And maybe even some reactions like the one I was having right now. There was probably a reason Brody was so good at a chokehold that had less to do with Marine combat training and more with dealing with these kinds of outbursts.
“I’m not an expert, but it looks like to me we’re just in time for the party.” Chuck moved the entire couch when he heaved his big frame into it. If it had been a cartoon, his end of the couch would’ve tipped Sloan’s up in the air like a seesaw. As it was, the couch just groaned with his added weight, and Sloan scooted a little ways away from him.
“Did you have to invite fucking everyone to this thing?” I grumbled at Ace.
“It was a group text,” he replied with as much dignity as he could. “The one we use for club business and general shenanigans. You got a message, too, inviting you over, because I didn’t have much time to finesse that kind of thing.”
“I think you can let the man go, now, Brody,” Chuck observed. “Don’t you? Jack’s outnumbered.”
I swore and struggled at the same time that Brody and Ace swore.
“Can we go with ‘Ryder’ instead of his given name, for now?” Brody asked the room. “Please?” But somehow, that was even worse. Given name? More like taken. My given name was James. I took my cousin’s name and identity from him.
“Let me go, goddammit,” I said, unbearably hot, way too vulnerable, shattered now that I knew this secret was on its way out of the bag. I wished I could savor these last few moments with my friends. They wouldn’t want anything to do with me as soon as they knew the truth.
“Are you going to hurt anyone?”
“No.”
“That includes yourself, Ryder.”
“I’m not. I won’t. I just – oh, for fuck’s sake.” All I’d wanted to do was cover my fucking face so I didn’t have to ugly cry in front of my friends, but there I was, weeping into Brody’s elbow, my legs asleep thanks to Ace’s heavy ass, Chuck and Sloan taking it all in from the cheap seats.
“Let him go.”
I wasn’t sure who said it, but I didn’t care. I was grateful. All I wanted to do was hide.
But as Brody withdrew from behind me and Ace unpinned my legs, someone – I was blinded by tears – drew my hands down from my face and instead folded me into a hug. This was it. This was really it. These were the final moments of Horizon MC. Would they keep up with the club after they kicked me out? Would Rio Seco suffer without the fundraisers? I wasn’t sure why I cared about any of that. I should’ve been figuring out where I could go instead of worrying about what I was leaving.
There wasn’t a place for me anywhere. A circle of hell, maybe. But nowhere on this world.
“Take this.”
Someone – Brody – pulled my hand free of the shirt it had been fisted in and fit a plastic cup in it. I blinked down, trying to clear my vision, certain that my eyes were swollen, and saw that I was holding a beer.
“Seriously?” I croaked, eliciting a round of light, relieved laughter from the rest of the guys.
“Beer makes everything better,” Ace informed me, and I realized it was his embrace I was in. I backed out of it, embarrassed.
“It’s something,” I said. “This might be more of a whiskey crisis, though.”
“That bad?” Sloan asked, wincing.
“Or something stronger,” I muttered, then drank the entire beer at a chug.
“You going to let us know what’s going on?” Chuck asked. “What’s wrong with your name?”
And that was it. This was the end of things. I looked around the room, wishing I could memorize the way things were in that moment. Everyone was concerned about me, and I hated being the source of that angst. They all had other, more important things to worry about, and I was monopolizing their attention. But right now, they all looked relaxed. Like the storm had passed, and there might still be some rumbles of thunder to deal with, but the worst was already over.
They had no idea that the worst was yet to come.
“It’s not my name,” I said, accepting a new pour from Brody. “I’m more than capable of drinking this from a bottle.”
“First of all, no you’re not,” Brody said. “Second of all, what? You’re going to have to explain the first part of your statement.”
“You shouldn’t call me…that name anymore, because that’s not my name.” I chugged the beer again and held my cup out for a refill.
“Too fast,” Brody said, shaking his head. “This is a high alcohol percentage. You can’t have another.”
“Give the man another,” Ace said. “He can handle it, and it looks like he needs it.”
“Slower this time,” Brody said sternly. “Who else wants a beer before they’re all gone?” He handed them out, but everyone else was slow to open the bottles.
“What’s your name if, you know, your name isn’t your name, then?” Sloan asked, dancing carefully around Jack.
“It’s James. James Ryder.”
“That’s not so far off from what it was before,” Chuck reasoned. “Why are you upset?”
I chugged the rest of the beer in my glass before Brody could stop me. The resulting outburst was just what I’d wanted – a distraction and a delay. Could I be blamed for wanting to keep my relationship with my friends intact for as long as possible?
“That’s it. Cut off,” Brody announced.
“Give the man a beer,” Ace argued. “I’m a bartender, and we know him. We know how much he can tolerate.”
“He doesn’t drink them at the bar like he’s throwing them back right now,” Brody said. “I get that there’s an issue going on right now, but this way leads to alcohol poisoning. Plus you let people drink too much at the bar all the time. I’ve been meaning to bring it up.”
“How dare you?” Ace asked, scowling. “My feelings are hurt. Now is neither the place nor the time. And I only let people get drunk if I know they’re within walking distance. Or if they have a designated driver. Or if it’s Sloan, because one of us will take pity on him.”
