants, and the gleaming black river that wound through the Tennessee hills like a heavy cottonmouth snake.
Ava cracked the windows and breathed deep. “Smell that,” she said.
“Fish and river water?” Ronnie asked.
Undeterred, she shook her head and kept smiling. “That’s home.”
And then the most magical sound reached her ears: bikes.
Roaring up from behind, riding the dividing lines between the lanes, she spotted a Harley in each side mirror. The bikes moved up alongside the truck, their riders covered in denim and old cotton and leather. Through her window, she recognized the rider nearest her. He had long legs encased in bootcut jeans, dirty Timberlands, two sleeves of tattoos, their bright colors burnished by suntan. She recognized his dark stubble, the dark locks of hair that curled from beneath his helmet, the black sunglasses, that smirking half-smile he wore all the time. In his black leather Lean Dogs cut, he looked almost medieval, a warrior of a sacred order that recognized neither time nor progress. Militaristic, dangerous. There was a defiance there, a proud middle finger thrust skyward at anyone willing to glance his way.
Brat, Ava thought affectionately. Because that’s what he was, under the threatening façade. Her big brother Aidan was a brat-and-a-half.
He gave her a sunglasses-and-stubble smirk before he surged ahead, and slid into her lane in front of her. The other rider joined him in perfect unison; they rode in formation so much the bikes were a part of them; they dove and swooped like swallows, making the heavy-bodied Harleys look slick as imported crotch rockets. Beside Aidan rode his best friend, Tango. She recognized his slender, dancer-like build, the tats on the backs of his fingers. Tango – Kevin Estes, in reality – had come into the club during his sophomore year of high school. He’d dropped out, toughened up, and patched in. His past was a study in tragedy, so he’d ditched it, and thrown himself into the MC. He and Aidan had been inseparable friends since they were sixteen.
It took Ava a moment to realize that Ronnie was having a minor panic attack in the passenger seat. “What the hell? Are they trying to get themselves killed? They almost ran you off the road!”
“That’s our welcoming committee,” she explained.
“Yeah.” He tugged at his seatbelt, pulling it tight across his chest. “Some welcome.”
Ava felt guilty about the note of fear shivering in his voice – honest, she did – but she was flooded with that old exuberance she could never contain. The growling of the bike engines, the sight of the running black dog patch in the center of the boys’ cuts, the way the other drivers cast dark looks toward the tatted riders she knew and loved so well – all of it brought a sick satisfaction boiling up inside her, filling her like steam, leaving her warm and proud and excited like a little girl. It was a secret world, that of the one-percenter, the outlaw biker, the true legit MC. Ninety-nine percent of all bikers were law-abiding, most of them weekend road warriors, motorcycle enthusiasts, mechanics, midlife crisis victims looking for an outlet. All of it was very legal and above board. Bikers of all ilk earned sideways stares, but only one percent of them had earned the right to be feared. Only one percent had the right to wear three-piece patches on their backs. The Lean Dogs Motorcycle Club was one of the largest in the world – a counterculture giant of business, both legal and illegal. An international force to be reckoned with. The thing that made petty thieves and small-time street gangs shake in their sneakers. The feds couldn’t shut them down; sure, a guy got collared here and there, but the club itself survived. Thrived. Not the FBI, ATF, Interpol, CIA, or any domestic law enforcement agency had been able to crack the brotherhood.
Ava was insanely proud of that, because she had too much of her rebellious mother in her. And because she had too much of her vice president father in her, she reveled in the counterculture royalty of her roots.
Oh, this wasn’t supposed to be happening. She had a college degree! She was getting her master’s in creative writing! She wasn’t just a biker girl, not anymore.
She envisioned her mother’s face, framed in her thick waves of honey hair, her eyes hazel and bright and bracketed by lines from the sun and the hard years loving an outlaw. “You can add new parts, baby,” she imagined Maggie saying. “But you can’t lose the parts of you that were already there.”
That was most likely true. Maggie tended to be right about most things.
