“Everything?”
“No, not stuff like… that. But…” He sighed. “Sorry, but really, it was funny.”
“And we get your pain,” Mitch tried to help him out. “The number of times we’ve walked in on Dad and Mel…” He made a face. “Eww.”
“Yeah… Eliza’s told me about that, too.” I turned to Mac again. “If she moves in with Dad I’m moving here.”
“I’m good with that.” He leaned closer and gave me a kiss.
I hadn’t been serious, but he seemed to take it seriously, and once again I got a bit nervous. He hadn’t mentioned it again since Mom’s visit, when it was me bringing it up. He hadn’t even said he wanted me to spend more nights at his place, but I knew he did. Especially since I graduated and had started working full time.
I was eighteen, had a job, and still lived with my dad. None of them had commented on it, but while Mac seemed to be waiting for me to make a decision, Dad on the other hand seemed to make sure I loved living at home. Me moving in with Mac was pretty much the elephant in the room.
On his twenty-fifth birthday party at the clubhouse, Mac’d reminded me it had been a year since I rode with him the first time. That his birthday, and him taking me home, had been what started it—started us. The ride led to his ink, and we kissed for the first time.
I’d gotten a bit pissy and reminded him about the fact he’d avoided me for about three months after that kiss. That he’d kept saying I was too young, and sort of threw in his face that it probably meant I was still too young to move in and play wife. He’d shut his mouth about it since then, but I suspected I’d hurt his feelings more than I’d intended.
I wasn’t ready, and while I usually didn’t know why I wasn’t ready for something. In this case, I did; it felt too soon. It felt as if I hadn’t done the things I should before moving in with a guy. I was just out of high school, and instead of having my ‘crazy’ years—that everyone said you needed—I had a steady job and a steady relationship. Adding moving in to that list made it feel like I was a hop, skip, and a jump from being married and knocked up—a thought that made me hyperventilate. It all seemed too grownup for me.
I felt even more like an ass about it all when he told me what ink he wanted as his birthday present. He wanted a violet on his chest on the opposite side of the Baxter family ink. I’d done it the weekend after, but I still couldn’t suggest I’d move in with him.
In short, I loved him, and I wanted to spend my life with him. I just didn’t want the rest of my life to start yet.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN:
None Of That Yet
-o0o—
SINCE DAD HAD TAKEN me to dinner with April a few weeks earlier, I’d met her twice more coming out of our apartment, and I knew he spent nights at her place, too. At least I assumed that’s where he spent the nights when he wasn’t at home—I didn’t ask.
I did, however, ask him to teach me to drive. It was getting more than a little annoying to always have to catch a ride to and from work, and he’d tried.
He’d started off by yelling about the clutch, gas, my hands at ten and two, and eggs under my foot—and I’d panicked. That happened sometimes when someone gave me too many instructions at once; my brain stopped working. At times like that, it was quite possible I didn’t even know what a steering wheel was. We’d given up after the first lesson, and I still wasn’t sure what he meant about the egg under my foot.
Mac’d given it a try as well, but it’d been even worse. He was too encouraging, and seriously said I was doing excellent, but maybe I could try to drive on the right side of the road. I figured if I wanted to learn how drive properly, it was better if the person trying to teach me wasn’t terrified of hurting my feelings.
Edie’d suggested Dawg. Apparently he’d practiced with her, and he was patient, calm, and wasn’t scared of calling you an idiot if you drove on the wrong side of the road. It was working out pretty well. He seemed happy about it, too. He told me it was nice to get out of the house, and I knew why he wanted to get out of the house. Edie was pregnant again, and she was very hormonal—it drove Dawg insane.
It was Monday, early August, and Dad took me to work in the morning. He let me drive, and I pretended to not notice his white knuckles, or his sigh of relief, when I stopped in front of the shop. He was taking the truck back to Greenville, and told me to give him a call when I was done. I never knew how long I’d work, since it depended on what tattoo I was making and how long the customer could take me working on him.
