My jaw tightens. "I know that."
"You don't look like a man who knows that."
"Cam."
"I'm just saying." She stands back and picks up a glass to polish, which is something she does regularaly. "She's going to be someone extraordinary. You knew that. That's why you did it."
The water bottle is cold in my grip, and I turn it slowly without drinking from it. "She already was someone extraordinary."
"I know." Cam's voice is quieter now. "That's the part that makes it brave instead of just stupid."
I drink my water and I don't respond to that, because if I do I'm going to sound like a man who's feeling sorry for himself, and I promised myself I wouldn't do that. I ended things with Savannah on purpose. I made her hate me on purpose. She's going to go to med school and become the doctor she always talked about being. She's going to have the life she was always supposed to have, and my job now is to make the choice I made mean something by becoming someone worth the sacrifice.
That sounds a hell of a lot better in my head than it does when I try to explain it to anyone else.
Seb drops onto the stool next to me and steals my water. He's been a prospect a couple of months longer than me, and he's got the easy confidence of someone who grew up around the club, who always knew this was where he was headed. I ended up here through Brick and sheer stubbornness. We're different in a lot of ways, but we get along because Seb doesn't ask questions he doesn't need answers to.
"Bike done?" he asks.
"Yeah."
"Razor wants us on gate duty tonight. Both of us."
I groan.
"I know." Seb grins and hands my water back. "But Knuckles is bringing some brothers from the Eastside chapter throughtonight and Prez wants fresh faces on the gate, not the same two guys who always look like they're about to fall asleep."
"Who falls asleep?"
“Bri fell asleep last week. Don't tell anyone." Seb stands. "We're on at eight. Don't be late or Knuckles will make your life a misery."
He leaves and Cam smirks at me from behind the bar. "You love this life, don't you."
"Ask me again after eight hours on a gate in a cold September night."
She laughs, and some of the weight in my chest shifts, just slightly.
CHAPTER 2
Austin
The workshop smells like grease, cold air and something faintly chemical that I've never been able to name. At five in the morning, it smells like that more than any other time because there's nobody else in here to cover it. Just me, the overhead strip light that flickers if you look at it wrong, and three bikes that need cleaning down before the day crew arrives.
I've been a prospect for eleven days.
Eleven days of being the first one up and the last one in bed. Eleven days ofyes sirandno sirandI'll get thatand not once has anyone said thank you, because that's not how this works and I knew that going in. When you're a prospect, gratitude is the patch at the end of it. Everything before that’s just the price of admission, and the price is high on purpose because the club needs to know you mean it before they give you the brotherhood that they welcome you to.
I drag the cloth along the length of a Dyna's tank and work the grime out of the chrome fittings. I don't think about Savannah. I think about the carburetor on the Fat Boy in bay two that's been giving trouble since last week, and whether it's a needle jetproblem or a float issue, and what I'm going to need to pull it apart properly. I think about that instead.
I've been thinking about carburetors a lot this week.
The side door opens and I hear boots on concrete. I know it's Brick before I see him because he walks with a particular weight that I've been hearing my whole life. He crosses the workshop and stops a few feet behind me. I feel him looking at the state of the place without him saying a word about it.
"You've been in here since when?" he asks.
"Four thirty."
"Gate duty last night?"