Ava lifted a finger and pointed through the windshield. “The one on the left’s my brother, Aidan,” she explained to Ronnie. “The one on the right is his friend, Tango.”
“Tango?” She saw his incredulous expression from the corner of her eye. “His name is Tango?”
She’d been getting that reaction since the first grade, when she’d been assigned a family portrait, and she’d labeled her family members. “Ghost,” as the other kids had explained, was not a real name. She’d burst into tears then. Now, she felt only a press of heat beneath the skin of her face.
“That’s his club nickname,” she said. “Not his real name.”
“So ‘Aidan’ is your brother’s nickname?”
“No, that’s his real name.”
“So just some of them have nicknames?”
It shouldn’t have – his curiosity was valid – but the question grated against her nerves. Her fingers tightened on the wheel as she followed the boys through the next turn and down the long stretch of Industrial Road. “Well, obviously, when you meet Ratchet, it’s safe to assume that’s not the name his mother gave him.”
She felt his gaze against the side of her face. “Yeah…okay…”
Ava sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m just…” She gestured to the road in front of them, the bikers leading their way.
“Excited,” he said, some of the hurt leaving his voice. “I get it.”
She glanced over, searching his handsome features for some sign that he understood the tumult of emotions rolling through her. “You do?”
He offered her a quick smile, tight with nerves. “Yeah, I do. It’s been a while since you were home.”
“It has.” A shiver stole through her as she faced the road again. This familiar, well-traveled road.
She’d ridden her green Huffy bicycle down this road. She’d stood at the edge of this road, hand shading her eyes from the relentless summer sun, as the old cracked pavement leapt against the soles of her feet and rang with the thunder of the approaching phalanx of bikes. She’d thrown water balloons at passing windshields with Aidan and Tango on this road. She’d walked down the white line of this road, in the dark, her hand dwarfed inside the big tan hand of the man she’d loved. She’d learned to drive on this road. This road – maybe even more than the road where she lived – had raised and shaped her. It was threaded through her veins, stamped in her DNA.
They passed a clump of rangy pine trees, their bases tangled with honeysuckle, and then the entire right side of the road opened up, the sprawling complex of buildings along the river unfurling toward the water, toward the cross street, a city unto itself.
“There.” Ava reached across the cab of the truck and pointed.
“What?”
“That’s Dartmoor Incorporated.”
“And that is…?”
“The heart of the MC.”
“Oh,” Ronnie said, and clearly, he didn’t understand the importance of it. Laying eyes on Dartmoor didn’t tighten his chest and shorten his breath.
Perspective, Ava reminded herself. From where she was sitting, the parking lots and industrial steel buildings looked like the Holy Land.
“The Knoxville chapter was the first US chapter,” she said. “The club started in London, and this was the first in the States. It’s the largest chapter, too, in the whole country.”
Ronnie said, without emotion, “Okay.”
Aidan and Tango slowed, and swept through the main gates in an expert swooping turn, gears growling, the bikes dipping dramatically as their weight shifted.
Ava hit her blinker and followed them, into the place that meant so much to her. To an outsider, the maze of businesses and building complexes would have been a labyrinth. Ava navigated the avenues of Dartmoor out of old habit, not needing the escort, but following it anyway.
At last they pulled up in front of the main clubhouse, a place that conducted no business but the innermost, most secret MC business. It was part sacred chapel, part home away from home, part barracks, and part nightclub. Its wood siding was painted a pleasant gray, its entrance double wood doors with glass inlay ovals; a low bed of smooth concrete took the place of a stoop. A wide portico offered shade, and beneath it lay a sequence of round iron café tables and park benches set up amongst heavy potted urns and a raised bed of railroad timbers filled with St. John’s wart. A four-by-six wood sign, painted white and emblazoned with the Lean Dogs running dog silhouette hung between two front windows, framed above and below with makeshift wood top and bottom rockers announcing the club’s name and its location of Tennessee. The house looked neither homey nor businesslike, but some hybrid of private and industrial.
The boys backed their Harleys into the row of bikes that flanked one long side of the clubhouse.
