by Nicole Fox
“Pain? Isn’t that a bad thing?”
She had never seen Xavier look so scared. He had helped blow up buildings and dealt with the meanest, baddest people of the streets. He had fought the entire mafia just to get to her. But his pregnant girlfriend was the most terrifying thing of all, and she had to laugh.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked.
“I’m sure. It’s just that you … there it is again.” Kenzie checked the time. It had only been a few minutes. If this was for real, then she wouldn’t be pregnant much longer. “I need you to do me a favor and turn off the oven. I think it’s time to go to the hospital.”
Xavier moved like lightning as he shut down the kitchen and ran upstairs to grab her bag. He helped her into the front seat of their new sedan. When he had gone around and gotten behind the wheel, he pulled his phone out of his pocket and poked at the screen.
“What are you doing?” The contractions were coming again, and they were starting to get painful.
He grinned. “You’ll see.”
As they headed out onto the main road, a roar sounded behind them. A swarm of bikes appeared off a side street and surrounded them. Big men in leather vests rode ahead and behind them, some of them screaming and shouting as they went.
“An escort of the Reaper’s Hearts to help welcome our new one into the world,” Xavier said with a grin.
Kenzie couldn’t help but be touched. She spun the old dented ring on her finger, which now barely fit her. Maybe she didn’t need anyone else, but she certainly had them. It was nice to know that she and Xavier would never be alone in this, no matter what happened.
Once at the hospital, she was rushed straight up to the maternity ward. A nurse put monitors around her belly, an IV in her arm, a blood pressure cuff on her other arm, and an oxygen monitor on her finger. The contractions increased, and the pain was almost unbearable. She gritted her teeth and twisted the sheets of the hospital bed in her fists.
As the pain subsided for the moment and she lay back on the pillow, she looked to Xavier. “I love you.”
His eyes were soft, and he reached out to touch her arm. “I love you, too. Which is why I brought you something.” He produced a small black box from the pocket of his vest and got down on one knee. “I know we haven’t really taken the time to talk about our future together. We’ve been too busy decorating the house and planning for the baby. You’ve got your job with the police department, and I’ve been working with the Reapers to find legal sources of income. It’s been crazy. But despite all that, we still fall into bed in each other’s arms every night, and I never want that to stop.” He opened the box to reveal a beautiful diamond ring. It sparkled even in the sickly fluorescent light of the hospital room. “Kenzie, would you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”
Her lungs squeezed as tears blurred her eyes. She could no longer see the ring or the man who held it, but she knew they were both there. Unfortunately, her abdominal muscles began squeezing, too. This contraction was bigger than any that she had felt yet, and she reeled against the bed with the pain.
The door burst open, admitting two nurses and Dr. Girtman. The old man grinned with excitement, but the women were all business as they got things set up for labor. They removed the end of the bed and put Kenzie’s feet up in stirrups, moving quickly and efficiently as they set out everything the doctor might need. “It’s time to start pushing!” the doctor announced.
Kenzie had never felt such pain in her life, but Xavier was right there holding her hand through the entire ordeal. At one point, she thought she might break his fingers, but he never complained. He encouraged her to push and fed her ice chips between contractions.
An hour later, Kenzie held her baby girl in her arms. Her fringe of red hair against her pink skin was the most perfect thing she had ever seen, and Kenzie cried once again to see that she and Xavier had made such a flawless human being together. “She’s so beautiful.”
“Just like you,” Xavier assured her.
“What’s the name?” the nurse asked, her pen poised over a sheet of paper.
Kenzie looked to Xavier, who nodded. “Sophia Grace, after my great-grandmother.”
The nurse smiled as she wrote it down. “That’s very pretty.”
The baby had been bathed and swaddled, the hospital bed had been reassembled, and the general chaos that had come with delivering a baby had finally settled down. Sophia lay sleeping in a clear-sided bassinet right next to the hospital bed. Kenzie was hungry and tired, but she could think about nothing but her new child. “I just can’t stop looking at her. She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
Xavier took her hand in his. “I agree. It’s going to be hell keeping the boys away.” He leaned down and kissed Kenzie on the forehead. “You did a great job. I’m so proud of you.”
“It’s only the beginning.”
“Speaking of beginnings.” There was something about the way he said it that made Kenzie finally tear her eyes away from the sleeping infant. “You never did answer my question.” He took the ring box out of his pocket once again and smiled.
“You know, I did get a little distracted there for a minute,” Kenzie laughed. She held out her left hand to him. “Yes, Xavier. Absolutely yes.”
THE END
***
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Filthy Nights: Demon Riders MC
By Nicole Fox
I’M NOT HERE TO SAVE HER. I’M HERE TO BREAK HER.
