Chapter Seventeen #2
The food is extraordinary. Flame has clearly taken the grill as a personal challenge, and the desert air has cooled into something gentle and perfect.
The conversation around the tables moves between serious and easy in the way it does when people have been through something together and earned the right to laugh at the other end of it.
It is Trigger who says it, near the grill with Remy, something coming up in the conversation, he says, “Tracker would’ve already eaten half of whatever’s on that grill and blamed it on someone else.
” The laugh that comes out of that is sudden, genuine, and slightly surprised, the way laughter always sounds when it arrives somewhere you weren’t expecting it.
It moves through the group quickly, table to table, face to face, and I feel it move through me too. I look up at the enormous Nevada sky above us and sit with that bittersweet thing, where grief and love are so tangled together you genuinely can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
I know, I think. I know that’s exactly what he would have done.
Later in the evening, the heat fully gone now, the desert night cool and enormous above us, the yard lit warmly against it, Quill appears at my elbow. “Can I steal you for a minute?”
Following him to a quieter corner of the yard, away from the tables, grill smoke, and easy chaos of the evening, I watch him reach into the inside of his cut and pull out something folded.
Dark gray, worn soft in the way that things only get when they’ve been someone’s favorite for a long time, washed too many times, reached for too often, the fabric giving way to something that has a warmth to it that is more than just cotton.
He holds it out, and looking at it for a moment before reaching out and taking it from him with both hands, something shifts before I’ve even understood what it is.
The moment it is in my hands, I know, before bringing it to my face, breathing in, or any of the logical parts of my brain catch up with what my hands already understand.
Ryan.
Pressing it against my face and breathing in its scent, it’s there, faint and completely real, absolutely impossible, and entirely true.
It still smells like him.
“Jasmine found it in his room,” Quill says, his voice low and even, giving me the words carefully.
“She was clearing it out a few weeks ago. She couldn’t do it for a long time, none of us could, and she found it folded on the shelf above his bed.
Like he’d just left it there.” A pause. “She kept it until she knew I was coming here. Said she thought you’d want it more than anyone. ”
I’m not able to speak.
Standing in the corner of the Sinners MC yard in Las Vegas with Ryan’s T-shirt pressed against my chest, I cry, quietly and completely, the way I’d learned to cry since all of this began.
Not fighting it, not performing it, just letting it move through me the way grief does when you stop trying to manage it and simply let it be what it is.
Quill doesn’t try to fix it.
He stands there solid, steady, and completely present, because Quill has always understood, probably better than most people in my life, that some moments don’t need fixing. They just need someone willing to stand in them with you.
When I finally surface, I wipe my face with the back of my hand and look up at him. “Thank you.” I pause, finding the rest of it. “And tell Jasmine—” I stop. Start again. “Tell her I love her.”
“She knows.” Simple and certain.
There’s a beat of quiet between us, the sounds of the evening carrying softly from across the yard.
“Are you happy here, Sophia?” His voice is careful with it. “Really?”
Considering the question honestly, the way it deserves, I look down at the T-shirt in my hands for a moment before answering, “I think so. More than I expected to be.” I pause while I find the right words.
“It’s not what I thought it would be. Vegas.
Tate’s house.” Another pause. “He’s not what I thought he would be. ”
“No.” Quill’s voice drops low. “He’s not.”
Something in his tone makes me look up at him.
“He’s a good man.” His blue eyes are steady on mine. “One of the best I know, and I don’t say that easily. Tracker knew that. That’s exactly why he asked him.”
The tears threaten again, and blinking them back, I look across the yard, the way I’d been doing all evening without fully realizing it, and immediately find Tate, the way I always seem to. He’s standing near the far table with Hawke, beer in hand, the desert night stretching out behind him.
As if he feels something, he looks up.
Our eyes connect across the yard and hold, and something moves through me that I don’t have a name for, warm, complicated, slightly frightening, and not entirely unwelcome.
Looking away first and back down at the T-shirt in my hands, I tell myself very firmly that whatever that was is simply gratitude, and the comfort of someone familiar in a world that is still finding its shape around me.
