by Addison Jane
She hadn’t.
But it just so happens that this date now had a different meaning.
One that I knew my parents felt was more important.
“Avery, we just can’t do—”
“Mom,” I cut in, feeling my stomach churn, a resurgence of the pain that I’d just spent the past couple of hours fighting as I forced myself to put on some makeup and get dressed and drag my ass here instead of climbing back into bed. I knew if I did, I wouldn’t leave. Not for hours. Maybe not for days. “I need this. I need my family.”
What’s left of it.
Mom tugged her short blonde hair behind her ear and pursed her lips tightly. “We are not your family.”
The burn of tears tickled my throat, a bitter taste burning my tongue. “You adopted me.”
“Because Micah fell in love with you,” she hissed back. “Not because we did.”
I’d known it for a long time.
I came second.
Always an afterthought.
It wasn’t like they hadn’t made it obvious that I was only there because they would have done anything to make their beautiful daughter happy. Their biological daughter happy.
My dad stepped up behind Mom, his hand on the door. “You need to leave. Do you have any idea what we’re going through?”
“I do!” I whispered loudly, trying to fight back the tears. It had taken too long to get to a point where I could breathe without feeling a dull ache in my chest. I couldn’t go back. Not now. “Because I’m feeling it, too. You aren’t the only ones who lost her. I lost her, too!” I should be staying home, spending the night with her and Dad, looking through photo albums, watching old home movies, and grieving together.
But instead, once again, I was being pushed aside.
Left behind.
Deemed not worthy.
My mom’s head bobbed up and down. “She was going to be something great. She was going to be something amazing,” she muttered, but not saying those words that I knew she was playing over and over in her head.
It should have been you.
She kept looking past me, into the darkness, her focus going somewhere else. Somewhere I felt like I was probably familiar with.
Hell.
“Avery, if you care, you’ll go,” Dad warned, his hands on her shoulders, pulling her back inside the house, so he could shut the door on me. On the unwanted daughter. The daughter who wasn’t as beautiful. As perfect. Or as amazing as the other.
The daughter, who was more like a stray puppy they adopted, only to put it in a bag and thrown off a bridge when it no longer served a purpose.
The daughter they loved conditionally.
I swallowed, pulling my cell phone from my pocket as the door shut, and I was thrown into the darkness of the night. It took two rings before Holly answered, “Hey. beautiful, you change your mind about us celebrating tonight?”
I knew she was teasing, but as I choked back the tears and took a seat on my parents’ front step, I answered, “Yeah. Can you pick me up outside Mom and Dad’s place? I need to get out.”
Silence.
“You okay?”
“No.”
“Cool,” Holly answered, the sound of her car already starting in the background easing my racing thoughts. “I’ll be there in ten.”
She was there in seven.
My backpack bounced with me down the cobbled path to the street, the heels of my knee-high black boots clacking against the concrete as I skipped up beside Holly’s little hatchback. I’d dressed up at least, thinking maybe my parents would want to go out to celebrate. I should have known better, given I’d barely had a phone call once a month since I moved out just after Micah’s death.
Wishful thinking.
That little girl inside of me hoping maybe this time would be different.
Maybe they would stick around.
Wrong.
“Well, hello, beautiful,” Holly crowed, turning to admire me with wide eyes as I folded myself into the tiny car. She was wearing a simple black mini dress and a fierce red lip that was seductive and sexy—everything I’d learned to quickly love about my attention-seeking friend. “How are you feeling?”
The air changed instantly, and I shook my head, feeling a prickle of goosebumps begin to rise across my skin. “Feeling like I want to have a few drinks with my friend and pretend like getting through today isn’t always going to be this hard.”
It’ll get better.
It’ll get easier.
Things will go back to normal in no time.
I’d heard every fucking ridiculous platitude.
That wasn’t Holly, though.
“All righty then. Let’s go numb our feelings,” she cheered enthusiastically and threw the car into drive, taking off down the road like she was in a damn Formula 1. “You ready to hit this party?”
I reached into my backpack, gripping the neck of the bottle of tequila I had stashed away for a while. I’d never been a big drinker. “What kind of party?” I questioned, already twisting at the bottle cap, not particularly caring where we were actually headed, merely eager for the opportunity to escape for the next few hours.
Physically, mentally, or other.
The sparkle in her eye and the way she pulled her bottom lip in between her teeth let me know exactly the kind of party she had lined up.
“Holly…”
“How do you feel about bikers?”
“No way,” Kid choked, shaking his head while I let out an emotionless laugh. “Your parents… on your birthday…” He pressed his fingers to his temple and squeezed his eyes shut. A few seconds later, they popped open again. Still looking confused.
“You wanna hear the funny part?” I continued, scuffing at the sandy dirt, the sun going down around us. “They aren’t even my real parents. My so-called real parents also said no thanks, and I spent the first five years of my life in an orphanage in China. Micah, and my adoptive parents went over on holiday and came in to donate toys to the children. Micah fell in love with me, forced them to keep coming back to visit while they were there, and six months later, they were picking me up for good.”
