on his laptop.
“I thought we weren’t moving up until next year,” she noted.
His wife didn’t want to leave Essence.
Speck was renting his pad, a home Rush owned, and they were paying rent to Essence.
It was stupid.
And he didn’t care.
She wanted to be there, and he’d grown immune to her kitchen, so they were there.
Anyway, she was cute as fuck when she was meditating out front next to the meditating garden gnome, and banging his wife in that cave she called a bed was awesome.
“Doesn’t hurt looking,” he said.
She grinned at him. “Don’t wanna miss the perfect place, not keeping on top of that.”
He grinned back.
He wanted a place in the mountains, so if he found it, they’d be there.
“Go so you can come back,” he prompted.
“Right,” she muttered, another lip touch then, “Love you, Cole.”
“Love you too, baby.”
He watched her walk away.
He gave it fifteen minutes, clicking through listings.
Then he called Dog.
Five minutes after that, he’d texted his wife and he was on his bike to go throw some back with his brother whose woman had just lost the last shot they were going to take at making a baby.
In the end, Dog and Sheila didn’t adopt.
They became foster carers.
But the first baby they got who didn’t get returned home . . .
They made her their own.
Rebel
Two months later . . .
The credits rolled on the 70-inch TV they’d brought in, and after the memorial dedication to Graham Black and then the brothers’ names slid by overlaid on a Chaos insignia, I lifted my hand with the remote to switch off the TV.
I’d been standing at the back, ignoring Rush’s eyes sliding to me frequently (mostly because he wanted me to take a seat, but I was way too nervous to sit down), throughout the whole ninety-seven minutes.
It was just the brothers in their meeting room, no old ladies. If the guys okayed it, the women would see it next.
That said, Tyra and Tabby had already seen it. And loved it.
They’d also given their go ahead that I could show it to the men.
So now I was there, watching a movie I’d watched approximately five thousand times while editing it.
A movie I called Blood, Guts and Brotherhood: The Story of the Chaos MC.
The title was long.
I should shorten it.
And a colon in a documentary?
Wasn’t that cliché?
And the montage on Black. Maybe it went on too long.
I mean, the man was photogenic and any picture he was in alone or with his brothers—hot, but the ones with Keely and his sons—total melt. Those pictures told a thousand words of the man called Black.
But using “Spirit in the Sky” to lay over that was totally cliché.
I should have used “Wish You Were Here.”
But it’d probably take a fortune to get the rights to “Wish You Were Here,” and even though Chaos had made it so that me and my cast and crew got all the monies earned from the films we’d made at Luxe, so I had some cake, that would for sure be shooting a huge wad of it.
And I had more films to make.
Not to mention that song was about Sid Barrett, and it wasn’t about him dying. It was sadder, and the words didn’t put him in a good place because, well, the rumors were, it was about him being mentally ill.
“Spirit in the Sky” had a much better vibe.
And Keely would see that (and Dutch and Jag just had).
Keely had given me all the pictures, with Dutch, Jag and Hound going through them with her, and I’d filmed them doing it. Her sons’ eyes gentle and alert on her, Hound close.
But Keely had such a beautiful, peaceful smile the whole time she did it.
And the way she handled those pictures with love and reverence. I was beside myself how that translated to film.
But there was so much of that coming from Keely (and Hound), it was impossible for it not to.
That scene was one of my favorites.
Outside, of course, the one of High watching Millie watching TV with her cat, Chief, tucked close to her belly, purring. Unable to have babies, she had furry babies and gave all her mammoth love to them. And what was so cool about that was, big, bad High gave those fluffballs the same, probably mostly because it made his woman happy.
I’d caught that footage when Rush and I were over for a movie. I didn’t even know (until right then, of course) if High knew I got it.
And then there was the