Chapter Eleven #2
“Jesus,” Tack grunted.
Georgie was smiling at Dutch, so as Carlyle headed his
sister’s way, he started hers.
He felt something and looked right, to see Tamira Stephens
studying him.
Seeing that look on her face, a look that he’d seen carved
into his mother’s face way too many fucking times his entire life, he gave
Carlyle’s mom a tight smile.
She closed her eyes slowly.
Opened them.
And returned it.
“I told you, a couple of days. I’m on vacation.
Tomorrow’s my man’s day. It’s brownie baking and snickerdoodle-rama Monday,” Georgie said on the phone to Kraken as they
made their way down the mountain.
It was early evening and they were headed home.
Georgie had been sharing they got the bad guy.
She was now listening.
Dutch kept driving.
She again started talking.
“I don’t know what getting tased by Luke Stark buys you. I
make a really good cheesecake with this kinda sour
cream-like layer on the top. It doesn’t sound good, but it cuts the sweet of
the cheesecake amazingly.” Pause then, “Listen, just come over for
dinner.”
Dutch choked on his own breath.
He felt her eyes on him when he did.
“We’ll see. I’ll talk to Dutch. Maybe Tuesday or Wednesday,”
she said. “I’ll be in touch.” Pause then, “Yeah. Yalola
back at cha.”
Out of the sides of his eyes, he saw her phone hand drop.
“Before you ask, ‘yalola’ means
‘catch you later,’ and I have no idea how that came about,” she shared.
“Tell me you did not invite those two men to your place for
dinner.”
“They’re harmless.”
“They found, captured and tied up a six foot nine,
three-hundred-pound seventeen-year-old.”
“They live on the streets so they know how to get by on the
streets,” she returned. “But Kraken is a graffiti artist, and a really good
one. Even at twenty years old, or maybe because he’s that young, Banga is a
master of spoken verse, and his poetry is honest and sometimes hard to take,
but it’s unbelievably good. They’re African American men who are members of yet
another generation that has been let down by the system, so they don’t
acknowledge the system in any way. Even dedicated non-conformists would think,
‘Yeesh, these two need to get a job.’ But I hope they never do. Because Kraken
might become the next Banksy. And there is no one like Banga. He’s so committed
to what he does and how he does it, I don’t think he’s ever written down a word
of what he creates. But if someone listens, writes it down and shares it, I
think his words could change the world. We might not understand everything they
say when they come over for dinner, because they hate the system so much,
they’ve made up a language so they don’t have to speak white man’s English. But
they’ll be a fun night in.”
One thing to be said about that, he couldn’t argue it.
“What article were you writing when you met them?” he asked.
“It was about disenfranchised minority youth,” she told him.
“That was a tough one. But I met those two through it, so it’s one of my
favorites.”
“Hand,” he ordered.
She gave it.
He threaded his fingers through hers and put them to his
thigh.
Then he said, “Right, now it’s time to share what went down
with that Jackson fuck.”
Her fingers spasmed in his.
“Dutch—”
“Babe, even if he was a total asshole, I’ll only rough him
up a little bit.”
Another spasm and a horrified, “What?”
He started grinning.
She yanked her hand from his so she could swat his arm.
And then she caught his hand again when she was done.
“So?” he prompted.
“So…what?”
“What’d that Jackson fuck do?”
“Well, I will preface this by saying, I do not take any
responsibility for him being a lech. However, I may not have played that as I
should, and it was all your fault.”
The fuck?
“My fault?”
“You’re gorgeous and you had my cat and I wanted to get to
your house. So I started in asking him for information that we didn’t get from
Eddie and Hank without buttering him up. He gave a little, then said something
total euw like ‘you gotta
pay to play’ and grabbed my breast right at the dinner table. So I
told him I didn’t have to do anything of the sort, and if he didn’t want me to
punch him in the throat, he could slide out of the booth where he’d pinned me.
I must have looked pretty ticked, because he didn’t argue. He got out and I
took off.”
Dutch said nothing.
“So you see, it wasn’t that bad. It was just gross.”
Dutch still said nothing.
“Dutch.”
“Maybe I’ll rough him up a lot.”
“Dutch!” she snapped.
“That’s the kind of hardcore Chaos is too,” he informed her.
