The Other Princess

by Christine Michelle

  Deck smiled like the cat that ate the canary. “Why would you ask that?”

  “Well, you haven’t been staying there, right? I thought if you were moving in with Declan that I could take over the apartment,” her sweet mousy voice took the sting out of the embarrassment for me.

  “Um, I don’t live there. I just go over, and…” I could feel my cheeks reddening as both Gretchen and Deck stared at me while I fumbled through my response. Finally, Gretchen clued in, and her hands flew to her mouth as her eyes widened in shock. Then she grabbed hold of my arm and yanked me back to the employee lounge area.

  “Oh my God, I’m so sorry!” She shrieked at me. “I didn’t mean to put you guys on the spot, I thought…” She bit into her bottom lip nervously. “I just thought you guys already had that discussion, and that he’d asked you to move in since you were always there.”

  “No, we haven’t had that conversation,” I explained to her, still trying to cool my reddening face down by fanning it with my hands.

  “That’s not entirely correct,” Deck’s voice behind me caught my attention. “I told Ever that my house was her house the first time I brought her over there, but I don’t think she understood then. So, let me clarify for the both of you. I do intend for Ever to continue staying in our house. If she agrees to that, then I don’t see why the apartment upstairs won’t be free for you.” He didn’t stick around to hear what I had to say to that. Instead, Deck turned and left. He didn’t just leave the room. He left the entire studio.

  “I’m so sorry, Ever!” Gretchen whined to me again. “I didn’t mean to make things awkward.”

  “It’s okay. At least this way, we know where we stand right?”

  “Well, we know where Deck stands, but you didn’t exactly say anything when he extended the invitation. Are you going to move in with him?”

  It was my turn to go bug-eyed, because while I had been staying over there, it was entirely different to think about moving in and living with someone. What if everything went wrong, and I had to leave behind the love of my life and my dream home? Life was hard. Sometimes, I wondered if I was really ready to adult on my own. Instead of continuing on with all the self-doubt, I turned to Gretchen and smiled brightly. “I don’t know how to not be with him,” I admitted.

  She bounced up and down on her toes while shaking her arms in the air in some weird little bubbly dance. “That means you’re moving in!”

  “I guess it does.”

  “Ever, aren’t you supposed to be doing that thing this afternoon?” Kane asked as he walked in the lounge giving Gretchen an odd look. He was probably wondering about her pseudo-dance moves like I had been.

  “Shit!” His question finally sunk in, and I realized I was due to be at the clubhouse in about 45 minutes.

  Kane laughed. “I guess it was a good thing Deck sent me back here to remind you.”

  “Did he leave?” I asked the question knowing he had, but wondering why he wouldn’t want to show up with me.

  “He did. He said he wanted to make sure,” he tossed some air quotes up. “And I quote, ‘that those morons don’t fuck anything up before she gets there,’” he explained, making me smile.

  “Okay, well I better go get ready. Gretchen, I’ll let you know when I get all my stuff out.”

  “Thanks, Ever, you’re a life saver.”

  “Sure thing, Gretchen.” With that I went upstairs to get changed into a top that would make it easier for me to display the tattoo I had on my back. The top was a silver piece that tied around my neck and draped pretty provocatively in the front, showing more cleavage than I’d normally be comfortable displaying in front of my family and the men of the club. It was, however, the only shirt I had been able to find that was also completely backless, having just a thin strip of material down at my waist that wrapped all the way around holding it to me. Once I had that on I was running a little behind so I just grabbed my cardigan to toss overtop my shirt so as not to ruin the surprise reveal of my own tattoo.

  When I got to the clubhouse I nervously sat in my car a few extra minutes just trying to catch my breath, and burn off some of the anxiety that was beginning to cripple me. Apparently, I sat there too long though, because before I could actually get my breathing back under control the door to Zeke’s car – which I had borrowed – was being pulled open and Deck stood there with his hand held out for me to grasp on to. “Ever whose car is this?”

