Page 3 of Resilience

No, not her room. At the last second, she ducked into the bathroom.

“—please leave a message after the beep. BEEEEP!”

Sam slung himself into the bathroom just in time to see Lark drop his club burner in the fucking toilet. Roaring with fury and panic, he shoved her out of the way and snatched his phone out of the toilet water. Please still work, please still work. It was a burner, but it was a recent-model smartphone. It was supposed to have some degree of water resistance. Please still work, please still work.

It did. Thank fuck. He checked his recents and saw that Eight Ball, the fucking club president, was the one who’d called. He called immediately back; he’d worry about the toilet water on his face later.

“Get a leash on your little bitch, prospect! You think this is a fuckin’ game?” Eight snarled when he picked up the call.

“I’m sorry, Eight. Won’t happen again.” Sam finally looked at Lark, who was rubbing her elbow and looking scared and betrayed. As he took in more of the scene, he saw the torn shower curtain and the askew rod. He’d shoved her into the bathtub, more or less, and she must have bashed her elbow on the tile wall.

At the moment, he was too fucking pissed to be sorry about that.

“Better not,” Eight snapped. “Get your ass over here. Right now.”

“Okay. Clubhouse?”

“Yeah, the fuckin’ clubhouse.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“Five, asshole. You got five.” With that, Eight ended the call.

Their president did not give one single fuck that Sam had called him Uncle Eight for most of his life. Now he was nothing but a prospect.

Wiping the phone dry on his jeans and slipping it into his pocket, Sam said, “I don’t have time to get into how incredibly fucked up that was, Lark. But when I do have time, we are gonna get into it, trust me.”

Lark’s bottom lip actually pushed out in a pout. Her eyes filled with tears. “I just want you to care about me like you care about them. And her. And everything. Where do I rate, Sam? Am I fourth? Am I in the top ten? Am I even on the list?”

“I do not have time for this. I have to go now.”

“But you don’t. If you cared, you wouldn’t.”

Sam was on a five-minute countdown. He did have to go, right now. And he was too angry to try to make her feel better about it. So he turned and walked away.

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~oOo~

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Three hours later, Sam pulled onto the wide driveway of a sprawling house in Broken Arrow. He parked his 1993 Wide Glide between a black Mercedes GLS and a blue Fiat 500. The Armstrong women didn’t care about American vehicles.

Probably he should have gone back to Lark’s place and had it out with her, try to get through the fighting and tears to the making up, but he was dirty and tired and not in the mood for that scene. Definitely Lark would throw a rod if she learned that instead of going back to her he’d come here, but he was too dirty and tired to care about that. He needed to feel good, and there were two places in the world where he knew he’d feel good: here and home. Home was three times farther from the clubhouse than here, so he was here.

He went up the short walk and opened the door. “Hey! It’s Sam!” he called as he stepped into the cool of the front hall.

“Kitchen!” Jacinda, Athena’s mother and Sam’s honorary aunt, called.

Sam followed the long hallway to the back of the house and entered the Armstrongs’ gymnasium-sized kitchen. Between what Apollo earned as the Tech Officer of the Bulls, what Jacinda earned as a private investigator, and what she’d inherited several years back when her mother passed on, Sam thought the Armstrongs were maybe the richest people in the Bulls. They lived richest, at least.

“Hey, Aunt Jace,” Sam said upon entering the room.

Jacinda was emptying out the dishwasher, so he went over and took the plates from her hand to put them away for her.

“Hey, Sam.” Before he could turn away with the stack of plates, she caught his arm and tugged him down to plant a kiss on his cheek. “Ugh. You smell bad.” Leaning back, she gave him her squinty ‘on the case’ look. “You smell like you’ve been digging graves. Please tell me you haven’t been digging graves.”

She signed the words as the spoke them. Athena, her daughter and Sam’s best friend, was deaf and had chosen not to get cochlear implants or learn to speak, so the people who loved her were all fluent in ASL. Athena wasn’t in the room, but her parents—especially her mother—tended to sign and speak whether she was around or not, like they’d gotten so used to using their hands to talk, the habit had become bound to the very idea of communication. Sometimes Jacinda forgot to actually speak until it was pointed out to her.

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