“Ohmigod, I shouldn’t have told you.”
She was right.
She shouldn’t have told him.
“Are you being serious right now?” she demanded.
“No, baby.” He gave her fingers a squeeze while he totally
lied, “I’d never do something like that.”
“You’re totally lying, aren’t you?”
He decided not to field that one.
“Dutch!” she snapped.
“What would you do if some woman I didn’t want to touch my
junk, touched my junk?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t rough her up,” she answered.
“Babe,” he said low.
He’d seen her go after her sister for doing a lot less just
the day before.
So she couldn’t stick with that.
And she didn’t.
“Okay, if I witnessed it, I’d probably lose my mind and I
would like to say I could hold my temper without it getting physical, but your
junk is your junk and that is so not okay. But I’d also like
to think that, given time, cooler heads would prevail.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“And you know where to find this woman and you know what she
did. That’d be it?”
She was silent.
“Georgie.”
She remained silent.
“Georgiana.”
His girl did not lie.
So she burst out, “Okay, Dutch! My retaliation would be more
cerebral and longer lasting, and there would be retaliation. But it wouldn’t be
roughing her up.”
That was a good idea.
Retaliation that was more cerebral and longer lasting.
He’d have to think on that.
“Jackson’s totally going to lose his job or similar soon,
isn’t he?” she inquired.
Dutch couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“You’re gonna stick up for this
guy?”
“No. A reporter is asking for information and you don’t want
to give it, just say no. So yeah, we were playing a game and I was giving him
my time to get something in return, but that doesn’t give him carte blanche to
grab my breast. But this is cruddy. He’s a jerk. We’ve had a really good day,
finally, and we shouldn’t be discussing jerks. And I don’t want you to have to
get involved.”
Except that last part, he couldn’t argue the rest, so he
ignored the last part and just said, “Okay, darlin’, we’ll stop talking about
him.”
“Thanks,” she rapped out. Then asked, “Are we gonna have sex tonight?”
“No.”
“Are we gonna have sex tomorrow
night?”
“Yes.”
She huffed out air.
Then asked, “Am I gonna blow you
tonight?”
“I don’t know. I know I’m gonna
eat you, and I’m not gonna do it sixty-nine. You’re
too good with your mouth. It’ll fuck with my concentration when I’m goin’ down on you. So after I make you go, if you’re up to
give some head, I’ll be all in.”
“Then we have a plan,” she said curtly.
“Sounds like it,” he said amusedly. “Though, we gotta get some food first. You wanna
roll through a drive thru, order some Chinese, what?”
“We have more than half a pizza left, since we got busy last
night and didn’t eat it. We can have that.”
He was disgusted.
And he sounded it when he asked, “Leftovers?”
“You don’t like leftovers?”
“You eat leftover pizza for breakfast when you’re hungover.
You heat it and eat it for lunch when you’re in a bind. You don’t feed it to
your woman on night three of the longest date in history.”
She now sounded amused when she asked, “Are those hard and
fast rules?”
“Emphatically.”
Georgie busted out laughing.
He tucked her hand into the bend of his hip and smiled at
the windshield thinking he really loved the sound of Georgie laughing.
“Chinese,” she said when she was done.
“You got it, baby,” he replied.
“Dutch?”
“Yeah?”
“You okay?”
He lifted her hand to his mouth, touched her fingers to his
lips, then tucked it back in his hip.
“Yeah, Georgie.”
“Okay.”
They fell silent and neither broke it the rest of the way to
his place.
He let them in and Murtagh came right to them and shared how
he felt about being left alone all day.
In other words, the cat was ticked.
Dutch locked the door, but when he turned to shrug off his
cut, Georgie was there, and she hadn’t yet taken off her coat.
“Did you want to go out and get Chinese?” he asked.
She didn’t answer.
She put her hand to his chest, but she did it watching her
hand, not him.
She then traced her fingernail through the bottom, outside
edge of his Chaos patch in a weird way like she was copying a line.
Still, he thought he read what she was doing so he assured
quietly, “I’m past what you said about bikers too, Georgie.”
She tipped her head back.
“Your dad made this scratch.”
Dutch stilled, and asked, “What?”
