TEN
Sugar
Not many people's memories stretch back to the time before they first went to school. And even if they did, it wasn't usually vividly.
But for me, that day was in bright, Technicolor detail.
I remembered the smell of my ma's cigarettes - both offensive and comforting because of its familiarity - from her place in the front seat of the car, window cracked for the smoke to sift out, but it didn't work. It never worked. I was in a booster in the back, the material torn and stained, most of the damage done before my ma had gotten it secondhand at the thrift shop.
I remembered the look of her hair, dark and piled on the top of her head, dancing in the wind as we drove. And drove. And drove. I fell asleep in daytime and woke up at night, being thrust a McDonald's box over the front seat. And for the next however long, I was kept half-occupied by the allure of half-warm French fries and deep-fried nuggets.
I remembered the silence. The complete and utter silence on the drive. Which wasn't normal. My ma was always talking - to me or on the phone, the long cord half-wrapping around every surface in our apartment as she did so while she cleaned or cooked or simply paced around. The only time she was ever quiet was when she was sleeping.
I felt it then. In my belly. A swirling, uncomfortable sensation that had me pulling my pillow out of the bag piled beside me, and cuddling it to my chest, breathing in the smell of our house.
The bags were another thing.
There were several of them, all full almost to bursting.
With my clothes.
Shoes.
Toys.
Blankets.
Snacks.
We finally stopped what felt like days later, my ma sitting there with the engine cut for a long time before I started whining about my butt hurting from sitting so long.
Looking back, she had been debating it, her decision.
And the sound of a three-year-old me doing what three-year-olds do best - whine - seemed to be what she needed to make her climb out, move around the car, and finally pull me out of my seat, putting me down on the grown where feeling slowly came back to my butt and legs as she reached inside, grabbing all the bags, hauling them onto her small shoulders, grabbing my hand, then leading me a short walk down the street.
Then into a building.
There were smells here too that were familiar. More cigarettes. The ones like my ma smoked in the car. Then there were those funny cigarettes too. The ones that made my nose curl up when my ma would have her friend over at night and smoke in the living room, laughing and wrestling. And then there were the drinks that my ma and her friends always liked. But it smelled stronger here. It made the air harder to breathe.
Everything else, though, was new.
Namely, the leather-clad men scattered all around, loud, laughing, yelling, snatching the women who were walking around with next to no clothes on.
"Well, well," a man said, stopping in front of my mother. "It's Candy. Where you been, sweet stuff? I missed that eager mouth of yours."
"I'm here to see Phil."
"Oh, fuck Phil. Phil has whiskey dick tonight. Take me on instead."
"I'm here to see Phil," she reiterated, dragging me forward. The movement caught the man's attention, his gaze going down to me, then shooting back up to my mother.
"Right. Right. Well, fucking glad I ain't Phil tonight."
"Real nice, ya bastard," my mom called at his back as he left.
"Candy?" another voice called not a minute later, making my mom turn.
This time, the man noticed me right off.
And, in turn, I noticed him too.
Tall, wide-shouldered, long dark-haired, gray-eyed.
"No fucking way. I always wore a rubber," he said to my ma who shrugged her small shoulders.
"Shit happens, Phil."
"And I'm hearing this now because?"
"Because I'm done," she said simply as I looked up at the man, guessing he was why we came all this way as I clutched my Happy Meal toy in my hand.
"You're done."
"Yeah, I'm done. Three years. And all I'm doing is fucking up. And I can't turn shit around because I gotta be around for him all the time. I'm done. You're up."
"I'm up?" he asked, lips tipping up as his gaze went to me for a second. "You fuckin' serious? I look like daddy material to you?"
"I look like mommy material to you?" she shot back.
"Got a point there," he agreed. "The fuck am I supposed to do with him?"
"He ain't rocket science, Phil. He's a person. You feed him. You clean him. You teach him shit. Put him to bed. Shower, rinse, repeat until he can take care of himself."