So I was surprised when I walked out to the front room later that afternoon, and found Dad waiting for me. The look on his face made my heart stop.
“What?” I whispered. “Is he okay? Please tell me he’s okay.”
“He’s fine, but he’s been arrested, Katze.”
My brain seemed to filter everything out. I could barely see or hear anything, just Trixie’s ‘take her to the back,’ and I felt Dad’s arms around me.
I knew I needed to get myself together, and let Dad tell me what had happened. Letting my brain spiral out of control was not a good thing. It was better if I could just calm down and get the facts. But I wasn’t able to, and when I started to cry Dad hugged me tight.
The only thing going through my mind was that it might be too late. That I might’ve blown my only chance to live with him, and it was my own fault for stalling.
Dad eventually took me out to the truck, but those horrible thoughts just kept rolling around in my head. How Mac could be gone until I was old. That I might miss an entire life with him, and finally, I turn towards Dad and asked him for the information I’d avoided.
“Tell me.”
“It’s Mac, Bull, Dawg, and Sisco who’ve been arrested. They were caught with pot and guns.”
“How long?”
I didn’t have to specify what I meant; he knew.
“It depends on a lot of things. It’s really complicated, honey.”
He was trying to not scare me, but I wanted to know. “Best and worse case scenario?”
“Anything between six months and… twelve years. But it’s not going to be twelve years, honey. It’s not.”
I tried not to panic. “What do you think?”
“I’d say around a year if they plea bargain and Silver does his job. He’ll get them all some deal. We pay him a lot of money to make sure he does that.”
Silver was the lawyer the club used. I’d met him a few times, but I’d never really talked to him. He always seemed stressed and very busy.
“Okay.”
I knew Dad had done time before I was born. It was him, Brick, and Wolf that time, and before Brick was the president. Apparently a lot of the planning for the future of the Marauders had gone down inside. Another one of those things I probably wasn’t supposed to know.
They’d plea bargained that time as well. They most often did if it was a clear-cut case—like being caught with pot and guns. I honestly had no idea why. I’d never spent much time thinking about it, simply since it had been years since anyone had been arrested in Greenville.
“When can I see him?”
“We’re gonna bail them out as soon as possible, sweetheart.”
“But Bull is with him?”
“Yes.” He smiled. He knew why I asked. Bull was Bull. No one fucked with him, and he’d done time before. He knew how it all worked, so he’d take care of them. “He’ll be fine. Even if Bull wasn’t with him, Mac can take care of himself.”
“I know, but I’m still glad Bull is there.”
We didn’t talk anymore. I needed to think, and Dad understood. I didn’t even protest when we turned into the compound. It was probably a part of some ritual I didn’t even know about to wait there for more news, and frankly, I didn’t care where we waited.
Dad took my hand as we walked into the clubhouse. The first one I noticed was Edie, and I went to sit next to her.
“How are you holding up?” she asked me, and I stared at her.
�
�You’re asking me that?” She was pregnant, her husband had been arrested, and she asked me how I was doing.
“Yeah. I’m just trying focus on other people at the moment.” Then she shrugged. “I’ll be fine. I know that. I’ll get help and… Silver is good. It’ll be fine, and it could’ve been a lot worse.”
“Okay.”
I kept staring at Edie. I’d never thought much about what exactly they did. I’d grown up in it, I’d known about it in theory for years, but never really paid much mind to it. I of course knew they smuggled pot and diamonds, but I’d never really thought about it for what it was. What it actually meant. That it was illegal… and just… that it was criminal. They were criminals. I’d never before thought about my family as criminals.
I should probably care that they were—but I didn’t.
But Edie was… Edie. She was the only person I knew who sorted her trash, always talked about eco-friendly stuff, saved dogs from being executed, and was all morals.
“How are you so okay with this?” I asked. “What they do?”
