from the wall. I have been judged and found wanting.
Faced with the cross, a foolish urge strikes me to beg Spider to put the bible and cross somewhere else, but I know better than to do that. He’s proven that he’ll use my fears and anxieties against me when he can.
I moan, turning my eyes to the window.
Yet more minutes pass, and still, no Spider. Outside the door, footsteps pace—Pip, I’m guessing. Someone walks past him and says something about babysitting duty again. If Pip replies, I can’t hear it over the noise from outside.
The widow looks out onto what must be the front of Pops’ Place, though from my vantage, I see only the darkening blue-grey sky. It’s a lot noisier outside of this place than it ever was out back of Casper’s. Men’s voices fill the air, laughing, shouting, a few yodels, all over the occasional growl of bike engines. A woman’s voice—Dee’s it sounds like—whoops from below. There is the sound of shattering glass.
I drop my head back again, taking deep breaths and pushing them out through the cloth, willing down my nervousness. Spider’s always promised me that no one will touch me, but I can’t help listening for the sound of the door opening, expecting some big, burly biker to slip into the darkening room, half drunk and looking for a good time.
Footsteps pitter-patter up the stairs and down the hall, followed by the squeal of a child’s laughter.
“Ben! Get your butt back here!” Jules, the woman Spider’d been talking to when we got here, calls out, puffing. “It’s past your bedtime. I’m not going to tell you again!”
Ben giggles and his feet pound further down the hall.
“Hey, slow down there, tiger,” Pip calls. “Shouldn’t be running around the halls, little guy.”
More laughter, that delightful childlike mixture of cute and evil, rings out.
“I don’t know where he gets all that energy,” Pip says.
Jules gives a winded laugh, sounding like she’s right outside the door with Pip. “Oh my God, I know. I don’t know how Penny does it. That kid’s more exhausting than having a train pulled on me.”
Pip chuckles.
If my mouth wasn’t stuffed with cloth, I’d have pulled a face at the unfamiliar phrase. How do you pull a train on someone? Obviously, she’s not talking about the only kind of train I know of.
Jules races down the hall. “All right, enough of this. Ben Gary Jamison, get back here! Do you want me to sick Spider on you? If he has to put you to bed, you’ll regret it.”
“Yeah,” he calls back. “I want Spidy to do it.”
“Well, tough. He’s in church!”
Ben laughs and says something I don’t catch. Footsteps clomp on the stairs again. I hear Jules growl before her voice fades out of earshot.
Somehow, the sound of this place going on with business as usual is both reassuring and alarming all at the same time. Maybe it’s just Ben’s presence, but there is an increased feeling of family here. I don’t know how much Spider or the others have told the people here about what’s going on between us. Do they know? If they do, how can they just let it happen?
We do what we have to for the club. Monica’s words reverberate through my head. Can these people just accept what Spider does to me the way she did?
It’s strange, but while what’s happening here should seem wildly out of place, unlike my first few nights at Casper’s, it’s all starting to feel so… normal.
It feels…right.
How in the name of all that is holy does that make sense?
My mind rolls back to the interaction with Spider, Ben, and Jules, whom I assume is a relative of Ben’s. Seeing the way Spider behaved with the two of them, I’d caught a glimpse of the man I’d begun to fall for after the night Cap was shot. The tender, compassionate man who’d been so worried about Cap and treated me like someone special. As if I meant something to him.
He obviously cares for Ben, and for Jules. In those few minutes, gone was the monster who came to me in that cell in Casper’s. Joking around with Ben, he’d been just a man. A man a woman could see herself spending her life with.
That thought scares the living daylights out of me.
It had been a shock to see how good he was with the boy, and the realization of that causes a sad sort of longing in me.