by Hazel Parker
“Am I allowed to just not want to?” I said, speaking with food in my mouth, hoping it would bug him off. “That’s it.”
“That’s boring,” Tucker said with a laugh. “Well, we are at the W Hotel. I will foot the bill.”
I had to admit; I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a smidge of temptation at that moment. Certainly not enough to change my mind; nothing was going to change my mind. Someone would have to force-feed me alcohol for me to change my mind.
I just had a thing for the W Hotel. The location, the view, and the history there always had good memories for me. I hadn’t even ever passed out there or made an ass of myself.
But no. That was like a drug addict saying he’d once used at a house where he hadn’t overdosed and nearly died. Maybe not in terms of degree, but the idea was the same.
“I’m good,” I said with a yawn. “Thanks for reaching out though.”
“Christine, you’re a challenge,” Tucker said with a laugh. “Don’t make me come to Brooklyn to try and get you out!”
Oh, shit, that’s right, I did tell him that.
“I know all the hedge funds and financing firms out there. I will find you!”
He said it with a laugh, but he couldn’t possibly have come across any creepier. I prayed that this wouldn’t be the rest of my dating life, but damn! If it were, I would very quickly go back to my days of refusing to date. Sobriety, at least, would be a hell of a lot easier.
“That’s great, have a great night, Tucker.”
“Wait, you’re sure—”
I hung up on him before he could say anything else. I almost regretted the day that he started and I did not request a transfer; I had always known him as something of a creep, someone who could never accept no.
I’m not sure what was worse: Tucker, or the fact that him saying he was at the W Hotel had almost changed my mind. I needed…
Shit, maybe I did need a night out. No, no, not a night with alcohol, but let’s face it, my social life was severely lacking. I had absolutely nothing. Maybe I needed a night with someone.
I thought of Sue from work, but she had, let’s just say, even worse drinking tendencies than Tucker. Tucker drank to loosen his tongue with clients and women; Sue just drank for the hell of it.
I thought of Lacy, but she had her boyfriend that she spent a significant amount of time with. Even if I invited her out, she was likely to say no.
Fuck, at this point, there was just one name left.
Was I really going to rely on … him?
You have the confidence and the courage to stand up if he pushes for anything. Besides, if you set the tone early…
I ran back to my room, went through the shorts I had worn for work, and found the receipt that had closed out my night. I saw the number, took a deep breath, and dialed.
But before I pressed call, I took a second to lay some ground rules for the evening.
No drinking. Home by eleven. No going into any establishments with alcohol, even restaurants. If that meant all we did was walk around the city and eat shitty late-night food, fine by me. And no sex.
Sex would ruin everything for me. It would throw all the slow-moving ideas out the door. It would make me emotionally connected at a time when I had to relearn how to be emotionally connected to myself.
And with that, I hit the button.
I went back to the kitchen table, my rice and beans about two-thirds of the way finished. But unlike with Tucker, when I just blew him off by eating and talking, I left my utensils untouched as the phone dialed on speaker.
“Hello?”
Marcel’s familiar gruff voice came through the speaker.
“Hey, I saw you left your number on the receipt.”
“Hey, Christine,” he said, his voice immediately shifting toward a little more playful and flirtatious. “How did the rest of your shift go?”
“Well, you closed it, so, yeah, pretty good I’d say,” I said with a laugh. “Everything before it was fine, though. Most of the shifts are. That’s the goal. The more boring the shift, the better.”
“I would imagine so,” he said. “Well, let me ask this then. I assume you don’t want to make tonight boring, do you?”
I bit my lip. Taken out of context, that would have sounded like something Tucker would have said, and I would have judged him for it. But here, with Marcel saying it, it somehow almost sounded… sweet?
No, sweet wasn’t right. He clearly thought it would turn into something more.
“Well, tonight is low key for me,” I said. “I, I like to have the end of my work week turn into a relaxing night in.”
There would come a time when I would reveal all of the drinking stories to him and my current status. Would there be? Really? You think you two will hang out long enough for it to happen?
Regardless of if that happened, it sure as hell wasn’t going to be tonight.
“Well, that’s a bummer, but it’s probably for the best for me anyway. I doubt Uncle would want me to go out drinking right now.”
Uncle? One of the older guys at your table?
“What about tomorrow afternoon then? Maybe around… five?”
I had Saturday off, though not always, so I could have done sooner. This was risking seeping into prime drinking hours, anyway.
But something told me that Marcel would push in his flirtation, just not in what he expected me to do. Again, I was probably biased, but you know what? Fuck bias being bad. I needed to get out a little.
And maybe Marcel would prove to be worthy of something a little more. It was doubtful, especially since my mindset was still squarely in the “no dating” concept until a hundred days.
But, hey, if I could keep him around until I got to a hundred days or something to that effect…
“Sure, why not,” I said, probably sounding less enthused than I was.
“Why not, indeed,” Marcel said with a laugh. “Well, listen, I need to take care of some things early in the morning, hence why it’s also good for me not to go out tonight. But five sounds like a delight.”