Kid cringed, his mouth falling open just slightly in shock. His pain told me something—he had a good family. One that loved him. One that would never put him through this kind of crap, and that was why he was so surprised to hear that sometimes the people who love you could so easily hurt you.
And within that all, there was still something about him that led him to the club, still an understanding of fear and pain, something that pulled him in. I wondered what it was. What kind of magnet had enough force to drag him from that life to this one?
“I lost my real parents. My fake parents. My sister…” My eyes focused on the tiny cross, and my voice lowered to a whisper, “And honestly, I feel like I lost me. And maybe that’s what scares me the most.”
“But what if you’re wrong?” Kid appealed, taking a seat back on the rock, looking past me to where the sun was quickly disappearing behind the city skyline. The hot air around us that had made my sweat stick to my skin was now beginning to cool, a chill settling over me. “What if showing up at the clubhouse that first night was you finding yourself? What if you’d spent so long before trying to be someone they expected you to be? Letting them define you. Letting them tell you who they thought you should be.”
I frowned, taking a step closer to Kid, his words playing over in my head, but at the same time, I was watching them play over and over in his. Like maybe they hadn’t just been for me.
But what if he was right?
Losing Micah wasn’t something I was ever just going to get over. My heart ached for her every single day. For the person who fought for me. Who protected me. Who loved me unconditionally, when everyone else made me feel like I wasn’t good enough.
But losing her had led to the club.
To Shotgun.
To these people I now called my family.
People who were so determine
d to protect and love me. Who seemed to be there when the universe knew I needed them the most. And yet, who I kept pushing away.
Scared.
Scared that their love meant more pain.
When maybe, it meant healing.
“How’d you get so smart, Kid?”
His eyes jerked up, and for a second, it felt like he was looking straight through me. Then he blinked, and the boyish grin I’d grown to love grew, pinching his cheeks. “I spent a lot of time listening,” he teased, walking over and hooking his arm around my neck. “Come on. Let’s go home.”
AVERY
Holding my breath, I slowly pushed the door open, cringing at the creak I knew so damn well.
The lights were dim, turned low, though I caught the shape of Shotgun’s body instantly. He didn’t look up, and I followed his gaze, finding it focused on the tiny sleeping bundle that lay on his bed. The dark blue onesie he had on was the same color as the comforter slung across the bed, almost making him camouflaged.
But it was the round pale cheeks that made my heart skip for just a second. “He’s beautiful.” Meyah said he was around four months old, but he just seemed so tiny.
“He is,” Shotgun whispered, his voice catching and his face twisting in pain as if the words were like razor blades in his throat.
There were men who were made to be fathers.
And there were men who weren’t.
I knew in my gut that Shotgun was the former. He was a born leader and protector. These men looked up to him. They looked at him as not simply the guy in charge, but as the man who they could trust to follow, who they could trust to lead because he was willing to do whatever the fuck necessary to protect his family.
Blood or not.
“He’s perfect,” I whispered softly, making my way around the side of the bed and gently climbing up onto it. I smiled as I smoothed my fingers across the baby boy’s soft hair, the pure blond strands sticking up all over. They felt like feathers, so light and silky smooth.
Shotgun stood back against the wall, his back pressed hard against it like it was the only thing keeping him from falling to the floor.
Or running.
“She had a fucking husband,” he murmured, his brow pinching as he stared across the room, almost like he was watching a movie play on the wall. A piece of his past that was so vivid, so real to him. “It wasn’t like I loved the girl, but why? Why fuck with me while she’s married?”
And there it was, the reason why this man was so hard to not fall in love with.
He was a fucking biker.
Why should he give a damn if she had a husband?
Why should he give a shit about the person he’s sticking his dick in?
Because to Shotgun, when it comes to loyalty—you either are or you aren’t. You don’t get to choose when it suits you and when it doesn’t.
It twisted my stomach.
His gaze jerked toward me. Watching that pain in his eyes, knowing it was caused because of these feelings he had for someone else—it was fucking hard to take. Especially for me, who has been pretending like my feelings for him aren’t so much stronger.
I was in too deep.
When a dead booty call can make you feel jealousy like you’ve never experienced before, you know you are in over your head.
His tortured gaze had me climbing across the bed, careful not to jostle the sleeping child.
I stepped in front of him, reaching up to touch his face, forcing his attention to me, trying to keep him in the present, not the past. “You can do this.”
His eyes drifted again back to the sleeping baby. “He needs a fucking family who can raise him the way she would have wanted him raised—”
“No.” I grabbed his face, pinching his jaw between my fingers and jerking his attention back to me. “He needs you. His father.”
I knew what it was like to have my own parents turn on me, to deem me unworthy of their love—not once, but twice.
The people who were meant to love me couldn’t.
And the ones who chose to love me wouldn’t.
