by Penny Dee
“These plants are massive,” Honey whispered in awe and I turned to her. She ran a delicate finger over a huge, furry bud. “I feel like I’m in Jurassic Park.”
I grinned at her, a little in awe of the plants myself. There had to be at least thirty or forty of them, all fat and plump with emerald leaves and dark purple heads. The air was warm and heady with their pungent aroma.
When a gentle ripple of wind lifted the sweet aroma closer, an idea hit me.
“Come on,” I said, taking Honey’s hand in mine. “I’d better cut down some of these buds and get them dried out before Sybil decides I’m taking too long and starts self-medicating with bourbon shots and peyote chasers.”
HONEY
Despite the marijuana plant being in the trunk, we still drove to Grandma Sybil’s with the windows down because Caleb was worried about the affects the aroma would have on the baby. You know, essential oils and all that. I tried to reassure him that it was fine, that I was fine, that the baby was fine, but he insisted. And then when we got to Sybil’s, he also insisted I wash my hands because I had touched the impressive buds on one of the towering plants.
When I told him I had wiped my finger on my skirt right away, he looked at me with a pained expression. “Please, baby girl, will you just do this for me?”
It was hard to not do as he asked when he was looking at me with pleading eyes and a furrowed brow.
“Fine,” I said, surrendering to his adorable good looks. When I glanced over at Sybil she was smiling back at us and I had to turn away, afraid my eyes would betray me and she would see through the thin veil of my façade. That despite what I said about being just friends, my heart still wanted something very different.
CALEB
I was late to chapel the next day.
With good reason.
Everyone was seated when I walked in and threw the massive marijuana plant down on the redwood table.
I had their attention.
“Gentlemen, here is the answer to the southern weed drought,” I said.
Immediately, the air became ripe with the sweet scent of pot.
“Fuck me, look at the size of those buds!” Hawke said with a lovesick cadence only a marijuana fiend could understand. “They’re the size of my fucking fingers!”
“Where the hell did you get this?” Bull asked.
“And give me the directions because I’m ready to ride out there now,” Matlock added, eyeing the plant like it was a priceless object.
He went to touch one of the buds, but I stopped him with a warning. “You touch it and I’ll break every one of your fingers.”
“You got some secret nirvana where the marijuana grows like trees?” Vader asked with a gleam in his eyes.
“Kind of, I found these out at the Calley cabin. There has to be thirty or forty plants just growing wild by the river.” I looked at Bull. “Remember Sybil’s marijuana crops of the seventies?”
“Of course. This clubhouse is standing on the land we bought from the profits.”
“These plants are from those crops. She kept the seeds and grew a few plants for her own purpose. But she hasn’t been out there in nearly a year and a half. Didn’t realize these had even survived or repopulated. Or how many there were."
“So what are you proposing?” Cade asked.
My older brother hated the drug trade. Just like our granddaddy, he hated the heroin and the meth, hated what it did to people and what those people did to others. But he wasn’t averse to smoking a joint.
“Things have been tight since Head Quarters burnt down and we lost five months of production. I propose we recoup those lost earnings by supplying weed to the Knights.”
We had lost close to three-million dollars thanks to a psychopath with a vendetta against the club. He’d burned down the studio as part of his plan to get my brother and cousin out on the road in the early hours of the morning. Then he had lain in wait and assassinated my cousin with two bullets from his sniper rifle.
“You mean go into business with those fuckers?” Hawke asked, clearly disgusted. “No fucking way. The Knights are a bunch of motherfucking cunts. You can’t trust them.”
As clubs went, the Kings were bigger. The Knights were a younger, broken fraction of a now defunct club from the north. They were growing in size but they lacked the finesse and discipline of the Kings of Mayhem. Their rules and our rules greatly differed.
“The Knights have trade in place. It would take months for us to set something like that up. I say, take advantage of their network and let them distribute it. We’ll grow and supply, for an attractive cost, of course.”
“Yeah, but trading with the Knights? Come on, man.” Tully had the same look of disgust as Hawke.
“I don’t know, I think it’s worth thinking about,” Maverick said, eyeing off the furry buds.
“What’s to stop them from cultivating their own crops?” Vader asked.
“Different county, different law enforcement,” I explained. “We have Bucky. They don’t.”
Sheriff Buckman had been in our pocket since day one. He would turn a blind eye. For a hefty fee, of course.
“Besides, they’ve kept their fingers out of the porn business,” I reminded them. “They’ve kept their hands off our trade.”
“This might just work,” Bull said, staring at the massive plant on the table in front of him. He looked up at all the men gathered around the table. “All of us in favor of the Kings reaching out to the Knights and offering a supply deal, say aye.”
The room reverberated with sixteen men saying aye.
All except one.
Hawke pouted like a petulant child.
“Hawke?” Bull questioned.
“I hate the idea of doing any business with those fuckers,” he sneered.
“We’re just reaching out. We’ll need to finalize how much we can supply, how much setting up the production will cost. But before that, we’ll need to know if they’re even interested in a supply deal.”
“You’ve got your numbers. Sixteen votes to one.” Hawke continued to look pissed.
