by Kiki Leach
"Cherry doesn't know that she's my old lady now."
He looked up at me and held his breath for a few seconds, then quickly released it. "Shit. I thought you might've mentioned it to her the other night when you were talking?"
"It never came up because I was too busy trying to find out shit about her and Jeremiah. Fuck."
"Just call Cherry up and let her know about it real quick. Or call up your wife and let her know--"
"Know what?" I asked him. He looked at me with question, then nodded his head and turned his attention elsewhere. I grabbed a beer from behind the bar, popped the lid and drank it back. "I'm gonna need more than double what I had the night we got married if I wanna keep her from going off on me about this shit when I finally get home to her tonight."
"Just a solid word of advice, brother. Keep it tucked in when you go to bed tonight if she's not speaking to you the minute she walks through the front door."
"What if she comes through yelling at me?"
He shrugged. "You've got a better chance of getting laid than getting your dick cut off in that case, which would be the other alternative."
I nodded and drank back the rest of my beer, then reached behind the bar for a handful more.
Chapter Sixteen
Colette
When Roman first called to let me know that he wouldn't be able to pick me up from the school once my last student had gone home (though I was happy as hell in not seeing Mr. Bourne again, I was also somewhat suspicious when Abigail's grandmother came to pick her up instead), along with the fact that he still had no plans to send my car along so that I could drive home on my own, I hated to admit that I almost feared who he had planned to send in his place.
Luckily when he mentioned Perla's name, I was able to breathe a sigh of relief and relax a little. I hadn't known her all that well outside of the few times Jeremiah would bring me along to hang around the club with the others, but she was always polite to me. And despite being well over sixty years of age, often dressed in the highest of heels and shortest of skirts as if she were ready to walk the runway. Today was shorts and a light blue tank with flats, and even though it looked somewhat simple on the surface, she still looked ready to strut across the nearest catwalk and give her best pose if asked.
After piling into her blue pickup, she mentioned that with me now being Roman's wife instead of someone just known for dating his brother, that I needed to be more integrated into the 'old lady' fold, which included taking a trip to her house to meet a few more of them before heading back to mine first. I was hesitant at the start but figured that unlike Roman, she was at least nice enough to tell me about it first.
The main women of the club (meaning anyone who wasn't a nameless club whore and had an actual title or high ranking status within) were like a family of sisters in the same way that the men were like brothers. Everyone looked out for one another and because so many random women who often made their way to the club during parties were looking to hook up with our men in the hope of someday taking our place, sticking together through thick and thin while having each other's backs always was a must. If you found your sister getting into an unnecessary scuffle with another woman, you pulled her back. If instead she needed your help in taking someone down or out, you either jumped in at all cost or made sure you were behind the wheel of the getaway car and ready to burn rubber across the road.
"I didn't exactly realize there were so many 'rules' in being the wife of a brother," I told her.
"Well, they're not so much rules, darlin'," she replied, her voice soft and somewhat demure; motherly. "It's more or less just our way of life." She looked over at me and smiled and I saw the tiny crinkles forming in the pale corners of her ocean blue eyes, a pair that seemed to tell a story filled with pages and pages of wisdom and titles that read 'Don't Make the Same Mistakes I Did When I Was Your Age, Twice'. She wore heavy mascara that more than likely would've made anyone else look like a complete clown, but on her it somehow worked, and almost too well. The thickness of each lash made her eyes pop like a set of diamonds and suddenly I found myself envious of not being able to pull off such a look in the same way.
As she turned back to the road, I leaned back in my seat and settled in.
"Your way of life," I said. "I can understand that. I guess the truth is that some things I always expected from it just from what I had always seen in hanging around, and some things I didn't."
"Such as not being able to have access to your own car when you needed it?"
I laughed and nodded. "Yeah, something like that."
She chuckled. "You know, you're not exactly a prisoner inside his home," she told me. "If you wanted to go and get your car from the club, there are ways of making it happen on your own."
"I know," I said. And then nervous laughter escaped and I cleared my throat, somewhat embarrassed of what I had planned to say next. "To be perfectly honest, I think there's just this part of me that kind of likes the fact that he fears I might leave him." I turned to look at her and she smirked while keeping her eyes focused on the road.
"And why is that?"
"Probably because I've never had someone give a damn like that about me before. My grandmother when she was alive, sure, but--"
"Never a man," she interjected.
"Right." I swallowed hard and shifted my gaze to look out of the window. "Jeremiah never cared whether I was coming or going, even if he was at my house instead of his own."
She sighed. "Well, Jeremiah always seemed... troubled. Not a bad person but something of a mess. I've known him since he was a little boy, and even then, he always needed to be told his direction."
I nodded. "Maybe that's why for most our relationship, he constantly said things that he didn't mean. 'We're gonna get married someday' and 'I love you' were just words to him with absolutely no meaning behind them. He was told they were the right things to say and so he said them to me; probably just to shut me up."
"If you don't mind me asking," she said, pausing to turn onto a dirt road, "how exactly did you two manage to get hooked up in the first place? I don't think that's something in all these years that I've ever known."
