I downed my second beer and threw the plastic cup to one side, needing more than just warm beer to get me through the rest of that fucked-up night. I needed to keep my head in the game and stop thinking about Laney—for a little while, at least. Too much was going on and too much was at risk to be distracted. Yet I couldn’t stop myself, because if I didn’t think about Laney I would think about Butch, and when I thought about Butch, bad shit happened around me. As usual, Laney and Butch dominated my very being. They were the two most important people in my life—or they had been. Now, through one thing or another, I had lost both of them.
“You okay?” Dom asked, coming to stand by me. He handed me another beer, and I took it because there was nothing else there to get me through this shit and I needed something.
“Not really,” I replied, still staring into the flames. “You?”
“Nope,” he replied. Dom had been Butch’s best friend and they’d known each other way back before we’d even moved in with Hardy, back when we lived with my mom and she was a crackhead junkie and we were half-starving to death because she’d spent our family allowance on drugs. Dom’s mom had fed us, helped clothe us; even though she had six kids herself, she helped me and Butch like we were her own.
Even after Mom died and we went to live with Hardy, Dom and Butch had stayed friends. Fucking nothing could keep those two apart. Not distance, not the club, nothing. Or so we thought. Now Dom was as lost as I was, going off the rails while he tried to sort out the rage that was filling him from the inside out.
Rage I knew only too well, because I lived and breathed right alongside him. Most of his shit went under the radar because he was always fucking quiet and moody anyway. Shit, maybe I wouldn’t have noticed too much either if I didn’t know him so well.
Because for me, it was his eyes that gave him away. Where once they had held a certain ferocity now they were cold and dead, just like Butch. They were grey, like slate or marble or some shit Butch had once said, but now…now they just seemed empty. Dead of anything.
At least for Dom the only thing he couldn’t fuck up was his relationship, because he didn’t have one. The man barely glanced at bitches, his time having been taken up by the club and caring for his brothers and sisters for as far back as I could remember. He was a goddamned saint as far as I was concerned, because most of his siblings were crazy fucked up too.
But Dom was a good man, and he was the biggest connection I had to Butch now, and vice versa. We stood in mutual silence, both of us watching the flames, drinking our warm, shitty beer and thinking of Butch, my brother, and his best friend, and wishing shit would have turned out differently.
We both missed him like crazy, and we would both probably never get over his death.
But at least Dom didn’t have to live with the guilt like I did.
