“Elizabeth asked about you. We all want to know where you went and if you’re OK.”
I bit my lip. Elizabeth?
Hell, Brock?
Hell, anyone?
Women don’t love. They don’t nurture. They just play a part.
So if that’s really true, then why did Elizabeth ask about me when she had no part to play?
I started to write out a response.
“I went to the graveyard to see Stan and…”
I bit my lip. I erased the message.
“I went to the graveyard. Hard fucking night. I…”
I again deleted the message. I just wrote whatever came to mind.
“It fucking sucks, man. So fucking over Davis. Tell Elizabeth I’m…”
I’m what?
No, this was stupid. We weren’t a bunch of college girls. We didn’t spill drama over the phone.
“I’m fine.”
I hit send. Brock didn’t need to have sympathy for me. I’d take care of myself. I would.
You want to go back down that road again? Thinking it’ll all work out just because?
I grimaced and put my phone in my pocket. No, I wasn’t going to show weakness to Brock. We had a job to do as men, as president and vice president in the Black Reapers MC.
But there was someone to whom I felt I could actually reveal something. Someone who wanted to know about me. Someone who had shown more interest in me than even her sister ever had.
Would I actually pull the trigger on that?
No, not tonight.
But for the first time in what felt like my entire lifetime, I no longer saw Elizabeth Rogers as the annoying little sister of my ex, but as her own woman who seemed to understand me better than the Rogers that had dated me for two years.
* * *
Sunday Afternoon
I got to the front door of my mother’s house with her groceries hanging off of my handlebars. Hot dogs, chicken, bacon, sausage, pizza for the freezer—things that tasted great in your twenties and things that killed you when you gave no shit about your health in your sixties. But I was well past the point of ever trying to convince my mother to change her habits.
I was about to knock on the door when I heard hacking and coughing so bad on the other side that I thought my mother was choking on her own nicotine-infested lungs. I dropped all pretenses of politeness and came in without knocking.
“Damnit, Stan, what did I tell you about entering without knocking!” my mother said in between fits of coughing.
I walked into the kitchen and saw her sitting at a table chair. She looked fucking terrible. Her skin was almost as white as a corpse, her coughing continued, and her hands shook. Somehow, in the week that had passed since I had last seen her, she looked five years older.
And it scared me.
“When are you going to see a doctor, Mom?”
