Chapter Eight:
1988
Laney
The party was in full swing, and I knew that at any moment Gauge was going to ask me to leave, so I was doing what any rational teenage girl would do: I was hiding.
It was ridiculous, really. I should not have been hiding at a party. Even if it was a biker party that I wasn’t technically invited to. I should have been out there, drinking and having fun with the rest of the women. Instead I was hiding in the kitchen with a bottle of beer I’d managed to get from behind the small bar area.
I unscrewed the lid and drank a quarter of it down before needing to belch. The door to the kitchen swung open and I heard Silvie humming as she walked to the pantry to get another tray of buns for the barbeque.
She saw me sitting on the floor and gave a little scream before I had chance to hush her, and a couple of seconds later I heard Hardy come into the kitchen.
“What the fuck was that?” he snapped.
I held a finger to my lips and Silvie nodded and walked out the way she’d just come in. “I thought I saw a spider,” she lied easily. “False alarm. Go back to the party, Hardy.”
It was silent for a couple of moments before I heard him speak. “Everything okay with you, Silv? You’ve been quiet all week.” He breathed out a heavy sigh, and I wondered what bothered him more—the fact that she was keeping secrets from him or the fact that she seemed unhappy. Hardy was true to his name in every sense of the word—he was hard. And mean. And definitely cruel. Yet I had seen a softness with him when he was around Silvie, and I wasn’t sure what to make of that.
He treated Butch like an employee, and he was downright hateful to Jesse, but with Silvie he was almost like a different person—a man without the weight of the world on his shoulders. And Silvie obviously cared about him a great deal. Why else would she stick around and put up with his shit?
I didn’t mean to listen in on Silvie and Hardy, but I was a people watcher. That was what my mom used to say. I couldn’t help that I noticed things that others didn’t. Like I noticed that Axle clearly had a thing for Rose despite being married to River. But I also knew that Rose clearly had a thing for Pops, despite the age difference between them. And what an age gap that was.
I also saw the way Butch looked at Dom sometimes. And it wasn’t in a best friend way.
I zoned back in, listening to the sound of Hardy groaning. Either I had missed Silvie’s reply to him or she was reassuring him that she was okay by giving him a blowjob. Either way, it seemed enough to satisfy him and stop him from going in there to look for the fictional spider.
“Fuckkk, Silv,” he grunted.
I took another mouthful of beer, wondering what the fuck I was doing with my life. I was almost eighteen, and hiding in a walk-in pantry at my dad’s biker club, when really I should have been out partying with my girlfriends. Not that I had any, but that would change when I got to college, for sure. Once I hit college I was going to put this whole part of my life behind me and make a new beginning up for myself. My mom wouldn’t be a dead hooker, my dad wouldn’t be a sleaze ball biker, and I would be a strong, independent woman making her way in the world.
But for now, the beer bottle was empty, I was still sober, and I was still hiding and listening to Silvie and Hardy do whatever they were doing. Which meant that I was still a loser.
The music was getting louder from the other room, and I wished like hell that I was in there dancing and partying, having some fun like the other women. I hated my life, even more so now that I was stuck with Gauge. My mom had warned me about him, telling me the sort of man he was and the life he lived. She’d even warned me away from this life. So I’ll never understand why she wrote to him and told him about me.
I could have stayed with my Aunt Kate—not technically a real aunt, but she may have well as been. She was the closest thing I had to family, much more so than Gauge. Yet for reasons unbeknownst to me, Mom had contacted Gauge and finally told him about me. The asshole didn’t want to know until he found out that Mom was dying. That’s what a great guy he was.
He found out he had a daughter and didn’t give a shit. Not until he thought I’d be thrown in the system. Why that mattered to him, I didn’t know, but it was what had changed his mind, and two weeks later Mom was packing up my stuff and Gauge came and collected me, taking me away from my home, my family, and my mom.
It wasn’t long after that that Mom had passed.
He took me to the funeral, but I blamed him for the fact that she had died alone in the hospital, without me by her side.
I hated him with every molecule in my body.
The sound of grunting and skin slapping against skin coming from the kitchen was getting louder and louder, and I was guessing that the kitchen countertops would need some serious sterilizing after Hardy and Silvie finished fucking on them. Or maybe not. Bikers were disgusting, so they’d probably get off on knowing their food was made on surfaces that had been fucked on.
Hardy grunted loudly and Silvie let out a little squeal, and the sound of skin slapping against skin came to a stop as Hardy panted.
“You good?” Hardy asked, but I didn’t hear Silvie’s reply.
However, a few moments later I heard the music get louder as the kitchen door swung open, and then I looked up as the sound of footsteps got louder.
“You okay, kiddo?” Silvie asked as she poked her head around the door.
“Yeah,” I replied, standing up.
She came toward me and pulled me into her arms, and I let her, because being hugged by Silvie was almost like being hugged by my mom. She wore the same perfume as she had, and she was the same height and build. If I closed my eyes and drowned out the world, I could almost pretend that things were how they should have been and I was back home watchingThe Wonder Yearswith Mom. But soon enough the world came crashing in and brought me back out of my fantasy.
