Chapter 12
There are some mistakes a man makes once and learns from.
You touch a hot engine block barehanded when you’re sixteen and stupid, and the burn teaches you faster than any warning ever could.
You trust the wrong prospect with information that matters, and one mess later you learn exactly how far loyalty stretches before it snaps.
You get into a bar fight with a man bigger than you because your pride’s louder than your common sense, and if you survive it, you learn to hit first and harder next time.
Then there are the mistakes that don’t teach you a damn thing except how badly you want to make them again.
That’s Allison.
Or maybe, if I’m being honest, the mistake was kissing her.
Allie herself has never been the mistake.
That would be easier. Safer too.
If she were just a bad decision, just some line I crossed once because I’d had too much whiskey and not enough sense, then I could’ve filed the whole thing away years ago and moved on with my life.
I could’ve told myself it was a fluke, a moment, a lapse in judgment that meant nothing once the alcohol burned off and the morning came.
The problem is, I know exactly why I kissed her. And I know exactly why I spent years after avoiding the hell out of her. Neither answer makes me look any better.
I’m in the middle of hauling a crib box up the clubhouse stairs when Mom’s voice drifts up from below.
“Jimmy, don’t just throw it around. Brooke said Carter already lost one of the brackets.”
“I’m not throwing it,” I call back, one hand braced under the weight of the box while I shoulder the upstairs hall door open. “And Carter loses parts because he’s an idiot.”
From downstairs, Carter’s offended voice carries clear as day. “I heard that.”
“Good.”
A laugh cuts through the room right after, light and familiar enough that every muscle in my back goes tighter before I even register who it belongs to.
Allie.
Of course.
Because apparently this house isn’t big enough to spare me five goddamn minutes without her voice slipping under my skin.
I set the crib box down in the room Carter and Brooke have been half turning into a nursery and scrub a hand over my jaw before looking back toward the stairs.
I can hear the women downstairs in the common room, all overlapping voices and the kind of chaos that’s become normal lately with three pregnant women in the club at the same damn time.
Mac’s cool, clipped tone slides in and out around Kya’s louder one. Brooke laughs at something. Ana and Shaina are there too from the sound of it.
And Allie.
Always right in the middle of it.
That shouldn’t matter. It does anyway.
I head back downstairs because if I stay up here too long, Mom’ll find another project for me before I can get out of her line of sight. The common room is exactly the kind of domestic circus I expected.
Baby clothes are spread across the coffee table in tiny pastel piles, little socks and onesies and folded sleepers sorted by size while Brooke sits on the couch looking emotional over a pair of newborn pajamas like they personally invented joy.
Kya is in the armchair nearest the window with one foot propped on Dom’s thigh while he rubs slow circles into her ankle and pretends he’s not being bossed around.
Mac is at the kitchen island with a basket of folded blankets, overseeing the room like a queen stuck ruling over idiots.
And Allison is kneeling on the rug between Ana and Shaina, holding up some ridiculously small little shirt while all three of them argue over whether a baby can pull off a leather jacket-inspired onesie without it looking insane.
That sight hits me harder than the damn box did.
She’s laughing, head tipped back a little, hair sliding over one shoulder while she tries to fold the shirt one-handed and Shaina keeps swiping at it just to be annoying.
Ana is on her other side, grinning like she’s found religion in a stack of miniature denim overalls, and Allie fits there so naturally it makes something under my ribs pull too tight.
Domestic.
That word again.
I’m getting real tired of that word.
“About time,” Mom says from the kitchen doorway, catching my eye before I can drag it off Allison. “Take that next box to Logan’s room. Mac wants the diapers up there.”
Mac glances over, one dark brow already arched like she expects resistance and is prepared to crush it.
“Don’t even ask me why,” she says. “If one more person asks me if I’m nesting, I’m going to start biting.”
Logan, who’s trying to build some kind of changing table against the wall, looks up with immediate concern. “Baby, no one’s asking that.”
Mac gives him a flat stare. “You asked me that this morning.”
He pauses. “I was checking.”
“You were being annoying.”
Kya snorts. “That’s his full-time job lately.”
Dom doesn’t look up from her ankle. “I thought that was mine.”
“It’s both of y’all, actually,” she says.
Brooke laughs softly, then presses a hand to her stomach and says, “Oh my God, the baby just kicked.”
