A giggling Anna responded. “St-t-top, daddy. You can’t take my face off!” Her shrieks of “Stop,” and wild giggles lightened the burden on my soul for just a bit.
“Okay, well, I’ll have to take you just like you are then!” I huffed out, having managed to clean most of the sticky mess from her face. “You ready to finish your ride.”
She shook her head no, surprising me.
“You’re not ready to ride again?”
“Daddy!” She huffed out stubbornly, plopping her crossed arms over her chest. “I’m ready to ride, but I never want it to end though.”
“Amen to that,” PeeWee called out as he left the room chuckling.
“Go see Merc, need to spread the word about some shit that went down in the office,” I informed him before he got too far. He turned back and gave me a knowing look, then waved goodbye to Anna.
“By PeePee,” she taunted.
“No more cherry candies for you, pipsqueak!” He called back as he walked away.
She giggled as I picked her up and cradled her on my hip. She leaned in and whispered in my ear. “He’ll still have candy for me next time.”
“You’re probably right, baby. Let’s get you home before your momma worries.”
That night, I refused to go back to the clubhouse to sleep. Enough was enough. When I finally opened the door to our bedroom after nearly a week of not even breeching the doorway Lucy glanced up from where she was tucked neatly into our bed. She had on the cute little granny reading glasses I teased her relentlessly about. They were even connected at the ends by a chain that was draped around her neck. I bit down on my lip to hide the grin that wanted to form there from seeing them again.
“Are you picking up clothes, or are you actually going to stop being a coward and face me?”
Jesus. I forgot how she didn’t pull any punches when she was serious about shit. “I’m not here for clothes, Luce. I’m here for you. We can’t keep doing this,” I insisted while still standing guard in the doorway, ready to… What? Run? I didn’t know anymore. It was like we’d switched personalities and I didn’t know what to do with that.
“Well,” she huffed out in a frustrated tone. “I’ve been here every single night since your daughter was brought to this house.”
“Our house,” I corrected, feeling a lump of emotion building in my throat.
“Our house,” she agreed with a slight tip of her chin. “As I was sayin’… I’ve been here every night. You’re the one that’s been missing.” I started forward, ready to argue with her, but the words wouldn’t come and she wouldn’t allow it anyway. Lucy held her hand up, whether to still my words or stay my feet from moving any further into our bedroom I wasn’t sure. “I’m sorry,” she finally managed to get out in the most sorrow-filled tone I had ever heard her speak. “I’m so sorry, CJ. If I’d had time to process before she was brought here,” she started and then stopped long enough to pull her glasses from her face and the chain from her neck before setting them on the nightstand.
She shouldn’t have been apologizing for that. Lucy was right. Merc had warned me that I needed to tell her before Ever got there. It was already breaking my heart to have to tell her, and I couldn’t find the words to use to knowingly break a part of Lucy’s heart. That was what I knew I would be doing when I told her I had a child by another woman. It didn’t matter that we weren’t together then, or that Lucy had been with someone else at the time. What would matter was that this child would always be a reminder, making it impossible to forget a devastating time in our lives.
“I think, I was angry with you, and I ended up taking that out on that poor little girl even though she didn’t deserve a single bit of what I put her through. None of this was her fault. She didn’t ask to be born to a devious woman. She didn’t ask to have a father who would be reluctant to have her here, or a stepmom who hated her at first for what she represented.” Lucy swiped at her face then, making me realize for the first time that she was crying once again. “I needed for you to have told me before she showed up, CJ. Not the thirty minute warning I barely had time to process, but the minute you found out she was a possibility, I should have been a part of that process. I’ve been angry with you because I thought we were a team now, and you didn’t trust me.”
“Luce,” I hummed out on a wave of emotion too great to contain. My own damn face was wet now. This was gutting me. “I do trust you. I didn’t want to break you. I couldn’t find a way to tell you something I knew that would hurt your heart.”
“That’s just it,” she offered quietly. “Once I was able to process everything, my heart didn’t hurt. Not where Ever is concerned. I just opened it up and made some extra space for her. You didn’t trust me to do that, and so by not telling me, it made for the horrible start she had here. She’s at an age where she’ll remember that forever, and I am so damn ashamed of myself,” she choked out. “Then you just left her here with me and took off. Every single night,” she tacked on at the end. “I haven’t been able to talk to you about anything, to even update you on where Ever and me are now. You don’t even know,”
“I saw you teaching her to make cookies,” I told her.
“She is going to need you too, you know. She had about ten minutes of you being a fierce dad protecting her from me, but then you disappeared. She just lost her mom, CJ. She needs her whole family.”
“We’ll talk about all the logistics with Ever tomorrow, Luce. Right now, I just want to know if I’m welcomed back into our room? All I can do is one thing at a time. My one thing right now is you, baby. I need you. I need to know that we’re going to be okay. Lucy, I can’t do this without you. None of it. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I just didn’t know how. I hoped…”
“You hoped she wasn’t yours?” I nodded my head. “Was that before or after you saw her?”
“Before,” I admitted. “I didn’t even need that damn test they had us do.”
