It wasn’t in me to lie. I shrugged and stepped over him to get behind the bar and check the rota, half expecting Rubi to leave me alone. I’d seen him do yoga before. The man was committed. But a split second before I put a hand to the staff file, the music dipped and he appeared in my eyeline again.
“Where’s my little queen?”
“Not here.”
“Can see that, mate. Thought you were off to the sleepover too? Or did Cruella let her go on her own in the end?”
“I never asked. Figured I’d just kip on the couch.”
“Saves hassle, eh?”
“Yep.” I opened the binder that held the stock sheets and rotas. Found the prospect due to work the night and pulled out my phone to bin him off.
Rubi plucked my phone from my hand. “What happened?”
“When?”
“Now. Yesterday. Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Depends what realm we’re living in, brother.”
Rubi smiled and it suited him. Before River had come back to the club, I’d never realised how unhappy he’d been. But it was plain as day now. The change in him. The light.
The love.
My heart twisted. I snapped the binder shut. Maybe it wasn’t too early for a beer after all.
Rubi watched me crack a bottle of Red Stripe while he lit a joint and blew smoke over his shoulder. “I was joking about the time travel, Deeks. But the fact that you’re here and Ivy ain’t is making me nervous.”
“My ex-wife scare you?”
“Anything that puts that look on a brother’s face scares me. What happened?”
There was more authority in his voice this time, and I felt it. Rubi wasn’t my president or even my VP, but he was as senior in the club as it was possible to be without either of those titles. “Ivy wasn’t at school when I went to get her. Lauren took her out early.”
“Why?”
“Dentist. Now she’s not answering the phone, so I’m not expecting to see Ivy until she’s bored of messing me around.”
I drained my beer and dropped the bottle on the bar. It had barely touched the sides, but as predictable as Lauren’s MO was, it was just my luck to be blotto if she changed her mind and gave Ivy back.
The bottle teetered on the bar. Rubi set it right, face twisting in a deepening frown as he processed my tale of woe. “This shit is getting out of control. Why does she hate you so much?”
“Because I left her.”
“That was years ago. She’s had, like, sixty-seven boyfriends since then.”
A heavy sigh was my only answer. I didn’t need Rubi to recite my life back to me. Living it in real time was bad enough.
And I still needed to text Mateo.
I took my phone back from Rubi and typed out a message that made me die a little. Then I tried Lauren again and got nothing, all under the weight of Rubi’s fraternal concern.
He watched me set my phone down when all I wanted was to hurl it at the wall. Smoked his joint. Then dropped his elbows on the bar and pinned me in place with the kind of gaze I couldn’t turn away from. “Don’t sack Hopper off. Work if you want to keep busy, but keep him on in case you need to go—”
“I won’t need to go.”
“—anywhere. Fuck, dude. Let an idiot finish his sentence. I’m saying you might wanna get out of here at some point and tying yourself to a one-man bar show is gonna kill that vibe. So take my advice, okay? Give yourself a fucking out.”
I didn’t need an out. I needed to hide in plain sight until the storm raging inside me quieted to a dull roar. Sometimes I envied people like Cam and River who shouted and hit things until they calmed the hell down. Or men like Rubi and Nash who had no trouble articulating how they felt with actual words. Even Saint, who faced his deepest and darkest fears over and over and over until he defeated them.
Me? I just drifted around in an eternal state of emotional constipation, waiting for the next hammer to fall on my head.
Rubi left me alone. He came back later with a summons to dinner in the chapel, but I wasn’t in the mood and blew him off.
“I’ll bring you a plate.”
“Nah, I’m all right.”
“Matron Matherson disagrees.”
That’s how I found myself in the bar’s backyard sometime later, poking at a bowl of his spag bol. Actually, it was hours later, but the bar had a microwave and by then I was hungry enough to use it.
I picked through my dinner, letting the sounds of a busy summer night on the compound surround me. Men shouting. Laughing. Revving engines. The scents of diesel and smoke heady in the air. Minus the metal music, it wasn’t all that different to being deployed, though I didn’t miss the threat of mortars popping over the boundary fence.
Or maybe I did. That kind of enemy made sense. And I knew how to fight it. Lauren, though. She wanted to hurt me for reasons only she understood, and years down the line, I still didn’t know how to put that right.
Over the din of the compound, bike engines rumbled in the night air. Brothers arriving. Or coming home. It wasn’t my job to know where everyone was, but I was unsurprised to look up and see Saint, River, and Locke returning from wherever they’d been.
Expecting them in the bar, I hauled myself from the back steps and trudged back inside, stopping to toss the remains of my dinner and wash my plate.
By the time I got back to the beer pumps, Rubi had reappeared too, already all up in River’s business while Locke took a pint from Hopper.
Saint was nowhere to be seen, but that wasn’t shocking either. The face I wasn’t expecting?
Mateo’s.
I poured Rubi’s pint and grabbed River a bottle before I paused where my scarred brother stood a little way off from the others. “What are you doing here?”
Mateo regarded me with his fiery amber eyes. “Came to check on you.”
“Why?”
“Because I’d feel like warmed up shite if I had my time with Lili taken away from me.”
“And yet here you are.” I spoke dully, but if any brother understood the raw pain in my heart, it was this one. “You shouldn’t have come out on my account.”
Mateo shrugged. “Orla brought the lads over and talked Nash into getting his nails done. Seemed as good a time as any to sneak out for ten minutes. You gonna tell me what the fuck happened?”
I already had, if you counted the six-word text message I’d sent him after school, but I repeated what I’d told Rubi anyway, more aware than I wanted to be of the others listening.
Mateo’s natural scowl darkened with every word. “You can’t just go over there?”
“And what? Kick Lauren’s door down and drag my kid from her bed?”
Mateo conceded my point, again empathising more than he deserved. “There has to be a way to stop this, though? Can’t you go to court or some shit?”
“I already went to court. This is the life it gave me.”
Mateo winced. “All right. But you have a . . . what’s it called . . . a contact order, right? She can’t fuck you around like this.”
“To stop her I’d need another arrangement order, and there’s a million things that have to happen before we go in front of a judge again. It could take fucking years.”