I laughed and dropped my hands in my lap. "It sounds cliché as hell, but I met him at the mall. In the food court as a matter of fact. Every time I walked past, he whistled at me. I knew that he was older and that there was something dangerous and mysterious about him and I kind of liked that. A few months in, I had heard about his reputation with the different women around town, but I didn't care. I liked him and I was determined to make it work no matter what," I said. "I wanted to be the one who changed him, reformed and made him better than he was. Then again, I was only nineteen, which probably means that I didn't really know any better after all."
She bobbed her head. "I know that all too well, honey, and believe me when I tell you that it doesn't just stop at nineteen. But the one thing I've learned in my sixty years since is that you can't change a man who will never be willing to change for himself first."
I thought about that for a moment and smiled. "I used to think things like that were bullshit," I told her. "Instead I was convinced that the power of love or sex or both could change a man along with just trying to help him be better as a person. But the fact is that you're right. There's no way in hell that we can change a man who isn't willing to change for himself first. What's funny is that Roman of all people has allowed me to see what that truly means."
"Has he?" she asked. I peeked over at her and she grinned.
I nodded. "Yeah. I wasn't sure about him when I first met him. Hell, I wasn't sure about him the second or third times I met him. Something about him drew me closer to him anyway, but... never in my wildest dreams did I think I would end up here, being his wife and having the most mind-blowing sex..." I stopped myself when I remembered exactly who I was talking to, and that I had been saying these things out loud. "Sorry," I told her. "I don't even know why the hell I started thinking about that, let alone act
ually saying anything--"
"It's okay, darlin'." She snickered and wagged her head. I winced. "Really, it's fine. I can imagine Roman being something of a 'wild reaper' in bed," she told me through a laugh. "Atom's still the same way even at damn year sixty-five years of age. So, you've got plenty of time to continue enjoying all of that."
When we finally pulled up to her house, I wasn't exactly surprised to see how large it was, but just at how nice it happened to look from the outside. It was red brick with two stories, shutters on every window that were bright white and clean as if even a spec of dirt had never touched a single one. She had an elongated front porch that seemed to wrap all the way around to the back, with a single porch swing situated on one side while three lawn chairs graced the other.
After hopping out of the car, and leaving teacher's bag behind while taking my purse, she walked me up to her six-foot tall red front door, then pushed her way inside.
I stepped in right behind her and as my eyes moved around the room, my mouth dropped. Clean wooden floors rested beneath bright red walls with pictures of her family as well as Atom and the brothers, hanging high from each one. Two chandeliers swung above our heads, one made with long pointed crystals while the other was somewhat smaller, with the crystals resembling tiny bulbs. It was what Perla called the 'grand entrance' before entering the living room which looked about ten times bigger.
"Wow," I said, not even realizing the word had escaped me until she glanced at me and smiled.
Atom seemed like a nice enough person and somewhat well-kept, but never struck me as someone who had been willing to spend more than a few hundred dollars a year to keep his house in order, and sure as hell not like this. After closing the door behind me, I was half expecting for someone to come out from another room and guide me to the nearest spa.
"Now." Perla moved over to me and stared straight down into my eyes. Her face suddenly became serious, grim. "Remember that I told you about a few of the women from the club being here? Old ladies and the like?"
"Yeah?"
"Well, one of them happens to be the like," she said.
"What does that mean?" I asked her
"AHEM." I glanced over her shoulder and shoved my brows together in disgust when I noticed Cherry leaning against the frame of the wall that lead into what looked like the kitchen. She was holding a pitcher of lemonade and glaring. "We're out of ice," she said. I eyed her up and down and sneered at her high heels and short-shorts. Not to mention her white blouse which was practically see-through. Who the hell was she trying to impress, exactly? "And there's none frozen inside the freezer yet."
Perla rolled her eyes up to the ceiling and nodded without even turning around to face her herself. "There should be a fresh bag in the other chest out back," she said. "You'll just have to dig through all of the beer placed on top of it."
Cherry looked me directly in the eyes, completely unapologetic over what she had done, before darting them away from me completely and turning on her heel to head back outside. I crossed my arms over my chest as tight as I could to keep from reaching out and throwing my fists into something I knew I shouldn't. I suddenly felt as if I couldn't breathe and was convinced that she was the reason.
"I didn't know that she was going to be here."
"If you had, you wouldn't have come and I'm aware of that now. I wasn't before I got the call from Atom about picking you up."
"Then you know what she did with Jeremiah."
"Yes," she replied. "And I can understand why you might want to throw a glass upside her head for it. But the thing is that she's considered to be part of our family."
My brows pinched. "Really."
"Believe it or not," she said. "Cherry's been around with the Reapers for at least twelve years, before a lot of the other women ever came along. In fact, she often likes to brag about just how much she knows these boys in ways that even I don't."
"You mean Biblical?"
She closed her eyes for a moment and chortled. "Not all of them, no."
"Has she ever been with Atom?"
She looked aside, then rolled her eyes down toward the floor. "Years ago, she admitted that she tried one night while they were all out there at the D&C, but he would never budge on her."
