“Then I’ll let you fight your own battle. Just keep your claws sheathed until there’s a battle to fight, okay?”
“I told you. I’m a fucking delight.”
He laughed and pulled her into his arms, lifting her off the bridge. It swung sharply, and she squealed and clasped him tightly. “You are a fucking delight.”
~oOo~
When Cecily pulled onto the broken driveway of Caleb’s grandfather’s home, she felt another push of adrenaline, this one not nearly so exciting as the bridge. As close as she and Caleb had gotten in these past few months, the men she was about to meet were his blood family. And they didn’t want her in his life. A lot rode on this dinner. What happened tonight might determine whether he would have to make a choice between his bond to his blood or to their love.
She felt the brevity of their relationship more keenly than ever before as she closed the door of the Trans Am and looked at the screened-in front porch of the modest home before them.
He came and hooked his arm around her waist. At the same time, a rusty creak from inside the porch said someone was coming out of the house. A shadow moved to the door, and it swung forward on an old-fashioned spring. What a great sound old screen doors like that made. A summer sound, even on this dreary, wet, autumn day.
A dog barreled out first and ran straight for Caleb, and then a man who was obviously Caleb’s grandfather came down the short steps.
Caleb gave the dog a quick wrestle of a snuggle. “Hey, Ace. Hey, boy.”
He stood back up at Cecily’s side. “Breathe, baby,” he murmured and brushed his soft lips by her ear. “Hi, Grampa.” His hand slipped across the small of her back, and he caught her hand.
“Caleb. Happy birthday, son.”
“Thanks. This is Cecily, my girlfriend.”
The old man nodded, slowly, as he took her in.
One look at him made Cecily want to pull her notebook from her bag in the backseat. He was beautiful. Not handsome at all, sort of scary looking, actually, but still—beautiful. Caleb had told her that his hate was carved all over his face, and she saw what he meant, but she saw it differently. It was a first impression, formed by nothing but what she saw, and what little Caleb had shared of him, but what she saw in the man’s strong face was life, a big life, lived and felt fully at every second, an epic story of a man. Every angle was dramatic—severe and striking and impossible not to notice: A heavy brow, a pronounced, straight nose, wide chin, downturned slash of a mouth, broad cheekbones, black smudges of eyebrows, black eyes so much like Caleb’s, heavy lidded and set deep. And his skin—carved with lines and pitted with scars. He was not a handsome man at all, but yes, he was beautiful. Cecily wanted to put her hands on his cheeks and study every inch of that face.
Every moment of life
Had dug into his flesh
Had hung on
Had refused to give up
Had made itself known
Had
“Ciss.” Caleb gave her hand a shake, and she realized she’d been staring while she’d written lines of poetry in her head. Great.
“Sorry, hi. Hi. I’m Cecily.” She pulled free of Caleb and offered her hand and a smile to his grandfather.
He shook her hand but didn’t return the smile. His hand was like her father’s had been—palm and fingers like cracked leather. “James Mathews.”
“It’s really, really good to meet you Mr. Mathews.”
A quick nod as he let her go and turned to his grandson. “We got venison steaks. Fresh dressed. Your brother took a buck on the ranch.”
Caleb nodded and took possession of her hand again. “Levi told me. Sounds great.” To her, he asked, “Have you ever had venison?”
Her father had hunted and fished, and just about every other Hemingway-esque thing manly men were supposed to do, and they’d eaten his kills. She wouldn’t say she was a fan of venison, but she smiled brightly. “I have. My father was a hunter. Sounds delicious.”
James Mathews cocked an eyebrow in his gorgeous, craggy old face. Cecily had no idea what that look was supposed to mean.
“Well, let’s get inside, then. Levi’ll be over soon.” He turned and went back to the porch. With a shrug, Caleb led her along to follow.
The house was the very definition of humble. Everything in it was at least twenty years old, probably even older. Wood-paneled walls, tattered rugs over scuffed wood, peeling sheet linoleum. The furniture, too, looked to have served generations of people. But it was perfectly neat and orderly, and, under the aromas of the dinner being prepared, the scents of Pledge and Pine-Sol pulsed.
They’d entered in the living room, with a fireplace that had been converted to house a gas heating stove. The mantelpiece was still there, and above it, in rows arranged with military precision, were the school photos, five-by-sevens tacked up in their cardboard frames, of Caleb and his brother.
His grandfather moved straight through into another room without a word, leaving them to their own devices, so Cecily took the opportunity to study those pictures. She threw a grinning glance back at Caleb. “You have always been adorable.”
“Hey. Adorable is not a compliment at twenty-eight.”
“Okay. You have smoldering sex appeal. How’s that?”
“Better.” He stood at her side. “Levi looks exactly the same at thirty-four as he did at five.”
His brother looked liked a very small old man at five, so she could believe it. “You’ve both always had long hair?”
“Yeah. I cut the ends on mine every now and then, when it gets straggly, but Levi’s never cut his.”
