24. Lynx
LYNX
Dear Diary,
The pregnancy checklist includes vitamins, books, pillows, belly bands…and dick.
The clubhouse was never quiet. It was one of the things I liked most about living there. I didn’t want quiet. Wasn’t used to it. It was what I’d noticed most since getting out of prison. I’d tried living alone, but the silence was deafening.
More than that, it was lonely.
As shit as prison was, lonely was the one thing it hadn’t been. I’d grown accustomed to always having noise around me and someone to talk to. Even at night, the silence was never complete. There had always been a TV playing infomercials or someone snoring.
The Saint View Slayers’ clubhouse was much the same.
Most of the rooms here were taken up by prospects, like myself, guys with not much else going on outside these four walls. Some of them had jobs they went to most days, but come knock-off time, they were back here, so there was always someone to have a beer with.
The patched-in members were around a lot too, even if most didn’t live here.
Hawk had a house inside the complex, though it was a few minutes’ walk from the clubhouse where my room was.
War and Reaper and Fang all lived with their families in houses outside the Slayers’ fences, but they were here most days, attending to club business.
And then there were family days.
Like today.
Where the clubhouse was more of a zoo, with people everywhere and kids running around, hopped up on too much sugar.
I loved it.
It sure as fuck beat the silence. I got enough of that when I was standing outside Nyah’s bedroom door.
Reaper flopped down onto the outdoor couch beside me, passing me a beer. He clinked it with mine, and we both took a sip.
I glanced at him. I could only see his profile, but there was no denying the happiness in his expression. It was there in the crinkle at his eye and the slight upturn of his mouth in between swallows of his drink.
I rolled my eyes at him. “Your happiness is disgusting. You know that, right?”
He leaned back against the couch cushions and crossed one leg over the other, resting his ankle on his opposite knee.
“Yeah, I know. But, man, I can’t fucking help it.
Look at what I have. My woman pregnant, two adopted kids who feel like they were always supposed to be mine.
A man I had no idea I wanted but now can’t fucking get enough of.
” He squinted at X. “And…X, who is apparently having a cartwheel competition with eight-year-olds…” He cupped his hands around his mouth to make his voice travel farther.
“X, you flunked out of gymnastics when you were eleven. If you snap your ACL or something, I’m not taking you to the hospital again! ”
X waved back to him. “Don’t worry! I’m a professional!” His gaze shifted to me. “Was thinking about doing one of these on the ice at our next game, Coach!”
He did the most awkward, gangly cartwheel I’d ever seen, his foot coming about an inch short of kicking a little dark-haired girl, whose name I couldn’t remember, in the face.
Him doing that in skates seemed like a recipe for disaster. All I could imagine was the metal blades, slicing through the air like out-of-control knives. “Uh, we might have to clear that with our insurance first.”
X shrugged, breathing hard from the exertion of turning his thirty-something-year-old body upside down over and over. “That’s okay. It’ll give me time to work out how I’m going to keep my head on.”
He meant the head of his mascot costume, a giant sequined viper that kind of looked more like a sparkly dildo, since X and Reaper’s woman, Violet, had handmade the entire thing, and neither of them were particularly crafty.
Reaper sniggered. “I still can’t believe you’re coaching his team.”
“His” team was probably putting it a little generously, since X didn’t actually play for it. But he had somehow talked his way into being their mascot, and I certainly didn’t have the heart to tell him he couldn’t, even though the man could barely stay upright on his skates.
“I can’t either. I have to run training this week. I have no idea what I’m fucking doing. And the Guerras are going to expect a win right out of the gate, I’m sure.”
Reaper frowned. “That’s unreasonable. The team sucks.”
I cringed at the memory of watching them skate around with zero team coordination, like they’d all been playing solo for their entire careers. How some of them had even made the team was baffling to me.
I knew I needed to get some new players in. Some superstars who could hold the team together, but finding them was the problem.
Not a problem for today though. It was my day off from thinking about the Guerras, and I intended to take full advantage of it.
Except inside the Guerra mansion right now, someone else was standing outside Nyah’s bedroom door, and that didn’t sit well with me.
Violet wandered over to us, a plate of food in one hand, and Reaper pulled her curvy ass down onto his lap and wrapped his arms around her middle.
I couldn’t tell she was pregnant yet. She didn’t have a noticeable bump, at least not to me, but they’d made the happy announcement a few weeks ago.
Which meant she was a woman I needed to talk to.
I sat up a little straighter, ignoring the way Reaper nuzzled at her neck, his fingers stroking her belly through her clothes. “Violet. You’re pregnant.”
She glanced up from her plate of food to focus on me. “Lynx,” she replied with the same matter-of-fact tone, “I am.”
Reaper’s hand rested proudly on her belly. “Baby is due right around Christmas. I can’t fucking wait.”
