Chapter 11 #2
“June keeps the report. Leah is my emergency contact until I change the paperwork. A prospect can enforce no-idling without knowing one thing about me.” I looked at Ryder. “He has no household assignment.”
Ryder kept his hands flat on his thighs. “Take me off the list.”
June drew a line through his name. The pen went across the page once, and five years of Ryder being called before anybody thought to ask me ended without ceremony.
At the hospital the intake clerk had asked for my husband, and I had opened my mouth before I understood that the man who knew every prescription I owned had made himself the last person I wanted answering.
Across the aisle, Jess asked Ryder something about the infirmary room.
He didn’t hear her. She touched the sleeve of the folded jacket, waited for him to turn, and said it again close to his right side.
I had whispered filthy things into that ear at club dinners and watched him lose the next whole conversation while everybody blamed the noise.
Jess wasn’t flirting. Ryder had chosen her chair, and I hated him for making an accommodation look like intimacy.
I stayed seated until the aisle cleared, unwilling to let Ryder see what standing cost. To reach the door I would have to pass on his right or ask him to move. I stood, picked up my purse, and came at him from the left.
“Your bins are on the porch,” I said.
He kept watching Jax until Jess glanced past him and he noticed me there. I didn’t repeat it.
He turned his whole body so he could read my mouth. “What did you say?”
“You heard enough.” Years I had spent saving him from that question.
Moving around tables, changing sides of the sidewalk, putting myself between his right shoulder and the world.
None of it was owed to a man who had set another woman down in the place it built.
“If you want the information, ask for it properly.”
Ryder looked at the empty air beside his good ear where Jess had been sitting. His jaw worked. “Please repeat it.”
“Your belongings are outside. A prospect takes them to your bunk after the yard rotation. Anything still in the house, you send a written list to June.” I stayed on his left even when turning my head would have brought me nearer to him. “Did you hear all of that?”
“I heard you.”
I closed my purse over the knife. “Good. We won’t have a misunderstanding when I put you out myself.”
Jess pressed the jacket against her stomach and moved off Ryder’s right side.
Shame took her eyes to the floor, and I refused to comfort a woman for recognizing a cruelty after she had helped perform it.
Ryder stayed where both of us had left him, and the part of the room he had trained himself to keep clear for me had nobody in it.
Colin came through the doorway with the bathroom bin, another stacked against his chest, and the grocery bag of mail hooked over his wrist. He was young enough to check every face in the room before deciding where to stand, and Ryder’s rank turned him toward the officers’ corridor until I stopped him.
“Those don’t go in a club office. Take them to the bunk Ryder’s been assigned. If he changes bunks, he moves them himself.”
Colin looked at Ryder for confirmation. Men had done that for five years. They asked me a question, took the answer, then checked my husband’s face to find out whether mine counted. Ryder had corrected them sometimes, before I noticed, which made every one of those corrections feel conditional now.
“She answered you,” Ryder said. He took neither bin. “Beside my bunk. Leave the seals.”
“Your batteries are in the bathroom bin,” I said. “Open that one in front of him if he needs them before he finishes. Don’t break the others.”
Colin shifted the weight against his chest. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Eden.” I hated ma’am nearly as much as the frightened look he gave Ryder afterward. “You’re not in trouble for asking. You’ll be in trouble if you ignore my answer because a man outranks me.”
Ryder’s eyes came to mine. He had stood at this door two years ago and made a nineteen-year-old say June’s name out loud after calling her Bear’s old lady twice.
“You heard her,” Ryder told Colin. “Don’t ask me to approve anything she owns.”
“He doesn’t get credit for repeating me,” I said, and caught Colin’s apology before it left his mouth. “Go. I’m angry at him, not you.”
Colin carried my husband’s razor and funeral jacket into the officers’ hall in front of thirty people. Nobody laughed, and that disappointed the ugliest part of me.
Bear stopped beside us with the revised list. “Colin taking that as an order from Eden?”
“He is now. If anybody sends Ryder’s property back without my asking, it goes in the burn barrel.” I put my hand on a chair back, which was as near as I meant to come to admitting I needed one. “I want the entry restriction in writing. Copies to June and to me.”
“You’ll have the order tonight,” Bear said. “Every man on this property hears it from my mouth before the shift changes. Fire, gunfire, gas, or a medical call you make yourself. Everything else comes to you first, and any man who treats that as negotiable answers to me.”
“In writing.”
“Not while we’re closed.” He said it the way he had said the gate would open at noon, and I understood he had decided it before I asked.
“A written order lives in a folder. Folders get photographed. Somebody inside my fence is feeding Silas and I can’t put a name to him, and the first page that leaves this building with your house, your medication, and your movements on it is a map.
You get my voice now. My signature the day the gate opens. ”
“Your voice can be misremembered by whoever finds it convenient.”
“It can.” He didn’t soften it. “That’s the trade. I’d rather tell you what it is than pretend it isn’t one.”
Every argument I had was correct and not one of them moved him. He had a leak he couldn’t find and plywood over his windows, and I had a piece of paper I wanted in my hand. I could hear how small that sounded out loud. It was not small.
“Then the men hear it twice,” I said. “Tonight and again in the morning, with June standing there when you say it.”
“Done.” Bear went toward the table with the list.
Ryder watched the corridor where Colin had gone with the bins. “Did you keep anything of mine in the bedroom?”
The question showed hope so plainly that I almost enjoyed the answer. “The mattress has the dent you left in it. I’ll deal with that when I’m strong enough to turn it.”
He shut his eyes for a moment and opened them and offered nothing.
I had wanted to hurt him and I had, and it arrived clean, with no apology behind it.
He had given Jess the part of himself that used to know how to take care of me.
I could give his batteries to a prospect and his side of the bed to the air.
He followed me as far as the common-hall door. “Eden.”
I stopped on his left and let him miss the first time I answered, then turned so he could see my mouth. I wasn’t going to let him call it mockery of an injury he didn’t choose. “What do you want, Ryder?”
His attention went to the pouch at my hip. “What did Aris say about tonight.”
I let the refusal sit there while the hall emptied around us. “No.”
“I’m not asking to come in the house or touch your medicine. Tell me what sends you back to the hospital.” He kept it under the noise of the hall. “If something happens on my watch?—”
“Nothing happens on your watch.” I stepped close enough that he couldn’t claim a missed word.
His eyes followed my mouth, and having all of his attention still worked on me.
“You resigned from knowing whether I slept. You put your jacket on another woman after smoke put me in an ambulance. You don’t get the husband’s part after everybody goes home. ”
“This isn’t about a part.”
“Say it in front of Jess.” I pointed at her, near the far wall with Jax. “Ask her what my discharge papers say. You wanted a new family in this clubhouse. Let them answer the next time you’re frightened.”
“I won’t ask again,” Ryder said.
What came instead of satisfaction was the winter I had bronchitis in the second apartment, Ryder on the bathroom tile at three in the morning reading the same instruction sheet four times because he was terrified of missing the line that mattered.
I had loved him for that fear. Now I wanted him to carry it with nowhere to set it down.
“If you want a wife standing on your right,” I said, “ask the woman carrying your child.”
Leah was already at the door with my pouch flat on her palm, waiting for me to take it myself.