Chapter 4 #3
"Since always. You just weren't paying attention." He grins. "So, when's my vote?"
"Ask Razor."
"I did. He said three more months."
"Then three more months."
Seb sighs dramatically. "Fine. But I'm billing you for tonight's gate duty."
It's past midnight when the road name happens, and I'll be honest with you, I'm on my third whiskey. I'm leaning on the bar talking to Cam about something I can't entirely remember, when Cash sidles up on my left looking like a man who's had an excellent idea.
"We need to talk about what we're going to call him," Cash announces to no one in particular, which means to everyone, because Cash is the kind of man who can make a room listen to him without raising his voice.
Ramsey, who is never far, looks up from wherever he was. "We do."
"He can't just be Austin. That's a name. That's what your mom calls you." Cash turns to me. "You need a road name."
"I'm aware." I turn my whiskey in my hands. "I assumed Razor would assign one."
"Razor assigns them sometimes. Sometimes they come from the floor. You got a preference?"
"Not something embarrassing."
Cash considers this. "Define embarrassing."
"Cash."
He grins. "See, I think the bar for embarrassing is higher than you think it is. Knuckles is called Knuckles. Pops is called Pops. Shadow is called Shadow because nobody could tell where he went half the time for about six months."
"That's not embarrassing."
"No, but you've got a situation on your hands, haven't you, Austin?
" Cash leans on the bar and tilts his head, and he has the look of a man who's been sitting on something funny and waiting for the right moment.
"You've got a baby on the way. Possibly.
A baby that isn't here yet. Mother is a piece of work we don't discuss, and you've gone from prospect to patched member without knowing whether you're about to become a father. "
"I'm aware of my own life, Cash, thank you."
"Just setting the scene." He looks at Ramsey. “You overheard Seb calling him something earlier. What was that?”
“No,” I say, “Definitely not that.”
Ramsey's face stays straight but his eyes give him away. "Sprog."
The word lands in the space between us.
Cash points at me slowly. "Sprog."
I look at him. "No."
"Yes."
"Absolutely not."
"Sprooooog." He stretches the word out like he's tasting it. "It works. It's got something."
"It's humiliating."
"It's memorable." Ramsey, the traitor, says this without any inflection whatsoever.
"Knuckles." Cash raises his voice without turning around.
Knuckles comes over from wherever he was, takes in the scene, looks at me, and says, Sprog like it was always obvious.
"You don't even know what's happening," I say to him.
"Cash texted me ten minutes ago."
I look at Cash. "You planned this."
"I had a vision," Cash says. "And I followed it."
Pops appears at Knuckles' shoulder. He hears the word, looks at me, and starts laughing. Not quietly. "Oh, that's good," he says. "That's very good."
"Pops, come on."
"Son, if you're going to have a baby you didn't plan with a woman you didn't want, you might as well wear it on your back." He's still laughing. "Sprog."
"Take it to Prez," Cam says from behind the bar. She's smiling but she's trying not to. She doesn't try hard enough.
Cash walks over to where Razor is standing and leans in to say something. Razor listens and looks across the room at me with that unreadable expression he has, and then the corner of his mouth moves.
"Sprog," he says, loud enough to carry.
And that's it. The name goes around the room like a wave, and I stand at the bar. I hate it but I know with absolute certainty that it's mine for the rest of my life.
Cam slides another whiskey across the bar to me.
"Look at it this way," she says.
"I'd rather not."
"It means they're not pretending the Raven situation isn't happening.
They're acknowledging it and making it yours.
The name doesn't make fun of you; it makes you carry it upright.
" She holds my eyes. "That's what this club does.
It doesn't let you hide from the hard things. It makes you wear them."
I look at my whiskey for a long moment.
"You've put a lot of thought into that."
"I put a lot of thought into most things. Nobody asks me about them because I'm behind a bar."
I drink the whiskey. "Sprog," I say, quietly, trying it on.
It fits. I hate that it fits.
Three months later, EJ arrives.
The paternity test isn't back yet when I first hold him, but I don't need it.
I look down at this small, red-faced, furious little person in my arms and I see myself.
Not what I look like now, but what I must have looked like in photographs I've seen from when I was a baby, the dark hair, the particular shape of the eyes, the expression like he's angry at the world for not being ready for him.
"Well," I say to him, very quietly, standing in an empty room, with only the crib for EJ, and a chair for me. Raven signed the paperwork that I had brought with me as soon as I heard EJ’s first cry. The paperwork also statedthat she has nothing to do with the clubhouse and that she has to find alternative accommodation as of tonight. It’s harsh, but what she did was wrong.
Prez was right, we could be a lot worse, but we aren’t.
She has given us a Black Saints’ baby and that is more than she was ever going to give us.
That’s when I walked out of the room. She wanted me out of the room the second the cord was cut, and I happily gave her what she wanted. "Here we are EJ."
He doesn't respond to this, because he's three hours old and he's asleep, but his face does something, a small shift in the muscles around his mouth, and I decide to believe it means he heard me.
Brick is standing in the corridor leaning against the door, waiting for me to invite him in.
He hasn't said anything since the nurse let me take EJ into this room.
We explained the situation to the nurse and she accommodated us.
When I look over at him he looks up and we just look at each other for a moment.
"I'm going to be a good father," I say. And I mean it as a fact, not a hope.
I mean it as the thing I'm going to build from this moment forward, the thing I'll put every piece of myself into alongside the club, because EJ didn't choose to be born.
He didn't choose his mother. He didn't choose any of the circumstances around his arrival, but he chose me, in the sense that I'm what he's got, and I'm going to make sure I'm enough.
Brick stands up. He walks over and looks down at EJ, and his face does something I've never seen Brick's face do. Something quiet and completely unguarded.
"Course you are," he says. "You're a Black Saint." He reaches out and very briefly touches the baby's head with two fingers, the gentlest thing I've ever seen his hands do. "And so's he."
I look back down at EJ. He's still got his eyes closed and his tiny fist is clenched next to his cheek like he's ready for a fight, and the thought crosses my mind, unbidden, that Savannah should be here. That she’d have had something to say about him. That she’d have laughed at the fist.
I push the thought down. I'm getting better at that.
"What are we going to call him?" Brick asks.
"EJ," I say. "Ethan James." I pause. "James was my grandfather's name."
Brick is quiet for a second. His father's name was James. I know that.
"Good name," he says eventually.
"Yeah." I look at EJ, at this whole, complete, and entirely new person who is somehow mine. "It is."
We stand in the corridor for a while longer, the three of us, and outside the hospital windows the sun is doing something orange and low on the horizon.
The world is the same as it was this morning yet completely different.
Somewhere out there Savannah is preparing for med school, and she doesn't know about any of this.
One day, maybe, she will.
But that's a story for another time.
Right now, I've got a son.
And a patch on my back that says SPROG.
And for the first time since I watched her walk out of my life, I feel like something is beginning instead of ending.