Zack
One Month Later
The rest of my class went to the graduation ceremony. They wore their gowns, put on their tassels, and walked across the stage to get their diploma.
It was telling of the world that I inhabited that I didn’t do so for safety reasons.
To be fair, it wasn’t like I had many—or any—friends at UNM. There were plenty of women that I’d slept with through the years, but I’d always stayed distanced from them. I didn’t need any guy friends because the brotherhood I had with first the Bernard Boys and then the Black Reapers more than made up for it.
But still, I didn’t want to pretend that what I’d done was common for someone from Santa Maria. It was a big deal.
And a bigger deal, as I had a shot glass in my hand, was the question that Garrett was posing to me.
“So, Professor Smartass,” he said, “now that you have a college degree, what are you going to do? Are you going to go to New York City? San Francisco? Maybe rule the world from Dallas or Houston? Or are you going to say you just went six figures into debt to say you were now a Doctor Smartass?”
Everyone laughed. I smirked and let out a short chuckle or two.
“Well, as much as I’d like to pretend I have a job offer from Google for five hundred grand a year and a private jet, it will shock you to know not every college grad gets that.”
“Not even Professor Smartass?”
“Not even,” I said. “But what I do have, much thanks to the Rogers girls, is a job opportunity at NME Services to work as a junior engineer.”
“Oh, shit, nice,” Mason said. “I guess they made up with Daddy.”
Brock smirked.
“Their dad is a workaholic asshole, but he’s not a sociopath. That, or Tara and Elizabeth just know how to leverage him.”
“And so I’m going to join them,” I said. “I start in January. But sorry to disappoint you, Garrett, I’ll still be a part of this fucking club.”
“Aww, man,” Garrett mockingly groaned as the rest of the club let out cheers and downed their shot with me.
“Guess that means we better take care of shit before the New Year,” Mason said. “Can’t be going into next year with Eduardo still alive.”
“How generous of you to say,” Connor growled. “I was thinking of taking care of shit before Christmas.”
“Happy holidays, indeed,” Garrett said with a laugh.
But while they were bantering and talking trash about how we’d finally try and take out Eduardo, my mind was elsewhere.
Justine and I had talked on and off in the time since she’d treated me for my wounds, and I couldn’t help but get the sense that both of us were lying to ourselves. We wanted to say it wouldn’t work because the fighting with King could go on forever, or there’d be some sort of conflict of interest, or some other fucking stupid reason that we both knew was fucking stupid.
But what the hell was the point of us putting all this time and suffering and risk in if not to have a reward of some kind at the end? Why did we really fight our fights? Was it for peace, as we had said?
Or was it so we could pursue the deeper things in life like, well, love?
Although the rest of the guys seemed too engaged with the fight at hand to think about it like that, the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that there was no reason to fight if we didn’t have someone to fight for. Ourselves was not a good enough answer; if it was, we wouldn’t have taken Cole’s help so eagerly. We’d resisted love for so long, but maybe that was because we were too fucking stupid to realize it was the target at the end of the line.
I stepped outside of the clubhouse with my drink in hand, ostentatiously so I could relax and breathe easy for a few minutes. In reality, I had a call to make. I looked down at Justine’s name.
Though we had texted on and off for the last month, at times getting slightly carried away with our flirtations, we’d both kept a blatant and obvious distance under the guise of avoiding commitment. But we hadn’t shared any phone calls in the month since the hospital visit, much less anything in-person.
It was time to change that.
“Hey, what’s up?”
The fact that her voice carried with it the hopeful tone of someone happy to hear me call told me everything I needed to know. There was the content happiness of hearing an old friend call, and then there was the hopeful happiness of hearing a romantic interest call.
