Blade

 

I called Robby the next morning and told him what we were doing, explaining that I was going to bring Lucy in after she went to see her father. He was fine with it. By the time she woke up, everything had been handled. I ran her to the clubhouse so she could get ready and so she could grab her things from her room. If everything went well, I hoped we would be grabbing the rest of her things from her parents’ house before the end of the day.

 

She showed me how to get to their neighborhood. It was amazing to me that we had only lived a few miles apart in the city, but we lived in different worlds. I wasn’t surprised by her parents’ neighborhood. The lawns were neatly trimmed, and all of the houses seemed uptight and almost clenched together, as if they were terrified of their neighbors. There were no porches and no signs of life out in front of the properties we passed.

 

There weren’t even any sidewalks. I knew that in my neck of the woods, we were also guilty of focusing most of our outdoor activities behind our houses, but at least we had sidewalks in case anyone needed to be outside. Somehow, despite our fences and overgrown hedgerows, our houses felt more connected to one another than the ones around her old neighborhood. It could have been that my neighbors’ houses sprawled across their properties, making them literally closer to one another.

 

All the houses surrounding her parents’ house were boxes. Everything was square or rectangular and perfectly contained in its own space. Nothing seemed out of place. It was exactly the kind of neighborhood where I would have expected to find the kind of parents who would disown their daughter for being pregnant.

 

We pulled up in her driveway, which looked like every other driveway on her street, and I parked in front of the brick two-car garage with the white wooden doors. I cut off the engine, and the silence of her neighborhood came crashing in on us.

 

I was used to the city noises of traffic, sirens, and yard work. There was nothing where we were. It was a void.

 

“Do you have your phone on you?” I asked her as she unbuckled.

 

“I do, but you’re staying in the car. You got it?” she reminded me forcefully.

 

“I’m just saying, in case you need me to come in or get the hell out of Dodge, okay,” I told her, holding my hands up to show her I didn’t mean anything by it.

 

“Okay.” She took a couple of deep breaths.

 

“It’ll be all right. I can come in if you need me to.”

 

“No, that’s not it. I have a few questions before I go in, things that have been bothering me,” she said, turning around to face me in her seat.

 

“Okay.” My stomach sank. I knew it was only a matter of time before she started asking about the MC. But if she was going to present us to her dad, she had to have her story straight before she went to him. Otherwise, he was liable to eat her alive.

 

My eyes glanced behind her at the perfectly manicured lawn. I wondered how many people had disappeared from this neighborhood without a trace, and without so much as an investigation. I was willing to bet their dirty secrets were juicier than mine.

 

“There are some things I’ve wanted to know, but I haven’t wanted to ask. My father is going to bring these things up when I tell him I’m dating a prominent member of an MC called the Vicious Thrills, especially when I tell him that you go by Blade, which isn’t even your real name,” she said.

 

“Right. Well, shoot. I’m an open book,” I told her.

 

“First, what’s your full name? I know your name is Devin, but what’s your last name? I should know this if I’m dating you.”

 

“My real name is Devin Shaw. Not nearly as impressive as Blade,” I told her.

 

“Shaw,” she repeated, committing it to memory.

 

I wondered if her father really needed to know all of that. If he were as powerful as she assumed he was, having my full name gave him more power over me.

 

“And he’s going to ask this because it’s the stereotype: is the MC in on any underground stuff, any illegal stuff?” she asked.

 

I looked at her for a brief second before answering. I didn’t want to lie to her, but she didn’t need to go in to talk to her father and tell him that we were in on weapons, drugs, and other underhanded business. She didn’t need to know all of that, even though I was sure there was no way she didn’t see that I lived well beyond my means as the owner of a little strip club that was really never that busy.

 

“I mean, we’ve been in a handful of bar fights and things like that,” I said.

 

“But nothing major? And let me guess, you got your name for cutting people in fights, kind of like Hatchet with his axes,” she said, taking the bait perfectly.

 

A lie was not a good place to start the new stage in our relationship, but it seemed to be the only way to ensure future stages, when I would get the chance to come clean about some of the things we really did.

 

“Right, that’s it,” I told her.

