Chapter 9 #2
It was so disheartening. Guilt warred with my happiness daily.
How could I have been so stupid to let her go off with that man alone?
I replayed that night over and over in my head, and I didn’t get it.
Nishi had insisted she was okay, that it was fine for me to leave, but how could I?
I’d left my best friend behind to be kidnapped by a human trafficker.
Logically, I was aware that there was no way I could have known, but that didn’t stop me from feeling like I should have known.
I’d done the smart thing. I’d taken a picture of the guy’s driver’s license, which turned out to be a fake, and a picture of him. Nishi had her phone on her and I had access to her location. We did everything right.
But it hadn’t been enough.
The worst part? I hadn’t even known something was amiss until the next morning.
I still didn’t know if the text messages I’d gotten throughout the night were from her or her captor.
Since she hadn’t used her codeword to signal she was in trouble, I could only assume it was from her and she hadn’t known she was in trouble yet.
At least, that’s what I kept telling myself.
I knew Aloiki’s priorities were stretched thin. He was building the club and searching for Nishi, and it fucking sucked that I could only help him with one of those things.
I liked Holly, the other Ol’ Lady, but she wasn’t Nishi.
And hanging out with her and getting to know her made me feel guilty because I wasn’t out there looking for Nishi.
Holly was socially awkward, and sometimes there was this ‘danger vibe’ I got from her that made no sense.
The woman was five-two and weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet.
And the way she looked at Mal, it was a mixture of worship and devotion.
I knew the two of them were in the BDSM lifestyle, which was great if that worked for them.
No judgement since my fiancé and I did porn, but there was just something about Holly that I didn’t get.
A lot of the club members were people Aloiki used to run with, so I knew them or of them, even if it had been years since we’d seen each other.
I was trying really hard to call them by their road names now.
Some were easy, because I didn’t know them to have a habit of calling them by their real names.
Like the twins. I knew they were Harlan and Sawyer, though I had no idea which was which.
They were now called ‘Thing One’ and ‘Thing Two’.
No one knew if they switched cuts to fuck with us or if one twin always wore the same cut.
Secretly, I sided with Aloiki and thought we needed to mark them somehow so we could figure out who was whom.
Mal was easy enough to switch to. My understanding was there had been a pig slur made against him during their first Church meeting, and the former cop had run with it. He was now ‘Bacon’. I liked it, though I would have gone with ‘Pua’a’.
Rafe and Sebastian were also strangers to me. Rafe chose ‘Tick’ as his road name and Sebastian wanted to be called ‘Saga’. I didn’t know either of them well enough to guess why, though I did learn that Sebastian had an eidetic memory and had a tendency to tell stories.
Lonnie was a former priest, so I didn’t know why he would want to be called ‘Lucifer’. Seemed to me that the man had some inner demons he was fighting with.
The ones I kept slipping up were the men I knew from before the club.
Virgil, Kanoa, Rory, Hiro, Nohea, and Tangaloa were the ones I was struggling with.
I would never call Aloiki ‘Paniolo’, which he didn’t seem to mind.
In fact, I had a feeling I was the only person who could have gotten away with refusing to call him by his new road name.
I liked Virgil’s name. A British soldier was called a tommy, so I thought the road name was fitting. But damn if I could get the word out of my mouth. I usually ended up calling him “Vir—Tommy”, which he seemed to get a kick out of.
Hiro didn’t seem to mind when I called them ‘Hiro’ instead of ‘Neo’. At least, I thought they didn’t until every electronic device I owned started playing The Matrix movie every time I went to use it. It was certainly an effective method of getting me to remember.
I didn’t see Rory often, which was a shame because we used to be friends. He took the position of Nomad, so he was on his boat a lot and away from the farm. Calling him ‘Skipper’ was fun, but it still didn’t roll off the tongue easily.
It was easy to remember the name ‘Spirit’ when I thought of Kanoa. He was the most spiritual and grounded person I knew.
I didn’t know Nohea that well. I couldn’t say if we’d ever met in person before now, but I knew his name and reputation. It was easier to call him ‘Mako’ than the others.