I moved to stand behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. “We’re not giving anything away. And they’re not taking anything from us that we don’t want to give.”
Two years ago, Hawke’s wife had left him for a Knight. She’d been sneaking around behind his back before clearing out their apartment and moving in with her new biker boyfriend. In Hawke, the betrayal still ran deep.
He looked at me and then around the table. Then slowly he nodded.
“Aye,” he finally said and the other Kings banged their hands on the table in approval. It would’ve been hard for him to give his approval, and we all knew it. “Now can we dry some of this fucker out and get to smoking it?”
Three days later, the deal with the Knights was in place. We would cultivate and supply the marijuana for a tidy sum. And they would create extra security to ensure no more heroin or other chemicals made it into our town.
Our deal wouldn’t end drugs in Destiny.
But supplying weed was the lesser of two evils.
“Nicely played, Caleb,” Bull said, cupping my shoulder and patting my back as we left the deserted cinema where we’d made the deal. It was located on neutral territory and was the perfect location, out of town with no one around. “You just made the club rich, and I’m pretty sure when Sybil calls you her favorite grandson, from now on she might just mean it.”
CALEB
It took me a month to set up the weed fields.
Bull put me in charge—with Grandma Sybil’s help, of course.
It was four weeks of organizing land clearing, procuring reliable staff, sourcing equipment and labor for the construction of a lab, and cutting a deal with our friendly, albeit corrupt, sheriff.
We were using almost four-and-a-half acres of land the Kings had purchased out by the watermelon fields. Back in the sixties and seventies it had been a canning factory, now the old warehouse was a massive hydro
ponics lab.
With everything in place, I was able to take a step back. Setting up the weed fields had been an interesting and rewarding project, but tattoo artistry was my real passion. I was pleased to hand over the cannabis production to our newly employed project manager and get back to what I enjoyed more.
It also meant I could spend more time with Honey. It felt like weeks since I’d spent any time with her. She was just over five months pregnant now, although in some dresses she wore you could hardly tell she had a baby bump. She was still insisting we kept things platonic, while I still prayed she’d wake up from that madness and want more someday. I won’t lie. It’d been weeks since I’d had sex, and my balls were aching for it. So when I saw her and she looked all glowing and beautiful, and when she smelled so good and felt so soft, it was like my balls were in a vise. My left hand was getting boring. My right hand had retired from overuse.
Now I was back at work in the studio, and things were getting back to normal.
Today was my first day back, and I was completely booked. Once people heard I was back, Pandora said the bookings kept coming.
This morning had been all about simple designs that required very little expertise. Now I was working on something a little more fun. The tattoo was intricate. An elaborately detailed crown that tested both my creativity and my dexterity. But I pulled it off, just like I always did, with absolute fucking skill. I’d been a tattoo artist for almost ten years and there wasn’t a lot I couldn’t do. Give me a picture of what you wanted and I could create a masterpiece.
This beauty belonged to Maverick. It was a skull wearing a crown, and beneath it were the words I wasn’t given my kingdom, I took it.
I was just wiping it off when Pandora walked in, dressed in a tight rubber dress and looking more like a dominatrix than the office manager of a tattoo shop. The dress was new with a neckline cut so low you could almost see her nipples.
“You almost done, Caleb?” she asked. “You have a visitor.”
“Who?” I asked as I dressed Maverick’s tattoo.
“Brandi.”
Both Maverick and I looked up at the mention of Brandi’s name, and Maverick raised his eyebrows because he knew the trouble that might walk through that door.
When my ex-girlfriend and I broke up a few months earlier, she didn’t handle it very well. Actually, that’s an understatement. She didn’t handle it at all. There were a lot of tears and meltdowns and tantrums, with middle-of-the-night phone calls that swung between tearful and sad to angry and accusatory. One night she turned up at the clubhouse naked beneath her coat and cornered me in my room, begging me to fuck her. When I turned her down, her meltdown was epic. She slapped my face, kicked over my bike, and told me my cock was too big.
I hadn’t seen her since. Realizing she needed help, she left town for a renowned clinic that treated people for everything from depression and personality disorders, to alcohol and drug dependency.
Now she was back.
“Send her in,” I said to Pandora, who raised an eyebrow at me, but didn’t say anything as she left the room. She didn’t need to. Her look said it all. Are you sure this is a good idea?
Maverick rose and gave me an amused grin.
“Think I will leave you to deal with that nightmare all on your own,” he said, patting me on the back and chuckling to himself as he disappeared out the door and down the hallway.
While I waited for my ex-girlfriend, I tidied up my tattoo station. Sitting on top, next to a box of unopened latex gloves was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s single barrel whisky, courtesy of my secret admirer. It had arrived by courier earlier that morning. Pandora said she had pressed the courier driver to tell her who the sender was, but he said it was against company policy, and even if it wasn’t, he was never given those details anyway.
I picked it up and looked at it. Judging by the label, it promised to be good. But I didn’t know how I felt about drinking it. I didn’t know who was sending me all this stuff and what she had in mind, or what she expected from me. Had she tampered with it?
I was putting the bottle away in my desk drawer when Brandi appeared in the doorway.