"And you?"
"What about me?"
"You're just washing your hands?"
"Look, I love the kid. I do. I love him too much to keep him. So, you need help here and there. You got a long job. You get pinched. My number and address is in the bag with his snacks and information about his doctor and stuff."
"Does he have a name?"
"Of course he has a fucking name. He's not a couch."
"You gonna tell me it, or am I supposed to guess?"
"You haven't changed a fucking bit," my ma said, shaking her head at him, but she was smiling. "His name is Sean."
Then, ten minutes later, my ma stooped down, threw her arms around me, and squeezed me until I was sure I was going to pop.
And she walked away.
"Alright, kid. Honest to fuck here, don't know what to do with you," Phil said, left standing there holding all my bags, looking as lost as I suddenly felt. "But figure it is late for little shits like you, so come on. I'll show you to the bed."
That was what he did.
He led me to a room with a bed and a dresser, pulled off my shoes, put me on the bed, shook my toys out of a bag, and left me there.
He was gone long enough for me to eventually fall asleep.
The next thing I remembered was waking up crying for my ma.
He came walking in to that, big body looking almost fearful at the sight of three-year-old tears.
Sitting down off the end of the bed, he reached for me with hands the size of dinner plates, pulling me awkwardly onto his knee, then wiping at my cheeks with the end of his leather cut, the material not absorbent, so all it did was smear them around more.
"Alright look, kid," he said in a grown man voice, the sound somehow breaking through the pit of sadness inside me, making my cries stop even if the tears kept coming. "I don't know what I'm doing here. Don't know dick about raising no kids. So you're just going to have to work with me here. You need something, you tell me. No more of this crying shit. Don't know what to do with that. Gotta be a man, now, Sean. Ain't nobody around to baby you no more. But you do that, you man up and work with me, we could have a good thing going."
I couldn't claim to know exactly what he was saying to me. But something got through. The tone, maybe some of the words, maybe just an innate understanding that this man, he was all I had now, and I needed to do what he needed from me. Because there was no one else to turn to.
I never cried again.
"That's the saddest thing I think I've ever heard," Peyton cut me off, eyes big and sad, but not watering. I figured she wasn't exactly the kind of chick who cried easily.
"It's life," I corrected. "Plenty of kids have it worse than I had it. Sure, I never got to have someone singing me to sleep or kissing my knee when I scraped it all to shit, but I had a family of sorts."
They were that, too.
A family.
All these men who seemed to take my presence there with a grain of salt. Some ignored me. Others treated me much the way my father did. The clubwhores occasionally pinched my cheeks and told me how handsome I was before they got dragged away. Other than them, I didn't see another woman for years.
About a year after I moved into the compound, one of my father's buddies had a similar drop-in from an old fling, the woman loud and nasty, throwing a dirty kid at Dwayne, my father's friend. Unlike me, he didn't come with his bags, with his toys, with his favorite things. He barely came with clothes that fit him.
So when he was put down on the floor, his eyes locking on me, big and fearful as I remembered feeling the first night I was at the compound, I walked over toward him, patting him on the shoulder the way all the men did.
"You're a man now," I remembered telling him. "So we can't cry," I added, leading him away from the scene his mother was making, swinging, slapping, spitting at Dwayne who seemed too shocked by the situation to do anything but prevent himself from being hit. "Don't worry," I added as I led him down the hall toward my room. "I have toys to play with."
And so I did.
And so we did.
"That's your buddy, right?" Peyton asked, her fingers absentmindedly tracing the edge of a tattoo on my chest. "Virgin. That was him."
"That was him," I agreed, nodding.
"What was this MC?" she wondered. "I know most of them aren't like this one. Were they into guns or prostitutes?"
"Heroin. They were into heroin."
Those were rougher times, less moral men.
Chances were, if there was blood spilled in that town, you knew whose hands it was by. The police pinched men when they could. For possession, for assault, for drunken brawls.