Lucy nodded and smiled so sweetly at me. “It took me three days to look at her,” she admitted. “Then when I did, all I could see was you standing there. Your eyes were looking back at me, watchful, scared, and hurting. We did that to her. We put that look there, and I hate us both a little bit for it.”
“We’ll fix it, Luce,” I promised.
“I know,” she agreed. Then she patted my side of the bed. It was a silent invite to join her. I had no choice, but to heed her call, because there was nowhere else on this earth my heart would allow me to be that night.
Chapter 21
(Lucy – age 39, Double-D – age 42)
Eight years went by in the blink of an eye. My son was close to graduating high school. Ever was nearly there herself. She had maintained the A Honor Roll in school from the time she came to live with us until then. She never misbehaved, listened like she was supposed to without question, and was basically what anyone else would think of as a perfect child. The problem with that? I didn’t think I’d been allowed to get to know the real her over the years, just the version of her that was trying to be perfect in order to secure her place in our home. It always left me feeling apart from her, unlike I felt with my other children. Lucy didn’t seem to have the same issue though. I was thankful, because I knew at least Ever always had Lucy, and her best friend – her brother – Toby too.
Anna was another story. She was still my baby girl, lost in her world as she wrote in her journals and dazed off into some dream world or other that she was always concocting. I worried about my youngest child a little, because she was always doing that, and not very often in touch with reality. At least, she wasn’t in the way that the rest of usually were. Life’s obstacles seemed to just roll off her or pass her by altogether. One day, she was going to be hit a brick wall of an obstacle that she wouldn’t be able to daydream her way around and I worried what the results of that catastrophic occurrence might be. She was finishing her last year in middle school and something told me that high school was where she was going to finally meet her first
challenges.
Lucy was still the love of my life, the light at the end of my longest days, and the one person on this earth that I couldn’t go a day without speaking too. I sometimes didn’t get to speak to my kids when I was away on a run, but if I couldn’t get a hold of Lucy, I was fit to be tied and unbearable to be around, or so said my brothers. I once confided in Merc how I felt. His words had stuck in my head ever since. “It’s different for us, man. The love of your life will always be Lucy. She comes first for you always. Your kids come in a very close second, but only because you know you have a good woman caring for them and that they’re just fine as a result. That’s why you don’t need to hear their voices or see their faces as much as hers. You need to make sure Lucy is there, happy, and whole because if she is – they are. There’s not a damn thing wrong with that.” I was thinking about that once again when I hopped off my bike and stretched.
Crow laughed at me. We had just gotten back from a two-day run to scout out some territory we were thinking about claiming up near Myrtle Beach. It had been a bit of a bust since the businesses we were hoping to snatch up were already under contract by the time we arrived. Still, Merc had ordered us to check around and see if there were any other worthy opportunities we should be thinking about while we were there. It wasn’t that long of a ride, but the hotel we’d held up in the night before had been ass with a mattress that felt like it was made of rocks instead of anything worthy of a restful night’s sleep.
“Fuckin’ hell getting old, isn’t it?” Crow commented.
“Shut the fuck up, you bastard. You ain’t any younger than me.”
“I know that. I was commiserating, not pickin’ on you.” I knew he was telling the truth when he went to step aside and I heard his knee pop as he cringed. Our eyes locked then and we both nearly busted a gut laughing. Yeah, we were getting older, as if having three teenagers and one pre-teen between us wasn’t evidence enough.
There was no missing the excitement in the air as we entered the clubhouse that day. I took off in that direction of the raised voices, my hackles rising as I went.
“Just calm down, Jay. I’m not saying you’re lying,” I heard Toby growling out, frustration lacing his every word. “I’m just saying that doesn’t sound like something she’d do.”
“She fuckin’ did, and she sure as shit didn’t even try to deny it when I confronted her, so I know it’s true.”
“I wasn’t fuckin’ there when you confronted her, asshole. I was in the locker room banging Brooke.”
“What’s going on in here?” I asked the question as I approached cautiously, not wanting to get involved in some falling out the boys were having. Neither of them were members yet, even though they were both working their asses off so they could get patched in after they graduated high school. Despite being legacies, they still had to prospect and prove themselves just like anyone else. The only leg up they had was we’d been able to take their measure for a lot longer than we would with any other prospect.
“Dad,” Toby started, but Jay interrupted.
“Your daughter was running her goddamn mouth trying to get my girl to break up with me!” Jay shouted the words at me in such a harsh, hate-fueled rant that I had a hard time figuring out what exactly he was saying.
“Why would Anna do something like that?”
“Anna?” They both questioned, and Toby then growled angrily in my direction.
“Fuckin’ Ever!” Jay sneered at me. “You know, your other daughter? The one I always thought you treated wrongly up until now. Finally, I see why you’ve always been so standoffish with her. She’s a deceitful, conniving little cunt!”
“Whoa!” I yelled at him. “You better explain yourself right now before another word like that leaves your mouth, or some teeth will be following those words, boy.” Oddly enough, Toby’s scowl warmed a little at that. Still, even if this was about Ever I couldn’t understand what she could have done to cause this type of reaction. She practically walked on eggshells around everyone.