“Thanks, man,” Sloan said, toasting Ace with his beer bottle. “You’re a hell of a bartender and my best friend.”
“I’m not the bad guy here. I just don’t want to – goddammit.”
Brody turned to see Chuck in the middle of pouring me another beer.
“It’s your funeral, Ryder,” Brody said. “I just didn’t want them to list the cause of death as Horizon beer.”
“He’ll puke before he reaches the point of alcohol poisoning,” Chuck said.
“Could you all stop talking about me as if I weren’t here?” My stomach was already roiling, but I took a stubborn gulp of the beer from my cup.
“Oh, so you’re ready to start talking, James?” Chuck asked, looking pleased. “Excellent. Tell us what’s going on.” I realized, with no small amount of anger, that this game had been in Chuck’s court instead of mine, but before I could say anything, Ace piped up.
“Isn’t it obvious? He has his memory back. Isn’t that right, James?”
I shuddered. “Can you stop calling me that name, too?” I was trembling so hard that I slopped some of the beer over the lip of the cup as I tried to drink from it.
“Jack, James, whoever you are, you’re still the same person to me,” Ace declared. “Do I speak for everyone on this?”
“Yeah.”
“Yep.”
“Both start with the letter ‘J.’ Easy enough.”
“Yes.”
Ace spread his hands after everyone weighed in. “See? We all still love you no matter what your name is. But we’re worried about how you’re reacting. And why. Would you sit down and talk us through what’s going on with you?”
All I had to lose was everything, but I could already feel them slipping away from me. Like trying to keep water in a closed fist.
Because I was in the process of losing, I told them everything. Showed them the tattoo. Recounted Cheyenne’s memories of it. Talked about my cousin and the life insurance policy and my h
ighly ironic amnesia. Described the journal of vitriol I’d found at my uncle’s – no, my father’s – house, in my old room. The shock of snapping back into myself. Above all, the regret. Regret at not being the person I thought I was. About being willing to cause so much pain to advance my own motivations.
And at the end of it, when I couldn’t figure out anything else to say, any other words to explain just how fucked up everything was, my friends were silent, staring at me.
“Say something,” I said, uneasy. “Or maybe I should apologize.”
Ace blinked, seeming to come back to himself. “What in the world do you have to be sorry for?”
“For not being the person you thought I was.”
“You didn’t know who you were supposed to be. I don’t think that’s something you need to apologize for.”
“I just don’t know what to do anymore,” I said. “I have been trying like a maniac to remember my memories, and now that I have them back, I just wish I could go back to the way things were before, when I still thought I was Jack Ryder, a decent human being.”
“What you do is keep moving forward,” Brody said. “So what that you’re James Ryder instead of Jack?”
“You are who you are,” Sloan agreed. “A bad person wouldn’t be organizing the kinds of fundraisers for Rio Seco that you have been. A bad person wouldn’t give a shit about any of that.”
“I’m sorry that you weren’t the person you thought you were,” Chuck said. “But we still like you just fine. You’re still our same fearless leader, if you want to be.”
“I can’t keep on being someone I’m not,” I said. “You’ll have to call me James.”
“We’ll call you whatever you want us to call you,” Ace told me. “The point is that we still like you whatever your name is.”
“Even if I did terrible things?”
“The only terrible thing I can see is that you thought we wouldn’t like you with your memories back,” he answered easily. “Everyone’s guilty of wishing they were someone else. Not everyone would go through the lengths you did to try and escape your own circumstances, but you didn’t hurt your cousin. You tried to save him.”
“I just don’t know how to be myself anymore. How to keep going in the face of all of this.”
Ace gave me a small smile. “The same way the rest of us do it. One foot in front of the other.”
“One day at a time,” Chuck said.
“Surrounding ourselves with good people,” Sloan said.
“And never hesitating to ask those people for help, when you need it,” Brody added.
“You can’t ever get rid of us, James,” Ace said. “We’re your friends, and you’re ours, no matter what your name is. You got that?”
How in the hell did I get lucky enough to wash up in Rio Seco and meet all of these guys? I’d had no idea what I was doing, drifting along without anyone in my life, but somehow my subconscious had led me here. It had done me a huge favor, hooking me up with the best friends a guy could ever ask for. I didn’t know what I would do without them.
“Let’s get you out of this shit hole,” Ace said. “I left Haley in charge at the bar, which means she’s probably already called all the girls to come over to lounge in the club booth. The place really goes to hell without you, James.”
Would it be that simple to keep going? Heading over to the bar with my best friends to shoot the shit and drink beer and do normal things, like planning the Valentine’s Day fundraiser?
One foot in front of the other. I didn’t have any choice but to try to keep going forward. None of these assholes was about to let me start sliding back.
