Chapter 9 #2
He goes back to his pasta for a moment. "Pops forgave me. About the trophy. Because I said sorry."
"I know he did."
"Have you said sorry to Dr. Savannah?"
"Not yet."
"You should." He says it with the simple certainty of a child who has learned that apologies work and cannot understand why adults complicate this. "It might take a while, because it was a big mistake. But Pops forgave me and he really liked that trophy."
I look at my son for a moment.
"I'm working on it," I say.
"Okay." He goes back to eating, satisfied. He's filed it under problems with known solutions and moved on. I want to be nine years old again for approximately thirty seconds so I can do the same thing.
"Finish your dinner," I say.
He's asleep by nine. I sit on the back deck with a beer and the quiet of the compound around me.
It's the kind of night that does things to you.
The right temperature, the right dark, the kind of sky where you can see more stars than usual and everything feels closer but further away at the same time.
I used to sit out here with a beer when EJ was tiny and couldn't sleep, rocking him on my chest while looking at the same sky. I’d think about all the things I was going to teach him and all the things I was going to protect him from.
Somewhere in that list was always her, the fact of what I'd given up and what it had bought me.
I let myself think about the first time. I don't do this often. It costs too much and it's not useful and it doesn't change anything. But tonight I've seen her and the memory is right there on the surface whether I want it or not.
She was running ahead of me through the long grass at the edge of Miller's field, barefoot, laughing before she'd even turned around to see if I was chasing her. She knew I would be. She shouted back at me, ‘bet you can't catch me’, and I could always catch her, that was never the question.
I caught her around the waist, and we went down into the grass, me taking the impact, her on top of me laughing until the laughing stopped.
The grass was warm and dry and the sky above us was exactly this color, the deep dark blue of a summer night, and she looked down at me with grass in her hair and her eyes bright as she said I love you for the first time.
Just like that. No lead-up. Like it was a thing she'd been thinking about and had just decided to say.
I said it back. And I meant it the way you only mean something the first time, when the word is still new and it hasn't had a chance to become complicated.
She needed me that night and I needed her and we were both so young and so sure of everything. I remember telling her afterward that no one was ever going to come between us and meaning it completely, not performing certainty but actually feeling it, the absolute conviction that this was permanent.
I couldn't have known then that the thing that would come between us would be me.
The alarm on my phone goes off and I silence it.
I need to see her. I don't know yet what I'll say but I know that staying away isn't working. It hasn't been working for three weeks and certainly isn't working tonight. EJ is right. You say sorry. It might take a while. But you say it.
I finish my beer and I go back inside.
The gate is quiet at this hour. The two prospects on rotation have split the yard, the older one walking the perimeter fence, the other standing at the gate itself. I nearly walk past without stopping and then I clock it's Seb and I slow down.
He's the youngest prospect they've taken on in a while.
Twenty-two, maybe twenty-three. He's got the build for it and the instincts, sharp eyes and a way of standing that takes up exactly the right amount of space without wasting any.
He noticed me as soon as I came through the back door, which is either good observation or good hearing and either way is a good sign.
"Sprog." He straightens slightly. Not snapping to attention, just marking that a patched member has stopped at his gate.
"Decker. Quiet night?"
"Yes, sir."
"You don't have to call me sir."
"Force of habit," he says. "My granddad was army. Every man in my house was sir."
"How's that working for you here?"
He grins. It's a quick grin, gone almost before it appears, but it's genuine. "Knuckles told me to address him as 'Your Highness' for the first two weeks."
"Did you?"
"For about four days until I was fairly sure he was taking the piss."
I laugh. An actual laugh, which surprises me. "What gave it away?"
"Cash started calling him that too. And Cash was laughing."
"Yeah," I say. "That would do it."
He's watching the gate while we talk, which is right. Not distracted by the conversation. Aware that his job is the gate and the conversation is secondary to the gate. I would have done the same thing at his stage, and I probably would have been more obvious about it.
"You rode today," I say. It's not a question. I know he was one of the prospects on the road with us because I saw him and because Prez said patched members only before he quietly added Decker as an exception, which is a thing Prez doesn't do unless there's a reason.
"Yes."
"How was it?"
He's quiet for a second, and I know he's deciding how much to say. "Clarifying," he says finally. "Good kind of clarifying."
I look at him. He means it. He's not performing, not telling me what a patched member wants to hear. He's telling me the truth about how it felt to ride with purpose toward something that mattered.
"Good," I say. "Hold onto that."
I leave him to the gate and go inside. I think, not for the first time since he arrived, that this kid is going to be good for this club. He's got the right kind of steady. The kind that holds when things get loud.
I go to bed and I stare at the ceiling for a while before sleep comes, and the last thing I think about before it does is Savannah's hands, calm, sure and precise, cleaning my son's wound and never once letting him see that she was shaking.