“Dentist. Now she’s not answering the phone, so I’m not expecting to see Ivy until she’s bored of messing me around.”
I drained my beer and dropped the bottle on the bar. It had barely touched the sides, but as predictable as Lauren’s MO was, it was just my luck to be blotto if she changed her mind and gave Ivy back.
The bottle teetered on the bar. Rubi set it right, face twisting in a deepening frown as he processed my tale of woe. “This shit is getting out of control. Why does she hate you so much?”
“Because I left her.”
“That was years ago. She’s had, like, sixty-seven boyfriends since then.”
A heavy sigh was my only answer. I didn’t need Rubi to recite my life back to me. Living it in real time was bad enough.
And I still needed to text Mateo.
I took my phone back from Rubi and typed out a message that made me die a little. Then I tried Lauren again and got nothing, all under the weight of Rubi’s fraternal concern.
He watched me set my phone down when all I wanted was to hurl it at the wall. Smoked his joint. Then dropped his elbows on the bar and pinned me in place with the kind of gaze I couldn’t turn away from. “Don’t sack Hopper off. Work if you want to keep busy, but keep him on in case you need to go—”
“I won’t need to go.”
“—anywhere. Fuck, dude. Let an idiot finish his sentence. I’m saying you might wanna get out of here at some point and tying yourself to a one-man bar show is gonna kill that vibe. So take my advice, okay? Give yourself a fucking out.”
I didn’t need an out. I needed to hide in plain sight until the storm raging inside me quieted to a dull roar. Sometimes I envied people like Cam and River who shouted and hit things until they calmed the hell down. Or men like Rubi and Nash who had no trouble articulating how they felt with actual words. EvenSaint, who faced his deepest and darkest fears over and over and over until he defeated them.
Me? I just drifted around in an eternal state of emotional constipation, waiting for the next hammer to fall on my head.
Rubi left me alone. He came back later with a summons to dinner in the chapel, but I wasn’t in the mood and blew him off.
“I’ll bring you a plate.”
“Nah, I’m all right.”
“Matron Matherson disagrees.”
That’s how I found myself in the bar’s backyard sometime later, poking at a bowl of his spag bol. Actually, it was hours later, but the bar had a microwave and by then I was hungry enough to use it.
I picked through my dinner, letting the sounds of a busy summer night on the compound surround me. Men shouting. Laughing. Revving engines. The scents of diesel and smoke heady in the air. Minus the metal music, it wasn’t all that different to being deployed, though I didn’t miss the threat of mortars popping over the boundary fence.
Or maybe I did. That kind of enemy made sense. And I knew how to fight it. Lauren, though. She wanted to hurt me for reasons only she understood, and years down the line, I still didn’t know how to put that right.
Over the din of the compound, bike engines rumbled in the night air. Brothers arriving. Or coming home. It wasn’t my job to know where everyone was, but I was unsurprised to look up and see Saint, River, and Locke returning from wherever they’d been.
Expecting them in the bar, I hauled myself from the back steps and trudged back inside, stopping to toss the remains of my dinner and wash my plate.
By the time I got back to the beer pumps, Rubi had reappeared too, already all up in River’s business while Locke took a pint from Hopper.
Saint was nowhere to be seen, but that wasn’t shocking either. The face I wasn’t expecting?
Mateo’s.
I poured Rubi’s pint and grabbed River a bottle before I paused where my scarred brother stood a little way off from the others. “What are you doing here?”
Mateo regarded me with his fiery amber eyes. “Came to check on you.”
“Why?”
“Because I’d feel like warmed up shite if I had my time with Lili taken away from me.”
“And yet here you are.” I spoke dully, but if any brother understood the raw pain in my heart, it was this one. “You shouldn’t have come out on my account.”
