I dropped my eyes from his and tried to remove my hands from his grip, uncomfortable with the question. He held tight with one hand now and moved to lift my chin with the other until our eyes locked once more. “Would you have come for me if it hadn’t been for Anna?”
I shook my head gently in his hold. “No,” I whispered. “I couldn’t bring myself to walk through that door again,” I answered as honestly as I could.
“So you wouldn’t have come for me?” He lamented, as his eyes were the ones to drop this time.
“That’s not what that means. When you brought Anna home all those weeks ago, I waited for you ask again when you stopped by the door. I wanted you home then, but…” I paused, sighed, and put my stupid little bleeding heart out there. “You didn’t ask to come home again, and I thought that meant you had gotten tired of waiting. Then you only called briefly to say shit was taken care of with the prospect and that he wouldn’t be bothering Anna again. You hung up so quickly. I knew then, for sure, that I had waited too long.” I finally managed to tug my hand free of his and then I fidgeted with the bottom of my shirt. “That’s not even the right way to say it. It wasn’t that I was waiting. I was hurting. I was hurting and I couldn’t handle your hurt on top of my own. I couldn’t deal with you sticking up for the club when I blamed them for Toby. It took me a long time to see, that while they played their part, the club didn’t kill him. Even though I understood that it took away the thing I needed. The focus I needed for my anger, because that woman she took something so precious from me, from us, and I can’t get that back. I’m just so angry that I can’t get that back, and I don’t know what to do with it.”
CJ reached over and yanked me into his arms then, holding me close as I cried into his kutte, the familiar leather scent mixed with the spicy cologne he always wore. It was a scent so familiar I just melted into it feeling like I was finally home.
“Told myself if you still didn’t want me after six months I would stop asking and wait for you to come find me,” he whispered into my hair. “I needed for you to stop running first,” he explained and I stiffened because I hadn’t run anywhere. “No, you didn’t go anywhere,” he said as if reading my darn mind. “You pushed me away though, because it was the next best thing considering you still had the girls around that needed you.”
What could I say to that? He wasn’t wrong. “Where did it all go so wrong?” I wondered out loud. “One minute we were finally all happy and living our lives with so much joy and…” I threw my hands up in the air in frustration. “Are we doomed? Are we not allowed to have too much happy? You were finally okay with Ever, we were doing so well together, CJ. Why did it have to be my baby boy? Why couldn’t someone else lose something for a change?”
“Don’t do that,” he said as he held me tighter. “Someone else did lose big that day,” he reminded me. “I’m hoping our losses have been counted and found overwhelming at this point, but never wish them on someone else, babe. Toby had a woman who won’t even speak to us when she sees us, because she lost so much in one day. We still have each other. We still have our girls, and now we’ll be adding to the family too.” It was his turn to sigh.
“I can’t believe our baby girl is going to be a mom. She’s too young,” he told me.
“She’s only a little older than I was the first time we met,” I reminded him.
“Yeah, but we never got to have sex back then,” he teased.
“That’s true,” I added before kissing his kutte, right over his heart and pulling away enough to sit up and look into his eyes again. “I don’t want us to be apart anymore, CJ.”
“I knew that back in the clubhouse babe.”
“Oh yeah? How’d you know that?”
“Besides the face you made when you thought I was there with a date?” He joked and I narrowed my eyes on him. “You called me CJ again tonight,” he reminded me. I didn’t know that he’d realize the importance of that. The day of our son’s funeral all I could see when I looked at him was the club, and so I made him the club again. To do that, in order to be angry with him and push him away from me, he became Double-D.
“Never hate my road name so much as the past few months when you used it,” he admitted. “Wouldn’t let anyone there call me anything by D.”
“I’m sorry,” I apologized and I meant it. I never set out to make his road name a dirty word, and that’s just what I’d managed.
“No, we aren’t apologizing for anything, sweetheart. We’re just moving forward, and chalking the past six months up to grief for the best man either of us has ever known.”
“CJ,” I managed to choke out around the emotion that welled up beyond containment with his words. We sat like that a few more moments before he leaned in and placed a sweet little kiss on my nose.
“Missed this nose,” he told me and I just looked at him like he was weird for saying that, because that’s what I was thinking. “Your cute little nose was the first thing that caught my attention. Couldn’t be helped with all the engine grease you swiped on it.” I laughed then. “Uh-uh. I’m not done. You see, what you did that day, was marked yourself as mine and you didn’t even realize.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“You don’t remember?”
“Of course I remember the day we met,” I argued.
“No, I don’t think you do. See I walked in that day to find this cute as shit girl working on my bike. My fuckin’ bike.” He shook his head back and forth as if still in disbelief over that. “Then, I saw you actually knew what you were doing there, and you got so nervous talking to me, even though you did such a fine job of playing like that wasn’t happening. You started rubbing your fingers down that nose of yours, and the only thing I could think was that you would be mine, and you just sealed that deal because there you were, standing in that garage looking cute as fuck and you had my bike all over you.”