  “It’s Zeke’s. It was either use his or call an Uber and wait for them to show up.”

  “I thought you had a car of your own?”

  “Nope. They let me borrow Lucy’s old one before I moved out,” I shrugged off the somewhat angry look on Deck’s face then, and plastered on a fake smile. “We should go in before I change my mind and head back to the studio.”

  I locked Zeke’s car up, pocketed the keys, and started toward the door with Deck’s hand wrapped around my own. Once we moved inside the easy banter I’d heard as the door opened dimmed to a hush, with barely a whisper being heard. “Wow, I guess that’s some kind of a reception. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea,” I whispered in Deck’s ear. He squeezed me reassuringly, and ignored my idea to leave, instead leading us deeper into the building until we were standing in front of the little makeshift stage that housed a stripper pole for the club whores to work their magic on if the mood struck.

  There was a microphone that I hadn’t noticed right away in front of the pole. Deck walked me over to it. He glanced out at the crowd, never releasing his hold on my hand. “I’m going to issue one warning to all of you. This is my old lady, and if you disrespect her at all during this process, you will deal with me first, and then you will lose a brother, and any chance for redemption. I know the brothers are aware of this, but if you don’t have your families under control, I will count that against you as well. Make sure we’re all clear on this.” I saw a woman back towards the bar scoff, and even heard her as she began to laugh at Deck’s warning. It didn’t take two seconds before several brothers were breathing down her neck and escorting her out.

  “Anyone else need to be ejected before we begin, or can the rest of you all behave?” Deck glanced around once more before he grumped, “I don’t know why club whores are here anyway. The rest of y’all get the hell out. This isn’t for you or about you.”

  The women, who were all seated toward the back of the room near the bar were outraged. “What the hell makes her more important than us?” One of them had the nerve to call out.

  “She’s the VP’s daughter,” Deck answered through clenched teeth.

  “Like that matters,” the woman huffed. “No one cares about that girl,” she spat out. “We all know it too. I can’t tell you how many of these guys have come to my bed complaining about that bitch when she’s deemed them worthy of one of her visits.”

  Normally, I wouldn’t care about a club whore’s words, but that one hit home, because I was pretty sure she wasn’t lying about that. I started to take a step back, but Deck held me firmly in place.

  “Get. The. Fuck. Out,” Deck ordered. “And you aren’t welcome back here for any reason,” he said pointing at the woman who had spoken up.

  “Why, because I’m the only one who will tell the truth?”

  “No, because you’re the only one too stupid to shut your fuckin’ mouth. We’re all here because we already know the truth, and since you don’t know the half of it that makes you even more of a dumb cunt.” Normally, I wasn’t a fan of the “C” word, but I would definitely be making an exception to Deck’s use of it this time.

  Once the women were escorted out Deck turned back to the microphone. “Ever has a specific order she’s planning on unveiling these tattoos, so stand by until she calls you up.”

  With that announcement he turned, putting his back to the waiting club members while looking down at me. “You okay to do this?” I nodded my head. “I’ll be here with you the whole time, I promise.” Again, I tipped my head up and down in a quick nod of a
cknowledgment before I moved myself in front of the microphone that had been set up.

  “First up is Crow, because he was the first to label me ‘the other princess,’ and mean it in a derogatory way. I was eight years old when that happened, and in a new home, because I had just gone through having my mom die in my arms. My father had told me I had more family to meet, and I got excited, because my mom was all I had before, and I thought the rest of my father’s family would be like my brother.” I glanced around the room and found Toby. “He told me he was going to protect me from day one,” I smiled at him. “He kept that promise for a really long time too,” I added and watched as his face fell at the implication that he hadn’t kept it forever as he once vowed.