Ava put her F-150 into one of the designated parking spaces between her mother’s black Caddy and Bonita James’s Expedition. By the time she’d killed the engine and disengaged her seatbelt, she realized she was shaking.
Ronnie was shaking too, she noted, as she watched his hands fumble with his seatbelt latch. “Ava,” he said, voice thick, like his throat was clogged. “Please tell me these guys aren’t going to rape me and throw me in the river.”
“They’re not,” she said, rolling her eyes.
And then someone rapped hard on her window and she reached for the door release with a giddy smile.
Aidan had ditched his helmet and pushed his hands through his hopeless, dark curly hair. Behind his shades, the shapes of his eyes were just visible; Ava knew them to be large and dark and full of haughty mischief, his brows round and prone to lifting one at a time, little wrinkles sprouting in his forehead that she liked to tease him about, because he was thirty now, and the age was starting to show.
He stepped back as her door opened, his grin wicked and sharp. Her ladykiller brother, with the dimples and the bristled jaw and the physique he carved into shape with rigorous weight-lifting.
“Hey,” he said as her boots hit the pavement. “I’m looking for my sister. She’s about this tall” – he held his hand a scant three feet off the ground – “and she’s four-eyed and got pimples and–”
“An asshole brother!” Ava finished, and launched herself into his arms.
He smelled like leather, and wind, and that cheapass cologne he soaked himself in every morning. He hugged her tight, lifted her feet off the ground and spun her in a circle, like he’d done when she was just a baby. It still felt like flying, the world spinning past over his shoulder where she had her face buried in the soft worn leather of his cut. The edges of his patches were rough against her hands, the threads of the embroidery silky under the pads of her fingers. He’d hand-stitched these patches onto his cut, the night he’d been patched and dropped the moniker of prospect. Ava had been a witness to his first moments as a full-fledged member, a raucous party totally unsuitable for a kid her age. He was solid in her embrace, the infallible beastly brother she’d relied on her entire life.
She was laughing as he set her back on her feet and stood back, studying her with brows leaping over the frames of his sunglasses.
His hands settled at his hips, his wallet chain dancing against his thigh, throwing glimmers of light down onto the pavement. “What the fuck are you wearing?”
Self-conscious now, Ava smoothed her hands down her H&M ensemble. At UGA, she’d fast realized that if she wanted to be taken seriously by her fellow English majors, she needed to dress the part. She’d packed her own wardrobe in bins beneath her bed, and slowly acquired a whole new one. Today, she wore a flouncy yellow skirt that hit just above the knee, sleeveless white blouse, and cropped denim vest over it, brown wedge sandals that gave her feet a pretty, arched shape. The straps just covered the tiny tattoo on the top of her left foot.
“This is a cute outfit,” she defended, tugging her vest straight.
“I like it,” Tango said, joining them. “It’s got that whole innocent college girl thing going on.”
Aidan thumped him in the arm, and he grinned. “Hey, doll,” he said to Ava, and pulled her into a fast, brotherly hug. In her ear, as she pulled back, he whispered, “My question is, what the fuck did you bring with you?”
Ronnie! She’d forgotten he was with her, for a whole thirty seconds.
She turned, and saw that he had his door open, but only one foot on the pavement, his other leg, and all the rest of him still inside the truck. The breeze tumbled over the door and stirred his soft dark hair against his forehead. Sunlight caught at the fear in his eyes; if Ava could see it, no doubt Aidan and Tango could too. She hated that; she didn’t want the guys to know he was frightened right off the bat. He wouldn’t stand a chance, then.
She wasn’t sure how to play this, exactly – she’d never brought a civilian home to meet the family – but she was pretty sure walking over to Ronnie, taking his hand and walking him back would only make the situation worse.
“Ron, come meet my brother,” she called.
Ronnie climbed out; his shoulders heaved as he took a deep breath.
Ava risked a glance toward the two Dogs beside her, and saw them wearing identical smirks. She kicked Aidan in the shin before Ronnie got around the tailgate, then pasted a wide smile to her face. She reached for his hand when he drew up alongside her, pulled him in closer to her.