Phil went away for a three-month stint when I was five, ripping me away from Virgin, who had become a brother to me. It was the two of us against the world.
When Phil or Dwayne wanted their rooms that we shared with them since there weren't enough to give us our own so they could fuck the ever-present clubwhores, we went out into the yard, climbing trees by moonlight, playing cops and robbers - except in our game, the cops were the bad guys. When shit went down and men with guns were at the gates, we would shoot downstairs, huddling behind the furnace, pretending not to jump at the shots popping off above us.
Then all of a sudden, I had to leave him. To be shipped back to a mother who I only really remembered from the day she left me. And on the drive to Staten Island, all I could think was how we were never supposed to leave a brother behind. And that was what I was doing; I was leaving Virgin behind.
But at five, choices weren't mine to make.
"Seany, baby," she had greeted me at the curb, eyes glassy, voice slow, something I attributed to her drinking since, at that age, I didn't understand the concept of 'high' yet. "You remember me?" she asked, eyes and voice filled with hope.
So I had nodded. And let her hug me, cry into my hair, tell me how much she missed me, bring me inside to a house that wasn't familiar, to be put on the pull-out couch in the living room like an unexpected overnight guest.
But she cooked for me.
She tucked me in.
She told me how she was making moves, getting her life back on track, trying to make something for herself so that one day I could come back to her.
If I wanted.
Not three months later, just when I was starting to settle in, Phil was at the door, fresh out of jail, ignoring his orders to stay in the state, coming to pick me up from my mom.
It was the first time I remembered feeling torn between them.
It would fade quickly too.
Once I was back at the clubhouse, back with my buddy, back with the men and the lifestyle I had grown accustomed to already.
"How'd you get the name Sugar?" Peyton asked, smiling down at me. And, let me tell you, I liked that sight just a little more than I should have.
I was seven.
And we - my father and I - had been spending a lot of time in an abandoned storefront in town. Inside, there was no heat. The electricity was stolen from the movie rental place next door. All there was inside was a folding table and cold steel chairs set up beside a counter that was full of bowls, old credit cards, bags of pure heroin, and pounds and pounds of sugar.
For cutting it.
Which was what he did.
Every day after school, Phil would scoop me up, and bring me to the storefront. Sitting at the table, he would pour, sift, and sort, putting the finished product into baggies as he helped me with my homework.
I was never allowed to help.
The job seemed simple enough - pour the white stuff, move it around with the card, put it into the little baggies.
But my father never let me even try.
It was one of those nights.
I was bored trying to train my yo-yo to walk like the other kids at school could.
Phil had just finished his sifting and sorting, and was running out to grab us dinner.
"Don't touch this shit, you hear?" he asked, stuffing his baggies into his pockets. "I'll clean it up when I get back," he told me, gesturing to the bags and baggies and credit cards on the table.
With that, he was gone.
And, well, I was never known for having great impulse control. As soon as I saw his figure disappear out the window, I jumped up, went to the table, and started imitating what I had seen him do hundreds of times. Pour, move around, put in baggies.
Just as I had suspected, there was nothing to it. Before I knew it, I had twice the amount of little baggies that Phil had made just stacked right there on the table.
About fifteen minutes later, when I had finally given up on doing it because it was really no fun after a while, two of my father's brothers came in.
"'Sup little homie?" Dwayne asked, giving me a nod as he started stuffing the bags into his pockets. "Your pops run out for food?"
"Yeah."
"You being good?"
"Yeah," I agreed, choosing not to tell them that I had made the baggies they had taken off the table. Because, well, I didn't want to get in trouble. Trouble would mean a butt whooping. I'd had enough of those. I wasn't going to volunteer for more.
Then it happened.
Blue and red lights out front.
"Motherfuck!" Fast Frank, the other brother hissed, looking around helplessly even as we heard doors slam.
I didn't know a lot about the world, but I knew one thing - we didn't like cops. My life had been overhearing nothing but bad things about them.
