She huffed. “I’m going to get the VIP seat and bring it over here,” she vowed. “I’ll tower over all you entitled turds.”
“No, he’ll know it’s the VIP seat, then, and that game will be over,” Brody said quickly. “Resist the temptation.”
“Fine. You’re right. But I’m going to be moody about it.”
“That is your right.” Brody turned to me. “What’s this I hear about a fight outside?”
“What?”
“Some regulars just came in said they saw you and Chuck going at it with the group of people shouting shit down the street.”
“There wasn’t a fight,” Chuck said, shaking his head. “See? Damn small town. This is how harmful rumors get started.”
“There would’ve been a fight if you hadn’t gotten in my way,” I reminded him. “That asshole had it coming.”
“What, a fight?” Jack swaggered up to the booth, hands shoved in his jeans pockets. “Please tell me I didn’t miss a fight.”
“You didn’t miss anything,” Chuck assured him.
“I don’t know,” Brody said. “Kind of sounds like there could’ve been one.”
“Between who?” Jack asked, incredulous.
“Didn’t you see the group of people outside as you were coming in?”
“No, came in the back,” Jack said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “I hate parking my bike on the street.”
“So you park it illegally in the alley,” Katie said, raising her eyebrows.
“My bar, my alley.”
“I should go write you a ticket,” she said.
“You’d get one, too,” he fired back. “Your ass is parked illegally in the club booth, and all of you are in trouble for letting her do it.” Katie stuck her tongue out at him.
“For the record, there’s a big group of people outside chanting anti-military shit,” Brody continued. “And Sloan and Chuck almost beat the shit out of one of them.”
“No, no, no,” Chuck said. “Sloan is the one who almost beat the shit out of one of them, but I stopped him.”
“And Sloan’s not even drunk yet, are you, bud?” Ace asked, almost proud. “Normally, the only way he ever fights is if he’s got a few too many in him.”
“What were they even saying?” Brody asked, wrinkling his nose. “Sloan’s too easy going to let any of that bullshit bother him, right?”
“I’m right here,” I said, waving my arms. “Don’t talk about me like I’m not.”
“You going to fight us?” Brody joked, putting his fists up. “I know, Chuck will protect you.”
“Fuck you,” I complained.
“Easy,” Chuck rumbled.
I whirled to him, my anger building. “You don’t understand because you never served in the military. If you were a veteran, you wouldn’t have held me back. You would’ve been right there alongside me, fighting for your honor. Your dignity.”
And there it was, the hot and ugly feeling that had consumed me outside earlier. It was back, and it felt like I was never going to get rid of it.
“What are you, some kind of war hero?” Brody asked, his voice deliberately jocular, testing the waters. I hated it. I hated all this awkwardness, the glances exchanged around the booth, everyone walking on eggshells around me, ready for me to explode again. I opened my mouth to fire off a retort that would hopefully get everyone off my backeven if I was certain it would only make my friends worry about me more when Chuck interrupted.
“Hell, if I knew we were going to be in the presence of a celebrity tonight, I would’ve worn a better shirt,” he rumbled, eliciting laughs from everyone. I relaxed a little, chuckling. It was going to be okay. Chuck had seen to that, defraying the building tension in the booth.
“Grab a seat, Jack,” Ace said, grabbing Katie and squeezing her closer to him. “There’s room for us all.”
We all knew Jack was going to give Katie shit again for sitting in the booth, but he surprised everyone by being silent and by still standing.
“Jack?” Brody asked, squinting up at him. “Did you hear Ace? Have a seat. There’s an ass-size space right there on the edge.”
We all looked up at our club president as he remained quiet. Was he angry at us for bickering? Pissed that Katie couldn’t ever seem to respect the sanctity of the club booth? About to projectile vomit on all of us? I braced my hands on the table to try and dodge away from that last possibility. He did have a funny look on his face.
“A war hero,” Jack echoed, his eyes fixed on a point far away.
“Hey, are you okay, man?” Chuck asked, leaning forward. “Jack? Talk to us.”
But Jack didn’t. I wasn’t even sure if he knew where he was, or who we were. All he did was sit there, jaw clamped shut so tightly his lips were turning white, his pale face losing more blood by the second, eyes glassy. He looked like he was going into shock, but I really couldn’t pinpoint a reason why.
“Jack?” Brody was in his face now, waving a hand in front of those frozen eyes. “Snap out of it. Jack!”
In something bordering on panic, Brody seized Jack by the shoulder and shook him hard. By this point, Ace had recognized the tumult for what it wasa true emergency and had stood up to yank his cell phone out of his jeans pocket.
“I’m calling 9-1-1,” he announced. “Jack, can you hear me? Help is on its way.”
“Don’t fucking call 9-1-1,” Jack muttered, rubbing his eyes, looking suddenly and truly exhausted. “At least, I don’t think I need to go to the hospital.”
“What the hell happened there?” I asked him. “You were here one moment, and the next moment you were far away. Was it any better than Rio Seco, wherever you were?”
He blinked a couple of times, seeming to consider it. “I can’t really say. I don’t know where I was. In my own head, I guess.”
