Stand (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 7)

by Susan Fanetti

  “Don’t stop now,” he gasped. “Ciss!”

  “I’m not stopping.” She rose up and climbed onto the bed, straddling him and pushing on his shoulders, prodding him to scoot farther onto the bed. He did, and she took hold of him and sank down. Her head dropped back, and the silken tips of her hair brushed over his skin.

  Oh God, she was hot and slick, and he was going to die like this, die beautifully, die complete. He’d never felt it like—

  “Wait. Baby, wait. I need a condom. We need a condom!”

  She still on him, and he sensed her head coming forward again, her eyes on him. “Do we?”

  “What?” He took his brain in both hands and made it focus on her words and not her body. “Cecily, what are you saying?”

  “I don’t know. I was sitting in church today, watching Simon with Deb and Sammy, and Rad with Willa and Zach and Jake, and Mav with Jenny and Kelsey and Duncan. They’re families. They’re all families. I knew Mav and Rad and Simon before they had that. They’re better men now. I loved them before, but I see it anyway. They’re better. My dad wasn’t as great a man as I always thought, but to me, with me, for me, and Clara, he was perfect. We made him better. We gave him something to be good for.”

  “You’re saying I need to be better? You want to have my kid so I’ll be better?” Caleb felt his cock soften a bit.

  She felt it too, and she gave her hips a little twist, heating his desire back to the boil. “No, babe. I think you’re good all the way down. I’m saying family makes everyone better. Someone to be good for, even when bad is all you feel. Someone to help you remember why.”

  Cecily was impulsive, but Caleb was not. “Ciss. I can’t make this call right now. It’s too big. You’re my someone to be good for. You’re my reason why. If you want to have my kid, we can talk about it. But not like this.”

  She sat on his lap, full of him, in the dark, and didn’t move. Caleb would have given up some more of his liver to get some fucking light in the room so he could see her eyes. Those blue gems flashed fire with everything she felt, good and bad, and he could see her through them and know what she was thinking, what she needed. But in the dark, he was blind.

  “Cecily. Baby, I love you. Let me get a condom.”

  “I’ll get it.” She eased off of him, and Caleb couldn’t suppress a grunt as her tight heat pulled away.

  She shuffled around in the nightstand drawer, and he heard the package tear open. Then the cool slick of latex rolled over him. Not nearly as lovely a feeling as her bare sheath.

  “Don’t be mad, Ciss.”

  “I’m not. You’re right.” She straddled him again and filled herself full of him, but something had changed. He had less of her than he’d had just moments before.

  “Baby, come here.” He reached up and pulled her down onto his chest. Burying his face in her hair, he let her move as she would, bringing them both back up to the highest heights of need. They rocked together, their mouths and arms and hair and breath tangled together as need drew up and demanded everything of them.

  His finish broke first, and he clutched her tightly, wishing he could draw her whole body into his and keep her there always. As he reached his end, she chased her own climax. She came, he felt her spasm around him, felt her body flex and shudder, but it was quiet, and Cecily was never quiet.

  After, she lay quietly on him, still connected, and yet too far away.

  He let them lay in that silent distance until his heart beat normally again. “Ciss, I’m sorry.”

  “No, it’s okay,” she muttered against his shoulder. “It’s just…I want to be better, too. I want to be good enough for you.”

  Okay, enough. Tensing himself against the pain he knew he’d feel in his back, Caleb held Cecily tightly and rolled them both over. He stretched for the nightstand lamp, grunting as he fought off the protests of his newly knitted muscles, and turned on a fucking light.

  He could see her now, finally, read her eyes and know her, and she was sad. “Cecily, dammit. Do you think I’m an idiot?”

  “What? No!” She shoved herself out from under him.

  “I love you. You don’t need to be better. You don’t need to be perfect. I love your claws, I love your smiles, I love you temper tantrums, I love your giggle fits. I love you when you’re angry or sad. I love that I can make you happy and calm. I love all the wild and weird things you are. You are exactly what I want.”

  She stared, her eyes rioting and her body still. “Maybe you are an idiot.”

  “Maybe I am. But I know a baby isn’t going to make me love you more.” He pulled the condom off, tied it, and dropped it in the wastebasket under the nightstand.

  “Don’t you want kids?”

  Settling against the headboard, he pulled her to him and was glad when she came willingly.

  “I’m honestly not sure, babe. Do you?”

  “Yeah. I love kids. I mean, until tonight, I wasn’t in a rush, but I’ve always thought I’d have kids eventually. What holds you back?”

  The answer could turn this night into a war. Though he did love her in any mood, and he understood the anger she so often felt, he wasn’t up to a fight now. His head couldn’t take much more stress.

  “It’s not so easy being indigenous in a colonized world, Ciss. You’ve seen some of it. That shit happens pretty often. Our kid would be a half-breed, and that’s even harder.”

  “That’s a really shitty way to say it.”

