Chapter 6 #2
Her pussy squeezed me yet again as I pushed her over the edge into oblivion, before I finally bucked into her a few more times and joined her.
Falling beside her, the only sound in the room was our heavy breathing.
Her hand picked up mine and she laced her fingers through mine, holding our hands up in the air as if she needed to see how it felt to have mine wrapped around hers.
It pulled at my chest, and I desperately wanted to say something, but words were failing me.
She sat up and looked at the back of my hand, her fingers grazing over the tattoo. I knew exactly what she was looking at.
“You didn’t.”
I smirked up at her. “It was a very poignant moment for me.”
“Alex, oh my god,” she smacked me lightly on the chest. “You had the note I sent to you when I was angry tattooed on your hand?”
“It’s my wrist actually, and yeah,” I replied. “It was to stop myself from coming back and climbing in your window every night.”
She looked at me then, a sadness drifting over her features. “I wished you did. I only sent that because you didn’t come back.”
I reached down to her club tattoo over her ribs. “You didn’t have this when I left.”
“I didn’t have any of them when you left,” she replied. “They’re addictive.”
She was damn right about that. “Why’d you get it?”
Orla closed in on herself. I saw it in her eyes, as she shrugged. “Just liked it.”
“The truth would be nice right about now, Or.”
“It was my home,” she said, finally. “When you left, I was in a bad place. I got kicked out of home, I got sick, hospitalised. When I got out, I was living on the streets. Butch got me cleaned up, he told me I was part of the family and he gave me a place to stay at the clubhouse. I got the tattoo as a loyalty offering to them.”
I sat up, not knowing any of that. “What do you mean your parents kicked you out?”
I’d known they were strict when we’d been growing up, that they hated the fact that I was a kid of a biker, and I was corrupting their sweet little angel. But for them to kick her out?
“I was pregnant, Alex, when you left. I never told you, and I didn't know how to in a letter or on a call so I just…did what I felt like I had to do.”
“You don’t have a kid, Orla.”
“I know,” she said in a whisper.
“Was it Brad’s?” I asked her, feeling rage rise inside of me. He’d been the one she’d fucked around with when we broke up. The reason I had to leave was so I didn’t see her fall in love with someone else.
“No,” she said, sadly. “I never slept with Brad.”
I got up off the bed, feeling the weight of what she was telling me. Strong emotions swirled in me that I didn’t understand.
“It was mine?”
She nodded, tears running down her face. My mind felt like it was splitting in two as everything from back then came crashing back.
“Alex.”
She reached out to me but I backed up, unable to understand why she didn’t call me. Why did she think she had to go through that alone?
She had been my solace, always, and I wasn’t hers. She had preferred to be homeless than to call me back, to tell her what happened. I would have taken care of her.
“I gotta get back to the clubhouse,” I say, lying through my teeth. She didn’t try to reach out to me again. She just nodded and sat on the bed, naked, and sad.
Grabbing my clothes, I left, locking the house on the way out and speeding down the road to the clubhouse.
“Hey, Alex.”
I turned to see Sheridan coming up to me from the side of the bar. I tipped my almost empty beer toward her in acknowledgement before I went back to the misery I’d been dealing with the past couple of hours, since I’d left Orla naked and in bed.
“Am I meant to only call you Bear now?” she asked me, earning her a smile.
“Not many call me Alex,” I admitted. “I don’t remember when I became more Bear than Alex.”
“You’ll always be Alex to me,” she told me, taking a seat. “What’s going on? Why are you here getting drunk right now?”
“It’s a bar,” he shrugged. “That’s what people do at bars.”
“What’s going on?” she asked me. “The only time I see you this miserable is when it has to do with Orla.”
“Hit the nail on the head with that one.”
“Locking her up in your house didn’t help?”
I smirked at her. “She told ya, huh?”
“No, Cooper did, but I know why you did it. Does she?”
“Yeah, I told her.”
“Is she okay?”
“Would you be?”
“I don’t know why he was so obsessed with her,” Sheridan admitted. “I thought he would target me because of who I was.”
“He made her feel bad for her tattoos,” I told her, angry that he had made my Orla feel bad about herself.
Not yours.
“She told you?”
“She didn’t have to,” I told her. “She was acting differently, covering herself up.”
