Macy woke up in a fog. Her mouth was dry and she felt like she couldn’t shake the cobwebs from her head. There was something there, pulling at her subconscious, something she was supposed to remember…and that’s when it suddenly came back to her. She sat up straight and called out for Jimmy, right before her eyes landed on Cody’s face. He was sitting in a chair in the corner of the room staring at her.

“Jimmy’s not here,” he said in a quiet, toneless voice.

“Cody, where…?” She looked around the room. She was in one of the bedrooms at the clubhouse. She was in Cody’s room. Panic began to set in. “Where is Jimmy?”

Cody’s face registered hurt and anger. He stood up and went over next to the bed. “You think I did something to him, hurt him? Is that it, Macy? You think what I did all those years ago when I was broken defines who I am? Who I’ve become?”

She didn’t answer his question because that was exactly what she feared. She remembered the look on his face when Jimmy told him about the baby. But, she was the one he should want to hurt, not Jimmy. “Where is he, Cody?”

He laughed. It was a frightening, hateful laugh. “You’re worried about him. I’m the one that got fucked over by both of you, and he’s the one you’re worried about. It figures. He went home, Macy. He left you passed out on the floor of the clubhouse, and told me he was finished dealing with you and your histrionics. That’s the way he put it, ‘histrionics.’ He said that you could be my problem now. To be honest, I thought about just calling Tank and being done with it.”

Macy’s emotions were all over the place. She’d woken up confused, then she’d been frightened and now she was just pissed off, mostly at herself. She threw back the sheet that was covering her and realized she was only wearing her bra and panties. “Where are my clothes?”

Cody sighed. “Stay in bed, Macy, you look like shit. I’ll get you some water…”

“No!” She threw her legs over the side of the bed. A wave of dizziness came over her but she tried not to let Cody see it. Concentrating hard on controlling her breathing she said, “Give me my clothes or I’ll walk out of here just like this. I don’t need anyone to ‘deal with my histrionics.’ You and Jimmy can both go fuck yourselves!” She stood up and that’s when the dizziness and nausea both hit her at once. A sharp pain stabbed her in the stomach and a little cry escaped her lips. Cody was at her side in an instant, holding onto her arm and guiding her back down onto the bed. She pulled her arm away as soon as her butt hit the mattress. “Don’t touch me!”

He stepped back and folded his arms. “What are you pissed off at me about, exactly? Like I said, I’m the fucking injured party here. You and Jimmy both fucked me over.”

She was fighting through the gray spots in her vision. She wanted to curl back up in a ball, but there was no way she was doing that again. Cody and Jimmy had both taken that as a sign of weakness, and she didn’t want either of them to think that she was weak. Instead she mustered all her strength and said:

“What am I pissed off at you about? Let me see…where to begin?” He continued to stand there like he was waiting. She sat fighting the nausea until she couldn’t do it any longer. She stood up again, and once more the dizziness threatened to knock her down. “I’m going to throw up.”

“Lie back down.”

“I need to throw up!”

“Lie down! I’ll get something for you.” He was ridiculously strong. He didn’t wait for her to lie down on her own, he picked her up like a child and laid her back down on the bed. “Stay there.” At that point she didn’t feel like she physically had any choice. If she moved, she was going to vomit all over his bed. Cody went over to the dresser and picked up a ceramic bowl that was filled with things he took out of his pockets at night, and dumped it out. He brought it back over and set it on the bed next to her. Then he went into the bathroom and came back with a towel and a glass of water. He put the towel on the bed and set the water on the nightstand within her reach. She thought about what she must look like…how pathetic he must think she is…and she closed her eyes. Like a child she hoped that if she couldn’t see him, he wasn’t looking at her. Some time passed and so did the nausea. She didn’t have to throw up in the little bowl, thank God. She was almost back to sleep when she heard him say, “Why, Macy?”

She wanted to pretend that she was already asleep and didn’t hear him, but she knew it was probably better to just get this conversation over with as soon as possible. “I was sixteen,” she said, before she opened her eyes. That wasn’t an excuse, she knew, but it was a huge part of the explanation. Her sixteen-year-old self did not have the capacity to be making adult decisions on her own. But she hadn’t had a choice. He wasn’t there…When she opened her eyes at last, Cody was back in his chair, watching her. “You were gone. My mother was dead, not that she would have been any help alive, I’m sure. My father...well, he doesn’t know how to handle his own shit, how was I going to expect him to help me handle mine? I had to make a decision that would affect the rest of my life alone, so I did the best I could at that moment in time.”

“You had choices, Macy. I wasn’t unreachable. I was in county jail a few miles away for the first year. You could have come to see me. You could have written…”

“Everyone was saying you’d be locked up for at least fifteen years. When you’re sixteen years old, Cody, that’s a lifetime. All I could think of was raising a kid here on this ranch as a single mother. If it was a boy, he’d be a biker and someday end up in prison, just like you. If it was a girl, she’d be a whore like my mother. I thought I was different all this time, but Jimmy’s right, I’m no better than she was. But I couldn’t do that to some kid. I hated growing up the way we did. I couldn’t bring another life into this mess. I convinced myself it was the right thing to do.”

