I climbed the stairs and pushed open the door to my room. I sat on the edge of the bed and put my head in my hands. The silence was deafening. No jasmine. No Indira.
My phone sat on the nightstand. Every night when she wasn’t with me, I texted her before bed. Just a simple “goodnight, baby”or “thinking about you” or sometimes just a heart emoji if I was drunk and feeling sappy. It was our routine.
But tonight felt different. Wrong, somehow. She was angry, and I didn’t fully understand why—I’d only done what presidents did, what club life demanded—but the look on her face kept replaying in my mind.
Still. She just needed time to cool off, right? Tomorrow we’d talk, and she’d apologize. I picked up the phone and typed out the message:Goodnight, baby. We’ll talk tomorrow and sort this out.
I hit send before I could overthink it.
I looked at the bottle of Jack and took a long pull. The burn felt good, familiar. This was how I handled shit—drink until the edges softened, until I could sleep.
But the whiskey didn’t help. I kept thinking about Crystal’s hands on me downstairs and the wave of revulsion that had hit me. That had never happened before. Crystal was convenient, willing, easy. I’d never had a problem with her before tonight.
So why had touching her felt wrong?
I took another drink, waiting for the answer to come. It didn’t. Just more questions I didn’t know how to answer. Why did this room feel emptier than it ever had before? Why did sending that text to Indira not make me feel better? Why couldn’t I shake the image of her face—those hollow eyes—when usually I could compartmentalize this shit without a second thought?
I didn’t have answers. Just an uncomfortable feeling in my chest that the whiskey couldn’t touch, and the certainty that tomorrow, after Indira had time to calm down, we’d talk and everything would go back to normal.
It had to.
Chapter 4
?
— Dutch —
Iwoke up alone with a pounding headache and sunlight streaming through unfamiliar blinds. For a moment, I was disoriented—where the fuck was I? Then it hit me. My clubhouse room. I hadn’t slept here in months, maybe longer. Every night I could, I’d gone home to Indira. To our bed, her scent on the pillows, her warm body curled against mine.
My phone showed three missed calls from my mother and a text from Holden about a parts shipment, but nothing from Indira. Not that I’d expected anything. She was probably still sulking, waiting for me to grovel.
Well, she could keep waiting. I wasn’t apologizing for shit.
I’d done the right thing last night, hadn’t I? Sent Crystal away after I saw how upset Indira was. That should count for something. I didn’t fuck her again. I could have, but I didn’t. That had to mean something.
But all I could think about was the look on Indira’s face when she’d asked me to promise it wouldn’t happen again. Like I’d broken something inside her that couldn’t be fixed.
I showered and dressed, taking my time. Let Indira wait a little longer. Let her think about what she was throwing away over something so fucking trivial.
I was halfway through getting dressed when my phone buzzed with another text from Holden about club business. The quarterly gun shipment. Important shit that required myattention. I started to call him back, then stopped with my finger hovering over his contact.
The shipment was important—critical, even—but it could wait an hour or two while I checked on Indira and made sure she’d calmed down, was being rational about this whole thing. I’d deal with Holden after.
As I was pulling on my boots, something nagged at me. Maybe showing up empty-handed wasn’t the best approach. Indira wasn’t like the club girls—she was educated, sophisticated. She’d probably expect some kind of gesture.
I stopped at the florist on Main Street and bought the biggest bouquet they had—white roses and some other fancy shit the woman recommended. Cost me two hundred bucks, but it would be worth it to see Indira’s face when she realized I’d made an effort.
I was even driving my truck instead of my bike because of the flowers—yet another concession I was making because she was upset. It wasn’t my fault she’d gotten back early from her trip.
The drive to her complex took twenty minutes, twenty minutes I spent rehearsing what I’d say. Nothing too harsh—she’d been emotional, after all. Women got like that sometimes. The flowers would soften her up, remind her that I did care about her, even if I couldn’t promise to change everything about how I lived my life.
But she needed to understand that I’d stopped myself. I didn’t fuck Crystal again. That had to count for something. She’d see that if she thought about it rationally.
Her apartment complex was one of those newer developments, all clean lines and perfectly manicured landscaping. The kind of place that screamed middle-class respectability. It suited her—professional, put-together.
She’d always taken a couple days to work from home after business trips—catching up on laundry, sleep, and whateveremails had piled up while she was gone. Usually she did all that at my place, and there wasn’t much sleeping involved. I’d come home to find her in one of my t-shirts, hair in a messy bun, laptop balanced on her knees as she worked from my couch.
My dick got hard just thinking about it—the way she’d look up at me with those dark eyes, close the laptop, and let me carry her to bed. We’d fuck for hours, making up for the days apart. But last night she’d chosen to come here instead of spending the night in my bed. Probably thought she was making some kind of fucking point.