“I decided years ago I was either with Dawg and lived with it, or left him.”
“Left him?” I couldn’t imagine Edie without Dawg—or him without her. “Really?”
“Yeah. It didn’t seem like a good option, so I live with it.”
“I guess those are the only options.”
“That’s what I figured,” she said with a smile.
Dawg being arrested while Edie was pregnant put my situation into a different perspective. Edie and Dawg had a kid and another one on the way. It wouldn’t be possible for her to just wait the way I could. If they were only sentenced for a year or so, it wouldn’t be the end of the world for Mac and me. Unless they got years. That would be different and…
They wouldn’t get years.
I couldn’t even think about years as an option. They’d probably get around one year, and that basically meant I’d be around twenty when he got out and that wasn’t much. There wasn’t any panic. At least that’s what I told myself.
I sat next to Edie for a while, then I helped with the food. While we ate, I sat next to Wolf. He seemed concerned about me, but I wasn’t up for talking about it, and we discussed music instead.
When it finally felt like I might be able to sleep, I went over to Dad. I knew we weren’t going to go home, and I didn’t want to spend the night on the filthy couch. He was next to Brick and Mel, and the three of them stopped talking when they noticed me.
“I thought I’d go to bed. Is it okay if I take Mac’s room?”
“Sure,” Dad said and stood up to give me a hug.
“Wake me up if you hear anything.”
“Of course.”
Brick took me to the office and gave me the spare key to Mac’s room. He gave me a hug, and it was a bit strange, because he didn’t usually hug me.
“He’ll be fine, kid, and it won’t be for long,” he said and patted my back. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
I brushed my teeth and went to bed. If felt wrong to be in the room without Mac, and it took me a long time to be able to fall asleep.
-o0o—
Bear, Brick, and Wolf were the last ones still awake in the bar.
“I think we can safely assume they’ll do time,” Wolf started.
“I’d say so,” Brick agreed.
“Which means we have a few problems,” Wolf continued. “Both Bull and Sisco have priors, so they’ll probably get a longer sentence than Dawg and Mac. Which means we’ll have our Sergeant at Arms inside, which isn’t that much of a problem, but also our Treasurer, and that is a problem.”
Sisco’d been one of the treasurers who’d helped set up the entire system with the money transfers. It’d been built it in collaboration with treasurers from all the clubs involved in the pipeline. He knew it all, and there probably weren’t all that many in the club who could do the finances even if they tried. Brick and Bear obviously knew some of it, but none of them had a head for finances or computers—or much of a brain at all. They were good at leading others, making sure shit got done, but they didn’t get involved in the details.
“Since it’s just us and no hysterical women,” Bear said, “What do we think? Best case scenario? Eighteen months for Mac and Dawg, and two and a half years for Bull and Sisco?”
“Silver was aiming even lower,” Brick answered. “Possibly a year for Mac and Dawg, but he didn’t think he’d be able to make it less. It depends on the DA, too.”
“So who do we make the treasurer while Sisco’s inside?” Wolf asked.
Brick sighed. “Mace?”
Both Bear and Wolf shook their head. They all knew who had the brains to deal with it. Who’d be able to understand it in the short time necessary. It was Mitch. He was already helping Sisco with some of it. Brick just didn’t want to admit he was the only option.
“I know he’s smart, but he’s been a member for less than a year.”
“He’s not just smart,” Bear said. “He’s a genius.”
“Yeah, when he uses his head, but look at him.”
They three of them turned and looked at Mitch sleeping on a couch with his dick hanging out, and his hand inside a sweetbutt’s panties. He was probably piss drunk and stoned out of his mind. He often was.
“With four of our brothers in jail, he doesn’t have much of a choice,” Wolf said. “You need to shake some sense into your son, because he needs to step up.”
Mitch hadn’t been that bad. At least not much worse than most of them had been around that age, before Old Ladies and kids, but Wolf was right. They needed Mitch now, and he better fucking step up to the plate. Brick took another look at his youngest son with a sigh.
