“Brother—”
Black looked right, their gazes caught and hung.
“She’s draining you and you know it,” he said. “And we need your shit sharp.”
He was not wrong. If Tack had ever loved his wife—and those days, he asked himself frequently if he ever had, and came up short every time—he’d fallen out of that as hard and swift as Black had recently fallen in.
“A man in love wants that to be contagious,” Tack noted.
“No, a man finds love, he wants the men he loves to have that bounty. She looks at me, brother, and the world takes flight in her eyes. All I wanna do is follow, and I couldn’t give that first fuck where it goes, as long as it’s never lost to me.”
“Always a poet,” Tack muttered.
“I’m not fucking around with you, Tack,” Black bit. “Life is too goddamned short to waste it on leeches like Naomi and you know that better than me.”
Tack clenched his teeth.
“Cut her loose,” Black advised.
“First, she’s the mother of my kids, and second, Black, we got some important matters at hand, brother, and Naomi is not one of them,” Tack pointed out.
Black held his eyes and sighed.
He then looked to the lights.
Tack did too.
“The babies you two will make will be beautiful,” Tack told him, and it was no lie.
Black was a good-looking man.
Keely was amazing.
“Oh yeah, they will. Boys. We’re gonna have a crew of boys,” Black declared. “She pops one out, fill her with another one.”
Tack felt one side of his lips hitch up. “Not sure you can make that call.”
“Keely is so on board with that, it isn’t funny.”
“I meant about them all being boys,” Tack shared.
“I’ll take girls, love ’em with all I got. That baby is her mixed with me, love every cell in their bodies with everything that makes me.”
“Good you got that attitude, ’cause far as I can tell, chances are fifty-fifty.”
“We can have five girls and we’ll go until we got at least two boys.”
Tack looked at his brother again. “Why?”
Black looked at him too. “You gotta ask that?”
“I did, didn’t I?”
“Okay then, a man needs a brother.”
Tack had a brother.
He was a piece of shit.
He found others.
Some of those were pieces of shit too.
But not the one at his side.
No, absolutely not him.
So Tack understood where he was at.
“I wanna watch ’em grow up,” Black said. “Teach ’em how to set up a tent. Show ’em the glory of sitting in the quiet, under the stars. Take ’em for a ride. Show ’em the thrill of wind in their faces. Teach ’em how to change oil. Get ’em dirt bikes. Knock their heads together when they pull shit so they won’t be assholes. Watch them find a woman and do the work beforehand so they’ll know how to treat her. Then, when they find the one, know in my soul a goodness complete, because I know they got what I found in their mother. And then spoil their babies so bad, they end up hating me. That’s gonna be my life, brother. That’s what’s gonna make Keely and me. That’s a great life right there. That is everything.”
Tack had a son and a daughter.
Their mother was one thing.
His Rush and Tabby…
Another.
So Tack knew that Black, like Black had an annoying tendency to be, was right.
That was everything.
* * * *
“Been waiting a long fucking time for today.”
Jagger Black took his gaze from the stars blanketing Tack’s house in the mountains and gave it to Tack.
“Twenty-four years. A long time, sitting on it, until you were ready to hear that story,” Tack continued.
Jag said nothing.
Tack did.
“You were his everything, Jagger. Everything.”
He watched the man swallow.
Then Jag turned his attention back to the stars and whispered, “Wind in their faces.”
“Wild wind, that was your dad. His edges have been smoothed with memory. Everyone remembers Keely being the crazy one, always up for a good time. Even, I think, your mom remembers it like that. But she didn’t know him before her. Before her, he dragged life around like it was his pet. Had a hold on that leash and owned it. Then he found her, and shit settled down fast, because he had to be her anchor so she could fly free.”
Tack let that sink in a second.
And then he gave him the rest of it.
“You remind me of him, Jag, a lot more than Dutch. Black was responsible when he had something to be responsible for. Dutch was responsible because he never had a time when he didn’t have to be.”
It was a blow, Tack knew. For a variety of reasons.
He watched it land, the flinch.
But then Jagger’s face eased almost to the point it looked serene.
He’d never seen Jagger look like that.
And seeing it, Tack felt a roughness in the back of his throat because finally, after waiting decades, he’d been able to do right by his friend.
And what would be more important to Black, do right by his son.
Tack watched Jag look over his shoulder.
So Tack looked over his.
The woman Tack had met half an hour before was standing in the kitchen with Tack’s wife, Tyra.
Tyra was bent over, pounding a hand on the kitchen counter, and he could see in her profile, she was laughing.
And Tack suspected he looked serene, seeing his wife like that.
Laughing.
Then again, even if he didn’t show it (mostly so he could give her shit, because they both got off on it), Tack had that feeling a lot, because his wife laughed all the time.
A cool customer, Archie was watching her, a shit-eating grin on her face.
“Would he like her?” Jag asked.
He looked back to his brother. “You love her?”
Jag looked at him. “That’s happening, yeah.”
“She make you happy?”
“Yeah, but it’s more. It’s like,” Jag shook his head, “I know it sounds crazy, but it’s like I was put on this earth for her.”
“Then no, Jag, Black wouldn’t like her.”
Jag stared at him.
So Tack finished it.
“He’d love her with everything that made him.”
A beat passed.
Two.
Three.
All loaded.
And then…
“I really remind you of him?”
Tack Allen nodded once.
And answered, “Absolutely.”
And yeah.
That look on Jagger Black’s face?
No other word for it.
But serene.
Chapter Nineteen
Brotherhood
Archie
“Babe, it’s kinda hard for me to do you when you’re sitting on my ass.”
“Shush, Jag.”
It was that next Tuesday.
First thing in the morning.
And it was going to be an important day and both of them had to be ready for it.
To be that, Archie reached over and found the bottle she’d set by the bed last night.