Chapter 17
Luca
We fall asleep, and when we wake up, our bodies come together again in a gravitational pull. This time, the sex is slow and worshipful, and when I come, I swear I feel it in my soul.
Afterward, we lay facing each other, for once, my arms not tangled around Evan, though I have ahold of his hand as I trace light, lazy patterns on his palm.
We play Evan’s twenty-questions game in fits and starts, asking random questions and then falling silent for a while, content to just be.
“How did you end up becoming a yoga teacher?”
“After I left the Reivers, I traveled around picking up any kind of legit work I could get. Carnival roustabout, construction, deep sea fishing—you name it, I did it. As long as the work was temporary and not illegal, I didn’t care how I earned my paycheck.”
“Sounds adventurous.”
I shrug. “Back then, it was just about surviving until I picked up work as a maintenance man at a little strip mall in Anaheim.
There was a little yoga studio with a wonky AC unit that kept going out.
It was run by Anne Marie, a feisty older woman who looked like she was in her forties but was closing in on seventy.
“One afternoon, after working on the thermostat during one of her classes, I made a cocky remark about how stretching wasn’t much of a workout. Anne Marie challenged me to stay for the next class, and witchy woman that she was, she enjoyed showing me how fucking wrong I was.
“After that, I was addicted. Everything in my life had always been so fast and brutal. Spending three hours focusing on my breathing and working on one pose for thirty minutes at a time calmed me and helped me find myself.”
“I’m glad you found something that brought you peace.”
“Believe me, so am I. I don’t know where I’d be right now if I hadn’t found yoga.”
“Maybe sometime, you could show me a few poses and maybe some more of those breathing exercises,” he asks shyly. “I think I could use some centering.”
“I’d love to,” I tell him. The teacher in me already planning the poses I think would be the most beneficial for him. And, of course, because it’s Evan, my mind strays to very un-teacherly thoughts as I start thinking about the other poses I’d like to work on with him.
My fantasy is so vivid that it takes a minute for my mind to process Evan’s next question.
“What made you finally leave the Reivers?”
I freeze, all my fantasies dying a cold, hard death from one question.
“I don’t tell people that story—ever.”
Evan’s eyes instantly go big and remorseful. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think. I’m so fucking stupid sometimes.” He starts to pull his hand away from me. “I ruin everything.”
I tighten my grip on him and don’t let him move.
“You don’t ruin anything,” I tell him, having a second to calm down and realize I have to share this with him. “You deserve to know.”
“Are you sure?” he asks carefully.
No. I’m not sure. I always knew my past would come for me someday—but not this way. Instead of a bullet to the back of the head, it’s probably going to cost me the man I love. I grip Evan’s hand even tighter. It may be the last time I get to touch him.
“I am,” I lie, and then I’m quiet for a moment while I try to figure out the best way to tell this story. It’s important I tell it in a way that doesn’t make excuses or glorify the bad choices I made. Evan deserves to see the real me.
Finally, I decide the only way to tell why I left the Reivers is to tell him why I joined.
“I grew up in Brixton, Kentucky. You may have read about it because it’s known as being the meth capital of the south.”
“Didn’t they make a documentary about it?” Evan asks.
“Probably.” I shrug. “In that town, it seems like everybody is either making it, doing it, selling it, or putting somebody in jail for it. My family sold it. Strictly low-level shit. We barely made enough to make the trailer park rent most months after the big boys took their cut.”
“What was your family like?”
“My mom died before I was out of diapers. My dad and my two brothers were….” I search for a good description of them. “Hard. They were hard.”
“In what way?”
“Nothing got to them. They were men, which meant you didn’t feel or ever express any emotion other than anger. It was the only acceptable emotion, and shit was, there was a lot of that flying around.”
Evan squeezes my hand. “It must have been difficult to grow up in a home like that.”
“Fuck, yes, it was. Especially because I wasn’t like them.
I felt things, and I liked music and reading and all the shit they thought was unmanly.
When I was six, I brought a book home once from school that a teacher had given me.
” I shiver, lost in the memory of being force-fed every page of that book.
“After that, I learned to hide anything they thought made me less of a man.”