  “The first person I met when I walked through those doors was Crow, who sneered at me and called me ‘the other princess’ and even though I was only eight, I knew hostility when I encountered it. I remembered the other guys looking at Crow curiously, and then they took some kind of cue from him, because after that no one even spoke to me that day. No one said hello or introduced themselves or their children to me. I never wanted to cry so much in my whole life as I did that day knowing that my father’s family hated me on sight. For the longest time, I thought maybe I was so ugly they couldn’t love me.” A shocked gasp erupted from the crowd and I saw Deck’s mom, Tiger Lily, wiping a tear from her eye. “Anyway, since Crow was the one who started that, I figured he should go first.” Crow slowly walked up to the stage and came to stand before me. I could see the remorse in his eyes as he realized what his actions had meant to the little girl I had been. He was the reason I questioned my outward appearance for so long. When I went to bed at night thinking I was ugly and unworthy, he was the main reason for it.

  Crow took off his leather kutte and handed it to Deck who held it reverently before him as we all watched the man peel off the long sleeve shirt that had been hiding the tattoo I’d given him. Once the shirt was out of the way he turned so that the prospect in charge of filming this could get a good look at it with the camera. The camera was used to project the image up onto a larger screen so everyone could take in the detail. There was a collective intake of breath upon seeing the image he had inked from elbow to wrist. At the bottom of the tattoo, near his wrist, the tip of feather turned into vines that strangled an Ace of Hearts playing card that had been buried in the ground with a dead baby crow. From the tip of the feather crawling up his forearm was a large, singular crow’s feather the fine black pieces had a slight sheen of blue in the black giving it an almost metallic look. At the top of the feather, closer to the crook of Crow’s elbow, the feather split apart and became two crows, one smaller than the other. They were flying free into the sky.

  “It wasn’t until some years later, around the time I turned 15 that I overheard someone talking about Crow’s ex and the baby girl he had lost because of her negligence. After hearing that I began to understand why he had hated me so much on sight. You see he thought of my mom as nothing better than his ex, and for some reason in his mind my mother’s sins were transferred to me, even though I knew nothing of what she’d done before I moved here. I didn’t even know I had a father until the social worker told me. I was just as much a victim of the things my mom did as everyone else involved, but I became her whipping boy for Crow, and others.”

  The man shifted uncomfortably as he listened to what I had to say. He hadn’t bothered to even glance down at the ink on his arm yet. I nodded to him. “Look at it,” I commanded. He bristled a moment, and then he looked, and I saw the tears well in his eyes instantly as he realized what the tiny little dead crow represented. “In case you can’t figure it out,” I began explaining. “The feather is you. The birds at the top are your old lady and your son. The roots are where our problem began, long before you knew me, when your woman betrayed you and your baby girl died as a result. You let those roots fester though, and you became the reason another child was lost to this club.” He flinched back as if I had physically slapped him.

  “You’re still here,” he muttered to me.

  “Physically, I’m here today,” I agreed. “When my father brought me here to introduce his daughter to the club, you made a stand – for your own reasons – that the rest of the club followed, including my own father to an extent. Instead of being welcomed and treated as all the other club children were I was shunned, pushed aside, ignored, and flat out tormented by you, the brothers, and their families. Your actions made it so that I would never be accepted despite the fact that I didn’t deserve to ever be treated that way. Your actions led directly to the damage that was done when everything went down with J-Bird’s girlfriend lying about me. If it hadn’t been for the precedent you set in how I was to be treated, things may have turned out very differently then. I almost took my own life when it became too much to handle anymore, but your actions took my soul long before that.” Tears dripped freely from Crow’s face as I finished my explanation. “You ended up just as guilty as the woman you hated, and now you wear that mark as a reminder that no one is perfect, and therefore you should never be another’s judge.”

  If it weren’t for the smattering of sniffles in our audience – which I had managed to block out for the most part – I think you would have been able to hear a pin drop in the place. Crow traced his fingers down the ink on his arm before glancing back up into my eyes. “Ever,” he whispered my name, and then shook his head. “I don’t deserve your forgiveness, so I won’t even ask for it now.”

