“You fuckin’ animals!” Griesedieck shouted.
When Martin’s howls had subsided to gasping whimpers, Delaney said, “Take their goods, both of ‘em. We’ll let ‘em feel that for a while, and then we’ll junk ‘em up and put ‘em out of our misery. Griesedieck’s the brains. We’ll dump him back at the squat for a warning. Martin, we’ll bury deep out here.”
Caleb looked around at his brothers. They were all solemn, all as disgusted as he, but not one of them looked away or flinched as Rad and Gargoyle carried out their president’s instructions.
So he didn’t, either.
~oOo~
Caleb opened his eyes to the enticing scents of frying sausage and brewing coffee and the alarming sight of bright pink and yellow flowers under his cheek. Obnoxiously flowered pillowcase. Not his linens. Kelly’s. He could hear the quiet hum of Kelly and Gena’s conversation, rolling down the short hall from the kitchen.
Fuck.
He rolled to his back and rubbed his hands over his face, running a quick diagnostic while he sorted out his waking thoughts and understood why they’d broken their rule about never spending the whole night together.
Their rule. Not just his. They’d decided together. They were friends who fucked, not a couple, and therefore they didn’t spoon or cuddle or any of that nonsense.
But here he was, and she was out there making breakfast. Fuck.
Right, he remembered how it had happened.
He’d gone with Levi to the Crossroads Bar in Pawhuska, after supper with Grampa. Levi liked the bartender, a hot little chick who was too young for him, but she was Osage, and she’d just broken up with her boyfriend—which Levi had learned on the prolific tribal grapevine—so he’d wanted to hang close and catch her attention.
The mid-May night had been clear and warm and bright with moonlight and starshine, and the Crossroads had their patio open, so Caleb hadn’t minded kicking back with a few beers and looking up at the stars.
But Levi had gotten lucky. Little miss Darlina Red Horse liked what he was selling, and when her shift ended, his fucking brother had stranded Caleb at the Crossroads so he could go get his pole waxed.
He’d called Kelly for a ride back to Hominy, but he’d woken her, and she’d refused to drag his ass those twenty miles at two o’clock in the morning. She’d come get him, but that was it. So he’d spent the night—and gotten his own pole waxed.
This morning, at a decent hour when he wouldn’t give Grampa a heart attack, he could hoof it over there and pick up his Monte Carlo. He’d had it garaged now for more than a year. It was a street racer, and he hadn’t had a lot of time to race since he’d been patched in. But he’d been keeping it up, of course.
First, though, he needed to piss. And then, he had to have breakfast with Kelly—and Gena, who was no doubt thrilled that he’d be sitting at their table this morning.
Well, he wasn’t one to sneak away from a problem. So okay. He got up, yanked his jeans back on, rooted around for his t-shirt and couldn’t find it. Giving up, he shook his hair straight, and went to face breakfast, stopping at the bathroom for a piss on his way.
~oOo~
Gena leaned on the narrow peninsula counter with the Tulsa World spread open before her and a cup of coffee in her hands. When Caleb came into the room, she said nothing, but her upper lip moved in a barely suppressed twitch of irritation.
Really wanting to get out of this apartment without drama this morning, Caleb smiled and said, “Good morning.”
Standing at the counter, flipping pancakes in a skillet, Kelly smiled. Over a pair of bike shorts too snug for her thick thighs, she wore his t-shirt. Oh shit. “Good morning. There’s coffee. You sleep okay?”
“I slept good.” He scooted behind her, pulled the carafe off the coffeemaker, and filled a flowered cup from the wooden tree beside it. A paper plate lined with paper towels held an array of link sausages. “Thanks for making breakfast. You didn’t have to.”
“I like to. And you have to work today, right? You need a good meal to start a hard day.”
Gena made a rude noise, and both Caleb and Kelly looked her way, but she was staring down at the paper, pretending to read.
“I don’t go in until ten, but thanks. Smells great. Can I do anything?”
“You could put a fucking shirt on,” Gena grumbled.
Caleb turned to Kelly, who was blushing. “Sorry,” she muttered. “I…uh…couldn’t find mine.”
She couldn’t find a shirt of her own. In her own bedroom. Sure.
She moved a pancake from the skillet to the plate on the stove where several others were stacked. “I’ll just go change right quick. Maybe you could put the food on the table?”
“Sure.”
While she hurried back to her bedroom, Caleb picked up the plate of sausage, the plate of pancakes, the syrup, and the pitcher of orange juice that sat beside the sink, and carried them to the tiny table under the window. Three people and the food was a cozy arrangement there.
“You see that you’re not her booty call, right?” Gena muttered in a voice low but pointed. “If you don’t, you’re either stupid, or you’re a dick.” She stepped away from her paper and brought her coffee to the table, taking up the seat that would keep Kelly from sitting right beside him.
“Not until just now, I didn’t see it.”
“All the times I said it right out loud, you couldn’t believe me. You had to wait until you’d really break her heart. Which you will, right? Because you don’t feel the same way.”