“Knew then, even when ol’ Jack was doing his level best to warn me away I knew you’d be mine one day. I also knew you’d be worth the wait it would take to get you. I knew that too the day you told me to get out of here. You needed time to heal and process, but baby, you have always been marked as mine. It will always come back to you and me needing to be together to be whole.”
I stood then and held my hand out for him to take. He did so and followed behind me all the way up to our room where we could work on become whole together again. The funny thing about being apart from your love for six months is that when you finally get back together, it’s like putting two teenagers in a room for the first time. We were wild, crazy, and a bit of a mess. Some clothing got torn and probably wouldn’t be salvageable when we were able to check out the aftermath.
Not one care was given though. I had my man in my arms, in my body, and in my heart. We were right where we belonged again. Finally.
We stood there for a few minutes just looking down at the headstones, holding hands, and taking it all in. Then I leaned down and placed the little toy motorcycle on the smaller of the two and the orange and black Harley Davidson wreath on the larger of the two. I allowed my hand to rest there for a moment, taking in the chill of the stone in the early morning. It was still a little wet with the dew that had collected there. The moment I pulled my hand free CJ tucked me against him, my back to his front and he clasps his arms around my waist.
“I love you,” he whispered into my hair. Then he spoke out loud to our son. “We got our shit together now, T. Got your momma back, again,” he chuckled as he added that last and I knew it was because that would have been what Toby said as he teased his dad about losing me yet again. It was something he would have done, for sure. He went on talking to our son as if he was here and was listening to every word. “You can thank your sister for that shit too. She went and hooked a brother,” I could feel CJ rolling his eyes. “The one of you I thought wouldn’t have a thing to do with the biker world when you guys all grew up. My little dreamer,” he added.
That made me
smile, because it’s what he used to always call her when she lost in her own worlds she was creating. His little dreamer. It made me ache for the fact that she was grown up already and about to have her own baby now.
“She went and got herself knocked up too, T. Wish you were here to help kick his ass, and hand her out some big brother wisdom. I think she’s going to need it, because she went and paved herself a hard road to travel with the start those two have had.” I sank in deeper to CJ’s embrace while he continued talking and I just took in everything he had to tell our son. I had been coming here weekly and doing the same thing, so I felt like this was his turn. It occurred to me then that this was the same day and time I normally came to talk to CJ and I turned a little to look up at him. He was smiling down at me.
“Seems your momma finally figured out I’ve been here too, listening to her talking to you. She didn’t know I was here, but I wasn’t about to leave her to this alone. Even if she didn’t want me at the time.” Oh God! I didn’t know if my heart was breaking or filling with that revelation. I just knew it felt as though it might burst open at any moment.
“Thing is, it was losing family that put some cracks in our foundation, but now we’re gaining family and trying to repair that damage. I know you understand that, T. So,” he leaned over and touched the smaller of the stones. “You take care of our grandbaby up there and we’ll make sure this one grows up right down here. Some day, we’ll all meet in the middle and compare notes, yeah?”
That was the moment my heart burst wide open.
Chapter 32
(Lucy – age 47, Double-D – age 50)
I opened the little hidden compartment in the wall that I had specially built into the garage after I bought the house, and touched each of the three wooden boxes that I had stowed inside reverently. Each one was a bit different from the last, the second one being the largest of the three, marking the times in life when they were needed. Only one other person, aside from the attorney who drew up my Last Will and Testament, knew it was here and what it contained. I didn’t bother taking the other boxes out or opening them up. I knew what each one contained. Instead, I added a fourth, much smaller box to the mix after I put the letters inside that were just a touch different from all the others.
“Thought that was something you only did when you two were apart? It’s been three years since you last needed a notebook. Something I should know about, considering?” Merc glanced down at the clothes he was wearing and I had to laugh. Yeah, that wouldn’t make much sense to him.
“Nah, man. Just added something I forgot a while back.”
“Don’t bullshit me.”
I huffed out a sigh, sealed the boxes back inside the wall, and then I turned to look at my lifelong best friend. “There are 2,572 letters in there, and aside from the three more I added today for Lucy and the girls just in case anything ever happens to me I don’t plan to have to add any more.”
“Okay, now I really repeat, anything I should know about?”
“No, I’m all good. Plenty of years left on my ticker anyway, according to the fuckin quack Lucy made me go see just to ‘be sure’.” I told him with the air quotes around ‘be sure’ because that’s how she’d given it to me when she wanted me to go in for a checkup out of the blue six months ago. “It’s something I’ve been thinking on since Toby’s funeral actually. I just had other shit happening for a while, then life was too sweet and I forgot.”
“So what made you remember?”
“Working on what to say at the wedding made me remember,” I told him. “We’re not promised time on this earth. We get what we get, and make the most of it while we can. I don’t want to check out accidentally without getting my goodbyes in.”
“Damn, you’re a morbid fucker!” He commented, and then turned his back to me. Before he made it out of the garage he swiveled back around for a minute. “We doing this thing today, or what?”
I grinned at my best friend. My brother. “Yeah, we’re doing this thing,” I agreed and then I followed him out of my garage and to our bikes that were waiting for us. We both fired them up and took off, running up the road to the church, and the wedding, that was waiting on us.