CORA
Lovers for a night.
Strangers again in the morning.
But one slip meant he left an unexpected surprise in my womb.
LOGAN
All she wants is to get away from her violent past.
Too bad I’m the man who’s been sent to drag her back.
At first, she was just a means to an end.
But when I find out she’s carrying my baby, everything changes.
Now, I’m becoming a man I never thought I’d be:
One who kills to protect what’s his.
Chapter One
Logan
I pull up outside the hospital on one of those California days that make a man want to submerge himself in a vat of ice water right up to his neck and just sit there until the summer sun decides not to be such a bastard anymore. I climb off the bike and shrug my leather, feeling its stickiness grinding up and down my back. I want to take it off, just wear my black T-shirt, maybe nothing at all. But I can’t go and see the old man without representing the Demon Riders. He’s put his whole life into this club; the least I can do is remind him that it was worth something.
I walk slowly on my way into the building, taking my time because I know what is waiting for me up there. I see a skeleton, skin drawn threadbare over old bones, coughing which rattles his chest, a rasping voice, and pitted eyes. He’s not that bad, but it’s what I see every time I come here. It’s like a waking nightmare.
I nod to the nurse as I pass, wondering if I should hang around and try’n see if I can’t make something happen. She’s tall, blonde, leggy, and thin, with black-rimmed eyes. But I find I can’t summon up the energy. I guess having a dying dad’ll do that.
I knock on the door before I enter. Part of me hopes that he’ll be asleep and that Mom won’t be here to let me in. Part of me hopes that I’ll drop through the floor and land somewhere in the past. Maybe I’m fifteen instead of twenty-eight and I’m sitting with my nineteen-year-old girlfriend at her place, listening to rock and making out and doing other things, too. Maybe I’m at the garage with metal blasting working on an old junker. I’ll keep working on the junker until it becomes a proud new car, fresh-painted and growling like a brave lion. But I get no such luck. Mom’s heels—and they’
re always heels—clip across the floor and stop on the other side of the door.
“Logan?”
I swallow, lick my lips, wonder if I still can’t get out of here. Then I say, “Mom.”
She opens the door, lips pursed, panting like she always is these days, her eyes red with recently-wept tears. She waves me in. She’s dressed even more flamboyantly than usual, as if she can stave off her husband’s death with fashion: her hair as big as a bike helmet, bright red, her face plastered with makeup, her shirt colorful, her jeans flaring, her heels six-inch blocks, her nails painted three different colors.
She goes to the corner of the room. The lump in the other corner is sleeping. I can tell by the steady beep-beep-beep of the heart monitor and the fact that Mom is sitting by the window and not next to the bed. I don’t look at him, the lump, a cruel way to think of him but the way I’ve come to think of him nonetheless. His chest rattles and I remember a different rattling, a rattling that came to me from downstairs, and Mom whispering to him to just call me down. I ran downstairs and saw Dad rattling some new tools around in their new toolbox, a smile on his giant’s face, a cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth. He took a long puff and then thrust the toolbox at me.
“Logan,” Mom says, her voice taut like a mighty engine just before it cuts out.
“Yeah?”
“Are you going to close the door?”
“Yeah.”
I’d rather be anywhere but here, is the cruel truth. As I shut the door I look longingly into the hallway, a long, narrow stretch that looks to me right now like a one-hundred-meter dash. Head down, run. It’s a coward’s way of thinking, but I never expected my old man to go out with lumps in his lungs, even though I should have. A man can’t smoke forty a day and skip into retirement. I expected him to go how most club folks go, with a slug to the head or chest or belly. A belly shot is the worst of all. It’ll spill your insides out like padding from a torn cushion.
“Logan?”
I turn around.
“Yeah?”
“You haven’t said hello to your father.”
“He’s asleep. You know I find that shit—”
She leaps to her feet, moving with surprising agility considering the six-inch heels. She skips across the room and stares up at me. Two heads shorter’n she can still make me feel ten years old. “You haven’t said hello to your father,” she insists. “What do you think we are, animals? Maybe next time I come I should just spit in his face, spit right in his face, and then—and then what? Maybe I should climb onto the bed and go to the bathroom right there, since this family has no sense of decorum anymore. Is that what you think?”
I repress a sigh and turn to the lump. Seeing him now makes it difficult to believe that Thorne Birch was ever as solid as a tree, with thick arms and thick legs, a thick mane of steel hair and a beard to match. Now he looks like a husk, bald on top with sunken cheeks and stick-thin arms and legs. “Hi, Dad,” I say.
“Thank you,” Mom says. “You’re going to be the president soon, Logan. You need to learn how to handle situations like this. How many of your father’s friends have died, do you think? How many times has he had to sit at their bedsides with their wives? It’s time to grow up. You’re almost thirty.”
