I walked outside church, didn’t see him inside the clubhouse at all, and walked outside. He was sitting on his bike, looking out on the night sky, having a single beer in his hand that looked like Blue Moon from here. I nodded to him and walked over, and he returned the nod back.
“You were serious back there?” I said. “Or fuck ‘em?”
Brock sighed.
“Does it even matter?” he said. “I’m never going to share a hug with Lane. I don’t fucking need to. I just want us to win this damn war.”
He sighed.
“I’m not going to lie, Mason; I’m fucking exhausted,” he said. “I’m over the Bandits and us escalating further and further. What the hell are we even fighting for, anyway? Peace? The more we fight, the less there is of it. For Rachel? She’s not even around anymore; she’s—”
“Connor and I just had dinner with her.”
Brock eyed me very carefully as if deliberating whether to attack me with his beer bottle for telling him something that was “obviously” bullshit. I did not flinch.
“You get one chance to tell me the truth, and if you are lying, I will fucking murder you with Eduardo. Did you really?”
“Yes,” I said without hesitation. “She came by to get her oil changed earlier. Then we were at Southwest Dine. She got food to go and we told her to eat with us. It would be the safest place in town to eat.”
Brock took a sip of his beer, looked at the ground, and didn’t say a fucking word. Neither did I. I really had no idea how he’d react. He finally sighed.
“How was she?”
“As good as can be,” I said, which I believed to be a fair and real answer. “She’s making the effort to come back to reality. But it’s clear what happened affected her.”
Brock nodded. A long fucking silence passed between us, so long that I wondered if it was best to just go elsewhere, give Brock his space. A couple of times, he drew in breath like he was about to speak, but he said nothing more. Finally, he spoke, so quietly that I almost wondered if I’d heard it.
“I think about that night every day,” he said.
I nodded. I didn’t, but the more of Rachel that I was seeing, the more I thought about it.
“Every fucking day,” he said. “That night…I won’t be able to sleep easy until Eduardo is dead. That fucker did something worse than killing her. He made her one of the living dead.”
He took another sip of his beer.
“How did she look? Physically, I mean.”
“Honestly? Beautiful. Tired. But she still has that part of her before it all happened.”
“That’s good,” Brock said, words that felt more like something he just had to say than words he actually believed. “Go fucking figure. I disappear to talk it out with asshole and Cole, and the ghost of my past returns.”
He smirked.
“I imagine I’ll see her soon enough if she’s coming around like you say she is.”
“I would guess so. She’s talked about wanting to return to the outside world more. And not like we’re in New York or Los Angeles.”
“True.”
But nothing we could say now would make it make sense to Brock. He needed to see Rachel with his own eyes. And neither Connor nor I could bring him to her; doing so would not be comfortable for either side.
“Well, shit,” Brock said. “I guess we got a chance to make the world safe for her.”
He looked…I wouldn’t say charged, but it was like he was coming around to accepting her return. And if it was making him energized, it was getting me a little fucking fired up too.
“It’s going to be fucking weird seeing her.”
“You still got feelings for her?”