Did you hear those fucking pigs locked up Mick?
Don't go down on Madison, the cops are trying to snag everyone with a DUI trap.
Those fucking cops shook me down when I wasn't doing dick.
In our world, they were the bad guys, always out to get us.
Seeing the lights made my belly twist and slosh around, thinking for sure they would make me confess to playing with my father's stuff, and then put me in a cell for years.
"Yo," Dwayne called, yanking a big grate off the wall. "Get your little ass in here, and don't say shit. No matter what you see. Got it?" he asked as I flew inside, making my knees crunch into my chest painfully as Dwayne slammed the grate and moved to stand just as the cops barreled in.
"Police. Get your fucking hands up!"
My insides jumped at the sounds of their voices, loud and mean, as they pressed guns into Dwayne's temple even though he did what they said.
"Been watching you fucks for months now. Finally got you," the other one said as he started pulling the white baggies I had made out of their pockets, piling them back on the table.
I wanted to stop it. To come out and say not to punish them, that I had made the baggies.
But Dwayne's gaze went to mine for a second, and he gave me a firm look that my own father had given me countless times. It was a look that said Do what I fucking told you to, boy.
So I did what I was told to do as my father's brothers were cuffed and led out of the room with the police who had my baggies in a bigger clear bag with red tape on top.
It wasn't until much later, when my belly was growling so loud that I was sure you could hear it from miles away, when every part of my body was aching from being in the cramped position for so long that the door finally opened, and my father walked in.
He seemed to know exactly what happened, coming in and walking directly over to me, pulling off the grate, then reaching inside to drag me out.
"Just went through your first raid, huh, bud?" he asked, ruffling my hair. It was the only way he knew how to show comfort and affection.
After that, he brought me home where they had an emergency church meeting where they made me tell them what I saw.
With all their eyes on me - hard - my belly twisted back into knots, and I decided to leave out the part about the baggies I had made.
Not five hours later, though, Fast Frank and Dwayne came back through the doors to a chorus of cheers, demands for shots, and a lot of fanfare until it all died down, and the president asked what happened.
"Turns out, all the bags were full of straight fucking sugar," Dwayne said, looking pointedly over at my father.
Who in turn looked at me.
"You got something to say, boy?" he asked, clearly wanting me to be a man again, own up to what I did.
"He told me not to," I started, not wanting my father to get in trouble. "But when he left, I decided to help and fill the baggies."
"I had used all the H," Phil explained. "Brought the product to drop to Mace."
I braced myself as the president's eyes went to me, knowing he wasn't the nicest man, knowing he flew off the handle easily, beat the hell out of his men when they did something that made him angry. But I had to stand up straight, take my punishment like a man. But then he clamped a hand on my shoulder, and burst out laughing. "Guess we oughta call you Sugar now, huh?"
And so they did.
Even after that MC collapsed in on itself and Phil, Dwayne, Virgin and I took off to a new one, this time slinging cocaine, the name had stuck.
Sean was nothing but a distant memory.
Hell, not even Virgin used the name anymore.
There was one person in the world who didn't call me it.
My mother.
And while I did still see her here and there over the years, my bond had solidified. With my father. Virgin. The lifestyle.
By the time I was twelve, we were out of the cocaine MC and in a new MC. In a permanent way. Phil and Dwayne had prospected, then gone through the torment of being probates for a good two years. Virgin and I had dealt with a similar fate. We were made servants, doing the dirty work no one else wanted to do, fetching food and drinks, whatever was asked of us from the patched members.
This wasn't like the old MC that had watched us grow up, had taken an interest in us. Albeit only in passing, when it suited them. But there had been men around to teach us to play catch, to hit, to learn the names for the parts on bikes, to slip us sips of beer, to impart drunken, age-inappropriate wisdom onto us. We weren't just Phil and Dwayne's kids; we were the whole club's kids.
