Stand (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 7)

by Susan Fanetti

  “Yeah?” Caleb knew most of that. Apollo had been trying to follow a vapor trail on Holloway and getting nowhere, and Maverick had kept Cecily at his place and had her firmly under his wing.

  “Kelsey’s got her school play, and it starts at seven. I’d have to leave early to get to Ciss. It’d be a big help if you could get her and follow her back to my place.”

  Caleb’s jaw dropped all the way open. He turned to the station, where at least three other Bulls were still on shift. Two years ago, Maverick had beaten Caleb almost to death for getting too familiar with Cecily Nielsen. “Me? Why?”

  “Apollo is with Jacinda. I’ve got the play. Ciss hates how many people know what happened to her, and being around people she hasn’t had to face yet will just upset her. You might have noticed, she’s got only one speed right now when she gets riled.”

  “Full-on furious,” Caleb agreed.

  “Exactly.”

  “Mav, she hates me. She won’t be glad I’m waiting when she expects you.”

  “She doesn’t hate you. You saw her at her weakest, and she hates the shit out of that. But you saved her, bro. She doesn’t hate you at all. She hates what she thinks you think of her.”

  “But…I…I like her.” That was a scary thing to tell the man who’d broken his jaw and added an extra bump to his nose.

  “I know. I’ve been watching and listening to the way you’ve been about her since this went down. I see that you like her, and I trust you as my brother. So do me this favor, and I’ll do you one, too—you know how to get past Cecily’s barbed wire?”

  He laughed. “No, I do not.”

  “Cut straight through it. Don’t fight with her, and don’t give in. Call her on her shit, and don’t take abuse, but stay calm. Her rage feeds on rage. If you can get past the fight, there’s a good girl in there.”

  “Has she always been like this?”

  “She’s always been scrappy, but since Dane…” Maverick shrugged. “Will you go get her?”

  “Yeah, sure. No problem.”

  “Thanks.” Maverick slapped the Oldsmobile’s fender. “Let’s get this beast on the lot.”

  ~oOo~

  Caleb pulled into the lot at the Tulsa Ed Center and parked his bike behind Cecily’s Trans Am. Not invited or expected at whatever was going on inside, he decided to hang out by her car and enjoy the nice evening. The spring had been one of the most pleasant he could remember, and if May was any indication, it seemed the summer might be nice, too. It was coming in like a lamb, at least.

  He dropped the stand and turned to sit sideways on the saddle. Her TA was a total hot chick car. A ’93 or a ’94, somewhere in there, white with a blue racing stripe down the center, and blue leather interior. T-tops, too. It wasn’t a car he could imagine a Bull ever owning, but a Bull’s woman? Totally. Or a Bull’s daughter, obviously.

  People began to file out of the front door around five minutes after he’d parked, so he stood and eagle-eyed for Cecily. The people walking to their cars were dressed nicely—khakis and button shirts, and skirts and blouses, that kind of thing—and most of them held some kind of pamphlet or program in their hands. Caleb wondered what had been going on inside.

  By the time Cecily finally stepped into the night, she was easy to pick out, because most of the crowd had gone. She came out with a pretty blonde about their age, mid-twenties, and a guy who looked a little older. All three were dressed in clothes like the other people had been, what normal people called ‘business casual.’ Cecily wore a dark dress that hugged her body and flared from her hips. She had a leather briefcase thing hanging from her shoulder. Her hair was loose, but pushed back from her face with a band or scarf or something. A different look for her, one that made her look sweet and vulnerable.

  Before she saw him, she and her friends paused on the sidewalk and chatted. After a minute, the guy noticed Caleb parked behind Cecily’s car and nodded in his direction. Cecily turned, and stared for a few seconds. She’d been expecting Maverick, and, as Caleb had foretold, she wasn’t thrilled with the change of plans.

  She said something to her friends, and the three separated—but not before the guy put his hand at the small of her back and bent to kiss her cheek. A hot fist of jealousy clenched at the base of Caleb’s skull, but he breathed through it. He had no cause to be jealous. The way Cecily was striding toward him now, she was about to show him just how little cause he had.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Mav wanted to stay at Kelsey’s play, so he asked me to get you home.”

  “Oh, right. Well”—she gestured at her car—“as you can see, I have my own ride home.”

  “You know I have to follow you. Mav’s already broken my jaw once for letting you down. Not looking for that to happen again.”

  She grinned, and he didn’t think he’d ever seen that expression on her face before. It was a happy look. Relaxed. She’d been in a good mood before she’d seen him, and that good mood hadn’t gotten so far away.

  “You afraid of Maverick? He’s a teddy bear.”

  “To you, yeah. To the rest of us, he’s just a plain old bear. Grizzly.”

  Jesus, she’d just giggled. Then her smile crimped up a bit, and she gave him a dramatically pitying look. “He really did hurt you, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah. But I deserved it.”

