Wild. The nickname I gave him the very night we met. When a casual bathroom hookup at a gay bar in San Antonio led to a night I’ll never forget. We’ve barely spent a day apart since, and usually only because of club business.
We were both Outlaws when we met. Straight out of the army, I needed another brotherhood in a world where I could breathe. A veteran I knew was an Outlaw road captain and he offered to sponsor me as a prospect. It gave me a place to work through lingering PTSD and make my peace with some of the things I was ordered to do.
Kai loved bikes and a good fight. He was in a different chapter, and like me, quietly lived the other parts of his life in secret. When I saw him that night in the bar, I saw the same kind of struggle and courage in him that existed in me.
A desire for a certain type of life in a club that would never accept us.
Ten hours after we met, Kai asked to be allowed to transfer chapters. I thought it was a terrible idea; he kissed me goodbye in the privacy of an alleyway and told me that you didn’t walk away from something as good as we had.
He was that sure after ten fucking hours. I smile at the thought.
All I had was a list of worries. Of being found out. Of it going wrong. Of him being too young for me.
Instead, Kai rode home, packed up his shit, and moved in with me. Over time, we became known for being a good pairing. His tracking skills. My shot. But the truth of it was, we always understood one another.
Or maybe Kai understood me better than I understood myself.
We were…are…a pair.
Nobody asked why the new guy moved into my house and never moved out.
“Straight face on,” Kai says.
I draw a circle around my face. “This is the only face I’ve got. It’ll have to do.”
When we get out of the van, I groan. We stayed overnight in a hotel in the Navajo Nation township of Kayenta, Arizona. A cute place with a pool that neither of us set foot in because we were either fucking or sleeping.
My back creaks after driving for nearly seven hours in a van that allegedly has shock absorbers, but I’m not convinced. The last hour, it felt like sitting on a wooden bench.
The wind no longer stings our cheeks as we cross the lot. It carries the cool freshness of the snow on the mountains, but the meadows are barely even dusted with it anymore, and the sun is warm enough to heat my shoulders as I tug my cut over them.
When we push the clubhouse doors open, we’re hit with a blast of warm air and wild rock. The quiet of the van did little to prepare me for the volume.
“Fuck you,” Grudge, our president, playfully yells at Smoke, our road captain, as he twirls a pool cue around like it’s a lightsaber.
“You’re the one who said to make it best out of five.” Smoke’s dark hair falls forward as he holds out his hand. “That’ll be two hundred bucks.”
Grudge reluctantly takes his roll out of his pocket and lays two big ones into Smoke’s hand.
“Good thing your old lady makes the big bucks as a lawyer,” Atom, the club’s sergeant at arms, says from his seat near the fireplace.
Lucy runs a law firm in town that she set up. Grudge wants to get remarried to his ex-wife so badly, but they’ve been heads down, renovating his house and her new office, so they haven’t done the deed yet.
And it’s making our president antsy.
Wraith, our impressive vice president, chuckles as he tugs his hair back into an elastic.
“The wanderers return,” Catfish says from his spot at the bar. Next to him is Wren. Our treasurer is rarely far away from the person who stole his heart. The way the club accepted the two of them gives me hope that the club might someday accept the two of us. Wren and Catfish are the only ones who know what Kai and I mean to each other.
“How was the ride?” Wren asks.
“Would have been better on our bikes, but at least I managed to pick up a shit load of my furniture from my mom’s place,” Kai says.
Neither of us adds that it’s ours, and we’ve been slowly collecting it all until we had a place to call our own. We’d been renting in town, with the whisper of an idea to settle down here. Being nomad added a cloak of anonymity to our relationship. Made it harder for us to get complacent and give ourselves away. But both of us have a hankering for something more permanent. A future.
“You headed over to your new place now?” Wraith checks his watch. “I got an hour before I need to go pick Fen up and take him to soccer. I can give you a hand.”
“Nah. It’s okay. We got it,” I say.
