Chapter Thirty-Two—Diesel #2
Swiping his arm against his snotty nose, Axel nodded. “Do you still love your real mom and dad?”
“Aunt Meggie and Uncle Christopher are my real mom and dad.” Diesel glared at Axel. “Unless you don’t consider me your real brother.”
“Reb don’t consider you her real brother,” Axel announced.
“I don’t want to talk about Rebel,” Diesel snapped. “This is about you and me. So answer me.”
Axel narrowed his eyes. “Dad says a screamed dog always kicks, motherfucker.”
“A kicked dog always hollers.”
“Yeah, that. Whatever, ‘cause you screaming and kicking, and kicking and hollering. CJ told me that means a guilty motherfucker makes the loudest noise. And you’re fucking guilty.”
Diesel straightened. “Of what?”
“Of leaving me and Reb and CJ and Mom and Dad. You probably don’t consider us your real family.”
“That isn’t true!”
Axel kicked him. “Shut up! You made Mom and Rebel cry. They barely wanted to eat or nothing. They just kept staring at your stupid spot.” Tears rushed to his eyes again.
“I didn’t care,” he yelled. “Me and Ransom and Ryder threw all the stuffs you used in the garbage ‘cause you threw us away.” Swiping at his tears, he poked Diesel’s chest. “You stopped visiting and everything.”
“I called you, CJ, and Uncle Christopher.”
“You’re stupid,” Axel declared.
“Axel—”
“I’m not listening! You bring a man to your house, don’t feed him, don’t have nothing to do, and then be mean and say he don’t see you as his brother.”
Axel constantly referring to himself as a man amused the fuck out of Diesel—but the kid was right. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. Do you know how you feel about Rule? You still love him but you don’t like him?”
“Yeah.” Suspicion laced the word.
“That’s how I feel about my biological parents.”
“Why do you love them?”
“I never said I loved them.”
“But…” Axel’s little face scrunched up. “You said I got to read the lines sometimes.”
“Read between the lines. I did say that.”
“Context clues.”
“Correct.”
“You mentioning me loving my brother but not liking him and then saying that’s how you feel means you love them. You didn’t got to say it.”
“I didn’t have to say it. I disagree with your assumption—”
“It’s not an assumption. You interfered it.”
“Inferred. I did not.”
“Gaslighter,” he accused. “Pretending I don’t know what you mean ‘cause you didn’t say it.
Whether you admit it, you can’t love nobody that just left you.
Me, Ran, and Ry talked about it. If Mom and Dad left us, we’d call them motherfuckers and hate them for the rest of our lives.
We’d blow them up. We’d build a mud dungeon, throw them in all hogtied, and then let bugs, snakes, and worms eat them.
We’d wrap them in Saran wrap and smother them. We’d—”
“I get the point,” Diesel interrupted, impressed by their creativity. “As I said, love is complicated.”
“If you stopped loving them, maybe you’d know how much we love you.”
“I do know.”
“Nuh uh! You wouldn’t keep saying we don’t think you’re our brother ‘cause we ask you about those stupid motherfuckers. It don’t matter what they did. We love you.”
“It matters to me.”
“’Cause you’re stupid.”
“You don’t understand. Aunt Meggie and Uncle Christopher would never walk away from you, so you’ll never know how that feels.”
Folding his arms, Axel glowered at him. “I don’t got to know how that feels to know you shouldn’t be mean to us ‘cause of them. We were never mean to you. Mom said it’s okay to ask questions to understand something better.
She said it can help you help somebody. Or help yourself.
I just want to know about them to help you so you won’t leave again but fuck you.
I don’t got to know. You know this—you ever leave me again and I’m never talking to you for the rest of my life.
If I don’t plan a way to fucking kill you for hurting my feelings.
” He puffed out his little chest. “Am I clear?”
Diesel smiled. “Perfectly,” he said gravely.
“Promise?” Not giving Diesel a chance to respond, Axel held out his hand. “Let’s shake on it.”
“Promise,” Diesel swore, shaking Axel’s hand. “Why don’t you play a game on your cell phone?”
“It’s at the hospital with Ransom. I gave it to him before he cut class today. He’s putting a VPN on it, so I can see a porn site from overseas.”
“Excuse me? You said girls are gross.”
“The ones my age are, but the grown girls in the videos are so pretty,” Axel explained. “They’re almost the beautifulest in the world.”
“Almost?”
“Texas girls are the beautifulest,” Axel said. “Ryder said everything’s bigger in Texas, including ta-tas. That makes them the beautifulest.”
“Beauty isn’t only about a woman’s body, Ax. It’s also about what’s inside them. Their soul. Their outlook on life.”
Kicking his legs, Axel rolled his eyes. “You don’t believe that, ‘cause you wouldn’t have married Tabitha. Ransom thinks she probably sucks good cock.”
