Page 64 of Biker's Prisoner: Property of Bucky

“I don’t need a woman. I have gambling and… you know.”

“I don’t,” my mother says sternly. I dry swallow. It’s not like I don’t talk to my mom about my problems but… the older I get, the less I want to spill my guts.

“Situationships.”

“What the fuck is that, Ethan?” she says, taking a swig right out of the bottle. Okay, she’s tipsy. Mom always switches from the glass to the bottle when she’s appropriately tipsy.

“Sleeping around.”

She wrinkles her nose in disgust. “That’s a good way to end up like Ruger. Or Owen.”

Ruger was married to Darlene. Owen and Kaylee-Marie had known each other for almost a decade. Sleeping around didn’t cause those babies out of wedlock. Loving the wrong person did.

“I can’t force a woman to be with me.”

“Why not?” she says. “Force her by proving to her you’re a good person.”

“Mom.”

She looks at me. Right at me. In only the way a mother can.

“I’m not a good person,” I tell her once I have her attention. My mom shakes her head.

“You just want to be difficult.”

“Yes.”

“I’m serious, Ethan. You need a wife.”

“I’ve made it this far.”

“I could setyou up with someone.”

“No.”

“Have you considered that you care too much about gambling?”

My mother isout of her fucking mind. Gambling takes the edge off. It makes it easy to keep track of the other shit I have to do. Playingmotivates me.Mom wouldn’t understand. She blames video poker for some big fucked up thing dad did in the 90’s that she mentions without mentioning. She doesn’t have a problem with card games or dice games that happen in person, but she doesn’t trust the machines.

I’m the opposite. I only trust machines. People are unpredictable.

“Mom.Can we just drink and have a nice time?”

Her body tenses. I sense that she’s holding something back from me, but if she doesn’t want to tell me what it is, I can't drag it out of her. But my mother sighs and then she touches her neck, which she always did when she was explaining a big credit card purchase to our father. I stare at her, with eyes that remind us both of the man we lost.

“Fine,” she says. “I want to go back to Boston.”

Her eyes are glassy. If this were Tylee, I would be suspicious that she stepped out on her husband and got pregnant orsomething. But it’s my mother – the most perfect woman on planet Earth.

“What? Why?”

Mom isn’t the type to leave the comforts of her Midwestern home. She finds people on the East Coast unfriendly, and she isn’t afraid to tell them that she thinks so. Despite her origins – on her mother’s side – mom has never had much of an affinity for Boston. She likes being close to Wyatt and Anna. She has precious grandchildren – and without all the drama that came with Kaylee-Marie, Owen’s first baby mama.

“I need to,” she says, the tears vanishing and her voice returning to that stoic, if not stern tone that I recognize from my childhood. Thereissomething wrong.

She’s drinking with her eldest son and pressuring me about marriage. This woman has never wanted to share my affections with anyone. She threw red wine on my prom date’s dress. I had to let it go eventually, but I didn’t talk to her for a month after that stunt.

I’m worried.

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