by Nicole Fox
He leaned forward and pressed a kiss to the crown of her head. If anything came out of this situation, the only heartwarming thing that had happened was over the fact that my daughter and my daughter’s father at least got a moment; I could appreciate Trip trying.
“That’s good hun. Your mama and I finished your room in my—in our—house. You’ve had a long da., You wanna see it? You can finally hunker down with us.”
Rose lifted her head to look at him. She sniffled again.
“Really, Mr. Trip?”
“Really.”
Trixie tossed me her keys. “You can drive my Bug,” she said. “We’ll follow you guys.”
Thirty minutes later, Travis, Rose, and I were in the kitchen, cooking as though we’d always been doing so.
Rose stood on a little pull-out stool that Trip had, so she could reach the stove. Rich tomato sauce rolled and boiled in the pan, with a hearty helping of meatballs sizzling in the juices. It smelt heavenly with spices and herbs—my daddy’s recipe.
Which was surprising to me, considering the fact that it was Trip who had suggested that we cook it in the first place.
“You never told me that you knew my daddy’s spaghetti recipe,” I said, peering over at him from where I stirred and watched the noodles. He was letting Rose get a taste of the sauce.
“More salt!” she ordered, like a little head chef. Trip laughed.
“You got it, boss. Also.” He grinned over at me as he added another small dash for Rose’s approval. “Bobby always told me that a way to a girl’s father’s heart was to make him a meal that would make him fall in love with you. Now, I wasn’t about to get your daddy to wanna kiss me or nothing, but I figured knowing how to handle his prized spaghetti recipe couldn’t hurt. I mean—I never got the chance to test it out on him, but it’s worth the chance to test it out on his daughter, isn’t it?”
I turned, hiding my smile.
“What?”
I giggled.
“What?”
“That is honestly the sappiest, sweetest thing that has ever come from your mouth, Trip,” I said. I looked over to him. “You really cared that much?”
“I always cared that much, Misha.”
Our eyes locked. The last hour had been … Not the easiest, but it was a lull in the tensions to have this ,and I knew we both felt it. I’d need to talk to him later, but for now, we were being a family.
I really liked the sound of that.
For the first evening, Trip, Rose, and I sat at a dining room table all together, eating dinner together as a family. I’d never thought that I would see this day—it was a dream that had seemed so out of reach while I was with the Jackals.
I watched as Rose and Trip interacted. It was the first time without the boys around, or not in public in general, that Trip had time with Rose. I smiled as she gave him herrapt attention, as it seemed he wasn’t expecting her to be so receptive to him.
“Mr. Trip, Mr. Travis says that you’ve never gotten in a wreck before. Is that true?”
Trip nodded.
“Mmhm. One of the only ones; because I actually know how to ride,” he said with a wink.
“Ooooh. What’s that scar from, then?” She pointed a little pudgy finger to a fine line that peeked up over the collar of Trip’s shirt. I blushed at the memory; it wasn’t from a wreck, but I knew what it was from.
“Well,” Trip said with you laugh. “That one was from your mama.”
Rose gasped and turned her gaze to me.
“You did that, Mama?!”
“It was an accident!”
“I was left traumatized.”
“You laughed the whole time!”
Trip let out another laugh, and set into the story.
“Back when we were kids,” he started, “your mama and I did some really wild things. We weren’t as good and responsible as we are. I was teaching her how to throw knives, like darts, yanno? Only, she was terrible at it—”
“You were trying to teach me how to throw while drunk!” I protested, tossing a napkin at him. He batted it out of his way playfully and laughed heartily at me.
“We were both drinking, and we were both being really, really stupid, okay? Anyway, I was teaching your mama how to throw knives—”
“Poorly.”
“I was poorly teaching your mama how to throw knives, and one thing led to another and she kinda clipped me.”
Rose looked at me, her little eyes wide.
“Mama, you stabbed Mr. Trip!”
“I accidentally managed to throw a knife at Mr. Trip, which is still his fault, because he wasn’t in the right frame of mind to be teaching an impaired girl how to throw knives in the first place.”
“I got a lot of really cool stitches, though,” Trip said, leaning over to Rose, whispering. “Like, really cool stiches.”
“Woah!”
“Alright, all right. Enough of that.”
Dinner was easily the most relaxed I’d been, watching Trip finally cut loose with Rose. You couldn’t tell that she still didn’t know that he was her daddy; they interacted like father and daughter and for all of Trip’s apprehensions, I couldn’t for the life of me understand why he had had them in the first place.
He was a natural.
We cleaned up after dinner, Trip letting Rose stand on the stool so that she could reach the dishes in the water better, and I watched from the sidelines—Trip and Rose wanted to ‘treat Mama’ to not having to do any work. Afterwards, Trip and I both walked Rose up to her new room, where she dressed down and got ready for bed.
