Chapter 2 #3
Regan slid eggs onto a plate. “This is hardly prison.”
“No man even looks at me.”
I took the plate Regan shoved into my hands and muttered into my coffee, “Because everybody here enjoys breathing.”
Emily shot me a glare.
Regan laughed hard enough to shake the spatula in her hand. “He’s not wrong.”
Edge walked in shirtless, half awake, scratching his stomach and looking like a man who’d been dragged from sleep by bacon and fatherhood.
He kissed Regan’s cheek, stole a piece from the pile, then ruffled Emily’s hair.
She swatted him away, but not before he looked down at the drawing on the table and declared his youngest daughter’s art better than Picasso.
“Picasso,” Regan corrected.
“That’s what I said.”
“No, you said Picasso, like a pasta dish.”
“Still famous.”
Domestic as hell.
Weird seeing Edge like that. Not bad weird. Just strange. I remembered him meaner, harder, less anchored. Now he stood in the kitchen eating bacon with a kid’s purple crayon stuck to the bottom of his foot and didn’t even notice.
He caught me looking. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Liar.”
“Usually.”
Regan poured more coffee and leaned against the counter, studying me over the rim of her mug. That woman saw too much. Always had. “What’s on your schedule?”
I cut into the eggs and took a bite. They were ridiculous.
Fluffy, buttery, with peppers from her garden and cheese she probably bought from some woman named Moonbeam at a farmer’s market.
The bacon was thick-cut, the kind she got from a rancher two towns over because grocery store bacon “tasted like salt and sadness.”
Food like this was the reason nobody complained when she made us build a chicken coop behind the clubhouse.
Or when she sent three patched members on a run to pick up a rooster that now woke us every morning like a tiny feathered dictator.
She had tomatoes, peppers, herbs, a greenhouse, and plans for fruit trees.
If Regan had her way, the Royal Bastards would have horses next and probably a damn goat named Earl.
I swallowed another bite. “Heading into town.”
Her eyes narrowed. “For?”
“Found a place.”
Edge looked up from his coffee. “A house?”
“Small place.”
Regan’s face lit up like I’d announced a pregnancy. “About damn time.”
I pointed my fork at her. “Don’t start.”
“I’m starting. Clubhouse is good until it ain’t.”
She wasn’t wrong, which irritated me. The clubhouse kept a man close to the pulse of things.
Club business. Brothers. Protection. Noise.
Always noise. Doors opening, boots on floors, bikes rolling in at all hours, somebody yelling, somebody laughing, somebody bleeding on a towel because pride wouldn’t let him go to urgent care.
It had been enough when I needed to be surrounded by motion.
Now I wanted walls.
Quiet.
My own damn coffee pot.
A porch where nobody asked me why I was awake at three in the morning. A kitchen where I could burn toast in peace. A bed that didn’t share a wall with Bullet’s entertainment choices.
“It’s outside town,” I said. “Affordable. Close enough if the club needs me.”
Regan smiled wider. “Good. I’ll come help.”
“No.”
Her mouth dropped. “What do you mean no?”
“No plants.”
“I wasn’t going to bring plants.”
Edge snorted into his coffee. “Bullshit.”
Regan threw a towel at him. “A tomato plant never hurt anybody.”
“She says,” I muttered, “after weaponizing zucchini all summer.”
“You ate the bread.”
“Under protest.”
“You ate three slices.”
“I’m a hostage to carbs.”
Emily smirked. “You need plants. And curtains. And maybe furniture that wasn’t purchased from a man named Rusty behind a storage unit.”
I looked at her. “Good thing you ain’t moving in.”
She flipped me off.
Edge pointed at her without even looking. “Finger.”
She lowered it half an inch.
Regan shook her head but smiled while she did it. The kitchen was chaos. Bacon grease. Coffee steam. Crayons. Edge half dressed. Emily pretending she didn’t like being fussed over. Tank’s kid humming to herself while coloring outside every line because rules were apparently optional at all ages.
Same old circus.
Same noise.
Same people.
And sitting there with hot coffee, real food, and family all around, the truth settled into me heavier than the ride had.
This place had become home.
But home was changing. Men who used to crash on couches now had women waiting in beds.
Kids left toys in hallways where guns used to be the only things out of place.
Regan’s garden crawled farther every season.
Weddings got planned. Babies got passed from arm to arm.
The clubhouse still had teeth, but it had roots now too.
Everybody was building something.
I was still sleeping in a ten-by-ten room like a man passing through.
Edge leaned against the counter and studied me. “You sure about this place?”
