Page 60 of A Love So Hard

I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “Jesus, Toby!”

“What? It happened. I fuckin’ freaked out. Can you imagine goin’ at a bitch and suddenly you have a palm full of hair in your hand and it ain’t attached to her head anymore? Fuckin’ hell, I lost my shit. Shoved her off of me, told her she had cancer or some shit, and completely lost my hard on. First time in my life my junk wilted on me, but that sucker shriveled up like I just jumped in an ice bath.” He gave me a pointed look and I couldn’t hold it together.

We both sat there laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation he had found himself in. “Christ, kid,” I laughed out. “I did not need to know most of that, but damn you can’t make that shit up!”

“No kidding. I wish I could say it wasn’t real,” he countered with a shiver. “If I could scrub any memory from mind, and I have a lot of fucked up memories I’d like to get rid of or have a re-do on, that one would be the top pick.”

We laughed a bit more before I finally us back to a serious chat. “I need to know if you think this is a bigger problem the club should step in on. Your mom seems to think the girl was outside our house again this morning. I thought maybe she was imagining things since she said the woman was stalking you, but then it turned out you were at the house so it made sense she might have actually seen her there.”

Toby sighed and ran his hand down the stubble along his cheek. “I didn’t notice her, but I’ll be honest, I just started tuning her out. Every now and again my girl will point her out and tell me that she thinks she followed us somewhere again, but it’s always somewhere that she honestly could have been and she appears to be invested in whatever she’s doing that has her in those places, you know? In other words, she ain’t just standing in the shadows watching and waiting.”

“I need to know if you think this is a bigger deal,” I reiterated for him. “Your mom wants me to talk to the club again about getting rid of the whores altogether.”

“Seriously?” My son asked in wide-eyed surprise.

“Seriously,” I answered. “It’s not a big shocker considering our history with them.”

“I suppose not, but you know the guys in the club would never go for that.”

“I don’t know. We have the clubs and…”

“Yeah, but there they have to work for it and then they have to take the time to go somewhere to fuck too. Half these guys are lazy fucks. They want to get off when they want to get off, and most of them like to do it where other people can watch. It helps with the getting off.”

“Thanks for telling me shit I already know, T. I’ve told your mother all this, not that she also didn’t already know.”

“If you bring it up today, I can back you with mom that it was done. What the club decides is over your head, she knows that. At least this way she’ll know you tried though.”

I clapped my son on the shoulder and gave him a squeeze. “’Preciate that, T.”

“Look who we have here, if it ain’t the brothers Brothers,” Sandman called out. “You guys looking for anyone in particular?”

“You and Merc,” I explained. Sandman waved us back to the office where we went over the same shit Toby and I had just hashed out. The best we got from the talk was that they would bring the issue of the club whores to the table at our next full-chapter meeting which was a month away. In the meantime they were suspending privileges from Seneca for causing trouble and overstepping bounds with a brother. It wasn’t exactly what Lucy had been hoping for, but it was better than the whole lot of nothing I thought I would go home with. I figured Merc must have been catching some heat from his old lady about the whores too. She had a bigger personal interest in getting rid of them since she knew her old man used to use them early on their marriage when she wasn’t around.

Just before I left to go home and try to catch up with my wife Toby caught and stopped me. “Hey, I wanted to let you know that I’ll be bringing my girl ‘round to dinner this weekend. She’s important, and…”

“Say no more, T. Bring her, we’ll be glad to meet her.” My son gave me a lazy grin that made me wonder if we were actually going to be meeting a stranger or if it was someone we knew. Interesting. At least with this news, Lucy would be thrilled, and maybe it would help my cause and get me into her pants even after making fun of her this morning. I found myself grinning like an idiot at the thought.

“Gross,” T-Bone hissed out. “I don’t even want to know where your dirty old man mind just went.”

“That’s easy!” I declared with a bit too much energy. “Your mom should be home about now and we have the house to ourselves tonight.” I hopped on my bike, cranked it up, and gave one final warning to my son. “That means stay the fuck out of he house for the next 24 hours or seeing your momma’s ass cheeks this morning is going to seem like a walk in the park that you want to remember.”

“Fuck! I could have done without the visual reminder, asshole.”

I just grinned, flipped my own damn son off, and got my ass out of there and headed home to my woman.

Chapter 26

(Lucy – age 43, Double-D – age 46)

Something else that had changed for the better since Ever’s reckoning for us had been club life. Finally, I was enjoying my club again. The vibe that had befallen us around the time of Ever’s arrival had blanketed us in negativity and it bred there within the walls for all of us to become infected with it. The night we held the tattoo reveal it was as if these walls received the cleansing they’d needed too. Then again, there was a lot of guilt to go around. The families might not have been inked, but their part in my daughter’s suffering, our family’s suffering, the club’s as well had not been hidden. They now knew it hadn’t gone unnoticed and they’d all been called out for it. Some of them took it upon themselves to literally cleanse the clubhouse in order to give us all a fresh start.

My Lucy had an appointment with an older couple that wanted to discuss what their options were for the wife entering hospice. Lucy had gone back to school over the years and added to her degree. She was now a Hospice Care Social Worker, and while I didn’t understand how she could deal with people dying on her day in and day out, she did it with grace and those whose lives she touched at their worst moments were better for having her. Since she was consoling and counseling the couple this afternoon I had decided to come on over to the club for a bit with the guys. We were going to be having our family dinner soon.

“Where’s T-Bone?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “He wanted to go by the house early while no one was home. Said he had a surprise for his mom he wanted to set up,” I explained to Merc as I laid down my shit hand. A fuckin’ pair of threes wasn’t going to get me anywhere.” Merc glanced over at me then.

“A surprise? Thought he was already bringing this mystery girl home today?”

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