Mason snorted.
“Someone has to pick up the slack on mocking you, now that Garrett isn’t here as often.”
“Wildest thing in the world,” Zack said. “Of all the guys here, I never imagined that he’d be the one to be a daddy.”
“OK, I made one comment; I don’t need an entire reminder of that scenario.”
Zack shut his mouth. It was the smartest thing he’d done the entire time.
“Connor. You going to go spy for me?”
“And start a fight just before church? You can always quit if you like.”
Mason sighed. He pushed his chips in the middle. Zack flipped over two eights, pairing up with another one on the board. Mason only had a pair of aces and a queen.
“God fucking damnit,” Mason said. “Just remember, I control your access to pussy.”
“I’m sorry, what?” Zack said, smirking as he took Mason’s chips. “If anyone here is the guardian of pussy with Garrett gone, it’s this guy right here.”
Zack looked at me. I actually laughed out loud at that, albeit in a very quick, bursting fashion.
“Why is that funny?”
“I don’t talk to women unless they’re already here and they’ve been staring at me for so long it would be more awkward to not say something.”
“Why?”
Because in the past, when I did try and talk to them…
“Because when you’re swimming in it, why would you go to the other end of the pool when it’ll just float to you?”
Zack scrunched his eyebrows as if I’d butchered the metaphor, which was highly fucking likely. Like I said, I was not a genius.
“All humor aside,” Mason said, “Connor, I hinted to Zack about what you’d said after we saw the graffiti at the clubhouse. I think it’s important to have more than just the two of us involved.”
“And not Brock and Steele?”
I didn’t mention Garrett’s name for obvious reasons.
“Brock and Steele are going to do whatever Cole tells them to do,” Mason said. “And not that Cole’s an idiot, but if we’re going to take matters into our own hands, we need to be separate from Cole.”
I looked at Zack, sizing him up. Despite our overt differences—me with a billion tattoos and more fights under my belt, him a college student and, as best I knew, only one tattoo on his shoulder blade of the Black Reapers he’d gotten six months ago—I actually trusted Zack a great deal. He wasn’t prone to emotional turmoil like I could be, and he wasn’t just a nerd who happened to like bikes. He could fucking fight.
“Works for me,” I said. “I—”
“All right, everyone, wrap it up, we’ve got church now,” Brock said, coming through the doors—and, finally, with Garrett behind him.
I shared a look with Mason and Zack that suggested we’d take care of our shit in due time. For now, we had to hear what Brock had to say—and I suspected that he would say something like wait until further reinforcements from California came and we had greater numbers of recruits or backups.
To which I gave a hearty “fuck that.”
We all headed for the church hall, a place that by now, we all had a good level of comfort with. When it had first happened, I found the whole thing stupid as fuck. We had our house down the street where we could just sit, drink beer, and discuss. Why the fuck did we need a fucking place called “church” when not a damn one of us prayed to Jesus at night?
But now I thought I understood. It was too easy to fall into bad habits back at the house. Here, we were much stronger and much more focused.
“You all know what happened last church meeting with the vandalism at Cole’s bar,” Brock said. “For right now, he said he is reaching out to his brother in California to see if there are any signs of a resurgence of the Fallen Saints. He has asked us to lay low, or to at least not attack any more than we would otherwise.”
You could practically see shoulders sag in the room. The only one who didn’t seem disappointed by the news was Garrett, who probably would have been looking at photos of his kid under the table if not for a ban on cell phones in church.
