Epilogue Decisions #2
Away from me, I couldn't stop a bullet for them. Then a man had written her name in blue ink.
The water kept coming.
It drummed on my scalp. The steam had filled the whole room by now, thick enough that the light through it had gone soft and the tile had disappeared past the end of my arm, and the soap on the shelf sat there unused. My shoulders were red under the heat and not one ounce lighter.
Two roads.
If I left him be, my people would quit bleeding. My girls would go to their school. Maria would sleep. Nothing happened, for as long as I did nothing.
If I went at him, all of it opened back up.
Every patch in this building would ride, and this time there'd be no pit to find him in.
We'd hunt. He'd know it, and he wouldn't be alone when we found him.
I'd said it at Church before any of us had a plan.
The pit was a filter. A year of it. Every man who'd made it through to him was as good as Caleb. Trained.
The men we'd left on their knees on that floor had all taken his offer, and he'd gone out through his roof and left every one of them behind without a look. A man didn't walk away from his whole crew. Only from the part he could spare.
And leaving him be would cost something too.
Men like him didn't stop building. He'd told me that himself in Sandra Whitfield's office with her blood still spreading across the floor, smiling at me while he said it.
When I build something new, and I will, I'd prefer not to have your people in my way.
Next time we meet, the conversation might go differently.
I stood under the water and I had no answer, and there was nobody in this building I could put the question to.
Reaper would have one. So would Tank, and Irish, and Blade, and Ghost, all of them the same way, with a hand going to a gun. I'd built them that way. And then each of them would go back to a room where somebody was waiting who'd ask how they were before they asked what happened.
I'd watched that.
Kai's hand on Axel's shoulder at the end of a long table, one press of the thumb, and the vice president of this club sitting back in his chair.
Tyler leaning his weight against Tank's side on a bench in the yard and neither of them saying a word for an hour.
Irish at full volume and Declan and Nolan on either side of him, one of them steering him and the other one straightening his collar, and Irish letting them.
Logan tooling a piece of leather at Blade's elbow through a whole dinner while Blade sat there with his knife on the table and his knee against Logan's.
And today, at noon, out my office window, Ghost's bike going through the gate with the cook riding behind him in a jacket with his name on it, the one he'd stood in my doorway three weeks ago and asked me about, red to the ears, and I'd said yes before he'd finished asking.
They had found somebody to fight beside.
Somebody who listened to them after Church, when the vote was done and a man still had to live with it.
Somebody, I had to guess, who kept them still long enough to find an answer to a question like mine.
I'd never asked any of them what that was like.
I'd watched, and I'd told myself I was watching because I hadn't seen much of men with men before this club.
It wasn't true. I'd seen plenty. I'd known about every jacket before it came out of a closet, and put a hand on each of them after, and I'd never cared for one second who any of them took to bed. That wasn't what I'd been looking at.
And when I'd looked around those rooms at the rest of my people, at the brothers and sisters eating and passing plates, not one of them was looking at those couples. Nobody was interested in it but me.
Enough.
I reached out and turned the water off.
It quit all at once. The roar went out of the room and left the drip off the showerhead, one, then another.
The last of the water ran down my back and off the ends of my fingers.
It ran down the front of me and dripped off the end of my cock onto the tile, and the drain pulled it away with a sound I felt through my feet.
Steam hung in the room and came up off my skin, and I stood there in it.
I got a towel around me and stopped at the bathroom door, and I thought about Henderson.
There were bars in that town with flags in the windows. Bright ones, a whole row of colors you could read from across the street. Everybody in the club knew where those were.
Irish had told me about the other ones.
He'd been a few beers into a Friday in the common room, a year back, maybe more, with his boots up on the table and Declan next to him drinking coffee late at night, and he'd been telling me about a run to Henderson.
"Forget the flag places, Hawk, Dec won't set foot in those, he says the music's a hostile act.
The other ones." He'd taken a pull off the bottle and pointed it at me.
"No sign on the door. No name. You go in, nobody looks up, nobody asks what you ride or who you came with or what you do when the sun's up.
You have your drink. You're a man in a bar.
Dec loves them, don't let the face fool you, the face is a lie?—"
Declan hadn't moved. He'd sat there with the coffee in both hands and his eyes on the far wall, and the back of his neck had gone red from the collar up. He hadn't said one word. Irish had kept going for another minute with his hand on the back of that red neck.
Discreet. That was Irish's word for them. Places where nobody asked a man a single question, and a man could just be.
I'd asked nothing that night. I'd finished my beer and gone to bed, and I'd never brought it up again with anybody. And it had stayed in me anyway.
I was looking at it now.
I had too much on my shoulders and too much in my head, and none of it was going to move tonight. Gravedigger would do nothing as long as I did nothing. He'd said so in his own hand. I had all the time I wanted. For now.
So I'd take the night.
One night, off. I'd ride into Henderson and have a whiskey somewhere with no name on the door, and I'd sit with it, and nobody in the place would ask me what I'd decided.
I dried off and got dressed. Clean jeans, a plain black shirt. I pulled my boots on and took my keys off the dresser. The cut hung on the back of the chair where I'd put it hours ago, the president patch facing the room. I looked at it for a long time.
Then I went to the closet and took down the other leather jacket, the one with nothing sewn on it, no patches and no president across the front, and put it on.
I picked up my helmet and left the cut hanging where it was.
Irish had said the place had no sign. He hadn't needed to tell me the street.