The Restart and the Remedy (Aces High MC - Dakotas Book 3)

by Christine Michelle

  We had moved tables since we came in because there wasn’t enough space for everyone once Charlie and Rage showed up. Liza and Tango had seats with us too, but Liza had dragged her man off to go dance. “The woman didn’t give a rat’s ass that there were strippers performing on the stage not far from the open floor area where she’d taken him. I loved her for it.

  “I’m going to go check on Rabbit. He’s been gone a while,” Spinner stated before he got up and started to walk off. Whereas Cherry had problems with how their baby had come to them, Spinner was dealing with his own issues. The fact that he had been a victim of sexual assault made him far more cautious and dare I say, jumpy when one of the guys suddenly disappeared from view for too long. He had also implemented the use of coasters inside the clubhouse and Renegade Rosy’s that tested for the drugs commonly used to spike people’s drinks. It wasn’t a complete failsafe, but it was something that gave him power over what had been done.

  “All right, we’re taking a little break, the girls will be on the floor momentarily to entertain you guys!” The emcee for the night shouted through the speaker system. That was weird. They didn’t often take breaks in a strip club. My brows furrowed, as did everyone else’s at the table. The last time it had happened was when Rabbit had gotten up there and stripped for me when I passed my NCLEX. He had better not be stripping again though. He was mine now and I wasn’t willing to share his body with anyone, not even another person’s eyeballs. My attention was immediately caught by Rabbit’s voice though, as he spoke to his brother from just beside our new table.

  “Have you ever taken a shit that just would not go down? There wasn’t even anything particularly massive about it. The fucker just kept circling the Goddamn drain and getting stuck in such a way that it wouldn’t hit the fucking hole and flush. You ever…?” Rabbit glanced up from fucking with his belt to Spinner only to realize that we had all moved to the large table closer to the bathrooms. Cherry, Charlie, Liza, Rage, Tango, and myself were all watching him. There was an uncomfortable few seconds before everyone burst out laughing and my poor love’s face turned several shades of red.

  “No, Brother, tell me more about how the shit you just took is a metaphor for how your life is circling the drain,” Spinner deadpanned, much to the amusement of everyone else within hearing distance.

  “Fuck!” Rabbit hissed. Then he turned accusing eyes toward me. “You could have warned me that you guys moved to a closer table.”

  “Was I supposed to send you a text while you were wrestling your shit down the drain.” He came at me with hands extended in a choking gesture, as if he were going to throttle the very life out of me. It only made me laugh harder. “Put those things away, we all know where they’ve been, and I won’t trust them now until I see you wash for myself.”

  Even the men at the table were doubled over laughing at my man. “You certainly met your match with this one,” Rage told him. “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy!” He slapped Rabbit on the back as he took off toward the emcee’s booth, presumably to find out why everyone was suddenly on a break. A few minutes later, Rage’s voice carried over the speakers. “Mrs. Rabbit, you’re needed in the back, please!”

  “Mrs. Rabbit?” I questioned as everyone’s eyes landed on me.

  “That would be you,” Rabbit told me as he slapped my ass and sent me on my way.

  “What in the hell?” I muttered… When I got to the back, there was a woman, a dancer, lying on the ground while another held a bloodied towel to her torso.

  “Please, help.” The woman who had been injured called out to me. “I can’t go to the hospital.”

  “Why not?”

  “The man who did this works there, and they’ll never believe me.”

  “Someone go get the emergency kit from the office,” I yelled. This was my life now. I had been training with Doc for just such an occasion. For the longest time, I’d thought maybe the club was overpaying me.

  “I need a name,” Rage demanded.

  “What are you going to do?” The woman, one of the newer dancers, asked him.

  “We’re going to take care of business. It’ll be on tape,” he told her as he pointed to the ceiling where the cameras were. “Now, either you can tell me who the dead fucker is or we can find out for ourselves and he’ll still be a dead fuck.”

  She nodded and whispered a name just before passing out. “Don’t worry, she won’t be down long,” I told him as I got to work checking her over and sewing her back together. Luckily for her, the wounds were superficial, if a little deep. She’d live, but there would most likely be scars.