 

She narrowed her eyes at me, as if to say she didn’t believe me, but we didn’t have time to go over everything in detail either. She was forced to accept my answers and move on. I was thankful for that. I didn’t want to tell her about my time inside or about shanking someone while I was in. That was really how I got my name. Luckily, the guy I had shanked kept his mouth shut, allowing me to get out without any extra time tacked onto my sentence, but everyone already knew it was me.

 

My stories were stories for another time, and there were plenty of them. I had been a member of the MC for over a decade, and in that time, I had done everything I could to move up in rank. That meant taking a lot of risks and pulling a lot of shit that should have landed me behind bars for a long, long time.

 

I sighed. “You got it?” I asked her.

 

“So, you guys run your own businesses on the side?” she asked.

 

“Yeah, we’re a group of business owners, and we typically provide work for our younger members,” I said.

 

“But you don’t. You don’t employ anyone associated with the Thrills, and I’m the only one working for Robby who’s part of it,” she said. “Robby told me Hammer used to work for him, but that’s it. I haven’t heard of anyone else working for him. What do some of the other guys do?” she asked. I could hear the concern in her voice, and I knew how it looked.

 

It looked like what it was, and that was why we had so much trouble with the law. We were funneling money for the MC through our other companies, through our jobs. I didn’t have time to explain it to her.

 

“Just tell him that’s what we do,” I said. “I don’t have time to make it sound more legit than it does.”

 

She looked at me, shocked.

 

“Don’t act surprised. We work to fund the MC, and occasionally our companies employ some of our people to help them out. For the most part we try to keep the companies separate from the MC so the cops don’t think it’s some sort of money laundering ring,” I explained, taking a shot at making it sound less suspicious.

 

“Okay, that’s what I’ll go with, but you and I are going to have to talk at some point. I want to understand what’s really going on with you,” she said.

 

“Okay, no problem. Good luck with your dad.” I looked away as she opened the door and climbed out of the car.

 

Sometimes it was hard to imagine that someone as colorful and independent as Lucy came from such a sterile, lifeless part of town, but there were other times when she revealed just how sheltered she was. I had to remind myself that my world was still new to her. There were bound to be things she just didn’t understand. The way we did business was one of those things.

 

I looked out the passenger side window to watch her take the steps to the front door of the brick house where her parents lived. There were two white columns in front, at the top of the stairs. I watched until she disappeared between them. It looked like some kind of government building or part of a prep school. Everything was boxed in and symmetrical. If there was any life here, it was contained inside, like a prison.

 

She had asked some pretty serious questions before going inside, and I knew she wasn’t going to just drop it when she came back out. She was going to get her answers from me one way or another. I didn’t know how to tell her that we were involved in so many things.

 

We ran drugs and weapons. We smuggled things in for our members who were on the inside. There was an element of prostitution. I wasn’t too terribly proud of it, but it happened. We also provided security, intimidation, and muscle for private citizens and other local organizations. We had even been known to carry out hits for the right price. None of our muscles or hitmen had street names to indicate what they did for us. We felt it was safer that way.

 

There was so much she didn’t know, so much she didn’t need to know, but if we were going to be talking about making our relationship last for the long haul, I was eventually going to have to come clean about everything. I dreaded it. My only hope was that she would be able to keep her mind open to accept everything I had to tell her without judgment.

 

I was confident that things in her neck of the woods weren’t as perfect and clean as everyone probably preferred to pretend. I was sure if anyone did any digging, they would have found plenty of dirt on people like her father. I didn’t know any successful businessmen who didn’t have some skeletons in the closet, just waiting to be found. I wondered what his looked like.

 

I cranked the car back up. The summer sun was starting to heat the day, and I didn’t know how much longer I was going to have to sit outside in the car without the air on. Plus, having it on meant I could get out of there if I needed to, with or without Lucy. Just as she didn’t know what to expect when she started asking questions, I didn’t know what to expect sitting outside in their driveway.

 

The air came on, and I continued to wait. There was no way it was going well in there. If he’d kicked her out of the house for getting pregnant by a married man, he was going to flip his lid when she walked in there to tell him she was living with and fucking a biker who went by the name Blade. My name was pretty obvious, I thought. I cut people, and I apparently did it enough to get a nickname based on slicing folks up with knives or shivs. Surely her father was experienced enough in the world to know exactly what was going on as soon as his daughter started explaining everything to him.

 

I hoped he didn’t try to blow my cover and expose my lies when he heard what she had to tell him about me or the MC.