If Kelly was falling, or had fallen, for him, he didn’t feel the same at all. Besides his blood family, nothing in the Osage was anything he wanted forever. Kelly was a friend. They had history, so he didn’t have to put a lot of effort into being with her. She was decent in bed, and always willing when he wanted her—shit, he was a dick. He couldn’t just admit that to Gena, especially not while she sat there looking at him like that. “I believed her. She said she didn’t want anything else either. I thought you were…jealous or something.”
Her laugh was dry as straw. “God, men suck. You totally suck.”
Before he could respond, Kelly was back, dressed now in a denim mini-skirt and a red bandana-print blouse. Not an outfit for a shift at the market, but maybe she was off work today. She’d unwound her braids, and her long black hair flowed loose down her back. He was pretty sure she’d put makeup on, too.
She tossed his t-shirt at him. “Sorry about that.”
“No problem.” He pulled it over his head.
The conversation while they ate was trivial and stunted. Gena’s irritation, Kelly’s vulnerability, and Caleb’s regret hovered over the table. Then, Gena stuffed the last of her pancakes in her mouth and stood while she was still chewing. “Well, I’ve got work. I’ll see you later, Kell.”
“Have a good day, Gena. You want me to bring one of those rotisserie chickens home for supper?”
Maybe she wasn’t off today? When she worked, she wore jeans and a t-shirt. No sense in dressing nicely when it was going to get covered up by an ugly smock. And she wore black orthopedic shoes, like nurses wore, not the little white sandals she had on now.
She knew he had a shift himself. Had she dressed up just to sit with him and have pancakes? Shit, shit, shit.
“Sounds good.” Gena took her dishes to the sink, washed her hands, grabbed her purse, and left.
Then it was just Kelly and Caleb, and a whole lot of subtext, hunched on the table like a gorilla, waiting.
“Sorry about your t-shirt. It doesn’t mean anything that I was wearing it.”
The fact that she said all those words staring at the swirls of syrup on her plate, while dressed for a date, made them kind of difficult to believe.
Gena was right. He was a dick, and he’d been leading Kelly on—or at least taking advantage of her feelings because they made her an easy mark. There was nothing for it but to be totally straight with her now and cut this off before it got any more wrong.
/> “Kell, you know I like you. A lot. Shit, we’ve been friends my whole life. But maybe this thing we’ve been doing…I think it was a mistake.”
“Is it because I’m fat?” she asked, still staring at her plate. Some of her hair had slid forward over one shoulder, strands of it dangling just above the sticky syrup residue.
He brushed it back before it could land in the goo, and she looked up and met his eyes. Dark brown, like his. And yeah, she was wearing makeup. “You’re not fat, Kell. Stop it.”
She wasn’t. She wasn’t slim, either. She was on the short and thick side, but it was all compact and not too flabby. Impressive rack, too. He didn’t mind getting his hands full at all. But yeah, he preferred a taller, leggier shape. Fair skin, red hair. Blue eyes.
He blinked away that image and shifted to the seat Gena had given up. “It’s not that you’re not pretty. You’re real pretty. It’s just…you’re my friend.”
“And nothing more.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You know, people talk about you. With that vest, and that ink on your chest”—she waved at his chest, where his club ink, over his right pec, was now concealed by his t-shirt—“roaring around on that big black Harley. They say you’re turning your back. They say you hate who you are.”
“You think I don’t know that? You think people don’t say the same thing right to my face? My own fucking family says it. It’s not true.”
“Then why don’t you stay?”
“What, in Pawhuska? So I can do ten-hour shifts at the market, like you do, and have nothing more to show for it than a shitty apartment and a car that barely runs? Thanks, but no.”
He’d hurt her feelings, and she swiped right back at him. “Like you’re so much better. You work at a gas station, Caleb. You pump gas. You could do that here.”
Kelly knew damn well what he did was more than that, but he wouldn’t say it out loud. So he just glared at her, feeling a lot less guilty for dumping her.
She softened and tried another approach. “Or you could work the ranch with Levi. It’s yours, too.”
In the weeks since he’d stood in Becker’s barn and watched two of his Bulls brothers torture men to death, and had dug a deep grave for one of them, he’d thought pretty hard about the life he’d chosen—a life where people died, where death and killing were not only possible but likely. Intended. He was an outlaw. He carried a gun. He buried the dead in unmarked graves. Someday, he would be called to be the one who created the need for the burying. If he wanted to be a decent man, which he did, how did that add up?
The thing was, it did add up, and that was what kept yanking his brain back to the question. He’d been sickened by what Rad and Gargoyle had done, but he hadn’t felt guilty. He’d…he’d appreciated it. A wrong had been done. A horrible, disgusting, evil kind of wrong. And it had been righted in kind. That made good sense to him. He thought he could have been the one to wield Rad’s knife. All he would have had to do was call up the vision of Cecily splayed out on that foul sofa, and he could have done a whole lot more carving on the men who’d set her up like that.