That wasn't true in the new MC. These enforcers that we had to learn to build bonds and trust with. If anything, we were inconveniences. Twelve-year-olds couldn't drive, buy beer, beat the shit out of grown men. We were useless except to clean the clubhouse. So we were just barely tolerated.
"Until?" Peyton prompted.
"Until we were sixteen."
By then, we had sprouted up to well over six feet, had enjoyed the muscular strength that came from working out alongside these grown men for years. We got our licenses. We became more useful.
Phil went away for a two-year stretch upstate. Dwayne was away more than he was around.
And it was around then that the president gave us the chance to prospect, a formality he insisted on even though we had been in the club for years, doing what prospects and probates did for years. We still had to go through the motions.
"What exactly did the MC enforce?" Peyton asked.
"A little bit of everything really. Someone welshed on a deal. Someone wants some other crew off their turf. We even ran private security at events if the pay was high enough."
"Is that where all these came from?" she asked, running her hand down my arm to trace over the top of my hand, stroking over the aged scars there.
"Most of 'em, yeah."
"And the others?"
My lips curved up at that. "Bar fights. Disagreements with brothers."
"Jealous ex-boyfriends?"
"To be jealous, they'd have to see me with their women. And since I never hung around for more than one night..."
"So, what happened?"
"With what, baby?" I asked, a bit distracted by the way her fucking hair was teasing over my chest.
"To the MC. Your dad? How did you end up here?"
"It's not a pretty story," I warned her, letting my hand slide down over her bare ass, then back up, sneaking under her shirt to move up her spine, not sure why I was finding her skin so damn fascinating. Never felt something so soft before. Maybe that was it.
"I think we have established that I am a fan of not-pretty stories."
"If that ain't the truth," I agreed with a smirk.
My old man had a heart attack around the time I was twenty-four. Dwayne, Virgin's dad, caught a bullet on a job a year or so after that.
We had stayed on in the MC, of course, it being the only home we knew.
Years passed.
Then there was the rally job.
That shit was really a bit of a blur. Virgin, me, and a couple of the other guys were left behind to hold down the fort, work some of the smaller jobs. Virgin and I had been happy about it actually. Nothing sounded less interesting than a goddamn biker meet up with thousands of stringy-haired, leather-clad old dudes who were all stinking up the air with their testosterone.
We heard nothing from our men.
In fact, the first we knew that shit went down was when the hospital called.
All of us hit the road.
Answers were hard to come by.
But most of our men were dead or locked up.
The MC fell apart.
"And that was the end of that."
Or so it seemed.
Peyton didn't need to know that part though. No one did. Not until we understood it ourselves anyway.
"How did you end up here? If your past was drugs and enforcing?"
"My past wasn't drugs. Cut that shit. Occasionally dealt that shit. But never touched that shit myself."
"You know what I meant." I did know what she meant. But for some reason, it was important to me that she know I hadn't been a user. "That was what you knew. How did you end up thinking gun running would work for you?"
"It's not as strange a career shift as you'd think," I said, my hand moving up to start sifting through her hair. "I have had a gun in my hand since I was ten years old. Know how to avoid and deal with cops. Know about brotherhood and loyalty. This club is different, but the underlying principles and protocols are the same."
"Different how?"
"Got some morals. More like a family. It's nice here."
"There's a lot of kids here," she observed, likely having seen them around. Before. Before the partial lockdown. Before the kids became fair game to some vicious bitch of a skin trader.
"Got a lot of interesting women here," I said with a shrug, knowing no average chick had ever seemed to snag one of our guys. They each had something special, something that got hooks into the men, and pulled - whether wittingly or not - until the man finally got reeled in.
"I like Lenny," she agreed.
"Lenny is a fucking badass," I supplied. "Could probably whoop half our asses."
"That's a great image," she said, smiling. "I can totally see her doing that too."
"They all eventually get training. The girls club swoops in, drags them to various self-defense classes."
"I guess being in this lifestyle - even just being married into this lifestyle - means you want to know how to protect yourself. I always wanted to take karate as a kid."
