Chapter 2 #2
Thirty seconds. Then I put it away and look at the road and the formation ahead of me. I breathe in the sound of nine engines and I ride.
The Harte County clubhouse is a converted farm building twenty minutes off the main highway, down a road that doesn't appear on any map I've ever seen.
Their Prez is a man called Darnell who is approximately the size of a refrigerator and who greets Razor with a handshake that turns into a brief shoulder-grip that tells me these two men have history going back further than any formal arrangement.
The brothers spread out the way they do when they arrive somewhere that isn't hostile but isn't home either. They’re alert without looking alert, comfortable without being careless.
I've noticed this is a skill the patched members have that I don't have yet, this particular way of occupying a space that reads as relaxed and is actually anything but.
I make a note to myself to watch it and learn it.
Seb appears at my shoulder.
"You're doing the hovering thing," he says quietly.
"What hovering thing?"
"The thing where you stand slightly behind everyone else and try to look like you belong without committing to actually doing anything.
It makes you look like you're waiting for permission.
" He nods toward where the Harte County brothers are gathered near the far wall.
"We're not guests. We're Black Saints on a courtesy call. Stand like that."
I adjust. I put my feet a little wider and my shoulders a little back and I stop looking for somewhere to be and just am somewhere. Seb glances over and gives a small nod that means better, and then wanders off to find something to lean against.
Twenty minutes into the visit, one of the Harte County brothers asks which of the Black Saints wants a run to the diner down the road to pick up food for everyone. There's a beat where nobody moves, and then Cash looks at me with his eyebrows raised, just slightly, and I understand.
"I'll go," I say.
"Good man." Knuckles doesn't look at me when he says it.
He's already turned back to whatever conversation he was in.
But he said it, and Knuckles doesn't hand out those two words to people who haven't earned them, even in small ways, and the warmth of it goes somewhere it probably shouldn't, somewhere embarrassingly close to pride.
I take the order from eight Black Saints and four Harte County brothers, which is twelve separate opinions about what constitutes a decent sandwich. A few minutes later, I ride down to the diner, and I get it all right on the first try without having written any of it down.
When I get back, Pops spots the bag in my hand and crosses the room as he holds out a twenty-dollar bill. "For the tip," he says. "You always tip on a run."
I take the twenty and I file that information away alongside everything else I'm filing away.
Every instruction, every observation, every unspoken rule that I'm picking up by watching people who've been doing this for years.
There's no manual for being a prospect. There's just attention, and either you pay it or you don't.
I'm paying it.
On the ride back the formation is looser, the business done, the mood easy.
Cash and Ramsey drop back and ride either side of me for a few miles.
They say nothing before they go back to their positions, which I realize afterward was their version of a welcome.
Shadow catches my eye in his mirror once and gives a nod that could mean anything or nothing.
Pops rides past me on the outside when we come off the highway and gives me a look that on a different face would be a smile but on Pops' face just means he noticed you did something right.
I watch Cash and Ramsey slot back into formation ahead of me and I think about what Seb said the first week.
He’d told me that those two operate like one brain in two bodies, that they've been riding together so long they don't need signals or words.
It shows. When Cash leans into a curve Ramsey is already leaning.
When Ramsey eases off the throttle Cash has already read the reason for it in the road ahead.
Watching them ride is like watching something that's been refined past the point where you can see the effort anymore.
That's what years inside this club looks like from the back of the formation. Not the patches or the reputation or anything you'd see in a photograph. Just two men on bikes who know each other well enough to share a mind on the road.
That's what I'm working toward. That's the thing that can't be rushed or faked or shortcut. You just have to show up, every day, until you're part of it.
Seb pulls level. "First run," he says.
"Yeah."
"How was it?"
I look at the road ahead of us, at the town coming up in the distance. I spot the familiar water tower and the church spire, note the particular flatness of the sky over this part of the county that I've looked at my whole life and never thought much about until right now.
"Good," I say. "It was good."