That was a life he understood. One in which he could wrest real justice from the world. Not this life here, where everyone around him seemed to simply wallow in an age-old swamp of injustice.
“I don’t want this life, Kell. I just don’t.”
“That’s sad, Caleb. Your family is important to the tribe. You could matter here.” She picked up her plate and his and walked to the kitchen. “You like white girls, don’t you? White girls, white friends, white job. You’re just an apple.”
An apple: red on the outside, white on the inside. One of the worst things a Native person could call another. A slur wrapped up in another slur. He stood so fast he had to catch the back of the chair so it didn’t fall over. “Fuck you, Kelly.”
Without looking at her or waiting to see if she’d apologize, Caleb stormed out the front door and marched toward his grandfather’s house, about a mile away.
~oOo~
Kelly’s final shot, and his lingering guilt for being a using asshole, kept his mood in the basement all day. He must have been emitting a toxic vibe, because everybody at the station more or less left him alone—and he made that as easy for them as he could. He had only so much patience for people today, and the customers got it all. The weather was good—a little warm and muggy for mid-May, but sunny and fair, so he spent his down time sitting on the retaining wall between the station and the clubhouse, plucking at his guitar, and by the last couple of hours of his shift, he was almost human again. He’d even thought he could hang at the clubhouse after work tonight, maybe see if he could get a card game going with some of the younger guys.
Then, Becker sent him on a wrecker run at four-fucking-fifteen in the afternoon, onto I-44, where an old Oldsmobile had overheated, and the idiot driver had pushed the engine so far it had seized up in the far left lane. Blocking rush-hour traffic. Those jobs were the absolute worst—getting a wrecker around a jam like that, for starters, and then every asshole driver honking endlessly while he loaded the car.
The job went about as badly as he’d expected, and it was after six, the official end of his shift, when he pulled the Olds in—a mid-Seventies 98, which could have been pretty great if it had been kept up. He’d brought the driver, an oldish white guy with a grey brush cut and a roll of red flesh across the back of his neck, to the station. They hadn’t talked on the ride, but as Caleb jumped down from the cab and went to bring down the Olds, the guy came up to him.
“You got a phone I can use, Chief?”
People called Caleb ‘Chief’ all the time. He looked Native, and he didn’t try to pass. He kept his hair long, and wore it loose or in a single braid, because hair meant something to an Osage man, and he was not a fucking apple. His ancestors had often worn a scalplock when they’d been fearsome warriors, but he knew of no one in the tribe who wore it now. Some modern men in the tribe had cut their hair, but they’d usually had a heavy reason for it; his grandfather had cut his hair when the family women died, and he’d never grown it long again. But he’d wanted Levi and Caleb to keep their hair, and they had. To their grandfather, to many of the Osage, long hair meant a strong spirit.
So people inclined to use such terms as ‘Chief’ did so with Caleb. Normally, when it was meant without malice, he let it roll. If he punched every mouth that uttered that racist syllable, he’d be doing life at McAlester by now.
The driver of the Olds probably hadn’t meant it maliciously; it had had the tone of a word spoken casually by someone who didn’t question or even notice his prejudices. But Caleb was in a bad mood. He’d started the day with shit, he’d ended his shift with shit, and now Mr. Overheated Oldsmobile was the shit cherry on top of this shit sundae.
Caleb grabbed a fistful of the guy’s shirt and shoved him against the wrecker. “Caleb. My name’s Caleb. It’s written on my fucking shirt. You can read, right?”
The guy was too shocked and scared to do anything but sputter.
“Hey, hey! Everything okay? Easy, Caleb.” Maverick had trotted up and put his hands on Caleb’s arms. “We’re all good here, right?”
Caleb backed off, and Mr. Olds found his voice. “Son of a bitch attacked me for no reason! You his boss?”
Caleb was average height, which was about an inch taller than Mr. Olds. But Maverick was six-three or so, and built like the fighter he was. He stood to his full height and breadth, and Mr. Olds shrank a little.
“I’m not his boss. I need to call him?”
Mr. Olds blinked up at Maverick. He dashed a glance at Caleb, who gave him a stony look back. “No,” he finally answered. “Just a misunderstanding. No harm done.”
“Good.” Maverick patted the guy’s arm. “Why don’t you head into the office. There’s a phone and coffee. Wally can get your paperwork started. Caleb and I’ll handle your car.”
They watched the redneck idiot stalk toward the office, trailing the last shreds of
his dignity.
“What the fuck, Cay? I assume you had a good reason to go at a customer.”
“Racist bullshit,” Caleb grumbled, hoping Maverick wouldn’t push for more.
He didn’t. Instead, after a few seconds of perusing Caleb’s face like it was some kind of logic puzzle, he said, “You’re off, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you do me a favor? Cecily’s got some work thing that gets out at eight. I don’t like her leaving that late without somebody with her. Whoever hurt her, they had her purse for hours before Apollo got it back, and until we get hands on that Holloway asshole, I like to keep an eye on her.”
Stand (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 7) Page 10