  “Everything okay, baby?” Rabbit asked when he finally made it to the back to check on me.

  “Rage is about to kill a fucker, this girl is getting a lot of stitches, and she’s probably going to need a career change after this. Either that or a fantastic makeup artist.”

  “Damn,” Sapphire hissed out. “She was one of our better dancers too.” I turned a glare up at her. “What? I’m just speaking the truth. We’re all worried about her, but it will be a loss if she won’t dance anymore.”

  “You need help?” I heard Rabbit ask someone. I turned my head far enough to catch Rage about to head out the back door.

  “Nah, I’m taking a prospect with me. We’ll give a call if we need backup for some reason.”

  While I didn’t doubt Rabbit’s skills at all, I was glad he wasn’t heading out. I didn’t need to be worrying about him in one place, our son in another, and my new patient too. As if reading my mind, Rabbit pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed a number. “Yeah, I need to know how he’s doing. Then just say he’s still sleeping. No need to be a dick about it. I might be needed later and Myra’s patching someone up right now, so there’s no telling when we’ll get in.”

  I knew he was talking to Whiskey or Fox. They were on kid duty so that the rest of the grown ups could have a night out. My confidence in them as babysitters did not waiver, but I really just wanted to go home and snuggle my son, Noah. Still, I did my job first, and got the woman patched up. Then I gave explicit care instructions to Spinner who had come in to see what the problem was.

  “We’ll get her transported to one of the medical suites at the clubhouse for now. We’ll call you in if we can’t get a hold of Doc later, or if there are any problems,” Spinner informed me before Rabbit took hold of my hand and started pulling me out the back door to where we had parked his motorcycle earlier in the night.

  “We need to stop by the house and grab The Beast so we can go get our boy,” I told Rabbit.

  “No, we’re not going to do that.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “First, we’re going for a quick night ride. It’s August, we won’t have too many more weeks of really good riding weather, especially for a night ride. Second, this is our first kid free night, Noah is with people we trust who assure me that he has been perfect for them so we’re going to enjoy it. Third, our night might get cut short and I want to enjoy every second of the time we have alone together before that happens.”

  “Yes sir,” I agreed, because all of his points made sense. Rabbit was still my person. The one I gravitated to more than anyone else on the Earth besides our Noah. He loved that boy just as fiercely as he loved me, and that only made me fall even harder for the guy. I found myself when I came to South Dakota, but more importantly, I found the love of my life too. There was no going back from here. Only forward, no matter what drama might have just creeped into our lives. We’d handle it together.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This is not your typical acknowledgements section!

  The Restart and the Remedy actually has multiple uses of reproductive coercion in it, as well as rape of a male character (Blaze and Spinner). This is not the first book where I have discussed a male character being drugged and raped or having someone use reproductive coercion. It will probably be the last (outside of the character’s own story), but I wanted to point out why I did
it (more than once). I’m sure the first time, people were thinking, “You know, you never really see that happen to the men”. By the second story you see this in, I’m sure there were even a few eye rolls. I’d go so far as to say there were thoughts like, “She did this before,” or “As if that would happen again”. That is exactly why I did it twice.

  When we read books where a female has been sexually assaulted, we never bat an eye at the next one where it happens, unless there are triggers involved for the reader that make those types of things hard to read. When we hear about it with a male character, people tend to feel disbelief. That is because when it happens to men in real life, it is kept quiet. It’s taboo to speak of. It’s considered a shameful thing, and men aren’t supposed to have feelings about things like that. There are even jokes about male rape. “You can’t rape the willing and men are always willing,” etc. I know you’ve heard them before. If you haven’t, congratulations, you’re probably one of the few.

  More men are sexually assaulted than you will ever know. Sexual assault isn’t just drugging and raping a man either. I’ll give you a glimpse of what I mean by taking you back in time to my own story. I was seeing a doctor after finding out I was pregnant by a man who purposefully tampered with our birth control in order to get me that way. His reasonings for it don’t matter! Something that did matter was the fact that I had to see someone about how I was feeling. I felt betrayed, trapped, used, and I was left to make horrible decisions that should have never been a concern if that man had not taken my choices from me. He didn’t just take my choice, he knew my choice, ignored it, and selfishly did what he wanted anyway.