Seb nods. "Wait till you do a real one."
I don't ask what he means by that. I already know the answer is something I'll understand when I'm ready to understand it and not a second before.
The bar at the clubhouse is busy on Friday nights.
I'm still getting used to the way the main room transforms from a working space into something louder and looser once the week is done. The patched members bring their energy in differently on a Friday. They’re less focused, more expansive.
The sweetbutts who hang around the club on weeknights triple in number by nine o'clock.
The music goes up as the drinks go down while the room gets warm from constantly moving bodies.
I've been nursing the same beer for forty minutes.
It's not that I don't want a drink. I want several.
But I've been on gate duty the last three nights and I'm operating on not enough sleep.
I know from watching other men in this club that the ones who make mistakes make them when they're tired and drunk at the same time.
I'm not going to be one of those men. Not this early.
Not when there's still so much to prove.
So I nurse my beer and watch the room. I think about the Sportster in bay four that needs new brake lines, and I'm so absorbed in mentally mapping out the job that I almost don't notice the woman who slides onto the stool next to me.
She's one of the regulars; I've seen her around all week.
Blonde, mid-twenties, wearing the kind of top that's designed to make certain things very difficult to ignore.
She leans on the bar and smiles at me with the confidence of someone who has never once been turned down and doesn't expect tonight to be different.
"You're the new prospect," she says.
"That's me."
"I'm Jade."
"Austin."
She tilts her head. "You've been over here on your own all night. That doesn't seem like much of a Friday."
"I'm good, thanks." I say it without any heat in it, just a fact. I'm good. Thanks. I turn back to my beer and the mental map of the Sportster's brake lines.
She stays there for a second, and I can feel the small recalibration happening beside me, the slight surprise of a woman who expected a different outcome. Then she slides off the stool and moves on down the bar to find someone whose Friday is going differently, and that's the end of it.
A fresh bottle appears in front of me. I look up.
Cam is leaning on her side of the bar with her elbows on the wood, her chin in her hand.
Her face is pinched in that way she gets when she's watching something she has thoughts about.
She's Brick's woman, which I knew before I ever set foot in this club, and she's been running this bar since before most of the current prospects were born.
She knows every name, every history, every preference in this room.
She stores all of it behind eyes that are quieter than her mouth and sharper than most people give her credit for.
"You didn't have to do that," she says.
"Do what?"
"Turn Jade down like you're doing penance."
I look at my new beer. "I'm not doing penance."
"No?" She tilts her head. "Because you've sat here all night turning your bottle in circles and not talking to anyone and being so deliberately normal about it that it's practically screaming fuck off, I’m doing penance."
"I'm just tired."
"You're tired of being here instead of somewhere else." She straightens up and takes a cloth and wipes down the bar even though it doesn't need it. Cam always cleans things when she's talking through something. "I'm not judging you for it. She seemed like a good person from what I saw of her."
It took me a second to realize she wasn’t talking about Jade. When it hits me who she actually meant, I don't answer her.
"Ruby told me she came to the diner the morning before she left. Had a strawberry milkshake and pecan pie, same as always." Cam folds the cloth. "Paid her own bill. Didn't cry. Told Ruby she was going to be a doctor."
The bar is loud around us, and I hold my bottle and I look at the wood grain of the counter.
"That's good," I say.
"It is good." Cam leans on the bar again. "She'll be great. Anyone who can walk out of a clubhouse like she did with her head that far up is going to be great at whatever she puts her mind to."
I look at her then. "You watched her leave."
"I watch everything." No apology in it. Just the truth. "I saw what she was when she walked in and what she was when she walked out and they weren't the same thing. That's a resilient woman, Austin. She'll be fine."
I nod. My emotions are complicated, making a knot in my throat that threatens to suffocate me and I wait for it to pass.
"She's not coming back, you know," Cam says, and her voice is quiet now, under the music and the noise of the room. Not unkind. Just honest.
"I know," I say. "That was the point."