“My girl came to me crying today,” Jay started explaining. “She said Ever cornered her in the bathroom at school and informed her that we were together, and that we had been all along. She said a bunch of other bullshit about how Tiffany was just placeholder because she wasn’t old enough to fuck yet, but once she turned sixteen soon that would change everything.”
“So it’s your girlfriend’s word against Ever that she said this?” I asked.
“Nah, I confronted Ever. She didn’t deny it. She put on the fuckin’ tears, for sure, but she never denied it. Plus, it wasn’t just Tiff there. Some other girls were in the bathroom at the time and overheard that shit too. I should have known. I had other girlfriends try to tell me she pulled that shit with them before too, but I never believed them. Ever never does anything wrong,” he mocked. “I should have believed. Apparently being miss goody two-shoes is all an elaborate act,” he finally said as he jerked at his hair.
“What do you mean by all that?”
“I’ve had other girls before Tiff tell me that she was mean to them and said shit. I never believed it, because Ever pretends to be this sweet, innocent chick. I was wrong.” He glanced at Toby then and spat out the next words. “We were all wrong about her.” He turned back to me then. “I should have listened to the brothers when they talked about how she was just waiting for her time just like her momma did.”
That twisted my gut a little. I knew there were a few brothers who disliked my daughter for their own reasons – most of which had to do with her lying whore of a mother. Still, it felt wrong that they talked about her like that to a kid who was supposed to be her best friend. I glanced around while letting the whole situation settle and then it began to simmer there. I flashed back to when I lost Lucy after Stiff ran his mouth, then again when he and the whores set me up. One thing I couldn’t stand was to see another man go through what I did. Hell, I’d been just the slightest bit older than Jay was now back when Stiff first fucked with Lucy and me. My eyes drifted to Toby then. He still seemed to be more pissed at Jay than his sister.
“This same thing cost me seeing you born, seeing you take your first steps. Lying, jealous women cost me being there for your first birthday, the second, and the fucking third too. You know damn well your sister has had a thing for Jay since you were little. She hero-worships him. You really think her jealousy wasn’t going to get the best of her?”
Jay seemed a little shocked at that revelation, but his anger overrode anything my admission about my daughter’s feelings for him could have caused. “Dad, I just don’t…”
“Nah, son. You want to be a brother?” He nodded. “Brothers come first, everyone else is secondary.” My son looked like he wanted to say something then, but I shook my head. “She knows better than to pull that kind of shit. Been worried about this all along. She was with her mother for the first half of her life; apparently she picked up some bad habits. Being a conniving bitch and knowing how to hide it well apparently does run in the family. I won’t fuckin’ tolerate that shit under my own goddamn roof. Come on,” I finally shouted before turning back to Jay. “I’ll make sure she stays away from you and yours from now on. She won’t be coming back to the club anytime soon either so know that you’re safe to bring your girl here without having to run into someone who will make her uncomfortable.”
“‘Preciate that,” Jay remarked before turning and heading to the bar. Toby shook his head almost as if he couldn’t believe I’d just said that, but he only remained thoughtful as I clapped him on the back and started moving us outside to the lot where our bikes were parked.
“Let’s go home and deal with this bullshit.”
“You really believe it?”
“It all makes sense, Toby. I know you didn’t know her mom and we’ve never really discussed the shit she pulled. Hell, we never really discussed the shit the club whores and one of our brothers pulled that caused me to lose your mom all those years ago. That shit caused me to lose you
too even though I didn’t know it then. When Anna was born it was both the best and worst day of my life.”
That caught his attention and he stopped walking to scowl at me once again. “Let me finish,” I told him and tipped my head toward the picnic table off to our left. We both perched on the table top with feet up on the bench as I told him. “I kept going back and forth that day, happier than I’ve ever been, so excited, and filled with joy that my body couldn’t actually contain it. One day, when you have a kid with the woman you love, you will get it. There was a flipside to that coin though. Every single time I felt that sheer joy that threatened to melt my fuckin’ heart right out of my chest, the thought of what I’d missed with you would pop into my head. I hated the bastards responsible for me missing out on that all over again.”
“What happened?”
I told my son the story about how I was betrayed by a brother and the club whores that worked with him to send his mother away the same day I’d planned to officially claim her with the club and propose to marry her. Before I could find out he was on the way, hell before his mom even knew he was already a possibility. “I know it seems like it ain’t worth the fight the way Jay goes through those high school bitches, but what if one of them was his Lucy? What if, for some stupid reason, he’d knocked her up and she took off heartbroken like your mom? What if he wasn’t as lucky as me to be able to get them back? Your mom was with someone else when I found you. If her father – stepfather – hadn’t come begging for help because that asshole had beaten on her I would have never know about you. We would have lost the chance to be a family because some jealous assholes told some lies. I can’t let your sister get away with that. She doesn’t even realize the damage she could have caused.”
A Love So Hard (Aces High MC - Charleston Book 2) Page 21