“This scratch.” She looked down and traced it again, then
back to him. “It happened when your dad had this jacket.”
He stared at her.
She gave him a small smile that was a little wobbly.
“I asked your mom about it the other night. I didn’t think
she’d remember it, seeing as it’s a tiny little thing, and she probably wasn’t
even around when it happened. Maybe didn’t even notice it. But she did. She
said she couldn’t share precisely how it happened, but it happened when your
dad took it off and tossed it aside when, uh…you know, they were—”
“Yeah,” he grunted.
“He saw it and he was upset that the patch was damaged. She
checked it out and assured him it’d be okay. It was worse on the leather, but
he buffed it out so it didn’t look that bad and you can barely notice it,
unless you’re looking.”
He’d noticed it.
But he’d been looking.
He didn’t think to ask about it.
But Georgiana Traylor, Ace Reporter did.
And now he knew.
Now he knew.
He wore that cut every day, he wore his father every day,
and now he knew what made part of that cut.
“Jag got his bike,” he shared, his voice strange, hollow,
far away.
“Yeah?” she asked, shifting closer, probably because of his
voice.
“We had to pick between us, who got his cut, who got his
bike. We couldn’t. Hound helped us. We both wanted the cut.”
“I can see that.”
“But then, before Ma handed them over, she kissed Dad’s bike
with red lipstick. She told us she’d said goodbye and we could come get our
dad’s stuff. We went right over. We both saw that mark, like, at the exact same
time. Like it spoke to us. I don’t think either of us said anything for about
five minutes. We didn’t move. We couldn’t tear our eyes off that kiss. Once we
pulled our shit together, I swear to fuck, Jag protected that mark with
everything that was him until he could get it sealed under a clearcoat. And
when I got the cut, I felt kinda guilty I got it,
since I knew Jag wanted it, and I had more of Dad than he did, even if it
wasn’t a lot. But when Ma did what she did, I wanted the bike because, with her
mark on it, it was both of them. You know?”
She nodded. “Yeah. I know.”
“I couldn’t say anything. Talk about a switch. The decision
had been made. But he’s my little brother. He barely remembers him. I do. I
have that. He doesn’t. I feel that for him because Dad was such a Dad.
I remember he’d make us peanut butter and chocolate chip pancakes every Sunday.
I remember how long his legs seemed, like they went on for miles, when he lay
in bed beside me, reading me a book before I went to sleep. I remember how he’d
stare at Ma’s legs when she walked around the kitchen in shorts with this smile
on his mouth I didn’t get, because I was a little kid, but it made me feel safe
and it made me know how much he loved her. I have all that. Jag doesn’t. And I
feel that. I feel it. So I couldn’t say anything.”
“Yeah, honey,” she said softly. “I totally get that.”
“It’s weird, a five-year-old remembering all that.”
“Very fortunately, not many five-year-olds lose their dad at
that age. But grief seals memories hermetically, I suspect, even for
five-year-olds.”
Dutch didn’t suspect shit.
He knew she was right.
“She talked about him to you?” he asked.
Her expression grew concerned. “She doesn’t with you?”
“We avoid it. Losing him broke her. Bad.”
“You need to talk to her about him, honey. You need it. And
she needs to give him to you.”
“Yeah,” he muttered.
She smiled, small and sweet, pushed up to kiss him under his
jaw, then she whispered, “I’ll order Chinese. What do you like?”
“Sesame chicken. Orange chicken. Kung pao chicken. Cashew
chicken.”
“So something chicken.”
“And egg rolls and pot stickers. Fried, not steamed.”
She smiled again and then…
Fuck…
She kissed his Chaos patch where the scratch was.
Then she turned and walked out, scooping up Murtagh along
the way.
He wasn’t thinking clearly, but still, he could swear that
cat was looking over her shoulder at Dutch, his eyes screaming, “You! Come get
me!”
So he was sorta smiling when he
shrugged off his cut.
But he wasn’t smiling when he ran the pad of his thumb over
that scratch.
Now, in his way, he had them both too.
“Hope I did you proud today, Dad,” he whispered.
Then he cleared his throat.
Turned.
And shouted into the living room. “If you pay for that on
your credit card, no sex tomorrow night either!”
To which he got, “Dutch!”
So he entered his living room grinning.