Christmas With The Brotherhood - A.J. Downey Page 0,9
and over at Dray and nodded.
“Yeah, man. Why?”
“Rev said maybe I need to check in with you a little more. Holiday coming up and all.” His dark eyes like burning coals raked over my face, searching out my expression. I kept it pretty neutral.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“He shouldn’t have bothered you.” I gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I’m fine.”
He put a hand on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze, a frown crushing his brow and says, “Don’t ever think that any one of my guys coming to me and expressing concern over another is ever ‘bothering me.’ Don’t get it twisted, Smoke. We’re a fuckin’ family here.”
I nodded, feeling thoroughly chastened, the first stirrings of shame making me itch.
“My bad,” I said and nodded, unable to bring myself to look at my president.
“What about Eden?” he asked me and I did look up sharply at that.
“What about her?” I asked, brow wrinkling with a need to know just what he was getting at.
“Come sit down with me.” He jerked his head in the direction of the tables out in the common room. “The rest of you fuck off and mind your business,” he said with a grin.
Slice and Disney turned away and started talking bikes, and I shook my head but took my beer with me as Dray guided me over to a far table by the window. The lights out in the parking lot were shining through the stained-glass mosaic of the club’s logo and I got a big dose of nostalgia. Looking at that window made the room feel more like a chapel than anything else. I think that’s why we still held it in here. We had every opportunity to build a new meeting room out off the back, but instead, we’d expanded the media room for the kids and the women to keep them out of our business we continued to conduct in here.
“It’s time to stop pretending, Sage,” Dray said kindly once we’d sat down. The use of my legal name caught me off guard.
“Stop pretending about what?” I asked slowly.
“Eedee,” he said simply. “You know that girl’s been absolutely mad about you since she was something like six years old.”
I shook my head and looked at the bottle between my hands, peeling back the label.
“It’s not like that,” I said. “Eden’s just a kid.”
Dray snapped his fingers, and I looked up sharply.
“Time to stop pretending,” he said with a little more vehemence. “She’s not a little girl anymore. Just like Maren was no more a child when she got with Nox.”
I flinched at that and scowled. Dray leaned back in his seat.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” he asked.
“That’s what?” I demanded, knowing pretty much exactly what he was fuckin’ talking about but wanting to deny it anyway.
“Age gap is bugging you,” he said.
I shook my head. “It’s way more than that.”
“You sayin’ you don’t feel the same?” he asked.
It was partially that, I mean, I think it was… part of it was I’d watched Eden grow up. I mean, we were kids together in some ways but in others, there’d been some gaps, you know? She was eight when Connor and I had made the decision to serve.
We’d been lucky enough to do bootcamp together, but we’d been separated by job pool after that. Different units. We’d stayed in for four years, got out, then we’d still been kind of young and dumb with some shit to prove. Not to anybody here, but to ourselves. We agreed on Chicago, prospected with the Chicago chapter and man, the president and his boys out that way did not go easy on us.
When the time was right, Slice and I agreed that it was time to come home for more than just the holidays… mostly after that holiday.
“Looks like you got some shit to sort out, brother,” Dray said, and I looked up from my beer to my president. He gave me a smile that was somewhere between pride and encouragement and said, “Just figure it out quick. Women don’t wait around forever.”
He stood up and I felt kind of startled, I mean… what the fuck was that? Had he just given me some sort of fuckin’ permission?
I stared after him kind of shocked when Ghost’s kids burst through the club’s front doors – all six of ‘em, boisterously all talking at once as Harmony, the oldest, tried to wrangle them. All of ‘em loaded down with pillow, sleeping bags, and overnight bags. A real campout about to go down in