“Mama, is it okay if Mr. Trip reads me a story tonight?” It was routine, she always got a bedtime story. It was my right, my little thing that I had, but—I plucked one of her favorites from her shelf, and handed it over to a very befuddled Trip.
“That’s perfectly okay, sweetie.”
Trip took the book and looked at it apprehensively before that apprehension turned to determination. He flipped open the book to the front page, settled on the floor beside Rose’s bed, and started.
“Once upon a time …”
“You were really good with Rose today.”
We were in bed. Rose was tucked away, snoring and snoozing. Trip and I had stripped down, too, cuddled under the plush comforter in his—in our—bed. It was peaceful.
Trip laid his head on mine. “You think?”
“Yeah. You were really good. I told you that she liked you. Now she knows you like her.”
“I hope she still likes me when we tell her I’m her father.”
“I know she’s going to love you.”
He looked down at me, his brows furrowed. Before I knew it, he was kissing me, my face held in his hand. It was the sweetest thing he’d given me so far, by way of kisses at least. It took my breath away and I sighed against his lips before he pulled away.
“Misha … about earlier.”
I frowned, having known that the pleasing lull in stress was only that, a lull. I scooted to sit up and Trip did the same.
“Whatever it is,” he said, “it’s not going to make me think of you differently. But I think—no, I know—I need to know what all of that was about. What Rose said … I need to know. For the sake of knowing how to keep our daughter out of this.”
Our daughter …
He really was a father, wasn’t he?
“You know Holland didn’t let anyone at me,” I said. I had hoped to avoid this conversation with Trip, but he was right. He deserved to know, not for my sake, but for Rose’s. “We slept together, yeah, but it was never … it wasn’t bad. It wasn’t traumatizing. When Holland got into his accident and Rigger took over, though, whatever elevated status that Holland treated me with was null. It didn’t matter. Rigger made me a club girl. At first, I thought he was bluffing. Holland’s condition wasn’t looking very good, but there’s a good chance that over a little time and some treatment, he’ll pull through. Which means he’ll know about anything that Rigger does between now and
then and in between. I called him on his shit and figured that I would just go ahead and move on my way, staying there as I had. I batted off the first few guys, reminding them of Holland’s rules. They respect Holland more than they fear Rigger, that’s for sure.
“One day, Rigger got fed up with this. He brought Rose out to the shop they all worked out of, and where I was doing books and stuff like that. He told me either I did what I was there for, or Rose would learn early.”
I drew in a breath. I could remember that day so clearly. It was a vivid image in my head, like a movie playing.
“I can tell you what was playing on the radio as it all happened. I could tell you what cars they were working on while they went in rounds. I can’t tell you how I felt because there was nothing to feel other than the fact that I was going to do what I was told in order to protect my daughter from something much, much worse than seeing her mother like that.” I avoided looking at Trip as I drew my legs up.
“I never regretted it. I would do it again if I had to. I just never thought that one of them would find us here again, that he would go up to Rose like that. I thought—I thought we were safe from all that. I thought I made the right choice—”
“Misha.”
I stopped. My heart felt like it was going to run out of my chest, like it was going to explode. I felt the same panic as I had the day it happened, and the days after where I wondered what it would take to make Rigger snap and do horrible things to my daughter, what it would take to make him hurt her, knowing that I couldn’t let him do such horrible things to her.
But we weren’t there anymore. I was here, with Trip, and I hadn’t realized until then that I had never had the time to really process what happened.
He held me while I cried. I sobbed. I don’t know where it came from; I hadn’t cried a day that I was with the Jackals, not even when I’d given birth to Rose, in Holland’s house with the doctor they paid off not to say anything. He held me in his arms, rocking back and forth as I was vividly reminded of all the reasons I had left the Jackals—but it was in his arms that I remembered why it was him I had come to in the first place.
“I’m not gonna let them touch her,” he vowed. “I’m not gonna let them touch you ever again, either.” He took my face in his hands and turned it upward, looking at me. “You’re my family. The both of you. You’re my girl and she’s my daughter, and there’s not shit that’s gonna change that. Whatever it takes, Mish.”
“I don’t want you going to war over me, Trip,” I said softly.
He pressed his lips to mine. “We’re already there, Misha.” He drew a breath through his nose. “We’ve always been there.”
“You never stopped.” He didn’t need to tell me. I knew. I knew. It was just different now than it was then. Because Trip was smarter. Wiser. He didn’t act rashly.
Still, the thought was terrifying.
“The boys weren’t celebrating a charity run, were they?” I asked. “When you guys rode on in.”
“We’d just finished dumping about a quarter mil of coke off into a ravine.”