“But your grandpa has short hair.”
“He cut it when my grandma and mom and aunts died. Hair…it’s a thing. Not for everybody, but a lot of us. In my family, it’s always been a thing. Grampa cut his hair to mourn the loss of our women.”
She knew that story, how they’d lost all the women in the family at once. “Your mom…that was his daughter?”
“No. Daughter-in-law. He’s my dad’s dad. But…” Caleb sighed and stared off through the doorway his grandfather had gone through. “He loved her like a daughter. Especially after my dad ran off.”
“He just left?”
Caleb didn’t answer right away, and Cecily didn’t push.
“He couldn’t deal with having a family, I guess. Or with life in general. He just didn’t come home one day. He died drunk in Omaha when I was eleven. Froze to death in an alley behind some bar.”
“Jesus. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. When he left, I was too little to remember him. I barely remember my mom or grandma, either, except weird flashes of things, like the beading shop. Levi remembers a lot more. It was always just Grampa and Levi and me.”
She slid her arms around his waist. “This was why I needed to be here. Even if they hate me, I need to know this part of you.”
“Okay. I get it.” He brushed her hair back and pulled her close. “How could they hate you?”
“That’s a great question. I’m awesome.”
“I thought you were a fucking delight.”
She grinned and kissed him. “That too.”
~oOo~
“We don’t always eat like this,” Caleb said, nodding at the spread of venison steaks, a colorful Osage dish of vegetables and rice, and fry bread. “We eat meat loaf and fried chicken like everybody else. I suspect Grampa is trying to make a point.”
James Mathews latched his look onto his youngest grandson and chewed his bite of food. “I made food you like on your birthday. What point am I trying to make?”
Cecily’s hour spent in Caleb’s family life had been quiet and chilly. Mr. Mathews had behaved exactly as if he had a stranger at his table, and Caleb’s brother, Levi, had literally said not a single word to her. He kept throwing squinty glares her way, studying her like a scientific specimen. She’d much rather have an actual fight than sit here while the air curdled, leaving Caleb to do painful contortions among them, trying to brea
k the tension.
So she answered, “You want me to see how different Caleb and I am. You think I don’t belong here, and we don’t fit together, and you want me to feel it. But you don’t see half his life. He fits there, too, and I fit with him.” She tore off a piece of fry bread and shoved it in her mouth, keeping her eyes on Caleb’s grandfather.
Off to the side, the silent Levi chuckled, and Cecily swung his direction. “That’s funny?”
“Yeah, girl. It is.”
“Why?”
Levi took a bite of meat and chewed it thoroughly before he answered. He looked a lot more like their grandfather than Caleb did. A few inches taller than Caleb, he was noticeably leaner, almost gaunt. His face was more severely shaped, with deep hollows beneath his cheekbones and an aggressive tilt to his eyes. She could see in Levi’s face that their grandfather had been good looking, as well as beautiful, when he was a young man. Before life had dug its hooks so ferociously in.
Levi swallowed and answered her question. “Sitting at this table, you don’t know what our life is like. You don’t know what it’s like to be in our world.”
“And you don’t know what it’s like to be in mine. That’s true for everyone. You have to let someone in before they know.”
He shook his head. “Not if they’re already there.” With his forearm, he pushed his plate aside, then leaned on the table, coming close. “Don’t be naïve, girl. Do you know what white folks see when Caleb takes your perky white butt around like you’re his? They see a red man stealing one of their white women. If they get a chance to get him off in a dark corner, or even out in the open, if there’s enough of ‘em, they’ll look to teach him a lesson about it.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s happened.”
At her side, Caleb reacted, and Levi’s attention moved to his brother. “That true? You get beat over her already?”
“Other way around,” Cecily answered for him. “He kicked some redneck ass.”
Levi’s eyes flicked to her, then back to his brother. “That’s not better. That’ll get you locked up.”
Caleb shook his head. “Not with a Bull on my back. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you since I joined up. The club is protection. They’ve got my back. I carry that around with me when I wear the kutte.”
Their grandfather grunted. Levi’s mouth shaped itself into an angry slash that Cecily thought was some kind of grin. “You’ve got protection here, at home, with your own. You want to be in that world so bad you join that gang to do it. I don’t get it.”
It was ingrained in Cecily to correct people who called the Bulls a ‘gang,’ but she bit her tongue, and was glad she did when Caleb answered.
“Isn’t that your point anyway, bro? We’re outlaws in the world, just because of who we are. There’s some that’d beat me for loving a white girl just because of how I look, like it’s a crime to love one of ‘their’ women. Wearing the Bull flips the table. They’re afraid of me, not the other way around.”
A stalemate rose among the three men. Cecily sat quietly as they stared at each other, their jaws all clenched and twitching in the same way.
“Cecily,” James Mathews finally said. “I mean no disrespect to you. You seem like a sweet girl. You’re pretty as a picture. I see why my grandson likes you.”
