Again, was it any wonder that I just wanted to get the hell out of the house and be on my own?
“I have given you everything you could ever need in this life,” he growled. “And your response is insolence? You stupid bitch!”
He kicked the couch behind me. I ran against the wall. He approached me with his palm raised.
But at the last second, he held back, content to tower over me and let his angry posture and size do the work. I bit my lip, quietly trying not to scream or shout if he did anything to me.
“I’m sorry, little one,” he said. “It is my fault that you fail to grasp just how serious of a situation this is. It’s my fault that you think Oregon will be such a nightmare. No, understand, child—”
I am not a child.
“I do everything I do because I love you. Your mother wanted you to run free, outside in the world, where there is danger and risk. What would happen to you if the Reapers got a hold of you? I couldn’t live with that knowledge. No father could.”
Strangely enough, I actually believed he was telling the truth. It was just a very warped and twisted truth.
He opened his mouth to speak when his phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out, looked at it with concern, and put it back in his pocket, trying to display confidence and certainty.
“You will stay here tonight, and we will discuss more in the morning,” he said. “For now, I have business to discuss with my club. Stay upstairs while I talk.”
He then put his hand on my cheek and patted it twice, a gesture that I took to mean, “I could hurt you, but I choose not to for now,” and then kissed me on the forehead before heading downstairs.
I believed that my father loved me, but boy, the way that he showed it was fucked up. And the actions he had taken had made me fucked up, too. I just had to hope that when I finally did live on my own, whether by my choice or by my father’s death, I’d have just a glimmer of sense of how the world functioned.
I headed back to my room for some privacy, but I could hear my father speaking from the entrance to the stairs. It was against my own good judgment that I decided to eavesdrop a bit. My father liked to think I knew nothing of the battle between the motorcycle clubs, but while I may have been sheltered, I sure wasn’t stupid.
“... they’re coming together even more?” my father said.
“Reports say there’s a bunch of them gathered at the Black Reapers’ headquarters,” a man I had never heard before said.
My father was known to cycle through club “officers” as he called them, with alarming regularity. He didn’t kill them, he wasn’t that sadistic; he just fired them and moved someone back in. It wasn’t uncommon, as I understood it, for people to be shifted through the same role multiple times in the course of even just a single year. But this was someone entirely new.
“Red Raven’s death was supposed to be the ultimate win-win for us,” my father said. “Either he betrayed the club and we won, or the club found out, killed him, and then that split the club in two. It’s not supposed to fucking bring them back together!”
“I can only tell you what I saw, sir. I’m sorry.”
“This is fucking bullshit!” my father yelled, and the sound of some sort of glass breaking reached up where I was. “Trying to split the club from the inside is not working like I thought it would. I was sure that the weakness of the Carter boys would be their undoing, but…”
A long silence came, long enough that I feared my father might have picked up that I was eavesdropping. If I moved now, though, while there was no other sound, he’d know for sure what I was doing.
“What should we do, sir?” the other man said.
My father sighed.
“If the two clubs have combined, that’s bad for us, because it eliminates our numbers advantage,” he said. “But it seems the longer we wait, the stronger the Carter brothers become. We missed our fucking chance right after Roger died. We just need to fucking attack them now.”
“Now, as in…”
“As in tonight, Spike. And we need to resort to whatever means are necessary. I don’t care who dies. I don’t care if we get in trouble with the law. I’m so fucking sick of the last name Carter that I’d erase it from the English language if I could. Do you fucking hear me? Do whatever it takes to wipe out those assholes. We take the fight to them tonight.”
As my father finished his last few lines, I knew I’d heard enough. I quietly walked across the hall, as if coming from the bathroom, and headed straight to my room.
But just as my father had decided that things could no longer wait and that he could not count on anything else happening as he stood by, I, too, had decided that I could not wait and hope for things to change. I reached into my closet, grabbed a backpack and a suitcase, and stuffed them full of clothes, a phone charger, my computer, and anything else I could think of that I needed to survive. I packed no makeup, no body wash products, and no entertainment.
I was running away.
And I was not coming back.
I was finally going to learn what it was like to be an adult.
