by Nicole Fox
“Don’t compare us!” Chopper snapped.
Kelsey rolled her eyes. “Then don’t act like him!” As he stomped out, she picked up the remote and pointedly turned up the volume. She wanted to pull her hair out. Part of it was the pregnancy hormones, she was sure, but Chopper’s volatile temper was a real concern. She wasn’t sure she liked having such a hot-headed man as the father of her baby. She knew for a fact she wasn’t signing up to mother both of them. Either Chopper needed to get his act together, or she’d find out a way to do things on her own. A man in her life would be useless if all he could do was throw tantrums. She’d live off the money that came with her plane ticket if she had to. But they hadn’t set a definite amount, and she couldn’t stop herself from worrying about a potential future as a single mom. It was not the life she’d ever envisioned for herself.
At the next commercial break, the door opened, and Chopper came back in. He set himself down on the bed, and they watched TV together for a bit, neither of them initiating conversation. “I’m sorry,” he said suddenly. “I shouldn’t have reacted like that.” He sighed. “I guess I just … I don’t know. Things have been the same for years around here. I run the Outlaws, Spike runs the Mongols. When one of us has something the other one wants, we fight.”
“And you don’t want a kid to get in the way of your precious fighting?” Kelsey asked.
He rubbed a hand over his face. “It’s like this, okay? We’re part of this club, and that means that everyone close to us becomes collateral if we fuck up. It’s one thing if it’s a brother who knew what he was getting into. He took the oath, he earned the patch, whatever. We don’t want to see each other die, but there’s peace in knowing we’re all okay with it on some level. And maybe you could say the same about your girl or your wife, because chances are she’s part of the club too. But a baby? A little kid? They’re like sitting ducks. On one of us, they’re like glowing weak spots.”
“You don’t think there’s any member of the Savage Outlaws who wants to be a dad?” Kelsey said.
“Of course. Some of us are already.”
There was that inconsistency again. But Kelsey was starting to get it. Chopper tended to think about things in ways that exclusively provided him with the most protection against the realities of the life he had chosen. He cultivated viewpoints that allowed him to avoid assuming responsibility for the death of a club member, or the life of a child. He constructed a vision of an ideal self that let him remain as detached as possible, while still being able to reap the rewards of things like sex and drugs and money. He was a machine for earthly pleasures.
And she was challenging his whole worldview. Kelsey reached over and took his hand. She was not without sympathy for Chopper’s problems. She’d only been part of the Mongols for five months before switching sides; she couldn’t imagine what years would do. She struggled to grasp the implications of what he was saying, and what she did understand seemed like an excruciatingly lonely life.
After Hannah died, Kelsey thought she was done with feelings of compassion. She thought she’d be okay on her own, that she needed to be alone if she didn’t want to be in pain. But she was learning through the rejection and acceptance of these men that those values still held weight in her heart. If she wanted to build a life again, she’d have to hold on to them.
“Look, Chopper,” she said, squeezing his fingers. “I’m not saying we need to get married and have some kind of blissfully idyllic life with a picket fence and a dog, okay? I just want to give you the chance to be there for this baby. I don’t think being a father will ruin your life, but I’ll also admit that I don’t have a clue about what your life is or what it means to you. If you don’t want to try to make this work, just tell me. I’ll take the money and the plane ticket when this is over, and you’ll never see us again.” She touched her stomach. “Either of us.”
“Hearing you say that feels like shit,” Chopper replied, staring fixedly at the mattress. “I think that means I do want to try. Or at least, I’ll never forgive myself if I don’t.” He lifted the back of her hand to his lips. “I’ve gotten used to always being right, but I mean, none of these assholes is ever going to question me, so how could I know if I was wrong?”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll tell you.”
He grinned. “I think I might learn to like it.”
Chopper ordered pizza that night, and when the food arrived, the smell of the cheese made Kelsey run to the bathroom and throw up. She managed to eat half a slice, but it came back up soon after. The only thing she kept down was water, and even then, the nausea persisted.
“Is it supposed to be this bad?” Chopper asked.
“I don’t know.” Kelsey lay curled up with her knees to her chest, eyes closed against even the soft light in the room. Her stomach turned restlessly. “I think I need to see the doctor.” It hadn’t even been two weeks, but she didn’t think she could endure six more months of such unrelenting misery.
Chopper rubbed her back. “I’ll go with you,” he said.
“Really?” She looked at him. “Are you gonna wear your jacket?” She wasn’t sure how well a patched member of a known outlaw motorcycle gang would go over in the waiting room of a maternity clinic. He seemed to catch her meaning.
“What?” he said playfully. “You don’t think the doctor will want to join the club?”
She swatted him gently, laying her head in his lap. The feel of his fingers in her hair drove some of her nausea back, and she closed her eyes, willing sleep to come. If she could just sleep until March, she thought, that would be pretty much perfect.
