by Paula Cox
“I accept your apology.”
We both laugh, and the tension dissipates.
“I’m proud of you, Terry,” I say.
“The pay is about the same as working in the Twin Peaks, if you can believe it. But there are added benefits, like dental and not having to wear a bikini to work. What about you? Are you writing?”
“Yes, or I am trying to. I’m working on a novel. Well, half-working on a novel. I keep starting and restarting it.”
“What’s it about?”
I tell her: a girl gets caught up in a biker’s quest for revenge.
“What’s your main character’s name?” Terry asks. “Iron?”
“Ha ha, very funny.”
A third pause, but this one without any of the brimming tension or resentment. Terry collects her thoughts. She murmurs something to a man, who says: “Yes, ma’am.”
“Listen, Lana,” she says. “I have something to ask you.”
“Okay . . .”
I nibble the end of my already tooth-marked pen.
“I leased a two-bedroom place. Which is fine because I guess I could turn one room into a drawing room—not the old English stuff kind, an actual drawing room—but I was thinking, seeing as I’ll be moving near to your area. Why don’t you move in with me? We can be roommates. I’ll warn you ahead of time. I have been known to snore. If that happens, all you need to do is chuck a couple of pillows over my face.” She giggles.
“Oh, Terry . . .” I think it over. I’m falling for Kade, hard. That’s the truth. And another truth is that our sex is explosive and intimate and the time after the sex, when I lie in his arms and he runs his hands through my hair, is almost as incredible. But another truth is that every moment with Kade is difficult. Difficult because I have not told him about his child. And one day, I’ll have to explain it. Each moment with him, no matter how beautiful, is marked with pain.
“What?” she asks.
I lower my voice: “I haven’t told Kade about the baby yet.”
“Oh.”
“And . . . I think I should, you know? What if he wants me to stay? What if he wants to—to sort of move to the next level?” I feel silly speaking the words. Kade enjoys our time together, enjoys tearing into each other, but he has never said anything that hints at something more.
“Well, the offer’s there. Send me a text if you change your mind.”
“I will,” I say. “I definitely will. I’m glad you called.”
“Me, too. Don’t be a stranger.”
“I won’t.”
She hangs up. I try and return to my writing, but my mind strays to Kade and Terry, to secrets, to the baby.
I can’t keep this from him any longer, I tell myself, trying to gear myself up for it. I can’t keep it from him; the lower part of my belly is softening, getting rounder. My hips and ass have gained weight, my breasts are swollen. I don’t think these changes are particularly visible to someone else, but I know my body well, and he’s getting to, too. At what point does it move from “putting on a little weight” to “incredibly pregnant?” I don’t know. And if I don’t tell him now, what will I say when he finally sees? Will I say it is somebody else’s? Will I plead ignorance and claim I have no clue how my body just started growing? Will I say I’m one of those women who don’t pay much mind to their periods? Perhaps he knows so little about women’s functions that he might believe it. But even then, I would have lied to him. And for the rest of my life, I’ll have to keep up the story that I didn’t know I was pregnant.
I realize I’m chewing the pen to tatters.
I drop it onto the desk and stand up.
No, I won’t live a lie. No, I won’t string him along. No, no, no.
It’s time to tell him.
I pace into the bar and to Kade’s office without giving myself time to think it over. Scud is sitting at the bar and as I walk past he says, “Where are you going in such a rush, Lana? Come and sit with me awhile.”
I ignore him. Not trying to be mean, just worried that if I stop, even for a second, I’ll begin to have second thoughts.
I knock on Kade’s door with a shaky hand, so that my knocks are quick raps.
“Yeah?”
“It’s me.”
“Alright.”
He sounds tired. Worn-out. On the verge of anger.
When I walk into the office, I see that the skin around his eyes is dark, sleep-deprived. His leather is thrown over the back of his chair and he wears a checkered shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the collar loose around his neck.
“Are you okay?” I say, when I see his face. It’s a picture of withheld rage.
“I need to get goin’,” he says. “Some incident out in the forest.”
His temples pulse and it’s like I can see the anger moving through him. He wants to punch the wall, or hurt somebody; he wants to be out in the forest where he can deal with whatever this is.
I tell myself that I need to come clean. I tell myself that it’s time. I tell myself I can’t keep this secret forever.
But looking at him, I know that telling him right now would be cruel. He’s already worried. He’s busy. He’s got other things on his mind. Telling him right now would serve no purpose other than relieving me, making me feel better, taking a weight off my chest. Telling him right now would be selfish. Maybe that’s true; maybe it’s just justification.
But as I look into those tired but still-bright blue eyes, I know I am not going to tell him today. And I know that if I am not going to tell him, I shouldn’t be here, lying to him night after night.
“I’m moving in with Terry,” I say.
“Your friend from the Twin Peaks?” He sits up, leaning forward. “What? When?”