  My doctor, and the nurse who was with him, both set me straight. It was okay to feel the things I did, because in essence, what he had done was a form of rape. I did not consent to those actions. He took it upon himself to force his decision on me though. I had never before thought of birth control tampering as rape. It wasn’t in the sexual sense, but the force and the lack of consent for what was done make it something similar. As a woman who had been sexually assaulted before, it took a minute to wrap my mind around that.

  “But women have been doing the same thing to men for years. People joke about women poking holes in condoms to trap men,” I remember telling them. Not that I ever thought it was right or okay for someone to do, but just that it had been ‘normalized’ in society as something that “just happened to some men”. My doctor’s answer said everything.

  “They forced a pregnancy he didn’t want or consent to, and did it with premeditation. It’s just as much a rape of a man for that to happen as it is for a woman. They have the same feelings about it of shame, helplessness, and loss of trust; only they’re told they shouldn’t. Men are supposed to just deal with it, and then have to raise a baby with the woman who stole their choice, their trust, and proved that they were criminally deceitful. The man will likely also be responsible financially. Yet, the woman will suffer no consequences for her actions.”

  That conversation stuck with me. That conversation happened over twenty years ago. There is actually a term for it now. It’s called reproductive abuse and coercion. In specific, pregnancy coercion and birth control sabotage. To put things into perspective for you here are some statistics from the US: 4.8% (just shy of 6 million) of women have reported that a partner attempted to purposefully get them pregnant without their consent while 8.7% (10 and a half million) of men said they had an intimate partner who tampered with birth control in order to obtain the results the female wanted. Note, the occurrence of female on male birth control sabotage is almost double.

  There are no laws currently, in the United States, that specifically address reproductive coercion. They may fall under “domestic abuse statutes” if you have other domestic abuse issues. The only recourse a person has is to take civil court action and claim fraud or domestic abuse while seeking damage for such.

  Obviously, this book and A Love So Hard (Aces High MC – Charleston Book 2) deal with the rape of a male character as well, which is criminal, but these stories were definitely used to highlight an ongoing issue of reproductive coercion and the fact that it actually happens more often to men than women. It is never okay to take a person’s choice from them!

  Women around the world speak out about “My body, my choice” and if you are also a feminist, you will understand that feminism means equality on the most basic level. ‘My body, my choice’ applies to men just as equally as women. As the mother of two sons and two daughters, I am a firm believer in this. IT IS NEVER OKAY TO TAKE SOMEONE’S CHOICE AWAY! No matter what gender is doing the taking! I am also a firm believer that fiction can teach people too. Hopefully, this helps someone else out there to understand things that may have happened to them. If you have been a victim of reproductive coercion – I am sorry! Me too! Let’s stop allowing it to be normalized! There is nothing normal about another person making that choice for you (male or female).

  If you are in the USA, here are some resources if you need help, or know someone who does (*the following items were taken from an ACOG article - https://www.acog.org/clinical/clinical-guidance/committee-opinion/articles/2013/02/reproductive-and-sexual-coercion ).

  National Domestic Violence Hotline 1-800-799-SAFE (7233)

  Rape Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) Hotline 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) Web Sites

  Web Sites

  Futures Without Violence (previously known as Family Violence Prevention Fund) www.futureswithoutviolence.org

  National Coalition Against Domestic Violence www.ncadv.org

  National Network to End Domestic Violence www.nnedv.org

  National Resource Center on Domestic Violence www.nrcdv.org

  Office on Violence Against Women (U.S. Department of Justice) www.ovw.usdoj.gov

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Christine Michelle (aka Christine M. Butler) writes contemporary romance stories as well as paranormal fantasy/romance. She also survives on coffee and her Twizzlers addiction.

  She's a mom to four humans (2 girls, 2 boys) along with two fur babies of the canine and feline variety. When she's not doing "mom" stuff or writing books, she enjoys making pretty pictures, going hiking in the woods, or feeding her soul with live music at concerts.

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