“It’ll have to be quick,” I hastily added. “I, uh, have plans in the evening.”
That was probably the worst lie I’d ever said in my life, at least in terms of believability. But I was giving Marcel the date, right? That would be good enough, right? If it was good enough, we could have a second one where I didn’t feel the implied pressure to stay out longer?
“No worries, my boys and I are starting something up anyway, so maybe being out wouldn’t be so good.”
The Savage Saints.
I opened my mouth to ask him about it before thinking better of it. That seemed like the kind of topic that wasn’t worth broaching right now.
“So five. Let’s say one of the bars near Egg?”
“Oh, no, I have to be sober for where I’ll be.”
A true statement, albeit one that was vastly incomplete of information.
“Let’s find someplace to eat, and we can go there.”
“Hey, any place with you will be perfect,” he said, practically purring the word “perfect.”
It wasn’t an elegant line, but boy did it make me feel good. I felt a tingle forming as I imagined his hands on my body when he said the word. I hadn’t touched him, not even placed a hand on his shoulder, but his mere presence was enough to get me going more than many men touching me. He had a gruffness to him that suggested he got his way, but a softness that suggested he had learned how to be a real gentleman.
Or maybe I was just making all of this up. Reality had become something that I questioned more and more after joining AA, and this doubt was becoming really noticeable now that I was, well, back in the dating game.
“We can figure it out tomorrow,” I said with a smile. “But I’ll let you go.”
I wasn’t really in a rush to hang up. I just didn’t think that keeping this going was going to be good for my self-control.
“Very well then, Christine,” he said. “Talk to you t
omorrow.”
“Sounds good,” I said with a nervous laugh.
He hung up without another word.
And just like that, I was back in the dating game.
It had been sixty days without alcohol.
Sixty-one days without sex.
And sixty-one without feeling a real connection to anyone.
Was I ready?
Would I ever be ready?
The problem with that question was that the very act of trying to prepare oneself to be ready automatically made them not ready to date. It was only when someone, or at least me, let go of the idea of being ready to date that it seemed like something that could happen.
That sounded insightful, but again, I was just trying to rationalize and justify my actions.
Either way, I was jumping back into the deep end.
I just had to hope said deep end didn’t mean the deep end of my darkest temptations and failures.
Chapter 7: Marcel
I spent many of my first few mornings in jail wondering just how little sleep I’d gotten the night before.
No, I never got raped. I never got jumped, though I had a few guys try and suggest they were willing to do so. I never had to worry about what my cellmate would do, because my cellmate knew I could kick his ass if I wanted to.
But for someone used to just sleeping in late, with an afternoon shift at the mechanic shops, waking up at six in the morning was just jarring. Eventually, I learned to stop asking myself that question. Nothing good ever came of it; it wasn’t like I got many opportunities to nap in prison.
It was a lesson that I carried with me to the next morning.
After my call with Christine—one that got me a date, if not necessarily an enthusiastically excited one—I went home from Long Island and parked my bike at Biggie’s. It was decided that for at least the first few weeks, until we started to have revenue, I would live at the clubhouse. Well, “clubhouse” was just the office where the auto shop would be. With any luck, we could build out something in the rear or section off one of the work stations.
But for tonight, I was sleeping on the couch at my brother’s. And I spent so many hours thinking about finally getting to see my little girl.
It was the most wonderful feeling I’d had since I got out of jail. But it’s exhilarating nature meant that I did not get to sleep, and so when my alarm went off at five telling me to get ready to be at Sarah’s at six exactly, the only thing that got me moving was the knowledge that Lilly was waiting for me.
Whatever Uncle had said about a business not having any opening or closing hours during its early days was bullshit. I didn’t function well without sleep, and no one was about to fucking tell me that I couldn’t be that way. When I was awake, sure, I could devote as many hours as possible to the business and do whatever it took to get it off the ground. But right now?
Fuck.
That.
I chugged a glass of water I had put out by the couch, which just made me feel colder. I threw on a jacket and stumbled to the kitchen, doing my best not to awaken Biggie. I cracked two eggs and grabbed two strips of bacon, a mere snack for me—I didn’t want to steal off of Biggie too much.
After I ate, I went outside to my bike. It was only five-twenty-five, and the bike would get me to Sarah’s a lot quicker than walking. Walking and public transportation, if everything went perfectly, would get me there just minutes before six. The bike would get me there by five-forty, but I’d wake up just about everyone in Brooklyn, and I didn’t think Sarah would be too happy.
Why the fuck does the opinion of Sarah matter any here? Fuck her. Go see your daughter.
I at least moved the bike to the street corner, as far away from Biggie as I could, so that he could keep sleeping. If I woke him up, well, Biggie was a laugher by nature. He’d find humor in it, and we’d be good.
The engine roared to life when I ignited it, having no concept of remaining quiet in the early morning. I felt slightly guilty, but I knew that I needed to chew up that part of me and spit it out. The very nature of an MC was a club that was a force of nature; it was not something that acquiesced to modern society, but something that disrupted it, that dared to say that it could do things its way and defied anyone else to stand up.
