Chapter 7 #4
Destiny saying, Don’t call me that if you’re just going to walk away.
And then I had walked away.
Because I was noble.
That was what I told myself.
Noble.
Self-sacrificing.
Letting the bird fly free instead of locking it in a cage built out of my own want.
It sounded good if I didn’t look too close.
If I looked close, it sounded like cowardice wearing a clean shirt.
So I stopped looking close.
I went back to San Diego and put both hands on the life that had been waiting patiently for me to stop haunting myself.
Georgia.
Classes.
The club.
The future I had been building one late-night assignment, one permit code, one miserable math quiz at a time.
Georgia knew I came back different after Santa Monica.
She didn’t ask right away.
That was one of the things that made her dangerous in the quietest way. Georgia didn’t pry. She let silence sit until it got uncomfortable enough to confess on its own.
Three days after Santa Monica, she showed up at my place with takeout, two iced teas, and a stack of index cards for my construction law exam.
“You look like hell,” she said.
“Good to see you too.”
“I didn’t say bad hell. Some people like the exhausted outlaw thing.”
“Do you?”
She looked at me for a long second.
Then she set the food on my counter. “I like you better when you’re not punishing yourself for breathing.”
That landed too close.
Everything landed too close after Destiny.
So I did what men like me did when we were sick of drowning in old ghosts.
I made a choice and called it salvation.
I went all in with Georgia.
For real this time.
Dinners. Movies. Study dates that turned into sleepovers. Sunday afternoons at her parents’ house, where her mom hugged me like I had always belonged at the edge of her kitchen island and her dad asked my opinion on deck repairs like I was a respectable man with respectable answers.
Georgia and I became easy in the way couples did when no one was actively bleeding.
She kept a toothbrush at my place.
I fixed her leaky bathroom faucet.
She learned how I took my coffee.
I learned she pretended to like black coffee around me because she thought cream made her seem less serious, which was ridiculous because Georgia could make a grown foreman cry with a color-coded spreadsheet.
We kissed in parking lots and on couches and against my truck when she laughed too close to my mouth. Her kisses were warm. Sweet. Present. She wanted me without making me feel like the whole universe had shifted under my boots.
Sometimes, I even wanted her back.
Not as a lie.
As a man.
As flesh and blood.
As someone tired of sleeping alone with a ghost.
Georgia was beautiful. Her body was soft and generous and real beneath my hands. Her laugh could pull me out of a bad mood if I let it. Her life had room for me in it without requiring a war council, a security rotation, and an apology to three chapters of dangerous men.
With Georgia, I could breathe.
Mostly.
That was what I focused on.
Mostly.
When my thoughts tried to drift toward Malibu, I put them to work instead.
I finished my degree.
Not a fancy degree. Not anything that would make JD tilt his head and pretend not to be amused. But mine. Earned between runs and repairs and long nights with my laptop glowing in cheap motel rooms while brothers snored on the other side of thin walls.
The day the certificate came in, Callum slapped it on the clubhouse bar under a shot glass and announced, “College boy passed.”
The room erupted.
Nate whooped like an idiot. Old Rafe clapped me on the back hard enough to rock me forward. Someone put a plastic graduation cap on my head. Someone else taped a pencil behind my ear. The elders gave me hell, but their eyes were proud.
That did something to me.
Something I didn’t know I had still needed.
Pride.
Not the kind that came from being feared.
The kind that came from becoming someone the boy in wet jeans would not have recognized but might have followed around just to learn how.
I started working under a licensed contractor connected to the club.
Long days. Early mornings. Real job sites.
Foundation inspections. Framing schedules.
Permit offices that made me want to put my head through glass.
Clients who thought they knew construction because they had watched three renovation shows and owned opinions.
I loved it.
Hated it.
Wanted to build something big enough to quiet every ugly voice from my past.
I wanted houses.
Real ones.
Strong ones.
The kind with good roofs, solid doors, working heat, and closets big enough for more than one pair of jeans.
Clean money started coming in.
Not enough to change my life all at once, but enough to prove there was more than one way to survive.
The club noticed.
Callum noticed most.
“You keep this up,” he said one night, standing beside me outside the clubhouse while I reviewed a bid on my phone, “we’re going to have a legitimate construction arm before the old men realize they accidentally approved progress.”
I snorted. “You make it sound fancy.”
“It is fancy. Paperwork makes everything fancy.”