It didn’t take us long to get there since the church was right down the road from where our house was in North Charleston. Merc and I parked out front, but then walked around the building and entered in through the back entrance. Somewhere, inside this building, my Lucy was waiting for me. I didn’t plan on making her wait any longer than I had to though. We made our way down a long hall and then out on the side of the main hall of the church. Hushed voices filled the room as Merc and I made our way to the altar where we took our positions. I tipped my head once to the man off to the side where he began playing the wedding march on a guitar. It was a beautiful acoustic version that Lucy had picked herself.
As I stood waiting while the doors at the back of the room – or was it front? Fuck it, it was the part of the church I was looking at from the altar – started to open I remembered the first time I had done this. Our experience then had been so different. One of those big differences had been Toby. He was standing here with me the first time. My hand reached out in a subtle gesture, touching the air beside me. It was what I had done the first time when I reached out to hold his hand as he excitedly told me, “here she comes daddy.” He had been just as ramped up to see his mother that day as I was. Fuck! I missed my boy.
Merc’s hand gently squeezed my shoulder. “He’s here.” His words were a quiet whisper, and yet they made my soul ache was if they were a sonic boom going off inside of me. When I glanced down the aisle again, she was there being trailed by both of our girls. She was wearing a similar dress to the one she’d worn for our first wedding. Not the same one, because she wasn’t the same woman. She was also a woman who had given birth to another child and had grown a little rounder with age over the years. My Lucy was still just as beautiful as the first trip we took down the aisle though. Each of our girls walked so gracefully down the aisle. Both glowed with a radiance that said they were happy. That was all I could ever ask for in this life. I knew that, because I’d struggled to grab onto my own happy and hold it tight. When my girls got to the end of the aisle they paused and waited for the pastor to speak.
“Who has the honor of presenting this woman in a renewal of her vows and love for this man before us?”
“We do,” my girls said in unison. The pastor smiled down on them and each girl placed a quick kiss on their mother’s cheek before they moved off to the side to stand as her matron’s of honor. There were two of them to go hand in hand with my two best men. Merc and Toby. I remembered what our boy said to me the day I married his mother. “Love my mom and me so hard we feel your hugs even when you ain’t there.” Later on, after all was said and done, I would swear that I felt his hand in mine that day too. Doesn’t matter how crazy it sounds either. It was a feeling no one was going to take away from me. I hoped like hell he was still feeling my hugs, because he didn’t know it then, none of us did, but that sentiment went both ways. Even when he wasn’t here, I still felt his love so damn hard.
“This man, Charles Jason Brothers, is here to present his vows once again to the woman before him, Lucy Ann Brothers,” the Pastor intoned and then it was on me.
I cleared my throat and turned to face my bride. Again. Her clear blue eyes had a few more lines around them now, especially when she was smiling at me the way she was in that moment. “When we were younger I made a lot of vows and promises to you. Some, I was able to keep. Others were ripped away or slipped off with the sands of time. The one vow I never broke in all our years was the one I made the day we met.” She seemed shocked by that admission. I grinned brightly down at her. “That day you marked yourself with my engine grease,” I reminded her as I slipped my fingertip down her nose and everyone in the church laughed thinking I meant something a lot dirtier. “I vowed to myself that you would become mine and I would cherish you for the rest of our lives. W
e’re still living, and I’m still cherishing, babe.” There were a few audible “aws” from the people attending, but I wasn’t done yet. “Some days, I think that’s all we get. That one vow, because life, as we know, can be short. It can be tragic, but it can always be wonderful and filled to the top with memories that will live on even when we’re long gone. I promise to keep filling our family with those memories, to keep loving my children’s mother, and to keep my woman in my heart for the rest of my days and beyond until we are set free into the wind to go join our boy once more.” Lucy was having a hard time with her emotions. Her shoulders shook, and tears ran freely down her face as the Pastor directed the vows back to her. I wasn’t sure she’d be able to pull it together enough, but she managed long enough to get two lines out.
“What he said,” she told the Pastor as everyone in attendance tried to stifle giggles after I brought them to tears. Then she added, “Until we’re set free into the wind,” and she ended it there, unable to get the rest out. It didn’t matter because my lips were on hers, tasting the salt from the tears that had traced them before I got there.
“Well, they jumped the gun again, just like last time,” that Pastor teased bringing levity back to the occasion. “I suppose some things never change, and in this case, that’s a good thing. Bless this couple and their continued union.”
And that was how Lucy and I found ourselves married again. Well, renewing our wedding vows at any rate. Thirty-one years since the day we met, 22 years of marriage, three children, a couple grand kids, and from the looks of it maybe another on the way, and a lifetime of a love so hard it nearly tore us apart a few times over, but we hung in there. We fought for this, and damn if we weren’t going to enjoy the rest of our lives together, come hell or high water.
Chapter 33
(Lucy – age 48, Double-D – age 51)
A Love So Hard (Aces High MC - Charleston Book 2) Page 34