"Yeah?" I asked, my hand moving to tuck her hair behind her head. "Why didn't you?"
"My father was a prick. Is. He's still alive. And he's still the prickiest prick around. Girls weren't allowed to do manly shit like break pieces of wood with their fist. Or, you know, have thoughts, opinions, and desires of their own."
"Well, you sure as shit showed him, didn't you?" I asked, liking that she pushed back against it, that she had a spirit that fought against that old school bullshit. "You could take classes now," I added. "Lo, Janie, and Cash, they own that gym in town. Have all kinds of classes. Edison and Cy even teach there sometimes too. That's how Edison met Lenny originally. Could be your very own badass."
"I'm already my very own badass," she corrected with a defiant lift to her chin.
"Fine. Then an ass-kicking badass."
"I like the sound of that. That place is always mobbed. You think they'll have room for me?"
"Talk to Lo."
Her brows knitted at that. "Why?"
"Just... trust me. Talk to Lo. Even if there isn't room, she'd make room."
"Is this a 'she'll let me in because I am fucking a Henchmen' thing, because I don't think I like that."
"It's a Lo thing. Hard to explain."
Actually, it was easy. She wanted to see me have my balls in some woman's grip. And she had it in her head that that woman was going to be Peyton.
At her raised brow, clearly not buying it, I added, "She likes helping women with no training. It's her thing, teaching chicks to kick ass. That's what she does. She'll make room for you."
"Okay," she said, nodding, her gaze falling for a second.
When it rose, the girl who'd been in my bed, on my chest, a bit open, a bit sweeter and less guarded, was gone.
I knew what was going to follow.
Me fucked good. Me no want to snuggle.
She was a woman who knew what she wanted - a good, solid dicking - and that was it.
Normally, that would have been the dream, right? No strings attached. No hurt feelings. No having to have that talk about how this is a casual thing.
That was what I wanted.
Always.
Why then was there a weird falling sensation in my gut as she planted her hands and pushed off me, jumping off the side of the bed and yanking down her skirt?
Fully dressed, panties aside. I had fucked her with her weird ass lady-butt shoes on still.
"This was fun," she declared, reaching up to make her hair look slightly less bed-sexy. "I gotta go."
"'Course you do," I said, rolling up to sit off the end of the bed, reaching for my jeans, pulling them on my legs.
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"Doesn't mean shit," I said, standing, jumping up my pants, fastening them, and reaching for a shirt.
"What is the pissy mood about then?" she asked, chin jerking up defiantly.
"Not in a pissy mood," I said, reaching for her chin. "Just an observation."
"What observation is that? We agreed to casual."
If you fall in love with me, I'm gone.
"I know that," I agreed, reaching up under her mesh shirt and yanking her hot pink bra band thing more into place.
"Then why are you being weird?"
"Why are you trying to analyze me?" I shot back, head dipping down. "If this is so casual, you shouldn't give a shit about my mood."
"I don't," she insisted, quickly. Too damn quickly.
"Then good. Let's walk you to your fuckin' hearse," I said, moving across the small space to open the door.
Then that was what I did.
"Tomorrow night," I said as I held open her door, watching her grab her giant blood-spattered purse from the passenger side floor, then digging through it for her keys. Guess she figured there was no need to lock it behind gates with armed guards.
"What about tomorrow night?" she asked, half-distracted as she had to upturn her purse on the seat, making a pile of books, makeup, perfume, nail polish, files, tampons, and gum packs fall everywhere.
"You. Riding me. Your place," I specified, making her turn her head over her shoulder at me.
"I get off at nine. But won't be home until nine-thirty."
"See you at ten then," I told her, slamming the door, and walking away as she finally located her keys, and turned the car over.
Inside, I closed the main door, exhaling a deep breath, resting my forehead against the steel.
"Yer ass is so fucked," Adler declared from behind me.
And, well, I had a feeling he was right.
Shit.