“I’m still a far cry from JD.”
“Everybody is.”
“You said that before.”
“Still true.”
I looked at him.
Callum’s mouth twitched. “But you’re not trying to be JD. That’s good. We already have one rich bastard in Santa Fe making people cry with legal threats. We could use a man who knows how to build.”
Build.
That word became the center of me for a while.
Build the business.
Build the degree.
Build the relationship.
Build a life.
A life that did not have Destiny in it.
I told myself that last part often enough that it almost sounded like truth.
Then Daniel Ducati came along.
I heard his name from Regan first.
Not directly. Regan never handed me knives unless she wanted to see whether I would cut myself. She mentioned him during a call with Callum while I was close enough to hear and far enough away to pretend I wasn’t listening.
“Destiny’s been spending time with someone from the medical program,” Regan said.
My hand froze on the wrench I was holding.
Callum’s eyes moved to me for one second.
Then away.
“Good kid?” he asked.
“Seems like it. Daniel Ducati. Med school track. Family is clean. Polished. Annoyingly handsome, according to Lily.”
Nate, who had been sitting nearby eating chips like the clubhouse was a theater and my life was entertainment, turned slowly toward me.
I kept my face blank.
Inside, something ugly opened one eye.
Ducati.
Of course his last name was Ducati.
The universe had jokes.
I waited exactly four hours before Googling him.
That was restraint.
Daniel Ducati was not a villain.
That pissed me off.
I wanted him to be smug. Wanted him to have a DUI, a cheating scandal, a mean streak, something I could point to and say, See? Bad idea. Not good enough. Keep him away from her.
But the bastard was clean.
Worse than clean.
Good.
Med school. Volunteer clinic work. Family from Pasadena.
Mother a pediatrician. Father in hospital administration.
Sister in law school. Pictures of him at fundraisers, beach cleanups, a medical mission trip, some white-coat ceremony where he smiled like the kind of man old ladies trusted with their blood pressure.
He had dark hair, clean hands, expensive teeth, and the kind of future that opened doors before he reached them.
A doctor.
Destiny was going to be a nurse.
They made sense.
I hated that most of all.
They made so much sense I could see the whole thing without wanting to.
Destiny and Daniel studying together in coffee shops.
Daniel bringing her soup when she was sick.
Daniel meeting Regan and surviving because he wore a clean shirt and had no blood on his hands.
Daniel shaking Edge’s hand and not understanding he was being weighed for disposal.
Daniel proposing somewhere pretty, probably with a photographer hidden in the bushes because men like that knew how to make moments look good.
Destiny in white.
Destiny with babies maybe, if she wanted them.
Destiny laughing in a kitchen full of sunlight, wearing her mother’s diamond earrings and turquoise ring while a good man came up behind her and kissed her shoulder.
I mapped her whole life out like a movie I was watching from the wrong side of the screen.
And in that movie, I was not the guy.
That was the part I had to accept.
I was not the hero. Not the husband. Not the man in the framed photos. I was the chapter before she got well. The scar. The dangerous first almost-love girls outgrew when they found men who could offer tax returns, clean histories, and family brunches without armed security.
So I doubled down.
On Georgia.
On school.
On work.
On being noble.
I told myself I was giving Destiny the thing no one had ever given her.
Freedom.
I told myself I was letting the bird fly.
I told myself I was self-sacrificing, honorable, disciplined, a man who loved with open hands.
I told myself a lot of pretty things.
Then I bought Georgia a ring.
Two years after Cabo, I proposed on the beach in La Jolla at sunset.
I had planned it.
Actually planned it.
Dinner first. Walk after. Ring in my pocket so long it had burned against my thigh the entire meal. Georgia wore a soft blue dress and sandals that kept sinking in the sand. Her hair was down, waves catching gold in the dying light. She looked beautiful. Happy. Safe.
I got down on one knee.
Her hands flew to her mouth.
The yes came through tears.
Everyone nearby clapped because people loved a proposal when it didn’t cost them anything.
Georgia cried.
I smiled.
I kissed her.
Her ring caught the sunset.
Her parents were over the moon when we told them. Her mother cried harder than Georgia had. Her father hugged me and clapped my back, then took me outside and told me if I hurt his daughter, he would be disappointed in me.
Not kill me.
Not bury me.
Disappointed.
That somehow hurt worse.
The club celebrated too.