It would come in time. I’d just have to find the balance between being a force of nature and a destructive entity. Or, maybe, you just have to recognize what things need to be destroyed and what things need to be protected. An MC might be too powerful and too potent to not do both of those things.
Maybe we can take out my other brother.
I banished the thought as quickly as it entered, but only because I was now just minutes from Sarah’s apartment. I didn’t need to finally be seeing my daughter with thoughts of fucking up Kyle on my mind.
I got to the house at five-forty-one. I wanted so badly to just run inside, scoop up my daughter, lift her in the air, and squeeze her. Yeah, that might be trespassing, but for Lilly…
I decided obeying the law was probably the smarter choice and just waited. I tried to think of what she might look like now; I’d gone to jail when she was still an infant, and she was now seven. I knew she remembered me, especially since she’d visited me in prison, but still; this would be the first time in years I’d hold her as a free man, and even then, it had been months since I’d seen her.
How would she have changed? Would she still be as excited to see me as before?
Finally, at five-fifty-nine, I dismounted my bike and went to the front door. As soon as it hit six, I buzzed Sarah’s apartment. The front door unlocked immediately. I gave a silent, soft fist pump.
I was going to see my daughter.
I ran up the stairs, belying the lack of energy that I should have had this early in the morning. I got to the second floor, knocked once, and heard the gentle pounding of a little girl’s footsteps. The door swung open.
And there was Lilly.
“Daddy!”
“Lilly!”
I scooped her up, twirled her in the air, and kissed her on the cheek. She giggled in delight.
God, how I missed having her in my life. How I missed having someone I loved unconditionally. How I missed my little girl.
“You’re back, Daddy!”
I smiled.
“Yes, I am,” I said. “And Daddy’s going to make sure he doesn’t have to take any more vacations.”
But all good things couldn’t last, it seemed, because just then, Sarah came into view. She looked like she had just woken up as she stared at me with half-awake eyes and frazzled hair in her pajamas. I briefly wondered how I had stupidly fallen for her all those years ago.
“One hour,” she said.
“That’s it?”
“You didn’t confirm if your visitation rights were affected, did you?”
“Not here—”
“Then one hour.”
“Daddy, can we go to the park?”
Lilly brought me right back to my happy place just as Sarah had started to push me over the edge. If all I got was an hour before Sarah decided to start playing legal games, then fine. I was still going to make the most of that one hour.
“Of course, sweetie,” I said, putting her down and holding her hand as we walked down the stairs. “You’ve grown so much since I last saw you!”
“Last saw me? You saw me a few months ago, silly!”
“Oh, right,” I said, laughing.
Lilly could have said that crocodiles were cute, and it would have made me laugh. Just about any word of out of her mouth would have made me laugh. She was my everything, the reason I was starting this MC—to provide her protection and to provide her the financial means necessary to do whatever she wanted. God knew, unfortunately, I couldn’t get it just being a mechanic in Brooklyn.
God knew I didn’t have the skills to get a job anywhere else. And even if I did, how often were felons going to get hired for those skilled jobs? I’d made the poor decision of getting caught for blue-collar cr
ime, not the white-collar variety. Maybe if I’d gone the criminal banker route or something like that, I would have had better luck getting an easier sentence.
Ironic. But I wasn’t bitter about it, if only because I was finally free.
I didn’t realize that by “park” Lilly meant a playground about one block away, but that was the joy of having a little child; they thought everything was bigger than it actually was. A park, to them, could have just been one slide and one set of monkey bars. For the most part, I just stood to the side, letting her run wild and free with the kind of enthusiasm that I had hoped she would have at this age.
She asked me a couple of times to go down the slide with her, which I did once, but after hearing what sounded like something giving out underneath me, I had to explain to her that Daddy just had a little too much girth on him for me to continue down the slide. Though she pouted, I made up for it by making myself look like a complete fool on the monkey bars.
I played along with her imaginative stories, listening to her describe herself as a great princess who had to climb through the playground to get to her throne. It was so simple, yet so fun. It was a nice break from the harsh, brutal world of Brooklyn and, soon, the Savage Saints.
And wouldn’t you know it, said break barely lasted any time, because a short while later, Sarah showed up. She had put herself together a little bit, having straightened out her hair and put on more respectable clothes, but she still looked like she had woken up less than five minutes ago. I nodded to her, but she didn’t nod back. I turned my attention back to Lilly, letting Sarah walk up next to me.
“You know I don’t trust you, right?”
I had to exhale slowly to stay in control. I had to believe she meant in general, because if she was saying that she didn’t trust me with Lilly…
There was nothing in the world that would have pissed me off and infuriated me more than hearing her say something like that.
“I don’t care about having trust from you on anything except her,” I said. “You can choose not to trust me as a man. But just trust me with her.”
Neither of us said a word, our arms folded, smiling whenever Lilly looked our way, but obviously with enormous disdain for each other.