Chapter 11
I treaded the water of my new reality for about a week, spending part of it at the bar, ruminating, and the rest of it surrounded by the Horizon guys. They trusted me – to an extent – that I wouldn’t do anything stupid. But it was as if they’d scheduled someone to be “on call” with me at all times. I was invited to sleep over at Chuck and Haley’s, invited on small road trips with Ace and Katie, invited to read pages from the books Amy was writing while Sloan offered suggestions for edits that got increasingly lewd the more he drank, and even hosted Nadine and Brody overnight at my place when they partied a little extra hard over takeout dinner with me. I could’ve called them out on it, gotten angry with them, even, but it was kind of nice being around people. I always had plenty of time to think about things. My friends wouldn’t drag conversations out of me like pulling teeth. They let me sit quietly and stare off into the distance as long as they could keep me in sight. It was just nice to be in their physical presence, to know I could reach out and touch someone if I required reassurance.
What I really needed to do, though, was get in touch with Cheyenne.
She was the one who had suspected that I wasn’t who I thought I was to begin with. It was only fair that she learned the truth about everything through me. It was Brody, though, of all people, who had kept in contact with her.
“What do you mean, you’ve been texting Cheyenne?” I demanded before taking a step back. “Sorry. I didn’t mean for that to sound so confrontational. I just…I haven’t been talking to her. I’ve been assuming she wanted space.”
“You were probably right to give her space,” Brody said with a shrug. “I’ve only been texting with her to consult on the kitchen and the recipes she had been considering.”
That was an odd revelation. “Really?”
“Yeah. She was really committed to the idea. Excited about it.”
“Was?”
“Still is.” Brody thought about what he was going to say next. “She just wasn’t sure of her place in the operation. Whether you’d still want her here.”
“If she wants to be here, I want her here,” I said. “I just didn’t think she would want to be here after she realized who I really was.”
“You’ve told her?”
“No.”
Brody stared at me. “That’s a conversation you should probably have with her, wouldn’t you say?”
“She knew, somehow.”
“What?”
“She realized something wasn’t quite right. She didn’t accuse me, but she could feel that I wasn’t the person she knew.”
“But you haven’t spoken with her since you got your memories back?”
“No.” Because I wasn’t sure that was a conversation I was ready to have. Because the conversation would probably culminate in some kind of decision, and I just didn’t know if I could handle the finality of not being with Cheyenne. I was pretty certain she wouldn’t want to be with me after I told her I really was James – confirming her worst fears.
“I think you might be relieved if you did,” Brody said cautiously.
“Relieved? I don’t know if that’s the word I would use.”
“She always asks how you’re doing.”
“And what do you say?”
He shrugged. “I tell her the truth.”
“Goddammit, Brody.”
“I tell her you’re hanging in there. Isn’t that the truth?”
A bit mollified, I nodded. “I’m trying.”
“Well, you should try to discuss what’s been going on with you,” he said. “She cares about you.”
“She told you that?”
“She didn’t have to.”
I was more than a little stunned that Cheyenne had maintained contact with someone in Rio Seco, even if it was Brody and they were just discussing kitchen plans. It was strangely endearing that she cared that much about the project, which I had more or less invented to try and get her to stay in town longer than she’d planned. The fact that she was still interested gave me a little hope that I might have a chance – at least she hadn’t cut all ties with everything when she’d gone back to Colorado.
I’d been telling Brody the truth; I hadn’t contacted Cheyenne at all since she’d left. That didn’t mean I hadn’t thought about it in extreme moments of weakness. But I had thought it was telling that
she hadn’t contacted me – no calls or texts. She was giving me space to figure things out, and I had been giving her space for her to decide if she still wanted to be involved in the mess that was my existence, even if neither of us had explicitly told the other that’s what was going on.
I didn’t care to really explore that, or call to confirm that was what we were doing.
In fact, I realized that talking on the phone or texting through these issues just wasn’t going to work. I could’ve invited her back down to Rio Seco for a discussion, or even had Brody use the guise of a kitchen meeting to lure her here, but I was done with the subterfuge. Even if I hadn’t meant to lie to her, the truth hadn’t been there. If I wanted to go forward, to see what I could try to do to build something real with Cheyenne, I had to step up and show her I was willing to put forth the effort it would take to do so.
And that’s how I found myself back in Colorado, back in Jack’s hometown.
I remembered it better, now, with my memories back, even if it had changed from when we’d been younger. I drove past my uncle’s home and remembered the bedroom Jack and I had played in for hours, the way the sunlight would act as a clock marking the time as it moved along the walls and ceilings. I hadn’t spent much time here after my childhood. I remembered the sharp cut of resentment that Jack was succeeding in everything he set out to try and I seemed to be stuck in neutral, unable to go out for anything or even dream of achieving the slightest thing. If he was bright day, I was his shadow – not even night. It was that reason I distanced myself from him, even when I wished I could be him. He just always seemed unattainable.
I parked my motorcycle outside Cheyenne’s apartment and let it idle a moment so whoever was inside could register the sound of the engine. I hadn’t called or texted before I’d driven up, and I was suddenly afraid that had been a mistake. I should’ve given her some kind of warning beyond the sound of my bike outside of her house, but I’d been frightened she wouldn’t want to talk at all.
By showing up in person, I was forcing both of our hands. Maybe it had even felt like I was doing something daring, putting myself out there for her. I thought it would strike her as important, or impressive, maybe.
HORIZON MC Page 74