“So, who’s the girl?”
I was sittin’ in the stands pretendin’ to watch my daughter sulk in her cheerleadin’ uniform on the other side of the court, her pom-poms held in her hands like they were deadweights. She was so unimpressed with bein’ at the game but she needed extracurricular credits to graduate and it’d been too late to sign up for anything else so cheerleadin’ it was. She’d been pissed. She was a smart kid, but she wasn’t like her brother, King. She didn’t go in for books and the normal high school experience. Nah, my girl was too much like her fuckin’ mother. She liked to drink beer with men who were too old for her, make bad decisions like it was a class she was acin’ at school and disobey me at every turn.
Loved the kid, loved her more than my next fuckin’ breath, but she was a Grade-A pain in my fuckin’ ass.
Still, I was there to support ’er because that’s what Garros and The Fallen did. We went to the important things and the unimportant things because at the end of the day, the only thing you had supportin’ ya was your family and I wanted H.R. to know we had her back even when she didn’t like what she was doin’.
My boy, King, and his woman, Cressida, were with me too. I’d called King back home for Thanksgiving a few weeks before to brief him on the fuckin’ Nightstalkers but now both of ’em were on break studyin’ for university exams and they were doin’ it from Entrance. It was cool as shit that my son was the first Garro to go to university and I was proud as fuck about it but it was good to have him home. He occupied a weird space between prospectin’ the club and bein’ raised by it to be the next Prez, and things didn’t feel wholly right to me when he wasn’t a part of things.
And things were goin’ down.
So, King and Cress were back even though they’d left Entrance in a cloud of scandal, they were both back at their old stompin’ grounds supporting Harleigh Rose.
Loved ’em for it.
See, Cress had been my kid’s English and History teacher last year and they’d fallen into it together. It was complicated, as any story involvin’ a smart, mouthy woman was gonna be, but they’d ended it good and in love. Even now, King had her scarred hands in his, rubbin’ at the marks in her palms absently like he still wished he coulda changed the fact she got ’em in the first place.
So did I.
The Nightstalkers had gone after family before and it’d resulted in Cress bein’ nailed to a chair with spikes through her hands. I’d killed the motherfucker in charge of the Nightstalkers that night, stabbed him clean through the back of his fuckin’ skull. But like I’d said before, you cut off one head and three more grow back.
I was just glad as fuck that Cress was with us today, sittin’ between me and her man in ripped jeans and her signature bookish tee under a leather jacket as though she’d been born an’ raised as a biker babe.
“Zeus?” she asked, bringin’ me back to the moment. “I asked you a question.”
“You know Dad doesn’t date, Cress babe,” King said on a laugh, slingin’ an arm over her and pullin’ her even closer so she was half in his lap.
People around us watched, drawn to the leather and the confidence, the prettiness of our Cress and the fierceness of the men beside her.
People always watched and what they coveted but didn’t have the fuckin’ guts to take for themselves, they hated.
So, the three of us, we were good, used to the looks and not carin’.
“Man’s got a point,” I said, tippin’ my chin at my boy. “Don’t date.”
Cress peered at me suspiciously. “You disappeared for fifteen minutes at halftime and I know it didn’t take you that much time to threaten H.R.’s dumbass boyfriend, Cricket, to get the freak out of here.”
King rolled his eyes. “Babe, seriously, you need to start cursin’ like an adult.”
She stuck her tongue out at him and then faced me again. “Please tell me you aren’t taking a walk on the Norman Rockwell side and banging a housewife?”
I laughed and hard ’cause that shit was so funny, I couldn’t even wrap my mind around it. When I was done, I rubbed my smile outta my beard and tried to take her question seriously. “Nah, teach, I’m not bangin’ a housewife.”
She relaxed. “Good, because seriously, I know these Entrance mums and I’ve heard them talk about ‘taming the bull’ and having a round with you. Women like that don’t know the first thing about handling a man like you, Zeus Garro, and you should know better than to get involved with them.”
I looked at King. “Did the woman just give me a lecture even though I didn’t do what she fuckin’ thought I did?”
“It was a preemptive strike,” she explained like the prim and proper little teacher she’d been. “And I’m not a teacher anymore, so don’t call me ‘teach’.”
