Page 65 of Resilience

Sam felt queasy, and he didn’t know whether physical injury or existential dread was the cause. Damn, he’d had no idea how very far down the rabbit hole the club was.

He was scared. He was worried. Even with his parents here in Laughlin, he was lonely.

He missed Athena.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Athena was in the clubhouse kitchen, helping Aunt Sage, Aunt Willa, and LaDonna, one of the sweetbutts, assemble approximately four billion pounds of lasagna for dinner. It looked like the lockdown would continue into a third day, and people were getting crabby. They were cooped up, and a lot of people, Athena included, were missing work with this thing.

The old ladies had decided everybody needed comfort food. Kelsey and Aunt Jenny had made cupcakes earlier, for dessert tonight. Duncan had raided the convenience shop for ice cream and candy for the kids. Now lasagna was on the dinner menu.

Somebody—usually Aunt Marcella or Aunt Jenny—had been getting reasonably regular updates from Nevada, so they understood that the club, and Aunt Deb and Aunt Leah, had arrived safely. They knew that Uncle Gun was still in a coma and the prognosis wasn’t great so far. At minimum, it looked like he’d never walk again. Monty had gotten off fairly lightly, with a concussion and a gash on his head. Nevada had lost one man and had a couple others injured.

They also knew that Sam had been shot and almost died, but that he’d pulled through and was doing pretty well, considering.

However, Sam had not called yet. Dad had called Mom and talked to them both a couple times. Dex had called Kelsey about a hundred times; Kelsey was seven months pregnant, and he was extra worried about being away. Uncle Mav called often. Uncle Eight called Marcella. Uncle Caleb had called Aunt Ciss. And so on. All the old ladies were either with their men or getting updates from them.

But Sam had not called Athena.

She was trying very hard not to be hurt about that, and she was mostly succeeding. He’d been shot. No doubt he was sore and tired, and probably drugged up. Of course he couldn’t call yet. Besides, his parents were there with him, so they were probably the focus of any attention he could muster.

But she needed to see him, to know he really was okay. She wanted to talk to him, too, he always helped her sort through her thoughts and feelings when she had something major going on, and he was the only person in the world she wanted to talk about this pregnancy bullshit with.

But the stuff going on with her wasn’t nearly as important as the stuff going on with him. Maybe she wouldn’t tell him her stuff at all. Her mom knew and was helping. Sam wasn’t in the right place to be worrying about her, or getting angrier at Hunter than he already was. She was angry enough for the whole world, anyway.

Her mom had laid out three different strategies for getting revenge on Hunter. Mom preferred to call it ‘justice,’ and that was fine, but Athena needed to think of it as revenge. Her anger was pure and motivating, and she didn’t want to set it aside and pretend she was after some moral result. No, that piece of used toilet paper masquerading as a person had made her feel helpless and afraid, he’d stolen something from her, he’d tried to fucking gaslight her about it, and now she was pregnant. She wanted him to hurt. Period. The only reason she hadn’t set Sam and Dad on him was her worry that doing so could cause trouble for them.

Well, there was one more reason, too: she did not want men fighting her battles. She hated feeling helpless, and Hunter had made her feel that way. So she didn’t want a man getting her revenge for her, no matter how satisfying that revenge might seem.

Mom’s brand of revenge was served over ice. She had a friend who helped her with complicated tech stuff when Dad couldn’t, so they didn’t have to tell Dad to get his help with that. Mom had already made it impossible for Hunter to get another teaching job within a hundred-mile radius, just by putting the right word out in the right places that he was a predator. She could go even harder and actually insert his name on sex offender rolls, which would make employment and housing nearly impossible all over the country. Certainly he’d be barred from any teaching jobs.

Athena was wary of that, though; Hunter’s father had pull in Tulsa, and if they fucked with official kinds of information, that could be discovered. Or, at least, she worried that it could.

Another idea Mom presented was a social-media rumor campaign, which amounted to starting a few sock-puppet TikTok accounts, posting some carefully worded accusations, and waiting to see how they spread. Mom believed that a man who’d done something like that once had done it before, or soon would. Thus, she figured the sock-puppets would unearth some real women he’d hurt in similar ways.

Athena was skeptical of that one, too, mainly because Hunter dated only Deaf women. His deafness was genetic, with a strong family line straight through several generations on his mother’s side. He felt militantly strongly that Deaf culture was important and valuable, and that deafness was not a disability. He’d said on several occasions that he’d wished Athena was genetically deaf, because he wanted to have children with a woman who also had deafness in her genes.

---