  “I didn’t deserve your treatment either, so we’re going to meet in the middle, and I’m going to give you the forgiveness you can’t ask for anyway. I don’t think you understood, yourself, what you were doing or why. Maybe now, though, you’ll think before you allow your actions to take another soul unwarranted.” Crow hung his head as he took his kutte back from Deck, and walked down off the raised area of the stage. Deck moved in closer to me and gave my shoulder a squeeze.

  “You okay to do the rest?”

  I nodded my head, and he backed up a few paces again as he had before I’d called Crow up.

  “Next up is PeeWee,” I called out and waited as the man bellied his way up to the stage. He was a stout guy with a beer belly he was proud of and shoulder length thinning hair that was looking more gray than brown these days. As he moved in closer with trepidation highlighting his features I took a breath and let it out again.

  “PeeWee took special pleasure in taunting me with ‘the other princess’ moniker. He delighted in it, and it always unnerved me to be around him, because I didn’t understand why he would take pleasure in tormenting a little girl, or a teenage girl as I grew and his heckling just became more cruel. It was especially vindictive and beyond crude when no one else was around to hear the things he would say to me.” That admission brought Deck in closer to my side, and I noticed his fists were clenched tightly at his sides so I slid my hand down over his and gave him a reassuring squeeze this time. PeeWee’s tattoo was on his left shoulder blade. When he took his shirt off I had him turn around so the camera could zoom in on the detail and PeeWee watched on the screen that was in front of him while standing with his back to the crowd as the lifting of his shirt unveiled the ink there.

  A man stood proudly with his back to the people viewing the tattoo as he looked out over a field of flowers. When the camera panned in everyone could tell the flowers were actually Aces of Hearts playing cards growing in a field. Then the camera panned down to take in the man, his kutte that was an exact replica of an Aces High MC kutte with the bottom rocker of Charleston on it too. As the camera panned down people noticed what the man was doing with his foot. He was stomping on a weed that attempted to grow through the crack in the sidewalk beneath his feet. The weed was an Aces of Spades card, and had been trampled to a point where it was ripped in places, torn from the stem it had grown from, and had a boot print clearly visible on its scuffed surface.

  “I don’t think this one needs a whole lot of explanation, especially
since I still don’t understand why I was always such an easy and desirable target for you,” I stated to PeeWee directly.

  He shook off whatever he’d been about to say, and instead he turned to look me in the eye. “Your mother was married to my brother by blood. She knew about that party because of me. She came here and seduced your father who was heartbroken and drunk off his gourd, all because she was pissed that my brother wouldn’t knock her up. He couldn’t do so even if he had thought it was a wise idea at their ages. My brother was a full 15 years older than me. They were too old to start having children. She came here to trap a man into putting a baby in her belly, and she succeeded. You are the product of an adulterous whore who used men like they were her personal play toys. I had no doubt you’d grow to be just like her.” He spat those words at me, apparently still holding me in that same regard despite the fact that we were supposed to be here as a way to heal and change.

  I nodded my head, finally understanding why he’d hated me so much. “You forgot the other part though,” I explained to him.

  “What other part?”

  “The part where I also belonged to my father, your club brother whom you have great respect for. The man who has loved my Momma-Luce with nothing but devotion since they figured out they couldn’t be without one another. I’m the product of your brother – a man you trust with your life – but you condemned me solely on the half of me that I’d already lost, instead of helping to insure I ended up like the half of me I had found.” I hung my head momentarily, wondering if things would have gone any differently if someone had pointed these things out to the men of the club who were supposed to be the grown adults even back then.

  “Maybe, your tattoo can be a reminder that not all weeds are bad just because they’re a little different. Sometimes, if given the chance, they can outgrow the cracks they spring from to become the bloom that brightens that space.” Having been properly chastised for his actions, and called out for not realizing there were two sides to every person, PeeWee slunk off the stage to go sit at the bar. No doubt, he’d be adding plenty of beer to that belly of his tonight.