“She did,” King confirmed, ignorin’ her. “She does that.”
“Don’t know how you put up with it,” I told ’im, purposely ignorin’ the irritation makin’ Cress bristle. I liked buggin’ the fuck outta her, she was cute like a little yappy dog when she was mad. “Knew I raised a strong man, didn’t know I’d raised a saint.”
King laughed, throwin’ his head back just like his sister and I did when we laughed. He was blond like his mum, skinnier than me but fillin’ out now he was nearly twenty, and other than the colour of my eyes, he didn’t look a thing like me. But fuck he was so much my son it slapped me in the face sometimes. Like me but, thank fuck, better.
“Oh shut up, both of you,” Cress snapped but there was no real heat in it. “Zeus you’re trying to distract me from the topic at hand and I will not be deterred. Something’s different about you.”
Fuck if that wasn’t true. I was sittin’ there in my cut, my normal scowl on my face to intimidate the dads and brothers in the stands and turn on the repressed mothers and curious little girls, and I was doin’ it leanin’ forward with my forearms on my knees so that the rows of people behind me could clearly see the cut I wore, The Fallen symbol on the back. I wasn’t smilin’, doin’ a fuckin’ jig or singin’ some pop song about it bein’ a beautiful fuckin’ day.
Yet somehow even I knew I looked different. There was something wrong with the air around me, like a near invisible shroud of misery had been lifted and people could see me clearer. Hell, even I could see me clearer.
I was fuckin’ happy, and after years of gettin’ by on rations of happy moments stolen from seein’ my kids grow good and strong, memories my brothers gave me ridin’ behind me in formation down the hot roads of the province and the brief flares of pleasure to be had from fuckin’ random pussy, this kinda happiness rocked me.
Yeah, I was different and Cress was too smart not to see it.
There was no reason to lie to her. She’d meet Lou sooner rather than later ’cause I planned to bring my girl over for Sunday dinner to “meet the family”.
But I was a selfish man and I wanted just one more night with my teenage woman as my dirty secret.
“Mute, brother.” King stood up with a loud cry to greet his best friend with a backslappin’ hug. Mute didn’t like to be touched but he was used to King, loved ’im more than anyone else in the fuckin’ world, and he embraced him back like they’d been parted for years insteada weeks.
When they broke apart, they were both smilin’.
“You been here this whole time? Why aren’t you sittin’ with us?” King asked, wavin’ a hand at the man sittin’ beside him to make room for Mute.
The man blinked at my son, looked to me and the entire size of me, then forcefully shoved into the person on his other side to make room. I grinned at him manically and watched him swallow.
Laughin’ under my breath, I caught the end of Mute sayin’, “Got a job to do.”
Fuck.
I stiffened before I could tell myself to stay cool. Cress was a fuckin’ hawk when it came to sniffin’ out secrets and I had a feelin’ mine was about to be blown to fuckin’ bits.
King was frownin’. “A job? At a fuckin’ high school basketball game?” He laughed, lookin’ at me as he did it to confirm that Mute was bein’ ridiculous.
Mute was never ridiculous and, un-fuckin’-fortunately, he never lied.
“Gotta keep an eye on Foxy,” he said, lookin’ over at his charge as she did a fuckin’ backflip on the opposite side of the gym.
“Foxy?” King and Cress both said at the same time.
It woulda been funny if I was in the mood to find the situation funny.
I closed my eyes and pressed my palms to ’em ’cause I knew what was comin’.
“Louise Lafayette,” Mute explained, pointing at her. “The one with gold hair and gold skin and blue eyes like Barbie.”
God, the kid never talked and now he was fuckin’ Shakespeare.
I opened my eyes and peered between my fingers to see Cress lookin’ at me like a fuckin’ pedophile and King’s mouth wide open enough to swallow a Quarter Pounder without chewin’.
I sighed, dropped my hands and shot Mute a look. “You do that on purpose or is this one of those things you can’t help doin’?”
Mute blinked at me.
No fuckin’ help there, then.
“Zeus, please do not tell me you’re sleeping with Louise Lafayette,” Cressida breathed. “She’s a kid!”