“It’s a bit early for that, isn’t it?” Her velvet smooth voice said.
I looked up. Seeing her standing in the doorway was a surprise. After the way things ended, she was the last person I ever thought I would see again.
“Is it ever too early?” I joked.
She smiled warmly. She looked good. Hell, she looked real good. Her flowing auburn hair gleamed like a halo around her beautiful face, and her eyes were warm like a good whisky. She really was a beauty.
“Hey,” she said softly, leaning against the door jam.
“Hey, yourself.”
When she was like this I remembered why I’d dated her in the first place.
She put a hand out as if to calm me. “I promise, I come in peace.”
I couldn’t help but smile, and when she crossed the distance between us and hugged me, I relaxed. This was a very different Brandi to the one yelling at me for breaking up with her. She held me to her. Her perfume subtle and tantalizing as I held her in my arms. I stepped back and looked into the gorgeous face of the woman whose heart I had broken. It looked as if she was in a much better place. “It’s good to see you.”
“You, too.” Her eyes twinkled with a confidence I hadn’t seen in a while. It made me feel better. I’d always felt guilty about breaking her heart. But at the time she’d wanted me to love her and I knew I never would. It was kinder to let her go. So I broke it off with her.
“So what brings you to this part of town?” I asked.
Her beautiful face frowned and she looked sad. “It’s Jasper. He passed away yesterday.”
Jasper was her dog. An old staffy who was as affectionate as he was obedient.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “He was a very cool dog.”
Tears glittered in her eyes as she nodded.
“I had to have him put down. The vet said he was in pain.”
“It’s a hard thing to do,” I said.
“The hardest,” she sniffed. Then she straightened and sighed. “To be honest, I don’t know why I came by to see you. I guess Jasper’s death has inspired me to fix things. To apologize, I suppose. I’m sorry for what happened when I last saw you.”
“It’s okay.” I moved away from her and leaned against the tattoo bed. “You’re looking a lot happier. Despite Jasper and his passing.”
“You’re being too kind,” she said with a teary smile. “I was a psycho. But then, you always brought out the crazy in me.”
“I’m sorry I did.”
Again she put her hand out. “Please don’t apologize. I’m the one who lost her mind. I kicked over your bike. Did I do much damage?”
Thankfully, no.
“Nothing Picasso couldn’t fix up.”
She grimaced. “Jesus, what a crazy bitch.”
We both looked at each other and then we laughed. The ice was broken.
“Does that mean I’m forgiven?” she asked through her laughter.
“Of course.”
She smiled brightly and flicked her long hair over her shoulder. “How about I buy you lunch to say thank you. I’m heading to Los Angeles tomorrow and I’d like to say goodbye on a more positive note.”
I thought about it. I felt better knowing she was in a better place.
“Sure,” I said. “It sounds like a great idea.”
HONEY
“Oh my God, look at all those penises!” Sailor exclaimed as he walked into the kitchen of my bakery.
I was bent over one of the stainless-steel tables, applying star-shaped icing borders to thirty-nine cupcakes decorated with sugar penises.
“They’re for Barbie Elliot’s bachelorette party tomorrow afternoon,” I explained, not looking up. I was on my last row of cupcakes. Two more borders and I was done. I could grab some lunch.
“Why are there only thirty-nine? Why not forty?” Sa
ilor asked. Then he gasped. “Please tell me your pregnancy hormones didn’t kick in and you had to devour one. I know you said you couldn’t help yourself when it came to cock, but girlfriend, this is taking it too far. What will Barbie Elliot do without all of her penises?”
I rolled my eyes. I knew I’d regret telling Sailor about my overactive hormones and sex drive.
I finished the last icing border and straightened. “It was deliberate. Barbie Elliot found out one of her bridesmaids is dating her ex-fiancé. So the bridesmaid got booted from the wedding party, because according to Barbie, she’d broken girl code.”
Sailor’s eyes lit up. “Oh, a scandal. I love it.”
“Barbie insisted I only deliver thirty-nine. She wants everyone to remember that someone is missing. And she wants them all to remember why.”
“Ugh. That woman is so totalitarian.” Sailor waved it off. Bored.
“Can you do me a favor? Can you pack all of these up in those boxes we keep for bachelorette parties? I’m going to get some lunch.”
“Want me to go pick some lunch up for you?” he offered.
“No, thanks. I need to stretch my legs. I’ve been bent over thirty-nine penises all morning.”
Sailor’s eyes lit up with glee. “Oh, darling, sounds like a Friday night at my place.”
Outside it was warm, and the midday sun felt good on my skin. I took my time, enjoying the walk to Mickey’s, the popular pizzeria Caleb had taken me to the night he’d found out about the baby. Mickey’s made the best wood-fired pizzas in the south, and when the cravings hit, wild horses couldn’t hold me back. As I neared, the delicious aroma of hand-tossed pizza dough, rich marinara sauce, deli meats, and a thousand different cheeses wafted out onto the street, and my stomach began to growl. When I walked in, I started to salivate.
I didn’t need to think about what to order. I was a regular now, so when Mickey saw me walk in, he winked and told me one mushroom margherita pizza was coming right up.