Page 56 of A Love So Hard

Later that night, I took my shower and then Luce was there to help me apply the ointment to the fresh ink on my skin. I waited for her response. I couldn’t see the tattoo since it was on my back, but I was facing the mirror and so was she. The moment she rounded my shoulder and saw the ink on my back a mask shuttered down over her face. It was the strangest thing to see, watching my woman close herself off from me. Her fingers lightly traced around the space that had been inked without touching any of the ink itself. Her only tell was that the fingers tracing that skin shook like a leaf in the wind.

“Well?” I finally asked.

Her eyes met mine in the mirror. Her beautiful blond tresses were piled on top of her head and I wanted nothing more than to snatch the elastic band out of her hair and let it all fall lose around her shoulders. I loved her hair. With it up I could see her eyes better though, and there was a world emotion of spinning in them as our gazes locked. “I think,” she started and then stopped while continuing to trace a circle around the image. “I can’t tell you anything, but CJ, it’s beautifully done.”

“No stick figures?” I asked trying to lighten the mood.

She offered up a small smile. “No stick figures,” she whispered damn near reverently making me ever more curious about what my daughter inked on my back than before. Lucy finished fixing me up and then took my hand and brought me out to the bedroom. “I think I’m the one that needs you tonight,” she informed me before her lips came crashing down on mine.

“I’m pretty sure you were the one who needed me last night, the way you attacked my dick,” I told her. Again, I was trying to lighten the mood that had deteriorated greatly since she saw the tattoo. It worked because she giggled.

“Yeah, I guess I did, but tonight, I’m on board with starting off slow.” Then she leaned in and laved my nipple with her tongue, sucked the tiny nub into her mouth and teased the hardening bit with her teeth before letting go and trailing kisses over to the other side. Lucy made a move to push me onto the bed and I did what I could to oblige her. I even ignored the sting of the freshly inked skin meeting the comforter before I remembered some the ink and plasma might run out on it.

“Better throw down a towel,” I managed to get out as she stood to remove her clothing. She gave me an odd look first.

“Why? I’m not on my period.”

“Shit, Luce,” I hissed. Yeah, we had sex on her period. It helped with her cramps and plus she was horny as fuck during her time of the month and I’m not a little bitch. Blood washes. “My tat,” I reminded her and she chuckled.

“Oh! That’s not where I thought you were going with that. My next thought was you wanted some dirty butt sex,” she informed me as she moved back to the bathroom to get a towel.

Nope. I wasn’t waiting after that. The minute she bent her naked, gorgeous ass over in front of me in order to grab a towel from the lower shelf I jumped out of bed and made my way to her. As she was coming up from the bend with the towel in her hand I caught her by surprise, grabbed hold of her hair with one hand, her hip with the other and slammed home into her hot, tight, wet pussy. “FUCK!” I growled out as I felt her muscles flex and release around me at the sudden intrusion.

“Yes, CJ!” She hissed out and that was all I needed. I started pumping furiously into my woman, right there, bent over the damn cabinet in our bathroom. There was no more waiting.

“We’ll do slow again later,” I told her. Again she giggled, only this time I felt it wrap around my dick the way her laughter moved her body. Yeah, we were definitely going to do slow later, and then maybe another around of take it any way we could get it before one of the kids or the club had another emergency we had to head out for.

The other men had to get their tattoos as well, and then she gave them all time to heal up before Deck scheduled the day we would basically unveil our tattoos to the rest of the club. At first, we were just going to do a private thing, with those of us who had been inked and our personal families in attendance, but it quickly became clear that those of us who had to wear our shame and my daughter’s heartache on our skin needed to set an example for the rest of our members too so that our mistakes were never repeated in the future.

After two weeks we borrowed some of our equipment from one of our clubs and set it up so that everyone could get a detailed view of the tattoos as they were revealed. We set one of the prospects up with the camera and he learned how to use it well before the day of the event. The event. It was more like counting down to D-Day. I knew that Lucy absently touched where I’d been inked when we were lying in bed together. She would trace the image and then get this lost look on her face that I wish I could erase with magic. I couldn’t though. I’d done this to her. To Ever. To our family. I’d broken us when in the very beginning, being broken was what I had been trying to avoid.

Right before my dad checked out on us we had a talk that made me wonder if he didn’t realize his time was up. He’d said something to me that I never thought I would be able to understand until this point. “Live your life so that you never leave anyone else in it with regrets,” he’d said to me.

“Pop, everyone has regrets,” I’d explained.

“Yeah, but when you get to my point in life and look at the people surrounding you, it becomes pretty clear very fast that you either treated people in a way they’ll remember you fondly when you go or you treated them in a way they’ll regret the moment they met you. Maybe it won’t be that moment they regret. Could be they regret staying,” he’d mused and I noticed his gaze had slid to the one photo in our house of my parents the day they’d gotten hitched.

I never thought I’d have to look back in my life and see the regret I’d caused in other people’s eyes. Then there was regret I had to live with too. It had been eating at me for the past two weeks as we waited to see what my daughter had inked on all of our skin.

