The Unpleasant Thing

Prologue

Slim

Whenever life, work, club business, or the heat feels like too much, nine times out of ten, I get the hell out of Tucson for the day. I hop on my bike, take the Tanque Verde road, then turn onto the Catalina Highway, and drive up towards the wonderfully cool air of Mt. Lemmon.

At the Loma Linda picnic area, right by the tables, stands a thick, tall pine tree with a heart carved into its rugged bark.

Inside the heart, you can still see the letters D + R.

Over the years, the tree has tried to heal itself, and the letters have faded somewhat, but ultimately they’ve prevailed over nature and have, at this point, become an unerasable part of that tree.

I can’t remember the last time I felt the need to come up here. Nine months ago, maybe?

I trace the letters with my thumb.

Dylan loves Rebel.

Rebel is the heartless bitch who left me almost seven years ago without so much as a word of explanation. She left her property cut neatly folded on my bed and just dropped off the face of the Earth.

The first year after she left passed in a drunken daze - there wasn’t one second in the day when I wanted to be conscious or have a functioning brain. Turns out, both of these are pretty important things when you’re a tattoo artist, so, in addition to being heartbroken, I also ended up unemployed.

Then our late Prez had a sit-down with me, man-to-man, and that helped a little. Together, we made a plan for my future. I sobered up, focused on building my business, and spent the next two years fucking every willing blonde in a 10-mile radius.

One morning, I woke up and noticed it hurt a little less. If you ask me these days, I barely ever think of her.

So why is she back? Why now, when she couldn’t even show her face for longer than an hour when her own father died?

The whole clubhouse must have heard me and Prez yelling this morning when he ordered me to hire Rebel in my shop.

“Gray Wolves MC gave you the money to start Inkspiration, so you will do as you are told,” were his exact words.

That’s when I lost it.

“How can you do this to me, man? You know better than anyone what she did to me.”

“Stop acting like a bitch! It’s been over six years; you need to get over yourself,” Prez told me cruelly, and then he dropped the bomb that Rebel would meet me at the clubhouse tonight, to explain.

So, after a few hours of staring at trees in order to clear my head, I drive my bike back to the clubhouse, sit down at the bar, and wait for her arrival, choking my beer bottle to unload some of the impotent anger inside me.

This whole thing feels like someone’s ripping an almost healed wound in my chest open. I’m right back where I was when she left, mourning the life I had planned out with Rebel as my old lady and at least three rugrats roughhousing with their Daddy at the club barbecues.

She took all that away from me.

But the old Dylan, the stupid, weak boy who used to give in to her every whim, is gone. I shake my head to dispel the memory of those days, when I was a lowly prospect, and Rebel was the unattainable club princess.

Things are different now. I’m 33 years old, I own a business and a house, and I have hundreds of hours at the gym under my belt. I straighten up, relishing the sensation of my pecs straining against my shirt.

Now, Rebel’s going to see what it’s like to deal with Slim, the man, the club brother, and her boss.

I nod to myself before taking a swig, and the prospect manning the bar nods back. I almost chuckle at the poor bastard’s confusion. Prospecting is a rite of passage we all go through, and once you’re patched, you can look back at it fondly. I wish that were true for all things in life.

The door opens, and I glance up at the mirror above the bar, not wanting to give the heartless bitch the satisfaction of eagerly turning around.

Only, she doesn’t look so heartless as her eyes search the room for me. She looks insecure and small, like she did whenever her mom had too much to drink.

“Hey,” I hear her familiar raspy voice next to me, and it takes all my energy to look like I’ve been distracted and unaware of her arrival.

“Hey,” I say back in a disinterested tone.

“It’s really good to see you, Dylan,” she says, and I can hear the smile in her voice as she climbs onto the barstool next to mine.

I nod and give her a cursory glance before looking back at my bottle. She doesn’t deserve more. However, I’m surprised to find that she looks… happy? I frown, confused.

“Prez said you wanted to talk to me.”

She catches the prospect's eye and points at my bottle. “I still can’t get over the fact that Sly is Prez now.”

I shrug. Her father used to be the Prez, and when he died, her brother inherited the title. If she had stayed for longer than an hour after the fucking funeral, she would have seen the change in real time, and it would be more natural now.

It’s like she can hear my thoughts. “I desperately wanted to talk to you at Daddy’s funeral, you know.”

The words cause me to really look at her for the first time since her arrival.

Her face has lost the softness of her teenage years. It’s sharper now, more wary. Her black hair is in a ponytail, but I can tell it’s still as long as it was back then. I don’t know why that pleases me. She didn’t keep it long for me, I know that.

She’s wearing tight black jeans and a tiny black tank top. Her sleeves are now filled in all the way, and I see the tentacles of a new neck tattoo peeking out from behind her hair whenever she turns her head. I itch to move her hair to the side so I can see it.

“No one was stopping you,” I reply, trying with all my might to keep the hurt out of my voice.

We both turn to look at the prospect who’s placing her drink in front of her.

“I was stopping myself,” she admits after a brief silence.

“Daddy was gone, and I felt lost. You’ve always been my safe space, so naturally, I wanted to be near you, to be comforted by you, to fall into old patterns and into the way things used to be so easy between us, and that wasn’t fair to you. ”

I scoff. I find it hard to believe that she cared about what was fair to me. She’s proven that by sneaking out like a thief in the night.

“I can see why you don’t believe me, and I don’t blame you for it.”

“How come?” I find myself being drawn into this back-and-forth, despite my better judgment.