That is all it is.
That is all it can be.
“You’ll always have a home with us.” Quill’s voice is quiet beside me. “Whatever comes next, whatever changes, the Blood Brothers are your family. That doesn’t go away.”
Pressing the T-shirt against my chest, I feel the truth of it land somewhere deep and certain.
“I know. I know that.”
He puts his arm around my shoulders briefly, warm, brotherly, and completely safe, and steers me gently back toward the group, back toward the light, the noise, and the evening.
We get closer to Tate, he turns when he hears us coming, or maybe he’d been watching, and his eyes go to me first with that quick, automatic check he always does.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.” And I mean it.
He briefly looks at the T-shirt in my hands, just long enough to understand what it is and what it means, and something moves across his face that he immediately puts away.
Then his arm comes up and settles around my shoulders, warm, solid, and completely instinctive, the way it sometimes is with him, as if his body makes decisions his brain hasn’t gotten around to approving yet.
He smells of cedar and something warmer underneath it, that combination I’d stopped pretending I hadn’t memorized, and he makes me feel safe, and for just a second, I let myself stay exactly where I am.
Then I feel him stiffen slightly at the exact moment he registers what he’s done, and he glances sideways.
Quill is standing right there, those knowing eyes taking in everything with the efficiency of a man who never misses anything and never needs to make a production of it.
Tate’s arm drops.
Quill looks between the two of us and says absolutely nothing. He just smiles slowly, quietly, and entirely too knowing. He takes a long sip of his beer like he hasn’t just seen every single thing.
Tate’s jaw tightens.
Pressing my lips together very hard and looking down at the T-shirt in my hands, I say nothing, which feels like the only reasonable response available to us.
RAVEN
I’m laughing at something Torch said, a real laugh, the kind that surprises me, the kind I don’t always let happen, when I catch it.
That arm.
That completely instinctive, unthinking movement of Tate pulling Sophia close, the ease of it, the way his body moved before his brain caught up with what it was doing.
I go still.
It isn’t the gesture itself that lands. It’s what it means.
The naturalness of it, the fact that he hadn’t even realized he’d done it until Quill was standing there with that knowing look on his face.
I’ve seen Tate in enough situations to know the difference between something deliberate and something that comes from somewhere deeper than deliberate, and this came from somewhere I never reached.
‘She’s not mine.’
That’s what he told Torch, standing in the corridor outside the room, flat, certain, and without hesitation.
I was close enough to hear it.
I told myself it didn’t matter. I told myself I understood the arrangement, had always understood it, and had never once let myself believe it was anything more than what it was between us.
But watching Tate’s arm drop, watching him register the gesture and remove it, watching Sophia look down at the T-shirt in her hands with that careful expression of a woman trying very hard not to feel something she is absolutely feeling, I understand something I hadn’t wanted to understand.
I was never his because the arrangement was casual.
I was never his because there was someone else, someone who hadn’t existed yet in his life in this way, but who had apparently always been coming.
And now she is here, standing in the middle of the Sinners’ yard in a pale-yellow dress with Ryan’s T-shirt pressed against her chest. Tate’s jaw is tight, Quill is smiling into his beer, and I understand all of it.
The thing is, it hurts. More than I expected, more than I’d allowed myself to admit was even possible, because admitting it would have meant admitting I’d wanted something I was never offered and had been foolish enough to wait for anyway.
I’m not a woman who does foolish.
Or so I’d thought.
Torch appears at my elbow. He doesn’t say anything immediately, just stands there with his beer, looking out at the yard the way he seems to look at everything, with that steady unhurried presence of a man who doesn’t feel the need to fill silence with noise.
Then, quietly. “You all right?”
I look at him, those calm eyes, and that steady presence.
I’m not all right. Not even slightly. What I am is smart enough to know that this yard is not the place and tonight is not the night, and so I do what I’ve always done with things that hurt.
I put it somewhere I can deal with it later.
“Yeah.” Taking the beer he offers, I turn back to the yard and we let the evening be what it is.