2. Ethan
Ethan
Eight months before I ever laid eyes on Cassie in that bar, I'm standing in the pouring rain at two in the morning, elbow deep in a clogged gutter because Brick told me to clear it before the storm did more damage to the clubhouse roof, and I'm asking myself, not for the first time, whether I've made a horrible mistake coming here.
"You planning on finishing that tonight, or do you need me to remind you that the sun's due up in four hours?" Brick's voice carries from the porch, dry, unbothered by the weather in a way that makes me want to throw the gutter muck directly at him.
"Almost done."
"Wasn't a question." He doesn't move to help.
He never does, not with the grunt work, not once in eight months.
I used to think that meant something was wrong between us, some father-son thing neither of us knew how to fix.
I've started to understand it different lately.
He's not making it easy on purpose, because easy was never going to teach me anything worth learning.
I finish the gutters an hour before dawn, soaked through, hands blistered, and drag myself toward my bunk only for Knuckles to intercept me at the door.
"Kegs need moving before Church this morning. Then you're on breakfast detail."
"When do I sleep, exactly?"
"When you've patched in." He doesn't even look up from whatever he's cleaning. "Prospect year's not supposed to be comfortable, kid. Comfortable doesn't teach a man what he's actually made of."
I move the kegs. I make the breakfast badly, and eat the brothers' good-natured abuse about my eggs along with my own plate of them. This is the rhythm of my life now. It has been ?months. Every day there’s a fresh assignment nobody explains the point of until long after I've already done it and understood on my own.
Knuckles catches me eyeing a girl from town who’s been in twice this week for the same coffee order at the diner where I’m running an errand, and he doesn’t say a word until we’re back in the truck.
“Don’t.” He doesn’t even glance over. “Prospects don’t date. Not girlfriends, not anything serious, not until you’ve patched in. Club needs to know your head’s in this and nowhere else for the whole year, or the whole thing doesn’t mean anything when you finally earn it.”
“That’s a hell of a rule.”
“It’s the rule anyway.” He shrugs, like the fairness of it was never really up for discussion. “Year’s hard enough without splitting your attention. Man who’s prospecting and dating is a man who’s not doing either one properly.”
I file it away, mostly annoyed, the way you file away any rule that doesn’t affect you yet.
I’ve got no girl waiting on me, no reason to care one way or another.
I don’t know yet how much that’s about to change, or how hard I’m going to end up hoping somebody bends that rule for me the way nobody’s ever had reason to before.
I'm not the only one drowning in it. Nerd showed up a few months after I did, prospecting out of some other chapter's referral, and the two of us fell into an easy rhythm fast, trading off the worst jobs so neither of us gets stuck with the same miserable duty two days running.
He's the one who teaches me how to fake competence around a deep fryer well enough to fool Cam, and I'm the one who covers for him the week he's too sick to stand and too proud to admit it to anybody patched.
We don't talk much about where either of us came from before this.
Prospect year isn't really built for that kind of conversation.
But somewhere in six months of shared misery, sharing the load without either of us asking the other to, I start thinking of him as something close to a brother even before either of us has earned the actual word for it.
"You ever think about quitting?" he asks me once, both of us flat on our backs in the yard after a full day hauling gravel for a new stretch of driveway, too tired to even sit up properly.
"Every week, probably. You?"
"Every day." He laughs, breathless. "But then I think about walking back to whatever I was doing before this, and it's worse. Nothing out there's half as good as what's in here, even on the bad days."
"Yeah." I stare up at a sky gone orange with sunset, arms too sore to lift. "Yeah, I know exactly what you mean."
Some nights, lying in my bunk, aching in muscles I didn't know I had, I think about walking away.
Going back to whatever ordinary life might have looked like if I'd never come looking for my father, and never decided at twenty-one that whatever this life cost, I wanted a piece of it anyway.
Then morning comes, and Cash tosses me a coffee without being asked, and Ramsay claps my shoulder on his way past making me feel like I already belong here, even though nobody's told me so out loud, and I remember exactly why I'm doing this.
Brick catches me alone by the bikes one evening, months into it, the two of us the only ones left in the yard as the sun goes down. He doesn't say much, he never does, just hands me a rag and starts working on his own bike beside mine. Both of us are quiet, and the silence doesn't need filling.
"You thinking about quitting?" he asks eventually, not looking over.
"Thought abut it. Most weeks, honestly."
"Good." He nods slowly, as if that's the answer he was hoping for. "A man who never thinks about quitting isn't taking it seriously enough. This life asks a lot. Anybody who tells you differently is selling you something."
"Why didn't you ever make it easier? You're my father. Other guys' fathers in this club, they still expect the same year everybody else pulls, but it's different, watching your own kid go through it and not stepping in."
He's quiet for a long moment, rag moving slowly over chrome.
"Because the day I make it easy for you is the day every brother in this club has a reason to wonder if you actually earned your cut, or if I just handed it to you.
" He finally looks over. "I want you standing on your own two feet when you get that patch, Ethan.
Not standing on mine. That matters to me more than you probably understand yet. "
"It's a long year, is all."
"It's supposed to be." He goes back to his bike. "But I'm watching. Every single day. Don't think for one second I'm not proud of what I'm watching."
That's as close as he comes to saying it outright, not until the night he hands me my patch months later, not until he crosses a room in front of the whole club and says it loud enough for everyone to hear.
But that evening, elbow deep in engine grease beside my father in the fading light, I understand something I'll carry with me long after I've got a cut of my own hanging on my shoulders.
He was never withholding love. He was making sure I'd know exactly what it cost to earn it, so that when it finally came, I'd never once doubt it was real.
I finish my beer, finish the bike, and head to bed that night lighter than I have in weeks, already counting down, without knowing it yet, toward a bar stool in a town I hadn't visited yet, and a woman who was about to make every single one of those hard months worth it.