“Soon,” I say. “She’s got a place in the city and she’s asked me to move in with her. I think it’s time—”
“It’s not,” he interrupts. “It’s not time at all.”
“I’ve told her I will now.” I’m shocked by how easily the lie comes to me, bypassing thought and just coming right out.
He stands up, shaking his head. “I can’t talk about this right now. Don’t do anythin’ until I get back. Give me that, at least.”
“I won’t be moving right away,” I say. “But I will be moving.”
How can I explain to him the importance of moving without telling him about the baby? I can’t, so when he looks at me waiting for an explanation, I just look back at him.
“We’ll talk about this later,” he says. He throws on his leather. “There’s somethin’ happening and I need to see to it.”
He glances at me, seems to be about to speak, and then shakes his head.
“She needs a roommate,” I say.
“We’ll see about that.”
Something about his tone makes me bristle. As though he owns me, and if I’m a hypocrite because I like him to own me in the bedroom and not out here, so be it. But as far as I’m concerned, the bedroom and the real world are distinct places with distinct rules.
“I’m moving,” I say, and then I march out of the office without waiting for a response.
I think Kade is following me before I get back into the dorm and hear the roar of his Harley.
I pick up my cell and text Terry: It’s a yes.
I went in there to tell him I’m carrying his child. I walked out after telling him I’m leaving him.
How the hell did that happen?
But maybe it’s for the best, I reflect as I chew on my pen. Maybe it’ll make things easier.
“Easier for who?” I mutter. “Easier for who? You? Kade? Or the baby?”
Chapter Eighteen
Kade
Mountain was a big man. A huge man. The sort of man the other men looked at and thought: Nobody could ever take him out. He was the sort of man who inspired belief in the Tidal Knights ’cause if a giant like him thought it was a good idea to be in the club, there must be some merit to it. He was the sort of man who walked into a bar and stopped the t
alking for a second. If one of the men was being squared up to by a few drunks, all it would take is a low throaty word from Mountain to get them running. Yes, Mountain was invincible; that’s how the men saw him.
So when I arrive at the clearing and looked down at the twisted, mangled, blood-drenched corpse, for a minute or so I can’t quite believe it’s Mountain.
Earl stands with his hands in his pockets, squinting at the body with the same disbelief I feel. We stand in the middle of a clearing, a break in the tall luscious green trees with a collection of rocks just behind us which look like the haphazard outline of a hand holding a pistol. Scud arrives soon after me, power-walking to the corpse, and then spinning around and puking all over the floor.
Earl curls his lip. “Get a grip,” he says quietly.
“What happened?” I ask Earl.
“Sheriff called it in for me, said it was one of ours. Some lady walking her dog found him. Good job the sheriff’s on our payroll.”
Earl looks at me meaningfully. Earl’s an old soldier. I should have made him second-in-command, even if Scud was third. Still, now that Scud’s second, Earl’s third.
“How does that help him?” Scud says, breathing heavily, wiping vomit from his mouth.
“It doesn’t,” Earl says. “But it helps the club. If it’s in the papers that Tidal Knights are being murdered, it makes us look pretty damn weak. Especially if it’s one of the lieutenants.”
“Yeah,” I mutter, thinking that it’s damn strange seeing a huge man like Mountain laid out like this. And thinking about Lana, too, about how she might be gone one of these days. I shouldn’t be paying that any mind at a time like this, but I can’t help it. Lana is the one thing right now that makes all this shit worth it. No matter how hard my day is, I can come home and join her in bed. If I can’t do that, I reckon I’ll go mad. Focus. I have to focus. But Lana . . . Fuck, man, this caring-about-women shit can really screw with your head.
I think about this past week, all the times we’ve fucked, every night now. I don’t know what I was doing for the weeks before that. Now, no matter how tired I am, I find the energy to fuck her until we’re both panting and sighing, until both our eyes can’t stay open.
“Boss?” Earl raises a grey eyebrow at me. “How do you wanna play it?”
“We’ll tell the men,” I say. “Can’t lie to them. But I’ll be damned if we’re goin’ to let them see Mountain like this. We’ll tell them what happened but we’ll keep this grisly shit to ourselves. Mountain’s people need to be told, too.”
“Only people he had was an old aunt down in Baltimore he hasn’t seen for a decade,” Earl mutters. “The club was his life.”
There’s anger in the man’s face. The same anger which must be in mine.
“I know,” I say. “The Italians have crossed the fuckin’—”
“What have we done, my friend?”
Suddenly, the clearing is full of Italians. At least twenty of them, emerging from the trees with pistol and rifles and sub-machine guns trained on us, three Tidal Knights stuck in the middle of all these Italians. Scud goes for his gun, but Earl and I do not. We know there’s no chance of out-shooting this. I lay a hand on Scud’s arm, stopping him.
“No,” I say.
