off the grid. This is about Maverick.”
“Our Mavvie?” I raised my eyebrows.
Tex wiggled his eyebrows in return.
“Don’t tell me he’s got someone, too,” I said. “That big teddy bear has been in need of a spouse for as long as I’ve known him.”
“Not just a spouse,” Tex said. “A boyfriend. With a baby.”
“You’re kidding me.” It’d blown my mind enough to hear that Blade had a dog. Now we also had a club baby? I shook my head in disbelief, even though, “That tracks for him, honestly.”
“I know,” Tex agreed. “The guy, Jonah, is really sweet. Single dad. Showed up like a lost puppy in the middle of the night with his little girl. He’s working at Custom Ankhs now, doing all the art.”
“Mav bagged himself a single dad with art skills?” I laughed around a bite of fries. “Boy, he earned it.”
“They’re cute together,” Tex said with a grin. “The baby, Grace, she’s basically the size of one of Mav’s biceps. But she’s got Mav wrapped around her finger.”
I could hardly believe how much change had occurred in the three years I’d been gone. It suited me, though. When Tex and I had shown up in Elkin Lake eight years ago, we’d been a little rougher around the edges, always looking for a drink or a fuck or a fight, and the club had given us a place to do that (even if Ankh and Priest always looked down on unnecessary violence).
Now, as we got older, the club wasn’t a place to blow off steam. It was our foundation—our place to find steadiness. And the rest of the guys seemed to be growing in the same direction, especially after Ankh’s death. We were all looking for calmness, for meaning, for togetherness. All in our own ways. I was glad that so many of our brothers had found it.
I laughed again at how easy it was to imagine Maverick cooing over a tiny baby. Across the booth, Tex had a strange, small smile on his face.
“What?” I asked and scrubbed at my chin, suddenly self-conscious under his soft green gaze. There was no reason for him to be looking at me like that—he didn’t look at me like that. It made something needy itch in my chest. “Is there something on my face?”
“Oh,” Tex said, and shook his head a little bit, like he was shaking something off. “No, just—it’s just nice to hear your laugh again.”
I could fucking feel my ears turning red. Funny, now that I wasn’t living in denial about how I felt about Tex, I was like a teenager with a crush. Like I was dealing with these feelings for the first time all over again. In the past, I’d just tried to push them down, ignore them, try to burn them out of me with substances or adrenaline. And look how great that turned out. At least now I could accept my feelings for what they were, and try to appreciate the bond I had with Tex even though it’d never become what I truly wanted.
“What?” I asked. “You miss me?”
Tex rolled his eyes, but I heard too much truth behind his words when he said, “Course I did, asshole.”
Whatever pithy response I had prepared flew from my mind. I hadn’t expected him to be honest—even with a little dig tacked onto the end. My heart twisted. I really was an asshole, wasn’t I, getting caught up in that shit and leaving him alone for three years.
I swallowed hard. “Listen, Tex, I—”
“Stop,” Tex said. His expression shuttered closed, hard and sudden. “Not now. We cheersed to old times, right?”
The waitress dropped by and Tex got another round of beers. If they weren’t low-alcohol pilsners, I’d be in trouble on my bike—it’d been so long since I’d had anything to drink, just the one beer was sitting warm in my bones.
“All right,” I said. “You win.”
“Damn right I do.” Tex hummed, and then scratched at his beard—another nervous tic I was familiar with. “Listen, I told Blade we’d be back in a couple days. Thought you might want some time to get your head on straight before jumping back into the thick of things.”
“A couple of days? You got something planned?”
Tex shrugged. “When you’re done eating, I’ll show you.”
Warm anticipation settled in my chest. A day or two with just Tex, our bikes, and nowhere to be? It really was like old times.
But even my happiness about being free was shot through with a line of