“You have no idea how you could break him by giving him up,” I whispered, that feeling of worthlessness and abandonment so fucking fresh I could feel my body beginning to itch. Panic settling just beneath my skin.
“I feel like I’ve already fucking broken him,” he murmured, withdrawing, and stepping around me, pacing across the room, though his eyes never left the small child. His small child. “I’ve spent my whole life fucking fighting the poison in my blood, and now I’ve already passed on everything I fucking hate about myself to him. He should hate me. The genes he got are dirty,” he muttered, thrusting his fingers through his hair, pulling it back from his face.
“And yet, he won’t,” I argued, following him, not allowing him to escape. “Because you are nothing like your father, and this little boy will be everything like you. Strong. Protective. Determined. Loving.”
He spun, his fingers curled into fists at his sides, his teeth clenched. “How do you know that?”
“Because you and I, we learned how to love from the people who didn’t love us,” I croaked, feeling this unexpected wave of emotion hit me. “And that means we love harder. And we fight to be something better than they could ever have imagined.”
He moved closer, and I reached out, taking his cut into my hands and tracing the stitching with my fingers.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he whispered, his eyes moving between his child and me.
“No first-time parent does. You might have no idea how to be a dad, but you know how to protect the people you love with every part of your being,” I whispered as I stared up at Shotgun and that lost look in his eyes. “It’ll be fucking hard. Sometimes it will come easy. And sometimes you’ll have no fucking idea. But… we’ll figure it out.”
He paused.
I heard the words come out of my mouth too.
I could have stopped them, but the truth was, I didn’t want to. I wanted to have his back on this. I wanted to help him be the person my family never could be—I wanted to help him be the man I knew he was. A soft murmur from behind me had both of us shuffling toward the bed. The small bundle had finally spit out the pacifier and was screwing up his nose and kicking his legs like he was building up for…
His scream resonated across the room, bouncing off the walls.
Shotgun didn’t move, so I moved for him. This now became a team effort whether it was meant to be or not.
You’re already too deep.
Now you’re going to get attached to a baby too.
You’ll never survive.
You won’t endure losing them.
And that’s what will happen.
Just like everyone else.
The words in my head tortured me, my hands pausing above the screaming child’s torso. But instead of running, I held my breath, tucking my hands under the tiny body and lifted him from the large bed before turning to Shotgun.
He was there when I needed him.
I was going to be there when he needed me.
Consequences and heartbreak be damned.
“Get on the bed and lay on your back,” I ordered, stepping out of the way. He moved slowly, his eyes on the baby, already displaying this anxiousness at hearing him cry. He lay down, and I gently placed the baby on his stomach on top of him, his little head resting against Shotgun’s heart. He was out of his depths, his hands laying at his sides while his son squirmed restlessly looking for comfort.
“Hold him.”
He lifted his hands, but his fingers curled into fists. “What if I break him?”
“Just be gentle, and he’ll be fine—”
“That’s not what I meant.”
His gaze jerked up to meet mine, glassy and unsure—the man who always needed to be in control, suddenly out of his depths.
It’s easy to forget sometimes that these men, they are hard, they are strong, and seem so indestructible sometimes. But the truth is, the
y have had to do and see things no normal person ever should have, and at the end of the day, they are still human.
With real emotions.
Real fears.
For them, taking a life to protect the people they love may be nothing.
A means to an end.
A job.
A way of life.
But when they do lose someone, when they are hurt, they feel pain just like each of us.
My heart squeezed, and I slowly tucked my legs underneath me as I lowered myself to the bed next to him, placing my hand on the baby’s back.
“He’s not stopping.”
“Talk.”
“About fucking what?”
I smiled. “Anything.”
His glare was almost cute, but he cleared his throat. “She named him Gage, you know,” he announced with a soft laugh. “Given that she consistently called me by my government name, how fucking weird was it to hear her give him a name that’s so connected with my road name.”
“She knew it was important to you,” I answered, trying not to let my grin grow bigger as I watched his tight shoulders settle and relax. I softly patted Gage’s back, feeling him react to his father’s calming body.
“I guess she did. I should have done something. Should have pushed harder when we saw her at the hospital the other day.” There was that move again, his eyes watching the ceiling, his pupils flickering slightly. “I knew there was something going on, something seriously wrong, and I chose to fucking ignore my instincts and let it pass. Let her walk out. That’s always going to stay with me. Wondering whether I should have gone after her that night. Wondering whether I should have made that choice for her rather than simply thinking she would come to me… God… why didn’t she just come to me?”
Shotgun was going to harbor that pain for a lifetime. To know that the one time he decided to step back and not force an issue like his gut had told him to, it was going to kill him. Possibly tear him to pieces if we weren’t careful.
I wanted to be angry at her for keeping Shotgun’s son from him for as long as she did. I wanted to be angrier that she knew she was in trouble and never asked him for help. She could have just admitted what she’d done and asked for help—fuck what the repercussions would be. Because now she’s not the one who has to face them.