If the Italians wanted to straight-up execute us, and if they’ve gotten the drop on us like this, we would never have seen it coming. Shot, fade to black; that would be all. But this . . .
There’s no question about who Enrique is. He’s the only one not holding a gun. He’s holding a machete instead. I look down at Mountain, at the hacked-at flesh. At the torn red flesh. Then back at the machete, which has hair and blood clinging to it. Fuckin’ animal. I wish I was back in bed with Lana; I wish I never left.
“Guns, please,” Enrique says, gesturing with the machete.
We throw our guns onto the ground.
Enrique nods at his men. “Don’t do a thing until I tell you to,” he says. He speaks with the quiet authority of a man used to being obeyed. He speaks like me. The thought makes me angry.
“Get on with it, if you’re going to do it!” Scud cries, voice high and girlish.
Earl sighs, showing no sign of fear. “Shut the fuck up, Scud.”
Enrique walks right up to me, so close I could dart my hand out and crush his neck. And I would, if it were not for the Italians all around us. He’s a head shorter than me, with gelled black hair and a gold chain hanging between an open-buttoned white shirt. No, not white. Red-specked white. Blood-specked white. His face is open, calm, the face of a butcher going about his business. But his lips twitch as though he’s struggling to hold back laughter. There’s an aura of violence around him, as though any second he could start hacking.
He lifts the machete to my face, places it against my cheek. I feel Mountain’s blood and hair against my skin. Goddamn, why did I ever leave Lana’s bed? Why would a man be that stupid?
He looks into my face. “If you shivered, or showed any sign of fear, I would kill you.”
“You don’t scare me.” I shrug. That’s not true. Of course it’s not true. I’m scared, alright. I’m scared ’cause if I die here I’ll never get to see Lana again. Never get to run my hand through her hair again. Never to get to feel the warmth of her naked body again. Never get to listen to her faint nighttime breathing again. Never get to hear her panting moans again.
But a man doesn’t show fear.
“I should,” Enrique says, stroking the machete up and down my cheek. “I really should.”
“Alright.” I just stare at him.
Enrique giggles, takes a step back, swinging his machete like a cane. He dances over to Mountain and kneels down next to him. “What do you think, big man? Should your boss be scared of me?”
“The theatrics won’t impress us,” Earl says. “We’ve seen worse’n you.”
“I doubt that,” Enrique says matter-of-factly.
He jumps to his feet and walks slowly around the clearing, looking each of his men in the face. It freaks me out ’cause the way he looks at his men is exactly the way I look at my men, gauging them for grit, for fight, seeing if they’ll stand tall when the time comes. Duster could do that without looking into a man’s face, he used to say, could tell just by listening to the tone of his voice. Said if a man spoke too loudly or growled and blustered and snapped he was a coward. Don’t know how close to the truth Duster was on that one.
Finally, Enrique stops next to a man—more of a boy. Shorter than the others with a reddish wind-burned face. He wears a pale blue suit, but no jewelry, and his hair is not slicked backed but a mop of jet-black curls. He holds a pistol, a small handbag type thing, and his hands shake.
“This is my son,” Enrique says, patting the boy of the shoulder. “He is a good boy, aren’t you, Pablo?”
The boy, still shaking, nods.
“He is a fine, brave boy. He is my only son, my only family now that you dogs killed my big brother. My last remaining family member, here to learn the business, here to get down and dirty with the men. I love him. I love him dearly.”
We watch, waiting. I have no clue what kind of point Enrique’s trying to make until he reaches into his pocket with his free hand and brings it out gripping a knuckle-duster, glinting gold. He stares at me directly in the face for around ten seconds, the boy trembling and dribbling, trying to hold back tears.
“This is my son,” Enrique says.
Then he punches the boy across the mouth so hard the gun goes flying from his hand and the boy lands in the dirt with a squeal. Enrique gives him two more jabs in the nose, the first shattering it in a bloody explosion and the second pommeling the broken cartilage into his face. The boy’s arms go limp and flop at his sides.
I look around at the Italians. “This is the man you follow?”
My hope is to get some of them to realize that this goes against everything they apparently follow. All their codes of blood and family and all that mafia shit. But the looks in their faces are mea
n, sadistic, or scared and beaten. They’re not standing up to Enrique anytime soon.
Enrique dances back across the clearing to me, swinging his machete.
“Now listen,” he says. “I could cut you up into little bitesize pieces right here and everything would be done and dusted neatly and cleanly. But the thing is, I’m a hunter. I enjoy hunting. Deer, rabbits, birds, I like the tracking and the chasing and then, finally, the kill. Take your friend.” He kicks Mountain in the side. I half expect the man to groan and roll over. “He was a coward and died easily and I was bored. Too bored. So now I have put the fear of God in you I would like you to return to your little clubhouse and your little biker life with the knowledge that sooner or later it will be you lying blood-soaked in the dirt. How does that sound?”