Chapter Seven
Chopper
He didn’t wear his leather jacket to the clinic. He wore a different one, without his patches and the giant crest emblazoned on the back. Sitting in the waiting room with Kelsey, he looked like all the other fathers-to-be with their wives and girlfriends, hands folded in his lap as he listened to the easy-listening radio station being piped into the room. Inwardly, he felt incredibly out of place. He thought about his men back at the compound, about Red and Hoss and poor, dead Ray. He thought about the decisions he’d made, everything he’d done to bring him to this point in his life. And he thought about how all of that was so close to changing forever.
A year ago, he might have been livid. But now — now he wasn’t sure how he felt at all. When the nurse called Kelsey’s name, Chopper got up and walked back to the examination with her. When she smiled and asked him for his, he gave her his real one — Jesse—and nodded in response to her statement that he must be excited. He sat in a different chair as Kelsey told the nurse about her morning sickness. She’d been hunched over the toilet just thirty minutes ago, and had repressed the urge to vomit on their way into the building. The nurse took Kelsey’s vitals, wrote some things down, then smiled and told her the doctor would be right there. He and Kelsey sat alone in the silent, sterile room, no sound but the crackling of the paper on the table.
“This is weird,” Kelsey said out loud.
“What?” He’d been thinking the same thing.
“This.” She gestured vaguely. “This whole thing. Do people ever plan to end up here?”
“A lot of people,” Chopper said. “But I didn’t have a condom on me, so …”
She laughed and kicked him gently with one socked foot. “Stop. That’s only sort of what I meant.” Then her tone turned serious. “Are you happy, Chop? You can be honest.”
He blinked. He hadn’t thought about it since the week before, when he’d been so sure that he wasn’t. Since then, their relationship had reverted to the one he’d been expecting, the one much more reflective of that incredible one night stand. He felt a kind of contentment when he was with her, as if some piece he hadn’t known was missing had finally been found. Of course, it was too early to tell for sure. He knew as well as anyone that things could change on a dime. There was no question that Spike knew she was missing by now, and probably no question that he knew where s
he’d gone. It was only a matter of time before the Mongols made their move. Chopper, ever vigilant, was already drafting a plan. But in his downtime, he laid in bed and watched TV with Kelsey, or he took her to the bar on quieter nights. Or, more recently, he took her into the garage and had her sit and hand him tools, while he worked on one machine or another. Food smells always seemed to set her off, but for some reason she tolerated grease and machine oil like a champ. It filled his heart to look up and see her perched on the bench next to his toolbox, hair cascading over her shoulders.
“Yeah, I think I am,” he told her. “I can’t explain it. It just feels good, the way we are right now.”
Kelsey smiled. “I think so, too. Except that I can’t stop puking.” As if on cue, the doctor opened the door at that exact moment. She diagnosed Kelsey with severe morning sickness, which had a technical name Chopper couldn’t remember, wrote a prescription for anti-nausea medication, and sent them on their way. They stopped at the pharmacy next to the clinic to pick up her medicine, and while they waited for it to be filled, Kelsey rested her head on Chopper’s shoulder. Without thinking, he turned and kissed her hair. She seemed to tire so easily, and he told himself that when they got home, he’d put her to bed and work in the other room so he could be near her. It was strange, the pace at which his life had transformed from an experience that was all about him to an experience that was all about her. Spike Lawler still lurked in the back of Chopper’s brain, but he had decided after that first fight that if Kelsey needed him, Spike could go fuck himself. He could feel his priorities shifting.
Yet, some things remained the same. Try as he might to acclimate himself to some aspects of a more normal life, the thought of going to an office job for forty hours a week made Chopper’s skin crawl. He’d always be an outlaw at heart, a man who preferred the quick and dirty methods of eking out a living. A baby on the way exacerbated his desire for money. Bike Out of Hell turned a steady profit, a good one, even, but the half-million payout of the drug bust that killed Ray was too alluring to resist. A single casualty wasn’t enough to dissuade Chopper from continuing his quest to conquer the Mongols. He needed to provide for his kid.
He wanted to provide for Kelsey, too. The income he’d earn off of Spike’s well-established drug routes could make it so that Kelsey didn’t have to work at all. That seemed like the ideal life to him, running an empire, while Kelsey cared for the baby. But in the middle of his little stay-at-home fantasy, Chopper realized that he had no clue what she wanted for herself. She had yet to make any sort of lifestyle requests, nor had she expressed an interest in going back to work. Did she work? Had she ever worked at all? He was sure she must have at some point, though he doubted that Spike would ever favor a working girl so highly. As the days rolled on and turned into weeks, Chopper began to see that he really knew very little at all about the mother of his child.
It bothered him, but there wasn’t a whole lot he could do about it right away. As soon as Kelsey’s meds started working, he went back to his role in the Outlaws in earnest. Mickey became almost as indispensable to him as Red. She was instrumental in helping him track drug shipments with increasing degrees of accuracy, mapping out every inch of Mongol territory, assessing exactly what kind of firepower Spike and his boys were routinely packing. Never again would Chopper’s outlaws be caught off guard. Never again would he lose a man because of negligence.