“Ronnie” – her voice was artificially sweetened – “this is my brother, Aidan, and his best friend, Tango. Boys” – a sharp glance between the two – “this is my boyfriend” – little squeeze for Ron’s hand – “Ronnie.”
“Boyfriend,” Aidan repeated. He pushed his shades up into his hair and gave Ronnie a narrow-eyed up/down look. “For how long?”
“Almost a year.” Ava felt Ronnie’s palm grow damp against hers. She knotted her fingers through his. Be brave, she willed. He’s not that scary.
Aidan put his tongue against the inside of his cheek, an old childhood gesture he’d never outgrown. His thinking face, she called it. He glanced at her. “Do the folks know?”
So that’s how he’d play it, then: let Dad be the bad guy and reserve the right to trounce Ronnie if he so much as slipped up. Sneak attack style.
Sometimes, Ava wondered if that was his true nature, or if he just thought that was how one-percenter big brothers were supposed to act.
“Mom knows.” She kicked her chin up. “She can’t wait to meet him.”
Aidan scratched at the stubble on his chin and looked like he hid a smile. “Oh, I bet.”
She glared at him. Stop being an ass.
His eyes laughed back at her. Try and make me.
Tango, deciding to be the buffer, as he’d always been, stepped between them, and extended a hand to Ronnie. “Good to meet you, man.”
Ronnie, his always smiling mouth tucked down at the corners, regarded Tango’s tattooed fingers a moment too long before he finally accepted the shake. “Yeah. You too.”
Tango noticed the snub, the reticence. He sent Ava a dancing glance that suggested he’d have plenty to say about all this later.
But he said, “The girls are inside, getting ready.”
Ava let out a deep, suddenly-exhausted exhale. “Good. I’m sure they could use my help.”
Aidan dug a crumpled pack of smokes from his back pocket. “Ronnie, what do you know about hanging crepe streamers?”
“Later, guys,” Ava said, firmly, one last scowl for her brother. She tugged at Ronnie’s hand, and started for the clubhouse door.
“I’m sorry about him,” she whispered. “He won’t ever get over the fact that I’m not twelve anymore.”
Ronnie didn’t respond.
The line of bikes, she noticed as they walked, had been reinforced. Out of town members had come for tonight’s celebration; by the end of the night, at least four chapters would be in attendance.
With her free hand, she shaded her eyes against the slanting sunlight, and thought she spotted a familiar bike. One that didn’t belong to any of the Knoxville guys, but one she knew well. One she’d been on the back of more times than she could count…
“Oh, hey,” Aidan called from behind her.
She paused and half-turned. “What?”
Aidan’s expression lost its teasing aggression and became serious, unusually so. “NOLA’s in the house.”
New Orleans. The city that was the birthplace, former and current home of…
She sucked in a breath through her teeth, unprepared for the sudden ferocious stab of pain in her belly. The hurt that came spilling out of her heart and began to boil in her insides. Heartbreak was never cured; it just went into remission. And here it came roaring back, leaving her feverish and weak and unable to move in the bright afternoon sun.
It took her three tries before she wet her lips and said, “So what do I care?”
“No one else was going to warn you.” Because the club didn’t worry about the hurt feelings of one member’s daughter. No amount of personal bullshit could touch the MC…well, it wasn’t supposed to, anyway. Aidan, as he studied her, became almost sympathetic, his features tight and somber as he gauged her reaction. “But I thought you should know that he’s here.”
She nodded. “Thanks.” Swallowed hard, her throat dry and sticking together. She felt the pavement shift under her feet; felt her lungs contract and her face grow hot.
She hadn’t counted on this, not at all. No part of her coming-home fantasies had included this kind of shock.
Clueless, Ronnie fiddled her with hand and said, “Who’s here?”
“Mercy,” she whispered, and just saying his name sent the waves of pain heaving through her again.
“Who?”
“Just…Mercy.”
Her ultimate ruination.