Epilogue #2
“Fuck, man, that looked like it stung. Maybe we should leave them to it. We could go beg Nell to give us a preview.”
“Yeah.” Grunt sounded a bit reluctant to leave at first.
“He would never do anything to push that further,” I insisted.
“I know. Not worried as much about her as I am him. When he realized how badly he fucked up before he went into that spiral.”
“Thought that was to do with Simone,” I said.
“Nah. It had everything to do with that woman right there.” We watched as Knuckles marched in through the open kitchen door and didn’t come back out again.
Cassidy pulled herself together and dropped the ramp on the back of her truck.
“I’m going to help unload. Do me a favor and send Grease around, too. ”
“Will do, brother.” I turned and headed back out front to my wife and the rest of my club brothers who started to gather around for the big reveal.
Once everyone was accounted for in the clubhouse parking lot, Brady hopped into the forklift and started it up.
It was only then that I caught on to the fact that they had some kind of boom attachment hooked up to it and he planned to raise the canvas shield off my wife’s creation as soon as she gave him the signal.
“Thank you all for coming out here for this,” Nell called to everyone. “When the club first stepped up to help me, a few of the members got a first-hand look at one of my works in progress.”
“Classic Sin,” Grease called out. “I still want to punch the motherfucker in the dick who bought it.”
Heat flooded into Nell’s face and she ducked her head forward to hide behind a waterfall of her mahogany hair.
It took a couple seconds, but eventually she shook off her cute little bashful moment and nodded her head at Grease.
“It is well taken care of, I promise. Besides, a few people requested that I make something similar for the club and that was before they saw the paint job in the end.” Everyone laughed because we’d all heard about the hard time Grunt had given my woman about fucking up her art and making Classic Sin look ugly.
The asshole’s face turned red with embarrassment as my wife glanced his way.
“How the hell was I supposed to know she was a fucking Goddess with paints, too?” He asked and everyone laughed at his expense.
“I don’t want to put this off any longer because you’ve all been bugging me to get a peek ahead of time. So,” my wife turned to Brady and gave him a thumbs up. “This is my gift to the club for bringing me in and making me part of the family.”
She walked straight into my arms and turned around to see the minute the larger than life Harley was unveiled. I wrapped my arms around her body and walked us a little closer to get a look at the detail. “Holy fuck, woman!” I whispered in awe against her ear.
The tank alone was a work of genius. She had fabricated sheet metal on either side into perfect cutouts of our anarchy king logo, so no matter which side of the bike you looked at, you saw his face.
The exhaust pipe looked like an original off a Fat Boy, but she had cut out the main line of our code and “Nobody Fucks With the Kings” had been stamped along the length of it.
Somehow, the way she shaded and shadowed with the paints, it made the words stand out amidst the rest like it was multi-dimensional.
The craziest part, though, was that she didn’t just make a larger-than-life Harley.
This motherfucker had a rider on it and his face was our anarchy king and as I dropped my arms from my woman and walked around the piece to see it from every angle, it became clear that she made the leather cut it wore look exactly like ours from the back.
When I got to the backside of the piece, the rider’s right side and the half that faced out toward the highway and away from the clubhouse, there was an in memory patch down low at the bottom of the vest. At the top of that patch was the word LOST and at the bottom was my father’s road name, Sticky.
Just beneath that in a more feminine, italic font was my mother’s name, Stace.
My shoulders shook and eyes burned with tears before I could even pull myself together.
I wished Angel was here to see it, but she’d taken off a few days after it was confirmed that our father killed himself.
I hoped like hell she’d find her way back to us.
I knew in my heart that she held herself responsible, but if she’d stuck around, I could have told her that it wasn’t on either of us for throwing the truth in his face.
He already knew - enough anyway - that he was planning to take himself out with or without the little nudge we’d inadvertently given him.
My wife’s arms wrapped around me from behind and I turned in her arms and leaned forward to bury my face in the crook of her neck, so my brothers wouldn’t see me bawl like a baby. I was there trying to pull myself together in her arms when I heard Crutch hiss, “Fuck!” He’d seen the patch, too.
My woman thought of every-fucking-thing when she put her monument to the Kings together.
That was what it was, a fucking monument.
A memorial piece. A celebration of our club and all we stood for.
It was all there, the good, bad, and even the ugly bits, with little pieces of our hearts wrapped up in one big package.
Each time I turned and looked it over, something new stood out.
She fucking got it. Got me. Got our club.
If I ever doubted that the woman loved me and my brothers, that was wiped away with the work she’d done for us.
Everyone thought Classic Sin was a masterpiece but it was nothing compared to…
“What did you call this one?” I finally asked.
“Oh, my love, this is Anarchy in Motion,” Nell said as she squeezed her arms tight around my middle.
“I fucking love you,” I told her just before my brothers swarmed around us and started to pass my woman around so they could each steal one of her hugs.
I could feel their hearts bleeding all over my woman in appreciation for what she’d done for us.
With each hug, I knew she felt their promise to always be there for her.
Their thanks for seeing us the way most never understood.
She took what was at the center of our brotherhood and put it on display to stand as a reminder for everyone who passed it by.
“You did good,” Crutch said to me.
“He asked to meet her,” I said remembering how my father knew I had met my one already.
Crutch tapped the memorial patch and then looked me in the eyes and said, “I think he did.”
Thank you for reading Property of Baffle.