Page 13 of Smooth Sailing

Harlan

Denver, Colorado

Present day…

Rush had been wrong.

Being a prospect for the Chaos MC wasn’t that tough of a gig.

Hugger and his ma had some rough times, more lean ones, some scary ones, so he’d been cooking and cleaning and helping his ma at the laundromat since he was in single digits. He got his first job, getting paid under the table, when he was eleven.

In his life, he’d lugged more kegs than he cared to count, cleaned up puke and blood, took punches, meted them out, got talked down to, taken for granted, screwed over.

Pulling a beer from a tap for a brother at his demand and driving home drunk biker bunnies was not a hardship.

Sure, there was tougher shit than that to do, a lot tougher, but it was shit that had to get done.

Hugger had learned in his life, if something had to get done, just do it. Don’t waste your time trying to figure out how to con someone else into doing it or assessing the easiest way to get it done. Just get stuck in and do the job right.

Then move on.

He worked out his time as prospect, got paid for it (which, seriously, made it just like a kind of shitty job), then got patched in, and now he got paid a helluva lot more, which was not shitty at all.

And the brotherhood was good.

They were all like those beat-up chairs he’d had to stack more than once when he was a recruit.

They were all a lot like him.

Nicked. Scraped. Worn. But still standing and doing their jobs.

Those jobs were, as he’d noted over the years he’d spent with them, being good husbands, good fathers, good brothers and keeping the businesses strong and thriving, mostly so they could keep their families the same.

That was it.

There was other stuff they got into, but it was up to you if you wanted to get involved.

Hugger had signed on to that right away.

He suspected they all knew who he was, of a sort. Definitely the older brothers did.

But no one got up in his shit. No one pressed for more than he wanted to give. No one did anything but let him be who he was.

Though, they might give him crap about it, like making his Club name Hugger because he wasn’t a big fan of being touched, unless he was having sex with a woman. But after, he was not a cuddle guy. If she stayed the night, she had her side of the bed, and he had his, and if she tried to encroach, he put her back where she should be. If she kept at it, he was out the door, or she was.

He didn’t give a lot of headspace to trying to understand that. It was obvious.

He and his ma were a team of two.

The end.

His ma died, he was one, and he was down with that, not on the lookout to let anyone in.

Until he got Chaos.

But the way they were, no pressure, hands off, he was down with that too.

He headed through the tatty, lived-in bar area of the Compound, a place where he felt at home the minute he’d first re-entered it, and that had nothing to do with the fact he’d been there before, to the brother’s meeting room.

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