Rosie

Age Six

“Why can’t I be like them, Daddy?” I asked, nodding toward the men roaring away on their motorcycles.

Daddy ruffled my hair. “Because even for a Fletcher, six years old is too young to be on a motorcycle,” he said, his voice smiling. “But don’t worry, kid. Soon as you can reach the pedals, you’re on a bike. It’s in your blood.”

I smiled too, but I also frowned because that wasn’t what I meant. “No, why can’t I be in the club too? Like you.” I tugged at the leather he always wore, so much so that it was a part of my daddy, just like his gray eyes and his smile voices. “Is it because I’m a girl?”

Daddy grabbed my chin. His eyes weren’t smiling. “Simple answer? Yeah, baby, it’s ’cause you’re a girl. ’Cause my pops lived in a time where women didn’t have much say in anythin’ and he quite liked it like that.” He paused, and even though he was looking at me, I thought he might’ve been seeing something else. “Still like that now, I guess. Society is moving on in that respect, but our club doesn’t move with society. Our club just is. Not many rules, but the ones we got ain’t gonna change. I’m sure of that. Not while I’m around, at least.” He looked at Cade, who was helping Uncle Steg with a car. “I have a feelin’ your big bro might shake things up a bit, though. Maybe after I’m gone.” There was both a smile and a frown in his voice.

I slipped my hand into his.

Daddy looked down, staring at my teeny tiny hand. He squeezed mine, not too tight, just right, then smiled.

“You’re gonna shake things up more than a bit, my little princess,” he said. “I already know that. Which is why even if the club wasn’t the way it is, I wouldn’t have you wearin’ a cut, following rules. There ain’t many, but there’s enough to tell you to be a certain kind of person. My Rosie will never let anyone tell her what kind of person she is. You’re my caterpillar. You’re gonna grow wings, baby. And you’re gonna soar and be the only version of you in this whole world. I know you’ll be the heart and soul of this club. In more ways than one. But you’re destined to be somethin’ different. Somethin’ bigger.”

* * *

Age Thirty

Something magical happens when you separate from someone you love and it’s someone you shouldn’t. When it’s too totally Fucked Up—Fucked Up requires capitals because of the sheer consistency of that phrase in my life—to ever work. When there’re a million and twelve reasons why it won’t. You know it when you’re together. Even when those little cracks of sunshine peek through the darkness that is un-destined love, disguising themselves as happiness for a fleeting moment, even then you know.

You make your plans to end it. You convince yourself that you’ll be okay. It’ll hurt, of course. It won’t be easy to walk away with a broken heart, but you’ll do it. You’ve broken things before and you’ve survived. You know the pain will be crippling, but you’re also sure you can do it.

Self-preservation and all that.

So you leave.

Walk, run, crawl. Whatever it is that gets you out the door so you can commence the process of repairing yourself. Or re-breaking everything he fixed because you can’t be whole without him; you only know broken, can only survive broken.

Then it happens, once you actually do it. All those reasons, those concrete barriers to true and lasting happiness that had seemed so unsurpassable before they melt away. The reasons, all one million and twelve of them, don’t seem so important anymore.

Because of the magical thing that happens when you leave someone when you don’t want to. When you leave someone because you know it’s ultimately the best thing for both of you, even though in your entire life you’ve always known that the best things for you have never been right for you.

You forget all the bad. The blood trickles down the drain, not leaving a trace of the wounds you sustained while together. Making you forget they even existed, convincing yourself that you imagined them. The only ones left are the new ones, so raw and painful that they have to be real. The ones that, in the empty air of loneliness, cut even deeper than the ones you couldn’t handle before. The ones that made you leave. The ones that you perhaps imagined.

Then it gets even more Fucked Up. You find yourself craving that exquisite pain you had before.

With him.

It had been unbearable, but it was easier to experience than the stifling empty air that yawned ahead of a life without him.

Even if I was never really with him.

“Please fasten your seat belts and set your electronics to airplane mode before stowing them safely,” a professionally pleasant voice requested over the intercom.

That was easy since I’d tossed my phone in a trash can two connections back. Right after I’d bought a one-way ticket out of the country. It wouldn’t do very well disappearing if I had a big fucking homing beacon in my pocket declaring where I was going.

Which was why my phone was buried amongst discarded sodas and soggy airport sandwiches.

Which was why I used my fake passport and stolen credit cards.

This was not my first rodeo.

My brother may have gone legit, and good for him. He could join the fucking Boy Scouts, bathe in his new, almost law-abiding life.

I excelled at breaking the law. When your brother is the president of an—until recently—outlaw motorcycle gang, you found the law didn’t pay much attention to the younger and seemingly harmless little sister. I utilized that, even though it killed me. Kurt Cobain had once said, “Thank you for my tragedy. I need it for my art.”

I couldn’t sing for shit, but I did make an art out of breaking the law and not getting caught. The boys could learn a few things from me, if they decided to go dark side again—unlikely—and listen to a female—even more unlikely.

I was a better criminal than all of them put together.

Not that any of them, including my brother and his club, otherwise known as my family, would ever know. The only thing they’d know was that the flighty and unpredictable Rosie had disappeared.

Again.

Hopefully that would be all they focused on. And hopefully no one inspected my now-abandoned house with a blue light.

They wouldn’t. They were used to this by now.

It wasn’t their first rodeo either.

Sure, Cade would go all stoic, perhaps break a couple of chairs, maybe even send someone to check my usual haunts: Las Vegas, Mexico, the Dominican Republic.

Maybe.