“Cress babe,” King muttered, sittin’ down beside her in a—useless—effort to control his woman. “Think ’fore you speak.”
“She a kid like King was a kid when you two started fuckin’?” I asked blandly, adjustin’ one of the skull rings on my finger where it’d gone crooked from finger-fuckin’ Lou twenty minutes before.
I brought my fingers to my nose and caught the salted caramel scent of her. Tried to focus on that insteada bein’ annoyed with Cress.
“That was—” Cress opened and closed her mouth. “That was different and you know it!”
“You know shit about it bein’ different,” I told ’er. “Careful here, Cress.”
“Queenie,” King said, firm. “Let Dad explain.”
She rolled her lips under for a second, tryin’ to reign in her sass.
No surprise, she failed.
“No, seriously, what the hell, Zeus? Louise is the seventeen-year-old daughter of the mayor! A man, I don’t have to remind you, who just last year held a freaking town meeting in an attempt to run The Fallen MC and, more specifically you, out of this town.”
“Memory works fine,” I told her between my teeth.
Didn’t want to scare her, didn’t want to ’cause even more of a scene than we were already makin’. Lou needed to finish high school ’fore we went public in her mainstream society. We didn’t need my son’s woman outing us in the middle of a fuckin’ high school basketball game.
“I’m trying really hard not to say something I can’t take back, but Zeus, help me understand how this isn’t wrong?” she begged me, her eyes wild with caged accusations.
She’d been raised by parents so stuck in the mud, they were permanently rooted in it and their stifled, judgmental ways. I knew it, I’d witnessed it and defended her from it then watched her grow away from bein’ that herself, so told myself to calm down even as the anger rolled through me like thunder lookin’ for a place to land.
I leaned toward her, closer than was necessary but I needed the threat to be real for her and I didn’t want to use my hands.
“Listen here, teach. I met you, you were a repressed sad little woman livin’ a life you hated and the only thing you wanted, the only thing that could take you outta that, was my boy. Why do you think I gave you the go-ahead to fuck your student, to stand beside my son? ’Cause I’m a rebel and I didn’t give a fuck either way. How ’bout fuck no? How ’bout I knew what it was like to want someone younger, to want someone so fuckin’ forbidden it made you dark and corrupt even to thinka having ’em? I know love when I see it and you think I got that from bein’ with my fuckin’ ex-wife? No fuckin’ way. I know that shit ’cause I helped raise a little girl with the soul of a fuckin’ angel and when she turned into a woman and still somehow had that fuckin’ soul after everythin’ she’d been through and I got the chance to hold that kinda woman in my arms, you think I was nuts enough not to take it?”
Cress blinked at me.
King did too, his face slack and younger lookin’ than I’d seen it in a long time.
Mute looked satisfied, his arms crossed over his chest and a hint of a fuckin’ smile round his mouth.
Yeah, the bastard had done it on fuckin’ purpose.
“Sometimes, Cress, you’re even younger than my son,” I told her with a disappointed frown.
She gasped slightly and leaned back into King who banded an arm around her hips and dragged her the rest of the way into his lap.
“The letters,” King said. “Remember you writin’ ’em, even when you got home you’d still write ’em every week. H.R. thought you were workin’ or some shit but I knew it was somethin’ else. You’d always get angry after writin’ ’em, frustrated.”
“Always been a smart kid,” I told him, leaning forward to punch him lightly on the chin.
“You’re in love with Louise Lafayette,” Cress said soft and fulla wonder. “Zeus Garro is in love and it’s with my heartbreaking and beautiful favourite ex-student, Louise Lafayette.”
“Second favourite,” King amended.
“She prefers Loulou,” I told ’em. “And I’m bringin’ her over for Sunday dinner so you two better be fuckin’ gems ’cause I still got Harleigh Rose to think ’bout.”
The three of us looked over to where my daughter was leanin’ against the wall to the exit door of the gym, smokin’ a cigarette when she shoulda been cheering. A teacher hurried over and told her to put it out. She did, in the guy’s coffee.
“You’re fucked,” King said.
“Don’t I know it,” I agreed.
