I didn’t stop to wonder what would happen if he wasn’t there.
Didn’t ask myself whether safety that depended on someone else standing guard was real at all.
I looked down at my hands, picking at a loose thread on my shirt. “Anything I can do?” I asked.
Doc lifted his magazine without looking up. “Eat something.”
Ranger: “Stay where we can see you.”
Brutus: “Don’t insult my chili.”
Wrecker: “Just breathe.”
That one scraped something deep in my chest.
But being told to sit and exist wasn’t helping. I needed to be useful. Needed to feel like I wasn’t dead weight dragging the whole club down with me.
So I grabbed a cutting board and moved next to Ranger. “Give me something to chop.”
“You’ll cut your fingers off,” he said.
“I won’t.”
He slid an onion toward me. “Try not to bleed.”
Ghost entered then with no sound and no warning. One blink he wasn’t there, next blink he was leaning over the laptop, black mask with a skull on it reflecting the kitchen lights. He didn’tacknowledge anyone, but the temperature in the room seemed to drop a degree when he arrived.
“Morning, Ghost,” I said anyway.
He didn’t respond.
Doc leaned in. “He heard you. That’s the closest you’ll get to affection.”
“That tracks.”
I chopped the onion exactly twice before my eyes started burning.
“Jesus,” I muttered, blinking hard.
Ranger glanced over. “You good?”
“Yeah,” I said, even as my eyes watered. “Just didn’t need tears today.”
He snorted quietly and went back to what he was doing.
I rolled my eyes and wiped at them, which Ranger stopped immediately by catching my wrist. “Don’t touch your eyes.”
“Thank you,” I muttered.
“You’re welcome. You’re still doing it wrong.”
Scout would’ve been all over this.
Not because we’d ever done this together. But because that was just how he was. Always drifting into the middle of things, filling space like he belonged there. He would’ve leaned against the counter behind me, close enough to be annoying, making some comment about how I looked like I was preparing for combat instead of chopping an onion.
He liked being where the noise was. Liked stealing food when Brutus wasn’t looking and denying it badly when caught. He had a grin that said he knew exactly how much trouble he was in and didn’t care.
I hadn’t known him long. Not really.
