Chapter 6 Rex #2
"I don’t know what to do, Rex. Shit’s disturbing, but you know what it’s like down there. Cops ain’t gonna listen. Got their thumbs up their asses until it’s too late and kids are dead.
"I can’t have that on my conscience as well, man.”
I reached over and grabbed his shoulder. “You don’t have to. I’ll figure something out.”
He released a breath. “I’d go down myself, try to—fuck, I don’t know. How do you reason with a kid like that? He’s on the brink of mass fucking murder because of some bullies. He’s the victim—”
“Until he becomes the perpetrator,” I tacked on grimly. “You can’t travel, anyway. You gotta stay here, continue with the treatment. Ain’t about to lose you, Mav. Not again.”
“I ain’t going nowhere,” he said gruffly. “But even if I wanted to flout my doctor’s orders, I can’t, man. Too shaky on a fucking hog. The pills they got me on are messing with me right now.”
Nodding my understanding, I told him, “You ride here in a cage?”
“Yeah. Hawk’s waiting for me in the parking lot.”
“Good. Leave this with me. I’ll figure something out.”
“Sorry to bring this to your table, Rex. What with Bear and—” He made a gesture with his hands that I fucking felt in my soul.
Life right now was rough.
I squeezed his shoulder again. “Don’t worry about it.”
Guilt etched its way into his expression. “Bear—”
“He’s dying. Won’t be long now.” I cast a look at the hospital. “Just a matter of time no matter what the fucking doctors say.”
“Sorry, brother. Love the bastard. He’s been a dad to all of us.”
Mav wasn’t wrong.
I clenched my jaw. “He has. You go home. Go and corral that Old Lady of yours.”
“You gonna stay here?” he asked uneasily.
“Yeah.”
“The clubhouse is ready to move into.”
“I know.”
We’d been working since the blast to construct a new clubhouse, and it was finally ready. Just in time for Christmas.
Ho, fucking ho.
“You moving out of Rachel’s?”
I didn’t want to talk about this now.
I stared at him until he pulled a face and raised his hands. “I’ll leave it alone.”
When he backed away, heading for wherever Hawk was waiting for him, I called out, “You did the right thing coming to me with this, Mav.”
He twisted around and dipped his chin. “You’re our Solomon, Rex. Wouldn’t want the weight of the decisions you bear every day, but I’m fucking grateful you’re man enough for the task.”
As he strolled between cars, I stayed staring at the hospital window where I knew my dad was slowly dying.
Shoulders hunched against the cold, I knew I was shivering, but I didn’t really care.
Solomon.
Funny how he called me that now when I wasn’t feeling wise, wasn’t even feeling like I had the capability of running the Sinners.
I was just a boy.
A son.
About to lose his dad.
“Maverick?”
He froze, and like he knew what I was about to ask without me saying a damn word, he turned again to face me. “Wynter’s doing okay, Rex.”
I gave him a shaky nod even as my hands curled into tight fists.
He didn’t leave like I thought he would, instead he asked, "Rex?"
"Yeah?"
"Do you know what's wrong with Rachel?"
For a second, I just stared at him.
There were so many things wrong with my woman, after all—I didn’t know where to start.
He angled his head to the side, reading into my expression and my silence without me having to utter a word. “You do. So why don’t you fix things with her?”
“Because…”
It was on the tip of my tongue to say that she didn’t want me to.
That wasn’t a lie. But it wasn’t the full truth either.
“I know why she’s been grouchy as fuck this week.”
“You know that wasn’t what I meant.”
With a sigh, I conceded, “I don’t know what broke her. Not specifically.”
“You didn’t think to ask?”
“I don’t need to ask to know. I—” Air gusted in my cheeks and the cold chill of the night bit into my flesh.
But the ice in my soul that came from the separation Rachel insisted on between us was so much worse than anything nature could throw at me.
“I know when things changed. I can guess what happened. She needs to tell me herself. I can’t look into it.
She’s…” How the fuck did I verbalize this?
“She’s not like other women. She doesn’t want me to fix things for her. ”
“She’s not fixing it herself,” he said, clearly unimpressed.