To my knowledge, Tangaloa was the only member who did not have a club name, choosing to keep his birth name. I hadn’t yet had a chance to speak to him about that, and if there was an underlying reason behind that decision. Either way, I loved his name. It was unique and beautiful.
And it was one less road name for me to remember.
It helped so much when the club’s cuts came in.
Holly and I each got one too. Ours said our man’s nickname for us, along with our Property patch.
Mine said Hōkūpa?a and Holly’s Little Owl.
The club members wore their cuts like they were a part of their skin.
Even the ones who refused to wear shirts, like Aloiki, wore his cut as if he’d been born to it.
After a bit of persuading, the club was in the process of buying Shakaloha Brewery.
Janko would be the manager instead of the owner, and would be the club’s only member that wasn’t an Officer.
Part of the deal about selling the brewery as well as joining the club was that Janko did not want to be an Officer or a Prospect.
Technically, Mal, or Bacon, was now the owner, as he fronted the money for the club to buy the brewery and the club was going to work over time to buy him out.
I was shocked when I learned that Aloiki wanted to partner with Yooko.
The only secret on O‘ahu that was bigger than Yooko’s ‘meals on wheels’ business was Superman’s true identity.
And while Yooko did not want to become a part of the club, he was looking to expand his business.
The club offered him regular security and the funds to be able to do that, but Aloiki was not a silent partner.
In addition to the new businesses the club now owned or was partnered with, the farm was under construction.
Aloiki had given his boarders thirty days’ notice to vacate or sell their horses, and now the barn was getting a complete renovation.
It would be more of a bunkhouse than a barn soon, though the stalls would still remain.
The twins were crashing with Bacon and Holly since their loft in the barn was no longer livable.
A temporary shed had been set up in the back pasture for our horses, of which we now had seven.
Two of the boarders had chosen to sell, and Aloiki was happy to accept the bills of sale.
The new bunkhouse was expected to be three times the size of the old barn.
Allowing for room for the horses, the members to move on property, a meeting room, and a room Aloiki lied to the construction crew about, claiming it to be a BDSM dungeon.
We all knew what it was in reality, but no one was speaking about it, and for good reason.
Personally, the less I thought about it, the better. The entire concept of a torture room made me queasy.
Actually, I’d been queasy a lot recently.
I thought it was guilt making my stomach go all wonky all the time.
Shortly after Aloiki and I got back together, I went to see my old OB and got on the Pill.
My hope was that it wouldn’t mess with my hormones as much as my IUD had.
Years ago, I’d tried the injection and had a bad reaction, and given how my body had started to reject the IUD, I preferred to try a daily contraceptive this time.
After taking the Morning After pill twice in the same week, I had to scramble to make an appointment.
Aloiki was insatiable, even more so than when he’d been in his twenties. We’d used condoms until I had gotten the new prescription. But when I got to the placebo pills this week and realized that I hadn’t gotten my period this month and all I’d gotten last month had been a few light spots?
Well, I’d had to sneak down to the basement to find a test. We kept a supply down there for the breeding videos. A number of our subscribers wanted to see the bred woman pee on the stick and then her ‘reaction’ to being pregnant.
I had no intention of having any audience, but I had to confirm my suspicion.
I loved kids, but that didn’t mean I wanted any of my own. In fact, Aloiki and I had been very clear about that from the beginning of our relationship a decade ago. No kids.
Yet, I really shouldn’t have been all that surprised when the second line appeared on the test. We really hadn’t been that careful. We’d played with fire, and we’d gotten burned.
Sitting there on the closed toilet seat, I laid my head back against the wall. “Well, fuck.”
I asked my kūkū once why she loved my tūtū kāne so much.
This wasn’t a question I could pose to my parents, who fought on a daily basis.
Not the way Aloiki and I fought, but hate-your-guts fights that should have ended in divorce years ago, but they took too much pleasure in causing each other pain to do that.
But seeing the difference in my parents’ versus grandparents’ relationships, I had to ask that question.