“Ma, I didn’t come here for a lecture.”
She aims a sword-like forefinger at me, slashing it through the air. “Sit down, and be nice. We’ll wait for your father to wake up.”
I want to leave, maybe go see Spider and get so tanked on whisky we can barely walk, but I’ve never seen Mom like this. She looks like she could crack any moment, and that ain’t just ’cause of how sad she is. Her makeup has been applied so thick that cracks have appeared all over the place, at the corners of her eyes and lips, on her cheeks, a line running down her forehead, like the cracked earth of a desert. Every time she speaks, the cracks open and close.
“Okay, Ma.”
We sit, Mom sipping coffee and me just staring out the window at the nurses and doctors and patients, at the smoking area where a few people gather. One woman laughs. I can’t hear it from up here but it’s a big belly laugh. She throws her head back. Her cigarette falls out of her hand.
“So, you found a girl yet?”
“Ma …”
“What?” she snaps. “I’m just asking you a simple question. You don’t have to get this attitude about it.” She pauses, letting Dad’s beep-beep-beep take over for a moment, and then says, “So, have you?”
“I haven’t been looking. Don’t forget that you’re the one who wants me to find a girl. I’ve never said shit about it.”
“You did! At the barbecue last year!”
I rest my head in my hands, massaging my temples. It’s true. At the barbecue last year, when Dad was first diagnosed, Mom cornered me and demanded to know if I was ever going to find a girl. I backed against the wall, feeling like I was under siege, and told her that yes, one day I would find a club girl and maybe have a couple of kids. I didn’t give it any thought beyond wanting her to calm down. Dad’s lungs were shot, and if she kept going on like that her heart would be shot.
“So you lied to me,” she mutters.
“I didn’t lie. I just told you what you wanted to hear.”
“Well, what a fine way to behave to your only mother!” She prods my nose with her fingernail, making me look up at her. “You have to understand something, Logan. Family is the most important thing we have, and we don’t have any. You don’t have any brothers and sisters. You know why that is.” Yeah, I know: Mom miscarried four times after me. “Is it really that unreasonable for me to want grandchildren, a daughter-in-law?”
I nudge her hand away. “No, it isn’t. But I’m not about to shackle myself down like one of those poor saps you see at the mall, nodding over and over ’cause their old lady wants to buy some curtains and they’ve lost the will to live.”
“I never said you had to marry that sort, did I?”
“What other sort is there?”
“Now you’re just being mean.” Mom pouts, which she somehow makes fierce. “There are as many different types of women as there are types of flower—”
“And there are as many different types of men as there are types of dog.”
“I don’t say it that often,” she protests.
I open my mouth to reply, but then Dad croaks and lifts his trembling hand. I go to one side of the bed and Mom goes to the other, busying herself with dabbing his forehead with a damp cloth and bringing a straw to his lips, and then cleaning his chin when he dribbles half of it instead of swallowing.
“Son,” he says, his voice an echo of an echo of what it once was. “My son.”
“Dad.” I don’t know what to do, so I lean forward. Mom nods at his hand so I take his hand. It’s small and sticky. The hand that once held me up to the sky so it felt like I was flying is small and sticky. There’s some horror in that.
“I have something to tell you …” He closes his eyes, shudders. “It’s important …”
“Go on,” I say.
“I …” He shudders again, forcing his eyes open. “Crash, Crash …”
“Crash? Who crashed?”
“No, Crash.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Pa.”
He closes his eyes, and in a matter of seconds he’s snoring. I look over him to Mom. “What was he talking about?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “He goes on that way sometimes. Maybe it was nothing. But did you see his eyes? He hasn’t looked that serious since the diagnosis.”
I did see his eyes: twin embers, blazing.
“Call me if he starts making sense,” I say.
“You’re going? You only just got here!”
“I have things to do.”
I stand up and make for the door.
“What things?”
Drink, is the truth of it. But I don’t tell her that. I just leave.
Chapter Two
Cora
<
br /> I sit in the green room of the dingy bar, head held back so that I can see the World Serpent’s mouth on my neck, biting its own tail. I study it for a time, thinking about Ragnarok and the beginning and the ending of the nine worlds, and Thor and Loki and Frey and all the other Norse gods, Sif and Frigg and Heimdall and on and on, and the wolf Fenrir and the sea-giantess Ran. I stare at the tattooed serpent and think about my own life and wonder if that, too, will die and be rebirthed: if the world of my life will be stormed by giants and Loki and emerge anew. Maybe if I keep singing rock I’ll be able to quit my job at the dentist’s office; that would be my rebirth.