Page 18 of Claimed By My Biker Daddies
I find a sugared petal in the wrong drawer and set it on the high shelf where odd relics live.
A bolt from my first bike.
A marble Isla swears fell out of the sky.
A photograph of three men on a summer day so bright it hurts to remember how confident we were.
I look up at the petal and consider eating it just to finish the sentence.
I decide some sentences are better when you let them hang.
I am not alone in this.
Cruz makes a point of using her orange peel trick in his night coffee and then leaving the cup on the counter where I will see it and grunt.
Deacon annotates the cookbook she held with structural notes written so neat you could draft a bridge off them.
He circles a biscotti recipe and writes load bearing in the margin.
Isla asks where the lady who laughs with her belly went, and I tell her Brooklyn, because a child should always get a real place even when the truth is I do not know and do not like not knowing.
At poker night in the back room it gets thrown at me because men like to press a bruise.
Cruz deals and flicks a glance over his cards.
“You going to call the girl or start a shrine,” he asks.
The table grins like thieves.
I light a cigarette I have no intention of finishing and give him the look you give a man you will not punch because he does your laundry.
“I am not a boy,” I tell him. “I do not chase.”
Deacon lifts his beer and studies the label like a map. “You do not need to chase,” he says. “You need to open a door.”
“Same thing,” I say.
“Not if she is already standing on the other side,” he says back.
We play.
I lose a hand on purpose because men get edgy when the house wins too clean.
I win one I should not because the table forgot my dead are tattooed on me and I count in cards.
I go to bed with the napkin under my pillow like a teenager with a contraband magazine and the part of me that lived past twenty shakes his head and lets it be.
There are jokes in our world and there are rules.
The jokes keep your chest from locking shut.
The rules keep you alive.
My men know both.
No lies. No abandonment. No harm to women or children.
When a prospect mouths off in front of a woman, I run him four miles in the snow and then sit with him while he eats grits and learns how to shut his mouth with dignity.
