Page 5 of Ask Your Mom If I'm Real

If I offered my hand, it was going to be via my fist in his face.

I didn’t like seeing women harmed.

I certainly didn’t like seeing them mistreated by family.

“So this is the motherfucker that fucked you and left you.”

My brows rose. “I most certainly did not.”

“Then what would you call the devastation you left in your absence?” he asked.

I looked at the woman who still hadn’t given me her name.

“Mary,” a man came out of the back, looking toasted. “What the fuck, man? You were supposed to come get me if you heard Dad’s truck…oh.”

Mary.

Her name was Mary.

Mary looked at me with pleading in her eyes, hoping that I’d follow along.

I reached for her hand, and she greedily took it.

“Oh, hey, um…” the man from the back, whom I assumed was Roger, her brother, said.

“Dixie.” Mary made big eyes at the brother.

“You know this clown?” the dad asked.

This motherfucker.

“Sure, I do,” Roger lied through his teeth for his sister. “He’s been coming here every time he is in town. But he, uh, travels a lot. And he comes in so randomly that sometimes I’m not here.”

The dad’s eyes traveled from me to his daughter to his son and back.

Then movement behind me caught his eye, and he stiffened.

“I don’t want no trouble from you,” he said, shoulders drooping.

That was right.

I’d taken off my cut because it’d gotten ripped earlier in the day, and I had dropped it off at the dry cleaners for repair a couple of hours ago. But just because I wasn’t wearing my cut, proclaiming me as a Dixie Wardens MC club member, didn’t mean that he couldn’t read it on my friends’ bodies that were, I knew, standing directly behind me.

They were ready to protect me with their life, just like I’d done for them countless times.

“No trouble?” I heard Sage say carefully. “It doesn’t look like you want no trouble with the way you just handled our brother’s ol’ lady.”

I liked the sound of that.

A lot.

“W-what?” He looked at me with wide eyes.

“You’re a biker?” Mary whispered under her breath to me.

“Sure am,” I confirmed.

“Very nice,” she whispered.

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