  All the humor vanished from her. “Please don’t apologize again. Please.”

  “I won’t. But Cecily—is there something I could do so you didn’t hate me? There’s a lot I’d do to try to make things better between us.”

  Picking up her leather bag and holding it to her chest like a shield, she only stared at him. The night had aged to near full dark, just a clear cobalt sky and the glow of the city around them. Her eyes seemed ghostly pale, and shiny.

  “Why?” she whispered at last.

  Caleb thought hard about how to answer. He thought about the fight he’d had with Kelly that morning. He thought about every fight he’d had with Cecily in the past few weeks. He thought about that night he and Apollo had found her, and how much he’d hated to see her like that, how it had hurt him deep inside and filled him with a warrior’s rage. He thought about the night two years ago, when she’d tottered into the clubhouse on sky-high heels and a tiny dress, when he was the only one around, and how that had felt like a gift.

  He thought about what he wanted, where he wanted to be, who he wanted to be, and how he didn’t fit anywhere. He thought about the Nowhere Girl and how lost she was.

  “Because that night you don’t want me to apologize for? I was sorry you left. I’ve always been sorry you left.”

  She clutched her bag more tightly and took a step back, her eyes round and her mouth open.

  “I have to go,” she finally said.

  Shit. He never knew the right words to say around her. Everything he said, everything he did, was always wrong. He hurt her in some way every time he opened his fucking mouth.

  “Okay. I’ll follow.”

  She nodded and slid into her car.

  When they got to Maverick’s, she didn’t even wave or turn his way, just hurried up the walk to the front door.

  Caleb took the hint and rode off.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Cecily turned the paper on the fake-wood desktop so it faced her student. “Read the first sentence out loud, Eddie. Then tell me what you think is missing.” A main verb, for one thing. She hoped he’d at least notice that if he heard the words aloud.

  He looked over his shoulder, where the other students in this class were chattering too loudly. They were supposed to be working on the drafts of their first essays: two pages on a topic of personal interest. While she worked with each student individually for a few minutes, they were supposed to be working independently. But only the older students were doing what they were supposed to be doing.

  Summer session was more difficult than any other term at the Ed Center. A special program supported by a federal grant tutored low-in
come high school students who were being held back a year, so that they’d be better prepared for the following year. The program blended these young people into the center’s normal literacy, numeracy, and writing courses, which were otherwise populated by adults.

  Cecily had never wanted to be a high-school teacher. She thought teenagers were the lowest forms of human life—she’d even thought that when she’d been a teenager. They sucked. Hard.

  “Quiet! There’s not one person in this room who isn’t me who can write their way out of a sack, so there’s not one person in this room who isn’t me who should be doing anything but working on their papers.”

  “That’s the trouble, Ed,” a high-school kid named Marcus called out. “You been trying to write in a sack?”

  “Sack of shit, maybe,” Marcus’s friend Ronnie added, and the young idiots in the room laughed.

  Eddie was old enough to be a grandfather, and he was mortified. He kept his head down, over his paper. Cecily patted his shoulder and stood. She went to Ronnie’s desk. He watched her come but didn’t expect her to take his paper, so he didn’t guard against it. It sat there on the narrow desk, unprotected, covered in doodles.

  It was only the second week of this term, and these students were used to high-school teachers. In Cecily’s experience of high-school teachers, there were three main types: teachers who were afraid of their students, who were uninterested in them, or who were totally overwhelmed by the job. She could count on one hand the teachers she’d had who’d managed to balance the workload, the meddling administrators, the demanding parents, and the shithead students, and still find a way to be really good at their jobs.

  Cecily wasn’t a public-school teacher. She didn’t answer to a school board. She didn’t even answer to parents. Hers was a non-profit organization providing free services to the community. So these miscreants didn’t scare her. She snatched Ronnie’s paper and read the first paragraph aloud. “Is worth dying over a buzz? Well drunk and drivin not safe. Ain’t nobody should drunk behind the wheel ain’t safe and could kill a body. Drink driving tear the world a part and ain’t givin us any growth. Crazy how teenagers be killin theyselves over a fun time.”

  As she read, Ronnie’s friends laughed. With each sentence they laughed all the harder. Marcus made a big show of slapping his belly and wiping his eyes. Ronnie stared down at his desk, just as Eddie had. Eddie wasn’t laughing, either. He looked on Ronnie with the compassion of the similarly afflicted.

  Knowing that Ronnie’s writing was far below proficient, Cecily had planned to put him in his place, read an embarrassing paragraph so the class could laugh at him. As they had. It had been in her mind to let him have that taste of his own medicine, then slap the paper back on his desk and ask him how he liked the flavor.

  But what he’d written, rough though it was, had come from his heart. Palpable emotion twined around his unpracticed words. So she gently set the paper back before him and spoke to the class, and calmly, no longer teaching the lesson she’d intended when she snatched his paper away. “We all have room to improve. We can always do better. None of us should mock anyone who is trying.”