“Trip—”
“My duty, and everyone’s duty here, is to protect this town. Misha—when we were young, it was all about the glory. Partying, fucking, showing off the bikes, showing how bad you were to anyone that was around. We were dumb back in the day. But after … after you left … I was so fucking angry, Misha. Angry because I couldn’t protect you. Was too busy getting into bar fights and drinking and being a stupid little shit that I didn’t know my head from my ass. It opened my eyes and made me realize that if I was going to be doing all of this, I needed to be doing it with some sort of purpose, you know? Protecting those that can’t be protected otherwise. It might be poking the Jackals in the ass, but it’s keeping drugs that made this town a shit hole out of it. it’s the kind of shit we do, Misha. I told you when you came back, didn’t I? Things had changed.”
“You knew I wouldn’t like this. You kept it from me.”
“You’re not a member of the club, so, yeah, kept it from you.” He must have caught the flash of hurt that went across my face. “You know I don’t mean it like that, Misha. But you’re not a club member, and you didn’t want Rose mixed in this, and I knew that if you knew everything that was going on, you would worry. That wouldn’t be good for you.”
“You kept it from me to protect me?” I asked, almost sarcastic. “Or yourself?”
“I kept it from you because you’d already been through enough and if that meant you thought we were going on a charity run rather than handling drugs, then I was gonna do it. Why do you want them bringing in that shit here? Do you want them fucking up this town after we’ve spent years fixing it? Do you care about them—”
“I don’t give a shit about them!” I shouted, not realizing that my voice had gotten so loud. I bit my lip, though, remembering that Rose was in the other room. “I don’t care if their drugs are taken. I hope all their shit suffers, Trip. But he—he was here. He knows we’re here. And now apparently, you’re messing with their stuff like that. It was one thing keeping them out of the territory—I know all about that little squabble and deal a few years back. One of Holland’s boys stepped over a line with a girl, Big Mama’s niece, wasn’t it? She told me about it. Shit that could have given you every right to retaliate like the old days, but you knew that would mean war. Holland told me that it took a fair bit of negotiating but there was always rumor of skirmishes one way or another—”
“We never instigated those—”
“But always were a part of them.”
“What do you want me to say, Misha? I’m doing and have been doing the best that I damn well can.”
The silence lingered over us. I didn’t realize that there were tears falling until Trip reached out and brushed one from my cheek.
“I don’t want this to be the reason that I lose you again, Misha. Say something.”
It took me a moment. Everything seemed to be crashing down around all at once, and I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to or even could make of it.
“I—I’m scared, Trip,” I admitted. I looked at him. “You’re more involved than I thought—”
“I’m only involved when it comes across the border, Misha. I don’t poke the bear, and I don’t make rash decisions that will hurt people.” He took my face in his hands. “I promise you. I will protect you and Rose. I swear. Don’t think I won’t, because I fucking will.”
It would have been so easy to tell him no. that I wouldn’t trust him. I hadn’t trusted anyone in years.
There was a fierceness in his eyes though. An intent there—I saw myself in those eyes. A parent willing to do what it took to protect their child.
I said nothing. I leaned forward, kissed him, and knew things would be all right.
Chapter Eleven
Trip
“You excited, sweetie?”
“Mmhm! I’ve never been to a school before!”
I had Rose’s little hand slipped into mine. I was walking her to her classroom—her first classroom. It was her first day of school after a hell of a lot of hoop jumping getting her registered. But she would be almost a year behind if we put it off, and Misha and I knew that she couldn’t just hang around the house or the bar for the rest of forever.
Oddly enough, it was kind of scary. I was leaving my daughter with strangers after I’d just started getting to know her.
However, I couldn’t let that get in the way of what was best for her. It was all a part of this parent thing that I was doing. Parent, family man, kind of thing. We got some odd stares, probably from people who weren’t expecting some biker guy to be dropping off a little girl, but I didn’t care. I only wished that Misha hadn’t had to pull a double at the diner and had been here to see her off, too; seemed like a thing a mom should be able to do.
“Mr. Trip.” I hadn’t realized Rose was tugging on my arm. I looked down.
“Yeah, sweetie?”
“Do you think I’ll make
friends? I’ve never had a friend, except for Mr. Holland, but he was an adult.”
I frowned and stopped with her, standing off beside one of the walls.
“You were never around other kids with the Jackals?”
“All the kids were older … and mean,” she said softly. “And Mama said she didn’t want me getting involved with them, either. so I stuck with Mama and with Mr. Holland. He used to give me sweets and help me color.”
I pursed my lips. I still hadn’t gotten over the fact that the bastard had basically been allowed to act as a surrogate father to Rose all these years, but that was neither here nor there, and I couldn’t change it, anyway. I squatted down in front of her.