“Wouldn’t be going if I wasn’t.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the one you’re getting.”
He didn’t push. That was the thing about brothers. They’d kick your ass if you needed it, but sometimes they knew when a man was holding something too raw to drag into the light over breakfast.
Regan, unfortunately, had no such weakness.
“Does it have good light?”
I stared at her. “It has no walls.”
“That tells me nothing.”
“It has a dirt driveway and a mailbox.”
“That sounds like a stash place. A house needs life.”
I thought of Rylee saying something almost like that once, standing in the middle of the place I’d wanted to buy before everything went to shit. She’d looked around at the cracked tile and old cabinets, nose wrinkled, already seeing what it wasn’t instead of what it could be.
I had seen weekends fixing floors, paint on our hands, her laughing at me for doing everything the hard way.
She had seen work.
She had seen less than what she thought she deserved. I never bought that old house and had regretted it.
I pushed eggs around my plate.
“Life costs extra,” I said. “I’m building a cabin with my bare hands. I bought land. Just pure dirt.”
Regan’s expression shifted. Softer, but not pitying. She was too smart for pity. Pity made men like me mean.
“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes it just needs somebody stubborn enough to stay.”
The kitchen quieted for half a beat. Not much. Just enough for the words to land.
I drank my coffee to avoid answering.
Emily broke the silence because she had survival instincts after all. “If he gets a house, can I have his room?”
Edge said, “No.”
Regan said, “Maybe.”
I said, “Gut it.”
Tank walked in then, hair wet from a shower, wearing a clean shirt and the expression of a man who’d smelled bacon in his sleep and followed it blindly. “Why are we gutting Mason’s room?”
“Because he’s abandoning us,” Emily said.
“I’m moving thirty minutes away.”
“Emotionally abandoning us,” she corrected.
Tank grabbed coffee and slapped a hand on my shoulder hard enough to jolt the old ache in my ribs. “Good. About time you got your own place.”
I looked up at him. “You, too?”
“Hell yeah. Man your age living in the clubhouse starts getting sad.”
“You lived here until Regan threatened to rearrange your spine.”
“Exactly. Growth.”
The room laughed, and I let it roll over me without fighting it.
Maybe they were right. Maybe this wasn’t just about wanting quiet.
Maybe it was about admitting I wanted something with a door I could close and a future I could choose.
Not Rylee’s dream. Not the club’s expectations.
Not the old version of me that solved loneliness with skin and silence.
Mine.
I finished the eggs, stood, and rinsed my plate because Regan had trained us better than she knew.
She watched me from the stove. “What time are you seeing it?”
“Ten.”
“I can be ready in fifteen.”
“No.”
“Mason.”
“Regan.”
“You need someone with taste.”
“I have taste.”
“You own one towel.”
“It’s a good towel.”
Edge laughed. “It’s gray because it surrendered.”
I grabbed my mug and headed for the door before they could organize a committee. “Nobody is coming.”
Regan called after me, “You at least need a plant!”
“No, I don’t.”
“A snake plant. They’re impossible to kill.”
“Watch me.”
Emily yelled, “Get curtains!”
Tank added, “And another towel!”
“What this?” I picked up a pamphlet of the counter featuring goats and woman in tight spandex.”
“Therapy,” Regan, snapped, snatching the brochure from my hand.
Edge rolled his eyes. “Bad news brother. The women decided they needed a spa and yoga weekend the same one we booked Tank’s stag.”
“No… Absolutely not…,”
Regan winked at me as she poured me more coffee. “You’re my favorite bodyguard, Mase. No strippers and beer for you. Goat yoga is so—”
“Fuck, no” I snarled like a bear. Their laughter chased me out. My mood going from mild to mad in seconds.
I stepped outside into the morning, coffee in hand, the sun already climbing hard over Santa Fe.
The air smelled like dust, warming asphalt, and breakfast smoke from the kitchen vent.
Bikes sat lined up in the lot, chrome catching light.
My body still ached from the ride. My knuckles were sore.
My bad knee complained when I hit the first step.
I kept walking.
The clubhouse noise faded behind me. Laughter. Voices. Regan yelling at somebody not to touch the bacon with bare hands. Edge saying something that got him cursed at. Family, loud and messy and alive.
I loved them.
But the itch under my skin had teeth now.
Move.
Shift.
Build something.
I didn’t know what yet. Didn’t know why the road that used to be enough had started feeling like a loop. Didn’t know what kind of man I’d be inside my own walls, with no bar noise, no nameless women, no brothers twenty feet away, no easy distractions.
But I knew one thing.
I was done standing still.