From his position, I got it.
I’d be unimpressed too.
I was her man.
I was supposed to slay her dragons and fix her crown.
Rachel, however, was capable of slaying her own damn dragons and fixing her own damn crown.
How did you make reparations for a woman who didn’t need you to?
“I’m there for her. Always. When she’s ready, she’ll come to me.”
It sounded like a weak as fuck excuse, and I half expected Maverick to snigger at me and call me a prick, but if anyone knew the lengths I’d gone to for Rachel, it was him.
Giving my daughter to another family to raise had been hell, but I’d done it. For Rachel. To keep her alive. That was just the tip of the Rachel Laker iceberg.
He blinked at me. “I think, if you’re not careful, you’ll be waiting the rest of your life for her to make things right. She’s stuck. You both are. You need to cut the cord or bind it around you even tighter. Trust me, man, I’d know.”
With that, he left, and I watched him wend his way through the cars.
He wasn’t wrong.
I knew that.
Peering up at the sky, I released a breath that frosted in front of me and wondered if my girls were looking up at the stars too.
Rachel might be in the same town as me, but for all the distance between us, she could have been in Cali with our daughter.
“Fuck you, Maverick,” I hissed under my breath as I heard a truck start up.
He knew this time of year was always rough on me because Wynter’s birthday was on the fourth of January, so close to Rachel’s. I’d forgotten Rach’s this year, but I knew she’d have gotten my gift by now. Not that she’d thanked me for it.
That she was pissed at me was a given.
Hands clenching into fists at my sides, I stayed staring up at the night sky for a ridiculously sentimental amount of time, trying to figure out what to do.
Maverick wasn’t wrong; that was something I couldn’t escape from, so I didn’t bother trying.
After a while, when the universe didn’t right itself on the wish I settled on a shooting star, I trudged back to Dad’s bedside, re-dressing in the protective gear I had to wear in the ICU, feeling the burden of my position as I sat my weary bones into the armchair I’d been sitting in for hours at a time.
For days and weeks and months since the blast.
I did most of my work here, only leaving for important club business, to rest, and to eat.
But tonight, I didn’t want to work. Not even when Maverick sent me the school shooter’s details.
I wanted to forget this and think about something else.
Swiping through the photos on my phone, I watched Rachel mature from a kid of about eleven to the woman she was today.
I had a Rachel album on my drive, and it was my go-to stress relief.
Each picture was a memory I wanted to hold dear. Each one was a trigger of something I didn’t want to forget.
The time I broke my arm when I jumped in the lake in Verona because some fuckers had pushed her in when she couldn’t swim. That was the first time she’d let me hug her.
The time when—
“Rex?”
My name was one syllable long.
Short. Abrupt. Just like me.
But Dad whispered it on an exhalation.
A rasp.
A death rattle.
My eyes watered as I jerked up onto my feet.
This was the first time he’d had a whisper of consciousness since the clubhouse bombing, and though the relief should have been raw, as I looked down at his ravaged face, his torn-apart body, it was guilt that drowned me.
“Dad?” I whispered back. “I’m here, Dad. I’m here.”
His eyelids fluttered open, bright pink and patchy from burns. “Want—” He let loose a long breath. “Rene.”
I swallowed. “She’s not here anymore, Dad. She’s dead.”
“Need.” A breath. “Her.”
Eyes wet, I reached up and rubbed my thumbs against the lids. “I know, Dad. I know you miss her.”
“No.”
“No?”
The effort it took him to connect his gaze with mine almost blurred the staunch will behind that stare.
“Don’t. Want.” A breath. “To live. Without. Her.” Another. “Anymore.”
Each word was labored. The sounds tortured as he tried to verbalize the impossible.
“It’s not your time to go yet, Dad,” I rasped, wanting to touch him but not wanting to hurt him either. “The doctors want—”
“NO!” he growled, living up to his road name. “NO.”
Then, he broke me, because there was no mistaking what he wanted, no mistaking the command of a man who’d led his own army of Sinners for decades:
“Help. Me.”