Carter appears in the doorway like he teleported. “What? Where? Is she okay?”
Brooke’s smile turns helpless and sweet. “She’s fine. You’re freaking out.”
“I’m not freaking out.”
“You’re definitely freaking out,” Ana says.
He ignores her completely and kneels in front of Brooke, palm flattening over the curve of her stomach like if he concentrates hard enough he can will himself into understanding every tiny movement in there.
And there it is.
That shift again.
That room full of women, babies on the way, men turning themselves inside out over it, and Allie right there in the middle of all of it with a tiny shirt in her hand and a smile on her face like she belongs in that picture.
I hate the way that lands.
Because it isn’t hard to imagine. That’s the problem. It should be hard. It should feel wrong, impossible, like a road my mind wouldn’t even know how to go down.
Instead, it comes too easy.
Allie on a couch with a hand over a round stomach while women around her laugh and argue and talk about names. Allie sorting baby clothes. Allie in one of my T-shirts with her hair a mess and sleep still in her eyes. Allie—
No.
Absolutely the fuck not.
I grab the diaper box off the floor before Mom can say my name again and head for the stairs without speaking, because apparently the safest place for me right now is anywhere she isn’t laughing in my line of sight.
I make it halfway up before Mom calls after me, “And when you’re done with that, I need the glider moved.”
Of course she does.
“Jesus,” I mutter under my breath.
“You say something?” Mom asks.
“Nope.”
The upstairs run buys me exactly three minutes of peace before I’m back downstairs moving a damn glider from one room to another while Carter apologizes every five seconds for not having it figured out before Brooke got tired.
Logan gets roped in to help me angle it through a doorway, which would be fine if he wasn’t distracted every thirty seconds by looking over his shoulder to check on Mac.
“For the love of God,” I tell him when he nearly drops his side. “She’s not gonna vanish while you’re gone.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about.”
“She’s literally sitting at the island folding blankets.”
“Yeah, and?”
I look at him.
He looks at me.
Then I shake my head because pregnancy has apparently reduced all these men to terminal idiots.
We get the chair into place eventually, and by the time I step back into the common room, the women have moved on from clothes to talking about names.
Which, somehow, is worse.
Kya has a notebook open in her lap and is crossing things out with enough aggression to leave dents through the page.
“If one more person suggests Joseph, I’m fighting,” she says.
Dom, wisely, keeps his mouth shut.
Brooke is listing soft, classic names Carter apparently found in some baby book online, and Ana is making gagging noises every time one of them gets too old-fashioned.
Shaina’s suggestions are useless on purpose.
Mac is calm but snappish, dismissing half the options because she doesn’t want their kid sounding like “a trust fund baby or a linebacker with rage issues.”
And Allie is smiling.
Just smiling and listening and occasionally tossing out a name that makes Brooke melt or Kya scoff or Shaina laugh so hard she chokes on her own spit.
It should be nothing.
A room. A conversation. A woman who’s been part of this family forever acting like part of the family.
Instead it feels like pressure. Like standing too close to a ledge and pretending I can’t see how far the drop goes.
Mom corners me before I can escape again. “Take these boxes out to the storage room,” she says, handing me three smaller cartons filled with shit I don’t bother checking. “And grab the diaper genie refill pack from the truck after. Logan forgot it.”
Logan mutters, “I did not forget it.”
Mom gives him one look.
He clears his throat. “I temporarily set it aside.”
“All right,” I say before she can drag me into whatever argument comes next.
I stack the boxes in my arms and turn toward the back hall. On my way past the couch, Brooke reaches for one of the little white sleepers and sighs so softly it’s almost painful.
“They’re so tiny.”
Allie leans over, takes it from her, and smooths it out in her lap. “That’s kind of the point.” Allie laughs.
I keep walking because I know better than to stop when she does that.
The storage room buys me another few minutes and absolutely no peace, because once I’m alone the memory comes right back the way it always does when she’s been too close for too long.
The kiss.
It doesn’t matter how many years have passed. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve replayed it, cursed it, shoved it down, or told myself it meant less than it did.
I remember every piece of it too clearly for a man who’s spent so much time pretending it wasn’t important.
I didn’t kiss her because I was drunk.
I kissed her because I wanted to.