I glanced around the club and took in the somber mood of everyone here. The members who weren’t the ones inked were waiting on tenterhooks to see what we’d allowed to be done to us. Those of us who were inked – most of us – knew we had it coming, no matter how it all turned out. The way that Lucy was always tracing that tattoo, I knew mine was going to hurt, but I also knew it would be painfully beautiful. That was the look I’d been trying to place on Lucy’s face all this time, every time she traced her fingers over the image. Beauty and reverence were splashed across her features as she remembered every detail.

The moment Ever and Deck walked into the clubhouse a hush fell over the place and didn’t break until Deck started telling people the rules and one of the whores in the back had to go and run her mouth. Fucking club whores had been the bane of my existence since my father’s time in the club. We all new he was taking what they offered instead of going home to my mom. Then there was what happened to me and what sent Lucy running. Merc and I had spoken about the need to have them here. He had his points. They had their place and served a purpose for the men without a good woman in their home, or those too stupid to want to keep the good woman they had. Still, my chest swelled with pride when Deck didn’t waste a minute of time in telling the whores they didn’t belong here. This was for family.

If I hadn’t been sure before that he was right for Ever, he would have just cemented it for me.

Ever called Crow up first. She spoke about meeting him, having him be the first to call her “The Other Princess” and mean it in a shitty way. My daughter spoke about becoming his and a few other members’ personal whipping boy for the women who had done wrong in their eyes. She had somehow become their representative. Their sins were deposited on her shoulders long before she could even understand what it was all about yet she did understand. She knew it had never been about her, and she taught a lesson about judgment that full grown men should never receive from a woman barely out of her own childhood.

PeeWee went next, and what she had to say about him nearly sent Deck on the attack, and I wasn’t far behind him. Merc stayed me just as quickly as Ever’s words kept Deck from taking action. That didn’t mean PeeWee was in the clear though. He’d pay for whatever vulgar shit he had to say to my girl when she was just a kid. There was the rude indifference and neglect she received from everyone and then there was something else that she got from PeeWee and I think he knew there would be a hefty price to pay considering the look he gave me along with the distance he put between us as he came back down off the stage. It’s a good thing too, because it was Merc’s turn to hit the stage.

One thing I could say for Ever, the tattoos she had given each of us were beautiful, with one exception. Jay. She only gave him a few words with a meaning she meant for him to decipher. It certainly wasn’t lost on anyone that he didn’t get the beautiful visuals the rest of the men had received. She wouldn’t give him that, and I didn’t blame her. I wouldn’t know if she never chose to tell me the truth about it, but I figured it was part of his punishment. Everyone else got to wear her art, but the man who had caused the direct line of events that led to her being ostracized everywhere else in her life and not just in the clubhouse. He quite literally took away the rest of her teen life.

I couldn’t fuckin’ stand this. It was like miraculously surviving while going five rounds with Daniel Cormier when you belonged in the flyweight class. Gut punch after gut punch continued to land and threatened to drop me where I stood. When I saw Toby’s tattoo I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I hurt for both of my kids. I ached for Toby, because it was my fault he was in this position with his sister. I put him there. He would have gladly gone against Jay and what he had to say if I hadn’t stepped in and told him my story and influenced things. My story wasn’t theirs and it had no business being told then. It had no business being weighed against the goodness that was my daughter. I had no business calling her that after failing her for so long, but damned if I didn’t want to earn the right to do so.

Toby was so fucking gutted by his tattoo and what it meant that he’d walked off that stage without picking his kutte back up. I watched as Deck took it to Lucy who was barely holding it together. We both knew that Ever had some pretty strong feelings about the loss of her hero – her brother – in her life as a result of him lacking any faith in her. I don’t think either of us were prepared to see what that actually looked like though.

Suddenly, it was my turn. I moved as though something else was controlling my body because the very last place in this world that I wanted to be was up there on that stage. Also, the only place I needed to be was right there. It was hard to reconcile the two, but I wasn’t about to let the fear win.

Once I got up there went Deck came forward as if to take my kutte and hold it like he had for all the other brothers. I shook my head and turned to Ever. “Not that I don’t trust my brother, but I think it’s necessary for you to know that I trust you too, baby girl. I would prefer you be the one to handle my kutte.” She took it as if it was something precious to her and I saw her lip wobble. I glanced over at Deck to make sure I’d done the right thing, and felt my own kick in the ass over the fact that I had to seek that knowledge from him. He tipped his head in acknowledgment and I turned my full attention back to my daughter as I removed my shirt and turned my back to our audience and the camera. Once again, I had that feeling as if someone was remotely controlling my body’s movements, because I was at war with myself. Part of me wanted to know about my tattoo, the other part wanted to keep it a secret I held in private. This was my daughter’s pain – pain that I’d been the cause of – and thus it was also my shame. When I was brave enough to look at the screen in front of me that was projecting my back and the tattoo there. I took it in and absorbed what it meant in the still quiet of the room. No one spoke, not even Ever. She didn’t need to explain this one at all. The first thing I took in was the lonely little wounded lion club in the forefront of the image. Behind it, off in the distance was a family. A pride of lions. The male and female each had a cub on their flank and they were all headed toward a beautiful tree and not a single one of the lions from the pride were concerned with the wounded cub that had been left behind.

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