“I love her, Grampa. Love.”
That got a nod from the old man. “Loves you. But I can’t be happy about it. I don’t know what he’s told you about our family, our people…”
“I know about your father, what happened.”
He nodded. The gesture was slow and solemn. “I mean nothing against you, but that’s what the world is to us, since the first white feet landed on this earth—whites taking from our people, killing our people, tricking us, shoving us from our homes. Thinking we can be free and safe in your world is what gets us hurt.”
“It’s the twenty-first century, Grampa,” Caleb muttered.
“And we’re still fighting to get back what was taken from us,” Levi answered. “Brother, you just said somebody came at you for being with her. How much has changed?”
Caleb stared at his plate. Cecily wanted to say something, to tell them they were wrong, to stand up and fight for what she and Caleb had together, but what could she say? She didn’t know enough about this part of his life to argue. She could never know it completely, because she could never be of it. Half of him was a mystery beyond her reach.
“I don’t want this life,” he finally muttered, still studying the remains of his dinner. “I want more.”
“It breaks my heart that who you are isn’t enough, Caleb,” his grandfather said.
Caleb looked up and faced him. “It breaks my heart that you can’t let me be who I am.”
~oOo~
“That was fucking awkward.” Caleb closed his bedroom door and leaned back on it. “I’m sorry.”
“I was prepared for worse. I didn’t have to get my claws out even once. Are you okay?” Some pretty intense words had been said at that table.
But Caleb shrugged it off. “I’m fine. That fight’s been going on for years.”
Cecily wandered a bit in the small room, absorbing the insights into her man. Rock posters festooned the walls, pinned up at different angles: Van Halen, AC/DC, Rush, The Who—and show bills from obscure regional bands, too. A twin bed, neatly made with a blue plaid bedspread, a red wool blanket folded across the end. It was the room of a teenager. “You don’t stay here much anymore, do you?”
He came up behind her and closed his arms around her waist. “No. A couple nights a month, maybe. I moved to the ranch after I graduated high school, so I could help Levi out. I was here the night before last, though.” As he said that, he picked up his guitar from where it leaned against the wall and set it on his bed, then came back behind her and closed her into a fresh embrace.
“I think I get Levi, actually,” she said as she perused his old posters.
“You do?”
“Yeah. I think maybe we’re a little alike.” When Caleb didn’t respond, a flick of anxiety made Cecily twitch, and she added, “I’m not saying my life is anything like his, or yours, but I get being mad about life all the time and not trusting people not to be shitty. That’s how I feel most of the time. And my sister is totally different from me, too. We don’t understand each other very well either—or, I guess we understand, but we don’t connect.”
In fact, now that she’d said those words out loud, she thought her sister was a little bit like Caleb, even—Clara didn’t feel at home in the world she was born into, either. But she’d run away. Caleb had stood fast and was trying to make all his pieces into a whole. Clara had abandoned one set of pieces for a brand-new puzzle.
“I think I’ve only seen your sister one time,” Caleb said. “Your dad’s funeral.”
“I haven’t seen her much more than that since then.” She hefted a gold-plated trophy showing a boy playing soccer—one of half a dozen similar trophies lined up on a shelf above a small desk, its top totally clear except for an ancient boombox. Inscribed on the base of the trophy:
CALEB MATHEWS
VARSITY MVP
PAWHUSKA HUSKIES
1991
Happy to change the topic, she lifted the trophy a bit higher and exclaimed, “You were a jock!”
His body moved, and she could tell that he’d shrugged. “I guess. Soccer’s not like football or basketball on the high school jock scale, but yeah, an athlete.”
“That explains your great legs.”
He grinned and moved to her side to look her in the eyes. “I have great legs?”
“My God, yes. Those thighs. I love every part of your body, but I could write a poem about those gorgeous hunks of manflesh. Actually no, I couldn’t—they are poetry.”
“Okay, now you’re laying it on a bit thick, don’t you think? I mean, you don’t have to seduce me. I’m a sure thing. If you want me to fuck you right here and get you screaming so Grampa can hear, I’
m in. It would serve him right.”
Laughing, she grabbed a hank of his hair and pulled him close to kiss him, but when he tried to turn it into more, she turned away. “I’m not going to fuck you on your twin bed in your grandfather’s house. And don’t be too hard on him. I liked meeting him, and I wasn’t offended. I understand. My dad wasn’t that much different. It wasn’t a race thing, obviously, but he didn’t like me bringing ‘normal’ kids around the house, and he hated the boys I liked. He tried hard to scare them off, and he succeeded every time. I didn’t really have a boyfriend until college, when I was hundreds of miles away. I think he was suspicious of them for reasons that are pretty similar. We were different, and normal people getting too close could be dangerous. He was suspicious of just about everybody who wasn’t club. He didn’t want them close enough to hurt us.”
Stand (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 7) Page 23