Diesel choked. “What the fuck do you know about that? When I was your age, I couldn’t imagine that concept.”
Axel rolled his eyes again and shook his head. “When you was my age, you wasn’t around no MC. Even Rule, who was always praying, liked club girls. It’s how we grew up. Reb…she’s going to be okay, huh?”
“She’ll make a full recovery.”
“Okay, so the Blonde Viper…we like to spy on her for so many different reasons. She got real cool music. She makes cool dives in the pool. We try not to look when her ta-tas are out and we pitch our fucking phones when she skinny dips. It’s gross.
She’s our sister. Anyway, when Rule first started pulling away from her, her and Mattie was in the natatorium and they said Rule was starting to look at them differently ‘cause of the club girls. They said he couldn’t be mean to them but that he was objecting them because he didn’t understand they weren’t choosing to be a club girl. ”
“Objectifying. They may have had a point.”
“Objectifying?” Axel thought about that. “Object’s in that word.”
“It is.”
“That means girls are objects to Rule?”
“Basically.”
“That’s not right. Girls are girls. They’re alive. Objects aren’t.”
“A concept some people find hard to understand.”
“Girls are supposed to listen to men, aren’t they?”
“Girls are supposed to do whatever makes them happy, whether or not a guy approves. Or girls and guys in a relationship listen to each other.”
“That means compromise. Dad says that’s what him and Mom does, but that’s not true ‘cause he does shit, she finds out and gets mad, then he undoes shit.”
Diesel laughed. “That about sums it up.”
“Mom is so cool. Did you know she could fight? And she’s ordering motherfuckers’ deaths. She’s such a badass. I didn’t know she had it in her. I thought she was only there to take care of us and we always had to protect her.”
“Soft on the outside but strong on the inside,” Diesel said.
“She lets us do a lot more stuffs than Dad. I mean, stuffs that’s not about the MC.”
“She does.”
“You don’t want to talk about your mom because Mom reminds you of her?”
“My mother and Aunt Meggie look nothing alike. Aunt Meggie’s much shorter, blonde and blue-eyed. The woman who gave birth to me was brown-haired. A shade lighter and it would’ve been blonde. She also had brown eyes.”
“What was her name?”
Diesel swallowed and glanced away, then heaved in a breath. He’d tried so hard to forget everything about her, but she lived in his brain because he wanted to ask her why. Or how could she. Or any of the million questions on the fringes of his mind. “Theresa. Her name was Theresa.”
“Was she pretty like Mom?”
“She was very pretty.”
“So’s Mom.” Axel began swinging his legs again. “She’s not from Texas but she’s still beautiful.”
“She is,” Diesel agreed, the pain of remembering his mother rising up in him and catapulting him back to his childhood self.
On his thirteenth birthday, his mother and father argued and she’d packed her bags to leave.
That evening, the cheap icing melting on his homemade cake, Diesel begged her to stay and physically restrained her when it seemed as if she’d ignore him.
She’d looked him in his fucking eyes and told him she didn’t want him because he’d been an accident who’d ruined her life.
She hadn’t left, though. An hour after the blow up, during which his father destroyed the fucking cake she’d labored over, she came to Diesel’s room and apologized.
She never mentioned running away again. Until he came home one day and found her gone. He’d kept vigil for two days, believing she’d change her mind. Even if she left Dad, she’d return for Diesel. It didn’t happen.
Clenching his jaw, he forced a smile, hoping his answers satisfied Axel’s curiosity.
“What was your dad’s name?”
“Skylar.”
“Why’d he leave?”
“He began drinking heavily after my mother deserted us. It devastated him. I went to school one day, came home, and found my father and his things gone.” He’d left Diesel in the same manner as his mother.
“He was a shitty chicken for that.”
“Chickenshit.”
“That’s what I said.”
“A shitty chicken and chickenshit are two entirely different things, Ax.”
“They’re both a chicken with shit, right?”
“One’s shit from the chicken. The other’s a chicken full of shit.”
Axel squinted. “So chickenshit don’t mean a chicken taking a shit?”
Laughing, Diesel shook his head. Axel confused words a lot, but he had a very good understanding of the world around him.
“Oh, brother,” Axel declared, slamming his palm against his forehead. “Anyway, I hate to break it to you, but your dad was both. He was also a motherfucker.”
“Agreed.”
“Why do you still love them if they left you?”
Diesel shrugged. “I don’t really love them.”
“You’re confusing me ‘cause you’re so confused.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Nuh uh. It’s simple. A mom and dad’s not supposed to leave their children. If they do, you’re required to hate those motherfuckers for the rest of your life.”
“It isn’t so cut and dry. I loved my parents for fifteen years.”