They were sickening. But whatever.
I needed information and I didn’t know anyone else well enough to ask. “What things do pregnant women need to do?”
Reaper groaned. “Jesus, Lynx! Who the hell did you knock up? It better not be one of the club girls. War will be pissed—”
I shook my head quickly. “No one! I know how to glove up.”
Not that it mattered, since I hadn’t touched a woman, or a man for that matter, since I’d gotten out. The club girls had offered. Hell, they offered almost every night, but my dick refused to get hard at the thought of any of them.
All it wanted was Nyah, who was completely unavailable, not to mention uninterested.
And Luca, who I was holding at arm’s length ’cause he was my fucking boss and both my jobs depended on him not firing me. Which I could guarantee he would if we fucked and made it awkward.
So it was just me and my hand.
Good times.
Violet had questions in her eyes. “How come you want to know about pregnancy then?”
I took a sip of my drink to cover the fact I was mentally trying to come up with an excuse, that wasn’t, “Your best friend, Nyah, is pregnant with Dax’s baby, so she’s trying to seduce Carlos so he thinks it’s his.
Because if he finds out it’s not, he’ll probably sell it to the highest bidder, and Nyah will never see it again. ”
Those weren’t my secrets to tell. I’d promised Nyah I wouldn’t tell a soul, and I kept my promises. I took a long swallow of my drink and glanced at her. “A friend of mine is single and pregnant. Just wanted to put together a care package for her.”
Reaper raised a questioning eyebrow in disbelief. “Since when do you make care packages?”
X, clearly eavesdropping from the gymnastics mats he’d completely kicked the kids off of, called, “I think the question actually is since when does Lynx have friends?”
I flipped him the bird. “I can always hire a new mascot…”
He changed his tune instantly. “You know, I don’t know what I was talking about. Lynx has friends!”
Reaper stifled a laugh at X’s quick one-eighty turnaround. “Who?”
“You. Me. Violet. The kids. My duck…”
I rolled my eyes and turned back to Violet. “So. Pregnancy stuff?”
She nodded seriously, thinking it over while she finished chewing a bite of her pasta salad. “Okay, so it’s her first baby?”
I nodded. “As far as I know.”
“Same, so I know how she’s feeling. Probably terrified. First thing she’ll want is prenatal vitamins. Then I would recommend a baby book. I have a good one. It tells you everything you can expect to happen at each stage of her pregnancy.”
I pulled my phone out of my back pocket and started writing it down in my Notes app. “Okay, vitamins and books. What else?”
“A body pillow for once she has a bump,” Bliss, the prez’s wife added as she passed with a baby on her hip. “They’re a godsend. Impossible to get comfortable without one.”
Rebel, Violet’s sister-in-law and Fang’s partner, caught wind of the pregnancy talk and sat on the chair across from us.
“Oooh, are we talking pregnancy must-haves? With five kids, I’ve tried every product out there.
You might want to get her a belly band. Once that baby starts getting heavy, she’ll be grateful for that. ”
My finger hovered over the touch screen. “A belly band? I don’t even know what that is.”
Rebel rattled off a few other things, some sort of weird plant tea that was supposed to make labor easier, and various foods she’d craved. She grinned. “You know, if she’s single and second trimester, what she probably wants most is some dick.”
Violet blushed pink.
Rebel clapped her hands together and pointed at her.
“See! You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?
You feel like shit for the first few months, but then you start feeling good again, and all of a sudden, all those pregnancy hormones are swirling through your system, reminding you daily how attractive your man is…
Just wait ’til you get to third trimester.
You don’t feel like it so much then, but you get to the point where you’re so big, and you just want the baby out that you start begging for sex in the hopes it’ll get things moving.
” She looked at me again. “Sperm softens the cervix. So I read online, anyway. I don’t know if that’s really true, but by that point in my pregnancies, I was always desperate enough to try anything.
So you know. If you have a dick, it might be nice to offer it to her. ”
Violet and Levi both laughed.
I just shook my head. “I have the dick. Pretty sure she doesn’t want it though.”
Rebel patted me on the shoulder sympathetically. “Poor Lynx. The friend zone sucks.”
“I’ll get the rest of the things you suggested though. Thanks.”
A squawk came from a couple of kids somewhere across the yard, and Reaper, Violet, and Rebel all got up to go investigate if it was one of their kids who needed them.
I just sat there wondering if Nyah was as horny as Rebel suggested she might be.
And then mentally punching myself in the junk because even if she was, it wasn’t me she was going to be turning to for help in that department.
I squeezed my eyes shut tight, trying real fucking hard not to remember the curve of her hips and the swell of her tits from that night I’d walked into Luca’s bedroom and found them both naked. Remembering that wasn’t going to help anyone.
But my list of things she needed would.
It might not have been my place to touch her, but I could damn well take care of her.