  “That’s what people would say. Both sides. My people call me an apple because I left the Osage and love a white woman, have white friends and brothers.”

  “Apple?”

  “Red on the outside…”

  “Oh. That’s mean.”

  “Yeah. That’s my point. But if I told Grampa and Levi that we didn’t plan to have kids, even Levi would calm down about us. They’re proud of the fact that no Mathews has ever had a kid who wasn’t pure Native. That’s what scares them more than anything, that we’ll have kids and bring white blood into the family.”

  “Your family is just as racist as the people who call you ‘Chief’ or whatever, then.”

  “No, baby. It doesn’t work like that. I’d think you’d know it, with your fancy college education. It’s different when people who’ve been living under somebody’s boot hate the foot the boot’s on. An oppressed people can’t be racist. They can be bigots, but not racist. You have to have power to be a racist, even if it’s just the power to be able to walk down the street and be left alone. But Grampa and Levi are bigots, no doubt.”

  “How’d you get to be Mathews, if your family has always been pure Osage? That’s not a Native name, is it?”

  “My great-grandfather took it, thinking it would help him make his way with the white folks around him. They killed him a couple years later.” This conversation had veered sharply away from afterglow. Caleb took Cecily’s hand and slid his fingers between hers. “And that’s what I mean. The lesson my great-grandmother taught my grandfather was that white people can’t be trusted, that they will lure us in, stab us in the back, and take everything we have, erase everything we are. I’ll never convince my grandfather of anything else, and he’s got Levi in the same mind.”

  “Why don’t you feel that way?”

  “I don’t know. I just never did. I see a more complex world than they do, I guess. But I mean it when I say that it is not easy to be something other than white in this world, and it’s even harder when you’re not fully any one thing.”

  “So you don’t want kids?”

  “I do. But I don’t know if we should. I need to sort through my feelings about that. Does that change things for you? About us?”

  “No.” She answered so quickly, she couldn’t possibly have thought about it.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I love you, and I don’t want to be without you. After you were hurt, I learned that for sure. You make me better, and if I’m good enough the way I am, then I’m good if it’s just us. If that’s
enough for you, too. I think I need to trust you and let you make the call about kids, because I don’t have the experience of being hated for what I look like. If it’s right, when it’s right, we’ll have kids. Or we won’t. Tonight was…I was full of feelings and love and I don’t know. I just…wanted.”

  Caleb held her close and nestled his face into her hair. “I know. I understand. I felt it, too.”

  They lay together, breathing in tandem, stroking each other’s hair, when something much bigger finally occurred to him.

  “Ciss?”

  “Hmm?” She brushed her cheek over his chest.

  “Did we just decide that we want to make a life together?”

  “No.”

  “No?” He lifted his shoulder and shrugged up her head so he could see her face. She was smiling.

  “No. I think we decided that in the hospital.”

  He thought about that for a second. “When I woke up and you were holding my hand.”

  “That’s when I knew.”

  “Me too.” He kissed her. “Then keep my flame.”

  She nodded. “Take ink for me, too.”

  “Your name. On my heart.”

  ~oOo~

  Later, when the night was still the blue-black dark of a world sound asleep, Caleb woke alone in bed. When Cecily was up in the middle of the night, something was bothering her. Worried that their heavy talk about kids had snaked into her head and sunk fangs into her thoughts, he got up and went looking for her.

  He found her in Ox and Maddie’s living room, sitting cross-legged in a corner of their sofa, wrapped up in a soft, knitted throw. A floor lamp shone over her, lighting the page of her journal as she wrote. She looked up as he came into the room, and closed her journal before he could sit beside her.

  “Hey.” He put his arm around her shoulders. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Just writing out my feelings from the day. I can’t sleep until I get them under control.”

  Since his birthday, and her discovery of the poem he’d taken, Caleb hadn’t asked her if he could read anything she’d written or brought her writing up at all. She hadn’t offered, either, and didn’t even seem comfortable letting him see that she was writing, much less what she was putting down. This was the first time in weeks the topic had come up, and Caleb saw danger signs everywhere. He’d almost lost her over this, and they hadn’t spoken of it. His injury and recovery, Slick’s death and burial, Delaney’s injury and complicated recovery—it had all provided a way to come back together, a bridge over the chasm of trouble that had opened between them that night.

  But Cecily was a writer, and Caleb played guitar, and those two things were bound to keep the incident in mind, to keep the trouble alive, to widen the chasm and fill it with lava when they weren’t paying attention. Tonight, they’d committed to each other. Cecily would keep his flame. Caleb would take ink for her. They couldn’t go on without filling in the rift, or at least strengthening the bridge. They had to talk about it.

  “Do you think you’ll ever trust me to read your writing again?” he asked.

  She stared down at her closed journal, playing her fingers under the elastic band that held it closed. “You’re forgiven, Caleb. Can we leave it at that?”