“I just don’t get it. How could going to a butcher and having them kill our baby and maim you for life be the ‘best thing’? If you’d had the baby, it would be just about eight years old and we could have raised it together. I was never part of this club, Macy. You think I wouldn’t have had more motivation to change my life if I’d known that I was going to be a father?”

“If you think I don’t regret my decision…if you think I haven’t lost years of sleep over it…you’re dead wrong. But at the time, Cody, yes, I thought it was the best thing. I had no way of knowing you’d be out in eight years, and you made a lot of promises to me, before you got locked up, that you didn’t keep.”

“So glad Jimmy was there for you,” he said, sarcastically.

Fine, if he wanted to know the truth, she’d tell him all of it, “After I…after the abortion I went home and got in bed. When I woke up the next day, the bed was saturated with blood and I was so weak. I thought I was going to die and I thought about my mother. I wasn’t afraid of dying. I’d felt like dying the minute you were taken away from me and every moment after up to that point. I was sure it would be a better option than living without you. After I had the abortion there was just one more reason to not want to wake up ever again. But you know that it wasn’t my mother dying that haunted me, it was her dying alone. It was her dying without any love or respect from anyone that killed me inside. For years after she died I would lie awake at night and wonder what she was thinking as she took her last breaths. Did she know that I would be the only one that cried, and that my tears would be more for me than they were for her? I tried to make a list in my head as I lay there and bled out, of all the people who would give a shit when they carried me out in a body bag. It was a short list. My dad, and Jimmy.”

“You don’t think I would have cared?”

“I told you, Cody, I was a scared, confused kid. I still had it in my head at that point that you had abandoned me. I couldn’t think past that to understand the kind of grief and pain you must have been feeling when you…that night. I felt abandoned and alone. If not for the pain in my belly I may have just closed my eyes and died. But I started cramping and the pain was unlike anything I’d ever felt. If I could have moved I would have found one of my father’s guns and put it in my mouth and pulled the trigger. But I was in so much pain that I couldn’t move. I called Jimmy then and the next thing I remember was waking up in the hospital.”

“And Jimmy was there.”

“Yes, Cody! Jimmy was there. You say it like it’s a bad thing. Do you hate me so much that you’d rather I was alone?” He didn’t answer her, so she went on. “He had handled everything. He said when he got to the house I was delirious and rambling, but the paper they’d given me at the clinic was still on my nightstand and he figured out what I’d done. He took me to the hospital and he told them I was his wife and we were eighteen. I don’t know to this day where he got the money, but he paid cash for everything so that they wouldn’t call my dad. He used a different name so that there wouldn’t be any record of any of it. He sat there in that hospital for three days, making all my decisions and making sure I wasn’t alone. Every time I opened my eyes he was there. He even gave them blood because I had so many transfusions that our little hospital blood bank ran out of my type. He held my hand while they told me that my insides were ruined and I’d never be able to get pregnant and carry a baby to term.”

“What did you tell your dad?”

It was her turn for the hateful laugh. “I didn’t have to tell him anything. He never noticed I was gone. You know how he was back then. He always had a different girl up in his room, and half the time I just didn’t go home because I couldn’t stand to listen to it. He didn’t notice. God only knows how long I would have lain in that bed dead before he noticed me. I was invisible, Cody, and at that point in my life, I felt like Jimmy was the only one who could see me.”

“He used that…”

“No! Don’t say that. He never intended for anything to happen between us. He was being a good friend.”

“A good friend who used all of that against you only a few hours ago because his feelings were hurt. He always wanted you.”

“And he never made a single advance. He never said a single word, even after you went to prison. He was always only my friend. When I got better, I was so grateful and still so lonely…it was me. I was the one that came onto him first, sexually. He told me it was wrong, that we couldn’t do that to you. I was the one that convinced him that if you cared about any of us you would have come to us before you ran off and got yourself into that kind of trouble. At that point in my life, I really believed that. Jimmy may not have, but if I’d never made the first move, he and I would have never gotten together. It was all me, Cody. You’ve been pissed off at the wrong person.”

“No, Macy, I’ve been just as pissed at you as I have been him. How far along were you when…when you had the abortion?”

“Almost four months. You’d been gone for two months by then and I had been getting sick every morning for a while. At first I didn’t think anything of it, because my world was such a mess. But when it continued to happen consistently and I wasn’t having my period, I finally figured it out and took a pregnancy test.”

“Where do we go from here?” he said. Macy almost laughed again. Cody was looking at her after everything she’d just told him like she had all the answers. She was about to tell him that she had no more idea than he did when there was a knock on his bedroom door.

“Who is it?”

“Cody, it’s Dax, open up.”

Cody mumbled under his breath and pulled the door open a crack. “Hey, Dax, what’s up?”

“Is Macy here?”

“Why would you think…?”

“Don’t fuck with me, Cody. She’s not at home and she’s not with Tank. I fucking know she’s here. Jimmy’s been in an accident.”