“Dangerous place to be,” Chuck said. “Can you please sit down? You scared the shit out of all of us.”
Jack sat without so much as a cross look at Katie, and I knew it was bad, whatever had happened. Everyone else seemed to realize that, too.
“What’s going on, bud?” Ace asked, and Jack looked at him. Those two had been the closest out of all of us for a long time.
“I think…I think I remembered something,” Jack admitted. “Something from my past.”
We all stared at him. If that statement was true, then we had all witnessed Jack have a significant breakthrough. But none of us, especially not Jack, knew whether that was a good thing or not. He had no idea who he was before the explosion. Any personality quirks he had now had been developed after he’d been released from the hospital and discharged from the Army Rangers as some kind of hopeless case. And that elite team was so secret, their missions so deeply classified, that they couldn’t do a lot to help recover anything, not even tell him stories about his various exploits. It was like Jack was given a blank slate, license to be whoever he wanted to be. They cut him a fat check, he had accumulated a storage unit full of his belongings from before his Army Ranger days, he was told, and that was it.
Until now.
“What did you remember?” Ace asked, leaning forward urgently. “You said something about a war hero.”
Jack flinched and recoiled in the same moment. “I don’t know. I don’t know how to explain it. It was like a dream…a dream you have trouble remembering, but you know is important. Someone was telling me I was a war hero. I think. But it was like I was watching it from across the room. That can’t be right, can it? That isn’t how memories work.”
“Hey, you have no way of knowing what’s going to come your way or how,” Ace soothed. “Maybe it’s a memory of you watching a recording of yourself getting some kind of commendation. That would make sense, wouldn’t it?”
Tension bled visibly from Jack’s body. “Yeah. Yeah, that would make sense.”
“See? No reason to panic.” Ace smiled across the table at him. He was doing a good job with this, being the point of positivity that Jack
needed right now. “You want to go home? We could get you there, borrow Haley’s SUV.”
Jack frowned at him. “Home? Hell no. I just got here. I’m ready for a beer. And for Katie to get out of the club booth.”
“There he is,” Katie said, laughing, scooting out of the booth with no complaints for once. “Glad to have you back.”
Jack fished around in his pocket before handing me a business card. “Did Ace tell you about that woman who was in here looking for you?”
“Yeah,” I said, taking the card. “You saw her, too?”
Jack nodded. “Pretty hot.”
“So I hear.”
“Is that a fact?” Katie gave Ace a look that made him shift in his seat uncomfortably.
I examined the card, which was simple and spare, including only a name, Amy Ovalle, an email address, and a phone number. The cardstock it was printed on wasn’t even that high quality, and it bent, flimsy, as I turned it around.
“Did she say what it was regarding?” I asked. “This card’s pretty basic.”
“No,” Ace said. “Just that she was looking for you, and wanted to talk to you about something.”
“What did she look like?”
“Hot,” Ace said, wincing as Katie scowled at him. “Sorry. Uh, dark hair, dark eyes. A, uh, handsome woman.”
“Handsome? Really?” Katie, unable to hold her grimace any longer, burst into laughter. “Really, you are ridiculous.”
“That’s why you love me, though, right?”
“Whatever,” she said, waving her hand at him. “Brody, you going to serve me something at the bar, or should I just get Haley to let me raid the coolers?”
Haley was currently lounging in what I was pretty sure was the VIP seat. She grinned when she saw Katie strolling over and hopped down, presenting it with a curtsy and a flourish.
“I’d better get back over there,” Brody said. “Let me know if you all need anything.”
“That’s more like it,” Jack sighed, spreading out a little in the booth. “So, Sloan. You going to call her, or what?”
“Call who?”
“The woman who left you that card.”
I studied it for a few moments, then stuffed it in my pocket. “Right now, I’m going to drink. I’ll let that get figured out later.”
“I’m with you on that,” Jack said, clinking his bottle against mine. “Cheers.”
And sometimes, all you needed to feel better about anything was a night of drinking with your friends.
Chapter 2
I dreamt of people I loved and lost, people I’d thought I’d saved, people I’d damned. When those visions finally decided to retract their claws and let me get away, the sun was already up. That was something positive, even if it meant I overslept. It was hard to wake up in the middle of the night after having those kinds of dreams and stare into the darkness, all alone, with nothing to reassure myself. With the sun up, at least I could get started with my day. It was too hot already to go for a jog, but I made do with some pushups and sit-ups to get my blood pumping, then a shower to wash whatever remained of the bad dream out of my system. They were just a part of life now, a little souvenir I got to keep after my Navy SEAL days were over.
It wasn’t until I was pulling on my jeans to go over to the worksite for Chuck and Haley’s new house when I remembered about the mysterious woman who had been asking for me at the bar. And that was only because her business card fell out of my pocket and slipped under my bed.
“Aw, come on,” I grunted, bending down to retrieve the card and pulling out a dust bunny about the size of an actual bunny along with it. “Gross.”
For not the first time, I considered hiring a cleaning service. I knew a couple of places in town where I could get a deep cleaning for the place for cheap. I only resisted because it felt like a man-child kind of thing to do. If I couldn’t take care of myself, of my own home, why should I be expected to help other people build the homes of their dreams? It was just so easy to forget that dust collected under things in addition to on the surface of things.