  “No, baby. You know we can’t. We almost ended over this, and I know you. You can’t pretend it didn’t happen. Neither can I.”

  It took her a long time to wend her way through her mind and respond, but when she did, she didn’t push the topic away. “Why did you do it?”

  Caleb sighed with relief. She would talk to him. They would have this out, fill in the rift, stand together on solid ground. “I wrote it down because I thought it was so good. It was a story, and I felt all kinds of things when I read it. Those few words made me feel like I knew you. I couldn’t leave them behind. I put it to music because it read like a song to me. I didn’t see that I was putting your words in my voice.” She’d never heard the song he’d made.

  Her eyes finally came up to his. “Do you know why it hurt so bad? Do you understand?”

  “I do. That’s why I didn’t tell you. I didn’t realize what I was doing when I did it, but when I got to know you, I knew I’d taken something important and private, and with everything you were already dealing with, I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Please don’t try to tell me you lied to protect me.” She twisted out of his hold and leaned forward, curled over her lap.

  He let her go, but set his hand on her back. “No, Ciss. I lied to protect me. I knew how mad you’d be, and I was afraid I’d lose you. It was shitty and selfish, and I’m so damn sorry.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay what?”

  “Okay. We’ve talked about it. You were already forgiven, and now we’ve talked. Can we stop now?”

  Her tone was brittle with pain and wariness, and Caleb didn’t think the issue was resolved at all. “You didn’t answer my question. Do you think you’ll ever trust me to read your writing again?”

  She sat back and faced him. “My words are mine. Just mine. No music, no songs, nobody’s prints on them but mine. If I share what I write, I’m showing you something fragile inside me. You said you wanted a piece of me to keep. I love you, and I will give you everything, but not to do with as you please. Just to hold. If I can trust you to understand that, then yes, I’ll let you read when I have something of me to share.”

  “I promise.” He’d never made a more solemn vow in his life.

  “Then okay.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “Wait, love.” Mo came to the refrigerator and pushed Cecily out of the way. Sticking her hand into the big glass bowl, she shook her head. “Not set enough. Let’s give it another half hour.” She moved to another bowl and stuck her hand in that. “The sandie dough is ready. You can make those.”

  Cecily took the bowl Mo handed to her and turned around to seek out a place to work. Mo’s huge kitchen was hopping with old ladies, all involved in some element of holiday baking, to the unfortunate song stylings of The Chipmunks Christmas album, which was Duncan’s current favorite.

  Uncle Brian was going to be home for Christmas. Athena was already home, and Apollo and Jacinda had gotten their pediatrician’s okay to bring the baby to the Bulls’ family Christmas. And Clara was coming home, for the first time in forever—and bringing a fiancé with her. They didn’t have everybody in the family—Ox and Maddie were still in Mexico, they’d just buried Slick, and Eight Ball was in prison—but it was as much family as they could muster, and more than they’d dared hope. After a subdued Thanksgiving spent in fragments, Aunt Mo was pulling out all the stops for Christmas.

  Cecily’s mother made room for her on the wide butcher-block island and pushed the canister of flour at her, and then the box of wax paper. Cecily got to work rolling pale pecan sandie dough into tiny logs she’d always thought of—silently—as ghost turds.

  She didn’t like pecan sandies. Or anything with powder-sugar coating. It got all sticky and gluey and ugh.

  Kentucky Colonels, though? Those were the bomb. You could actually get a little buzz on, if you had enough. Her first drunk had been the Christmas she was eleven, when she and Clara had grabbed the big baggie out of Aunt Mo’s fridge and sat on the floor together to eat all those yummy, boozy, chocolate-covered candies.

  The puking later hadn’t been so fun.

  “Can Uncle Brian even have Kentucky Colonels? I thought he wasn’t supposed to have alcohol.”

  “There’s less than a cup of bourbon in the whole batch, and they’re his favorites. We’re not having Christmas without Kentucky Colonels.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am. Whatever you say, ma’am.”

  Mo shoved a hand on her hip, and made her face into a frown, but her eyes were light. “Don’t you sass me, little lass.”

  “Wrapping’s done!” Jenny stood at the entry between the kitchen and the dining room. “Kelsey did tags and Zach stuck the bows on. I need to get back to the house and let Chunk ou
t. Willa, you want to come with? We can pick up the ham on the way back.”

  Willa pushed a tray of cooled, undecorated sugar cookies into an enormous Tupperware container. “Yeah. You want to grab Chunk and bring him to our house? Ollie could use the company. Chunk keeps him from lying around like the crabby old man he is.”

  “That’s great. Chunk will be so happy! Let’s definitely get the ham after we drop him off, though, or we’ll have a very stuffed puppy and no ham for dinner.”

  Mo sighed dramatically, making sure everyone could hear. “I can’t believe I let you talk me into a honey-baked ham. What kind of barbarian serves pre-cooked food for Christmas?”