And he wouldn’t be overly worried when no one found me. He knew I could take care of myself. He taught me to. Well, taking care of my physical self. Emotional self was a shit show. Another Fuck-Up.

He’d sit back on his throne and wait. Plan on yelling at me when I eventually got back, toting a new guy or a new tattoo and a thousand new stories. He’d think about that for a hot minute, then focus on the wife he worshipped and the children he adored.

My finger twitched thinking about them. My beautiful niece and nephew.

My throat burned with the knowledge that I wouldn’t be seeing them for a long time, of all the things I’d miss of their lives.

“The crew are pointing out your exits, in case of emergency.”

I didn’t glance up. I’d already selected my exit in case of emergency. It was this fucking plane. If it went down, so be it.

I clenched my fists against the one armrest I had. The asshole in the middle had his meaty clams claiming both on either side, and most of my personal space as well, so his sweaty skin brushed on my bare arm when he moved. Normally, I would’ve called him out. Calling out assholes was my favorite hobby.

But I was kind of in the middle of one of my not-so-favorite hobbies.

Ruining my life.

“Cabin crew, be seated for takeoff,” the harshly accented voice of the captain replaced the soft and calm one of the attendant.

I’ve made a huge mistake. The ultimate Fuck-Up.

I was pushed back in my seat and the roar of the engine filled my ears as we ascended, lifting from American soil.

Well, it was too fucking late now. Besides, the only mistake bigger than leaving was staying.

* * *

Six Months Later

“Una cerveza, por favor.”

I paused, my mind running over the events of the day. The horror. The blood. The death.

Just another day at the office.

“And a shot of Patrón,” I added in English. I could’ve said it perfectly well in Spanish—I was near fluent at that point—but it felt nice to speak my native tongue, a way of holding onto an identity that was slipping away. That I was trying to shed at the same time I was clutching at it to store for later, like a sweater I could slip back into once I’d left this season of my life behind.

But like when you gain a few too many pounds, regardless of if you lose them again, the sweater will never fit right. Just like when you change too much from who you were before—you would never fit back into your old life.

The cold beer slid along the bar, a lemon sticking from the neck of the bottle—not because it was trendy, but because it kept the flies away from the rim. A water glass filled with clear liquid that was so not water joined it.

It was what I liked about this country. They knew how to drink.

Then again, most of the population were living in poverty and subject to political upheavals, corruption and violence—a heavy hand was medically necessary as a prescription to cure this thing called life. A bullet was another, just about as common.

“En la casa,” the bartender told me with a sneer that I think he was trying to fashion into a grin.

On the house.

I raised my brow, not grinning, and slammed cash down on the bar. “Despite the fact that putting anything heavier than a couple of raindrops on the roof of this particular house would cause it to collapse, I pay for my own drinks,” I replied, evenly meeting his lecherous gaze. “Tends to help bartenders punching way above their weight from getting the wrong idea.”

I picked up the glass, letting the harsh liquid slide down my throat and soothe some of the burn that had been present for months, ever since I left.

Since I ran away.

From Amber.

From my family.

My girls.

Him.

But I wasn’t allowed to think of that. Those blue eyes, those sculpted muscles, or that kiss.

That fucking kiss.

No, I had to focus on the shield. That shiny, squeaky-clean piece of metal that was now tarnished and blood-splattered.

Because of me.

I blinked the blue eyes out of my mind and focused on the hardened, muddy brown, and mean ones of the bartender.

The gaze tried to tell me that he wasn’t used to rejection. I had to think the opposite was true. He had a moustache that only Tom Selleck could pull off, and it had pieces of his last meal trapped in the wispy stands. Broken capillaries on his cheeks gave away the fact that he sampled his wares more than a little. Prison tattoos snaked across the soft skin of his arms, exposed by a filthy wife beater, a hairy paunch sticking out from the space between it and his belt buckle.

I wasn’t exactly at my best, in ripped jeans and scuffed combat boots, my tight tank only slightly cleaner than his. I only had a swipe of mascara on my eyes, for business purposes more than anything else, and I’d grown out my chocolate curls to a length that cried out for multiple styling products. Which I didn’t have. They were all littered on my bathroom counter at home. Along with the broken pieces of the old me. My current makeup collection consisted of old mascara, a cracked lipstick and an empty tube of concealer.

The wardrobe situation was even more dire.

So un-Rosie-like.

Which was kind of the point.

But even with all that, I was nothing to sneeze at. I wasn’t afraid to admit that I had a bit of that natural beauty thing going on. On a good day, I had a lot of it going on.

That day, and the ones before, and most likely the ones proceeding it, couldn’t and wouldn’t be characterized as ‘good.’ Happiness made a woman glow with natural beauty; heartbreak and pain did something too. Magnified her beauty in a hard way that almost hurt to look at, but made her more endearing nonetheless.

I snatched the cold bottle of beer, my hands dampening from the condensation running down the chilled glass in the sticky room.

“The right idea,” I clarified, “would be to make sure you and your buddies figure something out.”

I glanced around the dirty and poorly lit room, a fan laboring at the ceiling to circulate the smell of hot body odor and cigarette smoke. Men and a handful of women were scattered around the tables, most lingering in the shadows. The men were more or less different versions of the bartender, some a little more attractive but with a meanness radiating around them that I recognized immediately.

That and the hard and cruel beauty of the women who were with them told me I was in the right place.

“That none of them think I’m looking to exchange free drinks for… anything,” I continued. “That’s if they actually like holding onto their manhood.” I winked at the scowling toad in front of me, whirling on my boot to find shadows of my own.

They’d come.

They always did.

And then my job began.