I looked at the card. Amy Ovalle. A phone number. An email address. It was strangely vague for a business card. There was no address, no way of knowing where she was from. There was no profession included, no company logo. No way to figure out what she might want from me, a realization that sent a spike of anxiety right through me.
And that was a funny feeling, being nervous about a woman I’d never met before.
I didn’t want to call her, but I didn’t want to wait on it, either. The longer I waited, the more anxious about it I would be. The best thing to do would be to just get whatever this was over with. Hell, who knew? Maybe I had a rich distant relative who had died with no heirs, and I had inherited a considerable sum of money. I didn’t know what I would do with a lot of money, especially since I didn’t need a lot to be happy, but that was the most positive thing I could think of as the phone rang and rang.
“Hello? This is Amy.”
I swallowed and almost choked on my own saliva. “Hi, Amy. This is Sloan Norris. You’ve been looking for me.” I laughed, marinating in my own awkwardness. “Sorry. That sounded kind of cryptic and weird.”
“Well, it’s true,” she said, her voice bright. “I have been looking for you. Your friends at the bar gave you my card, obviously?”
“Yeah,” I said, examining the rectangle of cardstock again like I might have missed something on it. “That’s how I’m calling you.”
“I wanted to meet with you,” she said. “Is there a time and a place that would be convenient for you?”
I hesitated. “Well, I’m about to go to work right now.”
“Oh, where do you work?”
“I’m an electrician.”
“Interesting.”
I frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything. Or, I don’t know, it means you’re really good at circuits, or something. Or good with your hands.”
“So I can’t meet you right now,” I said, after a moment’s pause. “Because work.”
“Right. How about this evening? Around seven, maybe? We could get a drink at the bar.”
“No,” I said quickly. “I mean, maybe that’s not such a good idea.”
“Why?”
“Um…” Because all my crazy friends were there. Because if she was as beautiful as Jack and Ace said she was, they wouldn’t let me hear the end of it, no matter what the reason for us meeting was. Because I had no idea what any of this was about, and what if she blindsided me? If the best-case scenario was a sudden windfall of cash, the worst case scenario was a surprise child from a random hookup or getting sued. “What is this about again?”
“I’d rather talk about it in person, if that’s all right with you,” she said.
“So…good news, or bad news?”
“Neither. Or both. I’m not sure. I guess it depends on your perspective.”
“At least I’m not the cryptic one anymore.”
“So, if you don’t want to meet at the bar…”
“It’s just because the clientele can be a little rough sometimes,” I said, even though the roughest Horizon MC Bar had ever been was during Chuck’s and my bar fight against the guy who’d roughed up Haley. “You seem like you’re a nice person…”
“You don’t know me,” she reasoned. “I can handle myself. It seemed pretty sedate yesterday, anyway.”
“There’s a diner in town,” I said quickly. “Pretty good burgers. Pretty good everything, honestly, if you’re hungry. Want to meet there around seven instead? It could be a dinner meeting.”
“All right. I know where the diner is.”
“Pretty hard to miss. Hard to miss anything in this town, it’s so small.” I paused. “You’re not from here, are you?”
“No.”
“How’d you find your way here?” How did you find me that was the question I really wanted to ask. How did she find me, and what did she want with me?
“That’s something we can talk about tonight,” she said. “I look forward to meeting you in person.”
“Okay, it’s a date, then.” I slapped my own forehead, stunned at my stupidity. “I mean, you know. See you later.”
“All right, Sloan. Goodbye.”
“Bye.”
Why was my stupid heart beating so fast? Had I convinced it that I was going on a date after work? Because it wasn’t a date. It could be good news, and it could be bad news, according to Amy. I didn’t even know what she looked like. How my life could change after meeting her.
All I could really do was get through my day and meet her to lay all this shit to rest and get on with my life. The average case scenario was that she was going to try and sell me something I didn’t need. There was no reason for me to be so excited. Or terrified.
Work was good. Work was nice. It was wonderful to immerse myself in work, to focus on doing my job and doing it right so Chuck and Haley had the best place possible. It was hard to believe that they were moving in together even before Ace and Katie, but they’d known each other for longer. There was something really special about their relationship not that Ace and Katie didn’t have something nice, too. It was just that Chuck and Haley were as different as they could be, but they still loved each other so much. Something about them just worked, and the work they were putting into the house was a testament of that love.
“Hey, Sloan.” Haley came trudging through the house in what looked like brand new work boots. “How’s everything going?”
“Good,” I said, surprised to see her. “What are you up to?”
“I thought I’d come out to the house and clean up a little bit,” she said. “Man, just everyone in here kind of gives me the creeps, a little.”
I laughed at her, sitting back on my heels. I’d been in the middle of wiring an outlet. “How did you think houses were built? Did you think they just sprung up out of the ground like a flower?”
“I wish,” she muttered. “Do you know, the last time I was here, I found all these buckets laying around, all sealed. And you know, I didn’t want to throw them away in case they were something important, so I just left them alone for a while. Then, I thought that I’d just look inside of them to see if there was anything important in there.”
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