Tears form in Evan’s eyes. I hate seeing them there for me. Maybe the little boy I’m telling him about deserved his empathy, but he’s about to find out the kind of man he turned into.
“When I was twelve or thirteen and realized both boys and girls could make my cock stand up, I panicked.”
“What did you do?”
“I became hard like them. Harder. I threw away all the books I’d hidden underneath my bed and started pumping iron, screwing any girl who was willing, and beating up anybody I could find to prove I was a man.
“Then, when I was about sixteen, I did a stint in juvie with a Reivers prospect, and when we both got out, he took me to a party in Adeline at their clubhouse. I met Digger Mcree and Hawk Devon and damned if they didn’t make me feel special.
I was surrounded by a bunch of tough men like my dad and brothers, but instead of being cold and mean, were a brotherhood with a set of ideals they pledged to stand up for.
Ideals that were closely aligned to the shit I’d heard my whole life.
Ideals I thought if I lived by, I could silence the kid inside of me who felt too much and thought other boys were pretty.
Add in the fact that joining the Reivers meant coin in my pocket and a way to get out of the family business, I signed up to be a prospect, and a little past my seventeenth birthday, I put on the Reivers cut and became a full-fledged member.
“By the time I turned eighteen, I knew I’d fucked up. The Reivers weren’t a brotherhood, they were a violent syndicate run by two psychopaths who got off on blood, hate, and power.
I take a deep, painful breath. “I was lucky for a long time. I was a good fighter, so Digger kept me in the cages to win him money, and Hawk put me on Grave’s crew, and I eventually became his second in command.”
“How was that lucky?”
“I didn’t have to go on the regular patrols. They go out looking to hurt anybody different than them.” I look at Evan. “You’ve covered enough of their attacks in your articles. You know their MO.”
Evan nods, and I go on. “Not that I wasn’t doing some heinous shit on Grave’s crew, but we were dealing with cartel heads and traffickers.
I could tell myself I was ridding the world of some trash, but eventually, that became too much for me.
The nightmares started, and every time I picked up a gun, my hand shook.
“Grave noticed, and after a stand-off where I got myself shot rather than have to shoot somebody, Grave sent me on a yearlong assignment where all I had to do was jack cars and get them across the border. When I came back, Grave had supposedly been extradited to Canada, and I was assigned to another crew.” I pause wishing for one of the cigarettes from the carton I’d thrown away on our trip up here.
“This crew made regular patrols on a nightly basis. I made it one week with them. We’d been sent to Memphis to broker a deal with a local gun dealer there. The deal had gone down easier than usual, and it left the guys restless and ready to burn off some steam.
The whole patrol went downtown to a local bar.
Two pretty girls were there kissing and holding hands and an asshat Reiver named Monty had gone over to them and hit on them.
When they sent him packing, he got drunk and talked the crew into some payback.
He ordered me to follow them when they left and scare them into a back alley where the rest of the crew would be waiting.
“I just stood watching the girls who had to be around the same age as I was but were so much fresher and unscarred than I was. The way they looked into each other’s eyes like they were everything to each other.
I stalked up to them and peeled off a fifty from my wallet. “You are being targeted. Call a cab and have it meet you at the back door. They just looked up at me in fright. ‘Do it now,’ I roared, which finally caused them to follow my orders.
“I watched them until they got in their cab, and then I met with the rest of the Reivers in that alley and beat each and every one of them, especially Monty into the ground.
“I drove back to Adeline that night and told Digger I wanted to be culled. Being culled is a—”
“I know,” Evan interrupts. “Johnny told me about his experience…he said only two people ever survived it. And you showed me your scars.”
I nod. “Johnny was one, and I was the other. We are the surviving members of a shitty club. But the night I walked into that cage, I didn’t care if I lived or died. I just wanted the ugliness and violence to stop.”
“Some part of you cared,” Evan says. “I can’t imagine someone who didn’t care about living would fight that hard to stay alive.”
“I think I wanted the punishment,” I confess
“Why?”
“Because I deserved it.”
Evan doesn’t say anything, and I give him time to soak up the story I just told him, each second feeling like forever. Finally, I can’t wait any longer. “Now that you know who I am, I understand if you want nothing to do with me.”