"She tried to hook up with your husband and you're still willing to let her inside your home?" I asked.
"It sounds crazy, but this is just the way things are with us. And I know that she might not seem like it, but deep down the girl really is a good person. She's just young and well-known for making a lot of mistakes, many involving her vagina, which happens to speak much more than her heart."
"If that's the case, it might be in her best interest to start keeping her legs closed," I said. Perla laughed aloud, then placed a hand over her mouth to muffle the sound, and rattled her head. I chuckled but was still somewhat annoyed in being forced to put up with this woman and the memory of what she had done to me.
Once Perla pulled herself together and caught her breath, she placed her hand on top of mine and gave it a tight squeeze. "If you start to become uncomfortable, just say the word and we're out of here sooner before later," she said. "I'll take you back home, no questions asked. But I would like to introduce you to the other girls as Roman's wife, at least. They deserve to know the other woman of the club worthy of respecting."
"Who else is out there?"
"Chute's old lady, Vetta, along with his girlfriend, Nancy. They got into it a bit earlier, but they should be fine now," she told me. I nodded, despite still being as confused by that situation now as I was when I had first heard about it years ago from Roman. Apparently Chute, short for 'parachute' because he loved jumping out of planes, thought was divorced from Vetta when he had gotten together with Nancy, but something about the paperwork hadn't gone through and was incorrectly filed. Once the truth came to light, neither woman was willing to give him up and of course, he was unable to make a true decision between who he wanted versus who he just liked spending time with every now and then, and opted for continuing to have both. "Then there's Poker's sister, Rebecca," she said. "She's only been around a few times and is somewhat of the quiet type, but I think you'll like her. Tracker's ex, Sheila, is out there as well. They don't get along anymore but we're still close and I try my best to invite her to everything that I can; it's something that I've forced him to put up with over the years even if he doesn't like it all that much. Then there's Prez's ex, Renatta. I think you might've met her a few times at the club, but she never stays long during the parties once she sees Riggs dragging off one of those young girls to the back, which I don't blame her for."
I bobbed my head. "Is that all of them?"
"For the most part," she replied. "At least the only ones I've ever been willing to invite out here to my house. The boys will have a girl come and go from time to time, but I can usually tell within the first meeting if she's going to stick around and if I'm going to bother in putting up with her for however long she says."
"What did you think of me when we first met?" I asked her.
She grinned. "I thought that you were sweet; too much sweetness for someone like Jeremiah."
"And what do you think about me now in being with Roman?"
"I think you could help to balance him out. And with any luck, will help to keep him sane. Now." She took me by the hand and tugged at my arm. "Why don't I get you outside to the gazebo so that you can meet the girls all over again while having a plate of good food." I agreed.
After reintroducing me to the women as Roman's wife, AKA the 'newest old lady of the bunch', which in any other circle would've caused sneers, smirks and overall dirty looks given who they knew me as before, I was kissed on the cheek and hugged (by all except for Cherry, thank God) and welcomed with open arms. They immediately wanted to get to know more about me as a person and were eager to know more details about the wedding itself. I didn't have the heart or the guts to tell them that I couldn't half remember how the hell it even happened, so I s
tarted making things up as I went along. Then I realized that with each word coming out of my mouth, about the flowers I was holding while walking down the aisle and the kiss we had after saying 'I do', and so on, that I wanted it all to be real. At least enough for me to remember it this time.
After each had a nice long and quite possibly envious look at my ring, I got up to make myself a plate and headed over to a table on the opposite side of the lawn. It was completely covered with trays upon trays of food, enough to fill an army. Turkey, dressing, ham, chicken, ribs and an assortment of vegetables, fruits and deserts. I was positive that it couldn't all have been for us alone, but Perla assured me that it was. Though she followed up with saying that anything left over would be sent to the local food shelter. She informed me that the Wild Reapers were big on giving back to the community, which was something that I knew a little of but not enough. "They might be outlaws," she said, "but they're outlaws with hearts of pure gold."
Once I finished fixing my plate, I moved over to the assortment of drinks, which included red wine, tea, fruit punch, and something called a 'Reapers Hurricane'. I opted for a glass mimosa to be on the safe side and started heading back toward the other women.
"I hear that your meat is supposed to taste better with red wine."
I stopped in my tracks upon hearing Cherry's voice and turned to look her in the face. "Excuse me?" I said.
She pointed at my glass. "The mimosa won't do anything for your taste buds as far as your food goes," she told me. "Red wine is supposed to make the meat pop inside your mouth or something."
"I'll take my chances on it." I slightly rolled my eyes and turned on my heel.
"Colette--"
"Where the hell do you get off even speaking to me?" I asked, spinning back around to face her. I could feel the other women staring at us now but I couldn't bring myself to look over at them. I also couldn't bring myself to back away from telling this woman just exactly what I thought about her. I understood that she was family. I understood that her role in this club was to basically be a fluffer for any and every willing member it had. However, it sure as hell didn't mean that I had to like it. "You know the last time I saw you, in both my house and bed, you had your legs in the air with Jeremiah planted right between them."