Everyone met us there, Chaos, Mom and Dad, Aunt Bette and Uncle Marsh, Tabby and Rush, Hawk and Gwen, Brock and Tess, Mitch and Mara, Elvira and even Tack’s Mom.
I discovered that Tack’s Mom was not surprisingly beaten looking. But she was also friendly and loved her son if in an unusual distant, hesitant way I didn’t exactly get and I didn’t like all that much. But that distance meant she went right back to San Diego and kept distant. We rarely ever heard from her. Tack was used to this and it didn’t bother him so I decided not to let it bother me.
As for my Mom and Dad, they had met Tack when they came to Denver after my incident. While I was drugged up, Tack left Mom with me and took Dad for a cup of coffee. There he laid it out, all of it about Chaos, the Russians and how that made me a target. There he also laid it out about the fact we loved each other and he intended to spend the rest of his life with me and make a family.
This was also very Tack, up front and honest and apparently my father appreciated it.
I knew this when I was less whacked out and more lucid and I approached my father about his talk with Tack hoping to head him off the path to judgment.
I shouldn’t have worried (though I didn’t know that).
“Honey, God makes those decisions, I don’t,” Dad shocked the shit out of me by saying. “I just know it wasn’t him who stabbed you with a knife. I also know it was him who nearly got riddled with bullets to get you out. And I know he got you out alive. And last, I figure the path to redemption is thorny but I’m guessing that man will make it through mostly because he’s got a strong woman at his side. And I know that because I raised that woman.”
Seriously, it sucked I was laid up in a hospital bed because that meant I couldn’t give my Dad a big hug.
And, for your information, bawling while recovering from stab wounds hurts like a bitch.
I didn’t know if Mom and Dad came to Denver with open minds. I just knew they respected Tack’s honesty and they saw how Tack, Tabby, Rush and Chaos treated me so if their minds didn’t start out open, they ended up that way.
Tack and I got married in a vineyard.
I was wearing a simple but kickass ivory dress and not simple and more kickass ivory spiked heels. At my side was an immensely sad but faking it for me Lanie. Tack wore jeans and an unbelievably cool ivory shirt with subtle western-style stitching and not subtle totally kickass rocker-biker black embroidery across the upper chest and his shoulders at the back. Through the nuptials, Dog stood by his side. And when we were pronounced man and wife, a collective biker howl split the air that made me laugh and cry at the same time.
After I slid my wide gold band on his finger, he slid the thin, diamond-imbedded gold on mine, we partied hard and long and, as it raged on, rowdy. The owners of the vineyard luckily were game and joined in rather than taking the alternative of calling the cops.
Everyone left but Tack and I stayed a week for our honeymoon. Then we extended our honeymoon and rode the coastal road of California.
Only after we’d done that did we go home.
It wasn’t near enough time riding the roads with my man with the wind in my hair. But it still was time I savored.
Every second.
Both Lanie and I missed Elliott’s funeral because we were both still in the hospital. But she waited for me and my moral support and I took her to his grave when Tack and I got home from our honeymoon. I also held her while we stood at his grave and she sobbed in my arms. Not long after, she moved back to Connecticut to be close to her Mom, Dad and sister. I missed her every day but I understood her play.
Too much Elliott in Denver.
He was a f**k up, got himself dead and Lanie in the ICU. But even so, she loved him and still wasn’t over him.
She hadn’t dated since. Not once.
I was worried about her and planning a trip to go out and shake her shit up.
Life was too short and too precious to lay it down to grief.
My friend was beautiful, she was funny, she was loving and she needed to wake the f**k up.
She was breathing.
She needed to start living.
And she was going to do it even if I had to kick her ass.
Yes, I was a badass biker babe and if my friend didn’t sort her shit, she’d answer to me.
On this thought, the bathroom door opened and my eyes went to it in the mirror to see Tack walking in wearing nothing but faded jeans and my dogtags hanging around his neck.
Mm. Nice.