Sheridan moved behind the bar and started to make herself a drink.
She moved with confidence and ease, like this was her bar.
Technically, she would become the head of the women here.
She could run the bar if she wanted to, and any other business dealings that came along with it.
It was good to see her take to it like a duck to water.
Ace deserved that.
“So what really brings you in here and away from her?” Sheridan asked, sipping on her drink and leaning back against the bar, facing me.
“She told me about her…situation when I left.”
Sheridan’s eyes cast down, almost guiltily. “Oh. You’re mad about it.”
“I wouldn’t say mad,” I said. “It’s no secret that I never wanted kids. I’d only imagined she would have mine because it was expected of us, it was expected of anyone really, but the fact she was homeless, and never reached out to me? She almost died from it because no one supported her.”
“Alex, she loved you fiercely, just as I did Cooper. At that age, it’s fucking scary to feel those things, you almost feel like it’s not real.
Orla didn’t want to end up like her mother, stuck to someone who didn’t love her, and treated their kids like shit.
She decided to end it with you and pretend to be into Brad Shepley. It worked, didn’t it?”
“She and he never?”
Sheridan shook her head. “She couldn’t stand the prissy no-gooder, but he did what she paid him to do. He acted like he was into her to piss you off.”
“She paid him?”
She laughed. “Yeah.”
“Why? Why couldn’t she just tell me?”
“If you knew the truth would you have laid off and let her be a teenager, or would you have tried to lock her down?”
I sunk the rest of my beer and tossed her the bottle. She caught it and put it in the bin, cracking open a new one for me.
“Tell me more about what happened.”
“Well, she came to me a few days before you guys left and told me, she showed me the pregnancy test. I asked her what she felt, and this smile was present that told me she wanted it. She wanted you. This was the universe’s way of keeping you, that you two were real.
Finally, she got up the nerve to tell you and you’d gone, without so much as a note. She was devastated.”
“What happened?” I asked, feeling guilty even though it was the only thing I could think to do at the time.
“She looked for you everywhere, until I finally told her what Ace had told me when he left. You’d all joined the Nomads, and wouldn’t be back for a while.”
“Why’d she get an abortion if she wanted my baby?”
“Well, that may have a little to do with your mother.”
I felt the fury rise in my chest, remembering the things I overheard her say about Orla when I walked in earlier. She had never liked Orla. Never liked that I would do anything for her, even back then. The amount of times she had forbidden me from seeing her were too many to count.
“What did she do?”
“Release your grip on the bottle, Alex, before it shatters.”
I looked down to see my white knuckles around the beer bottle and instantly released it.
“Her mother and father had found her pregnancy test and a baby name book hidden under her bed. They confronted her with it and told her that she wouldn’t be keeping it.
She told them she was, and they kicked her out.
That day, her bag and clothes were thrown over the lawn.
She came to me, and I tried to hide her in my house, but my father found her and told her she wasn’t to see me again.
She hid out at the school, and slept in a classroom for weeks before I told Donovan about it.
He found her and offered her a room at the clubhouse if she cleaned the bar after school.
He even helped her with doctor’s appointments and the like. Maree was like a mother to her.”
“Get to the point, Sher.”
“Alex, don’t be a dick,” she said. “You need to hear the whole story.”
I waved her on, waiting to be told the reason why my mother interfered.
“Maree took her down to the hospital for a check up, but something happened and she needed to leave Orla there. I ended up meeting her at the hospital and when I saw Louise, I knew it wasn’t going to be good.
She had overheard the doctor telling Orla about the supplements she needed to be taking.
She chased her out, and told her that you’d never want her back, that a baby wasn’t going to change things, and that you already had a new girl. ”
“What?”
Sheridan shrugged. “I knew she was lying but she was telling a very hormonal girl whose life was about to change dramatically that she was unwanted, and her baby would be a bastard and never accepted. She told her that if she had the baby, she would make sure the clubhouse kicked her out because Peter O’Leary never wanted a bastard grandchild. ”
I closed my eyes, feeling the pain in what Sheridan was telling me. The emotion in her eyes told me what it had done to Orla.
“My father knew?”
Sheridan shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. Louise, after all, wasn’t his wife so she didn’t get much time with him.”
“I remember.”