“I know you were hurt by how I chose to leave, and I admit, it was horrible of me. A real bitch move,” she says and frowns - at herself, apparently.

“I know I have to apologize for all the hurt I’ve caused you.

But I was only 24, Dylan. I was nowhere near mature enough to have the hard conversations.

All I’d ever known was the club; being the princess was intoxicating at first, but it got suffocating at some point.

I just wanted to live on my own terms for a little while, away from everyone and everything. And being with you…”

She trails off, and my heart contracts painfully in my chest. This is where she’ll say that being with me was unfulfilling and a mistake, and I have to direct all my energies towards keeping my face straight and unaffected, but she surprises me again by putting her small, warm hand on my knee.

“Being with you was the best part of my life. But then the pregnancy happened, and everything just became too serious and too much.”

“Why the fuck are you bringing that up now?” I ask through clenched teeth.

My skin feels too tight. The hand on my knee pats it soothingly before disappearing. I miss its warmth instantly.

“Because it’s part of our story, Dylan. I know you were ready to start a family back then, and I can never thank you enough for supporting my choice to terminate despite that, but you can’t deny that things changed between us after that.”

Neither of us says anything for a while. I wonder if she’s also reliving those awful months after The Appointment.

“Why did you come back?” I ask, and let myself look at her again.

“I wanted to come home,” she says wistfully. “I know you’re happy and you’ve gotten what you wanted from life, and since we’re both grown now, I hope we can have a respectful coworking relationship. Maybe one day we can even be friends again.”

She smiles as she looks up at me with those baby blues. Once upon a time, one such look from her and we'd be out of there.

I shake my head at myself.

“Maybe one day, Bell,” I say in my conciliatory tone, and she must recognize it because she bites her lip to hide her smile.

“I see you got my autograph covered up,” she says as her eyes flicker down to the side of my neck.

I rub the spot in question reflexively. “Yeah. No sense keeping your name on there when you’re not my girl anymore.”

“I guess you’re right,” she says thoughtfully. “I’m trying real hard not to read into the imagery of snakes and thorny vines you’ve chosen for the cover-up, by the way.”

I laugh.

It’s effortless and natural, like inhaling.

I try not to think about our tree up at Loma Linda.

“Well,” I say as I get up abruptly. “I better head home now. It’s been a long day.”

“Yeah,” she says in a small voice, and I can’t help the warm, giddy joy coursing through me at her visible disappointment.

I take a twenty out of my wallet and put it on the bar, nodding at the prospect.

“Alright,” she says as she gets off her barstool. “I’ll head upstairs as well then.”

She lifts her arms, and for a moment I both fear and hope she will give me a hug, but she merely stretches out her back. I gather my phone and my keys and do my best not to look at her.

The ride home is exhilarating because the vibrations of my bike match the buzz I’m feeling all over my skin. It’s after midnight, but the air is still warm.

Starting next week, whenever I look up from my workstation, I will see Bell. We will be in the same space for hours. Every day for the foreseeable future. It sounds like a fever dream.

Fuck.

Why does that thought make me feel so good?

I walk into the house as quietly as I can, immediately taking my boots off and carefully putting my cut on its hook in the mudroom. I quickly shower off the day’s sweat and the dust from the ride before tiptoeing to our bed in my boxers.

“Fuck!” I yelp as I accidentally kick what seems to be a very loud rattle into the nightstand.

Junior starts crying.

“Sorry,” I whisper to Marissa, who gives me a sleepy smile in response.

“Say hi to Daddy,” she coos to DJ as she lifts her shirt to feed him.

I get into bed with them and absentmindedly stroke my son’s tiny head until he melts back to sleep. When he unlatches, Marissa sighs in relief.

“Why is he in our bed again?” I ask sternly, suddenly overcome with irritation towards her. “We’ve talked about this a million times.”

My tone cuts through Marissa’s sleepiness.

“Shh! He’s going through the big sleep regression; he wakes up every 40 minutes! If I want to get any sleep before I have to be up for work, this is the only way to get him to go back to sleep.”

“Why don’t you just do the sleep training program that Angie did?”

Marissa doesn’t respond.

“He’s going back to his crib now,” I whisper.

“If you’re the one who’s gonna get up and bring him to me every time he cries, be my guest,” Marissa hisses.

She is sitting up now, her arms crossed over her ample chest, glaring at me.

“Fine,” I admit defeat because I’m too fucking exhausted for this back and forth, and she smiles her dimpled smile at me before glancing at the alarm clock next to her side of the bed.

“Why are you getting in so late?”

I get settled on my back, careful not to jostle DJ too much in the process. “We have a new employee, so I had to stay and show her the ropes. Prez’s sister, actually.”

“Oh, that’s nice. I didn’t know Sly had a sister.”

“Yeah,” I say into the darkness. “She moved away a while back, and now she’s back home.”

“Is she like her brother?”

“What do you mean?”

“Living hard and fast, always above the rules, larger than life,” she lists teasingly.

Something in my chest constricts, like I’m being disloyal if I talk about my Prez and his family that way, even to my ol’ lady.

“They had an unusual upbringing,” I offer in way of a compromise.

Their mother was an alcoholic, and their father fucked everything that moved, even girls from his kids’ high school, is the part I don’t say.

“I can imagine. The clubhouse must’ve been an interesting place to grow up in. Well, I’m looking forward to meeting her,” Marissa says on a yawn and reaches over DJ to squeeze my hand good night.

I’m looking forward to something too.

For the first time in years, I feel alive.