“I think I’d better wait until tomorrow,” he muttered. “Not sure he’d even understand what I’m saying if I wake him up now.”
“Probably not,” Bear agreed with a chuckle. “You know, sometimes two daughters doesn’t seem all that bad.”
“Hey! My other kid never did that.”
“That you know of,” Wolf pointed out. “He did his first year in Emporia. It’s during the first year most guys really let loose.”
“Mitch’s still not even close to what you were like,” Bear laughed.
“I wasn’t that bad!” Brick protested.
“Yeah, you were. You just kept it in your dorm, since you were married and knew she might come looking for you,” Bear reminded him. “I was the one who banged your door so you’d have time to get them out through the window.”
“Fuck, I was a real ass, wasn’t I?”
“How’s Mel doing?” Bear asked, since he’d decided to let Brick off the hook. No matter what he was like back then, it didn’t matter anymore. Brick stuck to his Old Lady these days.
“Okay,” Brick answered. “Had to tell her to stop calling Silver, though. She was all worried about her little boy.”
“Wow!”
“Tried to tell her he’d be fine. Then she called Donna and all hell broke loose.”
Donna was Mac and Mitch’s mom, and the wife Brick used to cheat on. Bear liked her, and her divorce from Brick had been pretty drama free. As drama free as divorces could be. It had been a lot of yelling about Brick dipping his dick in every set of lips he could find—which was true, and that he didn’t give a shit about his kids—which wasn’t true, and even Donna’d admitted it once she calmed down. Brick was a good dad.
These days, she was married to a regular Joe in Phoenix and worked as a hairdresser. She was doing well, and kept in touch with Brick and her sons. They’d lived every second week at her place until they were in their early teens, and kept staying there for weekends until their late teens. He knew Mac’d brought Vi to see her, but she hadn’t said much about it. She’d been to her to get her hair dyed lately, though. He couldn’t tell the difference from when Edie did it, and Vi’d simply said it was easier than doing it at Edie’s, since Travis kept trying to eat the dye.
“And how’s Edie doi
ng?” he asked Brick.
“She’s Edie,” Brick shrugged. “She’ll be fine. She knows we’ll all help out, and she fucking adapts to anything. It’s probably worse for Dawg.”
“Yeah,” Bear agreed.
He was just happy he hadn’t done any time since before Vi was born, which was something of a fucking miracle.
All of the older members had done years, and they’d all been arrested a number of times, but had a good lawyer who had wangled them out of most of it. Compared to a lot of clubs, they didn’t have many years between the lot of them. The system they were using for smuggling worked, and they’d been lucky this time around, since they’d been carrying smaller amounts. It was still the worst hit on the Greenville Marauders in a long time. They just had to cross their fingers and hope that the huge amount of money they paid their leech of a lawyer would pay out.
-o0o—
Mac was relieved. It didn’t take long for them to get out on bail, and since it was late, they decided to wait with church till the next morning. It was dark in his room, but he knew Vi was waiting for him. She’d probably just fallen asleep.
He took a quick shower to get the prison smell off him. He already loathed that smell, and he didn’t even want to think about probably being forced to get used to it soon. For now, he was going to not think about it, and just enjoy the shit out of what time he still had on the outside.
When he came back out from the bathroom, the bedside light was on, and Vi was looking at him.
“Hey, baby. Thought you were sleeping.”
“Are you okay?” she said and lifted the cover to let him in under it.
“Am now.” He pulled her naked body closer to him. That was what he needed. His girl, naked, and right next to him. When she noticed his dick against her thigh, she threw her leg over him with a smile. “I need you close, Katze.”
“I know,” she mumbled and tried to move even closer to him, and he tasted her lips. “I need you, too.”
He moved her over to her back and started to gently rub his dick back and fort in her slit while kissing her. It was all calm, slow, and just the two of them—holding each other close.
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