I took my time getting to my room. I glanced over my shoulder as I reached for my doorknob and…nothing. He wasn’t watching. He was gone to the men’s room.
I shut the door and let out a big breath. Okay, so… anything? Nothing? I had no clue.
I was dressed and in the kitchen when I heard footsteps coming down the hall.
I was about to call over my shoulder and offer him a cup of coffee, but caught the back of his wet man bun and his Dom leather and that was it. Gone.
That night, I hung out in the clubhouse all evening and he didn’t get back until after eleven. He gave a two-finger wave to the room at large, which was filled with bikers, bunnies, and hang-arounds. He went right down the hall. No passing go, no collecting Jojo on his way directly to his bed.
Damn.
***
Tuesday:
I went to the movies with my new friends, Lulu and Andie. Lulu was tiny with a big personality and pink hair. She was like a colorful goth who worked at my brother’s girlfriend’s hair salon. Andie was Rider and Jenna’s neighbor and worked next to the salon at her parents’ bakery. And then we went back to Andie’s apartment above the bakery and drank sangria. All three of us passed out on Andie’s humungous c-shaped sectional that took up almost her whole living room while watching another delicious massive blond man, Thor. Yes, it was my pick. I liked blond men, especially ones with muscles.
I got a four o’clock in the morning text from my brother Deacon asking where the fuck I was. I replied to tell him I was asleep on the couch at Andie’s.
He replied with, “Tell someone next time. We’re all looking for you.”
I replied: “How can I tell you if I’m sleeping?”
He ended our conversation: “Night, Joelle.”
I rolled my eyes. Overprotective family. Especially Deacon. Deacon acted like my second dad. He might’ve been bossier than my actual dad. Spencer was my enabler (minus penises. He didn’t like men even looking at me). He loved me fiercely. They all did, threatening away any suitors.
Rider, my other bro who was between Deacon and Spence in age, he was my other enabler. He got me drunk for the first time. Scored pot for me whenever I asked. And he bought booze for me and my friends since I was underage. And he would do anything in the world for me. Except let me date.
After Deacon’s text, I silenced my phone before turning over and putting the pillow over my head to try to drown out Lulu’s snoring.
Wednesday:
I worked in the office of our family’s bike dealership and helped my brother Deacon’s girlfriend Ella with some data entry, plus ordering of supplies for Deke’s Roadhouse, our bar. Between the bar, the garage, and the bike dealership, which were all in a row and known to locals as The Valentine Block, there was plenty to keep me busy during the day for the summer, until my classes at NSU started back up for my second year of teacher’s college.
I’d had an April to August job lined up in New York as a live-in nanny after having spent some time with a friend from high school who was staying at her grandparent’s awesome New York apartment, but Dad rushed me home during wartime with the Wyld Jackals MC because it kept him up at night worrying they’d hurt me to get back at Dad and the club.
The feud between the brotherhood and Jackals was years long and it had come to a head not long ago, hence the patch-over that made Christian Forker one of us. Very few Jackals had become Dominion Brotherhood members. Some of them got pinched and were doing time. A few of them got dead. I wasn’t told by any brothers; they wouldn’t do that. I read the papers, am friendly with some chatty biker bunnies, and also… have a brain in my head.
Some of the Jackals ran either scared or in an effort to re-group and come up with a plan to get back at us. I didn’t like that idea, but it was the reality, a reality not everyone put much stock into, but I wasn’t new to this life. I grew up in it. I knew better than to sit back and assume life would be rosy from now on. The girls who paired up with my brothers were new to the life and most likely blissfully ignorant. I was glad that worries about our enemy didn’t seem to keep them up at night, but only hoped that they’d still be careful.
Dad wanted me close and told me he’d keep me busy working for him, so I quit the nanny job with no notice (which I hated, but life was more important than a good reference) and I bounced during most days between the bar, working in the kitchen (since I was under 21 and couldn’t serve due to the fact that we sold way more alcohol than food) and the dealership where Ella ran a tight ship to manage admin for all three businesses. I also dealt a lot with the contractor for the new clubhouse project, saving Dad the hassle of the micro level details unless it was a major thing going on.
Dad showed he was happy that I wanted to work rather than just sit around all summer and he paid me generously for my efforts, usually dropping a thousand bucks a week into my account. I needed to be busy. Being idle wasn’t good for me. It made me think about my mother being in jail. It made me think about Luke being dead. It made me think about the fact that there were still some unaccounted-for Jackals who hated us enough to try to blow up Jenna’s salon, to kill Luke, to shoot Bronto, to stab my brother, shoot my other brother, try to burn my family alive while they slept, to rape and kill Edge’s girl, Jet. Yeah, to say the war had gotten ugly was an understatement.
Losing Luke had sent me into the depths of self-torture. I had been a wreck since it happened, making dumb decisions, spending too much time in my head entertaining alternate realities. I was tired of being broken-hearted about Luke. I was ready to move on.
Luke was a Dominion Brotherhood member that I’d been crushing on since before my first training bra. He was tight with my brothers, especially Rider, and we had a secret thing going for a few months, until The Wyld Jackals ran us off the road to get back at Luke for supposedly gang-raping a Jackal’s old lady. It wasn’t a rape, though it was a totally consensual gang bang. It was, however, during the time Luke and I were secretly seeing one another and talking about going public with our relationship. Well, I kept talking about going public. Luke kept finding reasons to wait.
I was fantasizing about being on his arm at club parties, on the back of his bike going to rallies. We’d kissed a bunch of times, had a million text conversations, and we’d made out hot and semi-heavy a few times. And I was sure I was in love.
Would we have ever gone public? I’d asked myself that plenty in the last couple of months.
He knew, for years, about my crush, and then one night I got hammered, cornered him at a club family party, and kissed him. He let me. This began a relationship based mostly on text messaging. He kept our in-person times to a minimum, worrying we’d get caught. He never let us get past second base, either, except that once --- the night he died. He made me come with his fingers in my panties, my fingers wrapped around his shaft. He wouldn’t let me take him in my mouth. He wouldn’t let me finish him. He got all weird about it and lost his erection. I pleaded with him to find a way for us to go public. I told him the guilt was what made him lose his hard on. If we went public, the guilt could go away. He told me he was between a rock and a hard place, that he didn’t want to upset my dad and brothers, the club. That he felt guilty. That he was sure he wasn’t the right man for me. I kept trying to convince him that he was. Maybe he just didn’t want to stop having group sex with biker bunnies.