Mickey also brought him valuable tidbits from the grapevine that Chopper didn’t always get to hear himself. She told him Spike was pissed, that he knew Chopper had his girl, and that even though he was biding his time, he fully intended to get her back. She promised to keep her eyes and ears open for any developing battle tactics, any leaked sneak attacks. If Spike received weapons as well as drugs, Chopper would be the first to know.
He passed on the news of Spike’s intentions to Kelsey, who wrinkled her nose and said simply, “Ugh.” Her belly, though still small, was rounding unmistakably now, and Chopper derived a surprising amount of satisfaction from monitoring the baby’s growth. At fifteen weeks, she brought back her first sonogram, and together they marveled at the distinct shape of the baby’s nose and its tiny right hand. The pictures made things real for Chopper, whose instinct to protect only grew with his child. He poured even more of his heart into making certain that his machinations against the Mongols were perfect. The old beef wasn’t just about him and Spike anymore: it was about the future of Chopper’s baby.
But perfect things took time, and Chopper had never been an especially patient man. He was, like the members of his club, always ready to get something started. And now that more than his ego was at stake, his patience ran thinner than ever. After initial preparations were set in motion, there was nothing for Chopper to do but sit around and wait. He was fully confident that his men were the best in the city, and it was both a blessing and a curse. Their competence ensured that things ran smoothly, and it made him bored out of his mind. Suddenly, he had hours of downtime, and there were only so many times he could knock the old cue ball around. New parts came into the bike shop every day, but staying in the garage made him stir-crazy. The weather had started to slowly cool, and he wanted to be out in it.
Kelsey seemed restless too. Chopper was very aware of the infrequency with which she left the compound. He knew that she worried about being snagged by roving Mongols, and now that her belly was growing noticeably, she stood out even more. He was pleased to learn that some of the other club girls had taken her under their wings. They, like their men, were fiercely protective of each other, and they guarded their new pregnant charge like mother geese, shepherding her lovingly from place to place, dropping by the apartment with food or a movie when Kelsey wasn’t up to going out. She talked about them with real affection, and it made Chopper unspeakably proud to hear about the way his Outlaw family was taking care of her and the baby.
Still, he knew he could be doing more himself. Before the abrupt lull in his schedule, he had spent barely any time with her except at night. Their quality time together amounted to an hour of amazing sex, then maybe a few minutes together before Chopper left for the war room in the morning. Kelsey never complained, but he wondered if she was just holding it in because she knew the work was important to him. But every time he apologized, she just smiled that gorgeous smile and said, “Don’t worry. I understand.”
Each passing day filled him with more and more of a needling suspicion that he did not deserve her in the same way he knew Spike Lawler didn’t. That feeling became his driving motivation when the slower days began. He embarked on a new and personal quest to become worthy of Kelsey’s love. And the way he decided to start was with something they had never had — a date,
Beyond the reservoir outside of town, there was a patch of woods that Chopper knew about. He’d gone there a lot as a kid, growing up alone in the poor countryside, and the tranquil silence in the trees helped to soothe a lot of his young anger and mold him into the person he became. He wanted to share that with Kelsey, mostly because there weren’t a lot of places he could take her in the city that she hadn’t already been a million times. Any outing beyond the compound had to be quick and stealthy, full of constant checking for the presence of Mongols. But no one went to those woods. They’d be able to spend as long as they wanted there, and after the baby was born, they’d have a place to go and be a family, all by themselves. Chopper could hardly believe that he was getting so sentimental about a collection of trees, but the idea of a quiet domestic life was slowly growing on him. And if that was what he wanted, it was a damn shame that he barely knew a thing about the woman he wanted to share it with.
Her eyes lit up when Chopper suggested a picnic in the woods. Then she laughed and said, “It seems like something you’d hate. Are you sure? We can always go see what’s playing at the bar.” Again, he felt the sting of unworthiness. She was always the one accommodating him, always reaching to compromise for his selfish desires.
“No, no,” he said, grinni
ng. “I swear it was all my idea. I even packed us food.” He’d originally wanted to take her out on the bike, but he soon discovered the picnic basket wouldn’t fit in the storage compartment. Besides, he knew that riding made her anxious ever since her belly began to grow. So, he put the things in one of the cars, and they set off toward the reservoir. Driving a car was another one of those things he’d formerly avoided that was beginning to grow on him. There was still nothing like the wild freedom of his bike and an empty highway, but he found that something had to be said for the security of a proper car. If he’d thought like that a year ago, he would have also thought he was going insane. But his sense of importance had been changing ever since he met Kelsey — imperceptibly at first, and then practically all at once.
The leaves on the trees in the patch of woods were just starting to turn fall colors. Chopper found a nice level spot and spread out the blanket he’d brought, weighing the corners down with rocks. Then he set the basket in the middle and unpacked its contents. Plastic plates, plastic cups, an array of fancy sandwiches. It was all store-bought — Chopper knew he was no cook — but he hoped Kelsey would approve nonetheless. She stood at the edge of the blanket, looking around at the little spit of nature surrounding her. A tiny breeze lifted the edges of her hair.