  ~oOo~

  Back at her desk after class, Cecily checked her email. She deleted five spam messages, two of which promised they could double the size of her cock, and had three left. The first was from a poetry journal where she’d submitted a few pieces. Its subject line “RE: submission dated…” didn’t give her any inkling whether good news or bad were to follow, but the other emails were from Maddie and Clara, and she was even less excited to read those, so she held her breath and clicked the Kenyon message.

  A rejection. Awesome. Her streak remained unbroken. The message was long, a lot more than the boilerplate “Thanks, but no thanks.” But she wasn’t in the mood just now for constructive criticism, so she returned to her inbox and clicked Clara’s, the subject line for which was “RE: summer visit.”

  Hey Ciss—

  How’s it going? Have you had your first pool party at Casa Sanchez yet? Did the cops come haha? Things are good here. I met a guy maybe. He’s a copywriter at the agency, and totally cute. He’s from Mississippi, but his parents have a beach house on Cape something in Massachusetts. Very Kennedys. We’re going up for a week at the 4th of July.

  I told Mom already, but just so you know, things are just too busy at work for me to take any time to come home. This place is crazy all the time, it’s amazing!

  When classes start up again, maybe I’ll have more time. I’ll try for Christmas, or Thanksgiving, something like that.

  Hope you’re having a great summer!

  xoxoxoxoxoxoxo

  C—

  Only Clara could write that she was going to Massachusetts for a week’s vacation in one sentence and that she had absolutely no time for a visit home in the very next, and not see the offensive irony in that. Because in Clara’s mind, she honestly didn’t have time for a visit at home, and her beach getaway with the ‘totally cute’ advertising copywriter was a completely separate situation. Because that way, she didn’t have to deal with any guilt for choosing one over the other—or not even seeing that there was a choice at all.

  All those hugs and kisses were Clara assuring herself that she still loved her family that she didn’t want to see.

  The two Cs. Cecily and Clara. Combative and Cowardly. They both sucked.

  That left only Maddie’s message. Cecily hadn’t heard any news about Ox, and she highly doubted that she would be the first to hear, so she highly doubted that there was bad news about him in this message. But her heart still pounded as she clicked, because there was guilt in there, no matter what it said. She’d been a terrible house-sitter and wasn’t even sitting anymore.

  Dear Cissy,

  Just a quick note from me. We’re doing okay here, and Uncle Ox is still feeling pretty good. He’s happy and calm.

  I’m just writing to check in. I’ve called the house a few times in the past couple of weeks, but the machine’s been full, so I haven’t been able to leave a message. I should have gotten your cell phone number—would you give it to me now? Anyway, I just want to make sure Mario called you to set up a time to open the pool. We usually open it the week before Memorial Day.

  I won’t ask how the house is doing, because I know you’re taking good care. I hope you’re enjoying it. It gives me some peace to know it’s not sitting there empty while we’re away. Ox and I love it so.

  And we love you, too. Drop a line when you can, or give a call.

  Aunt Mad

  Well, shit. She really did suck—and she couldn’t even write back right away, because she couldn’t say whether Mario had tried to call. She hadn’t set foot in the house in two weeks. Memorial Day had come and gone.

  While she grappled with the gelatinous blob of guilt that had leapt out of the monitor at her, there was a knock at the frame of the open office door. “Ms. Nielsen?”

  Ronnie stood there, his backpack slung over one shoulder. Their class had been over for an hour.

  “Hi, Ronnie. What’s up?” He glanced at Clark’s empty desk, and Cecily told him, “Mr. Reis went home for the day already.”

  “That’s okay, it’s you I’m here for.” He stepped in and closed the door.

  A jolt of worry went through her, like she’d brushed her finger over a live wire. She was alone in the office. It was the end of the day, and most of the office wing was quiet. Ronnie was eighteen, a full-size man. If he wanted to hurt her, he could. It seemed like men had been lining up to hurt her lately.

  But she felt like an idiot when he sat on the chair beside her desk and pulled his essay draft out from his pack. “Do you think you could show me how to make it better?”

  “Of course. That’s why they pay me the teeny-tiny bucks.”

  Ronnie laughed and handed her his paper.

  The first thing she noticed, because they overwhelmed the words on the page, were his doodles—elaborate swirls and dots, with words and names done in all d
ifferent kinds of fonts woven into the patterns. “Your artwork is beautiful.”

  His complexion was too dark for her to be sure, but she thought he’d blushed. “Thanks. I want to do tattoos someday.” He waved a finger at the doodles. “I know it looks like I wasn’t paying attention, but I was. Drawing helps me think. Otherwise, my head goes all over the place.”

  “I get that. It’s like that for me with words. I can’t think straight unless I write things down. Sometimes I even make pictures with words.”

  “What, like shapes?”