Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 64917 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 325(@200wpm)___ 260(@250wpm)___ 216(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64917 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 325(@200wpm)___ 260(@250wpm)___ 216(@300wpm)
Somebody came to you. He told you a story about me that had just enough truth in it to feel right when it’s wrong. I won’t chase you. I won’t come knock until you open the door. But I won’t let him keep drawing this version of me for you either.
I’m not a good man. I told you that shit. I’m loyal. Sometimes that looks the same. Sometimes it doesn’t. With you, it does.
When you want me, call. If you don’t, I’ll keep my promises anyway—to my son, to my brothers, to the version of me you saw that night when the smoke dropped and I wasn’t pretending to be anything but yours.
— G
I stared at the page until the lines blurred and then folded it, slid it into an envelope, and wrote her name. I didn’t know if I’d mail it. Maybe it was just a way to move breath past a place it had been stuck.
My phone buzzed. Burn again.
“Talk.”
“Two things,” he stated. “One, we got the campus footage. It’s clean. He went in alone. He left alone. No security. No escort. Two, got the media looped in. Somebody leaked in another county that funds went missing and contractors with no trucks got paid for roads and repairs on buildings that don’t exist.”
“Good,” I stated. “Keep them hungry to share a story but make sure it releases when we say so.”
“And three—”
“You said two.”
“Consider this one a bonus,” Burn added. “Your ex’s key don’t work anymore. She apparently tried and came to the clubhouse to let you have it. I educated her on not stepping into a man’s place uninvited.”
“Thanks, I think. I’ll deal with her shit once I got GJ free. She’ll chill once she can hug her boy again.”
“You want me to talk to Cat? GJ is one of us. He’s gonna get that patch. She needs to come to terms with her place in your life and his.”
“No,” I stated. “She said what she wanted to say. Nothing you can say back changes any of it. She will calm down and go back to being quiet Cat again.”
“You gonna tell IvaLeigh Cat was right about old you?”
“I already did,” I shared.
“And new you?”
“Doesn’t exist,” I stated. “There’s just this me trying to do better.”
He was quiet long enough for me to hear him deciding not to say something he knew I’d hear wrong. “We got you,” he replied instead.
“I know.”
I hung up and stared at the letter with her name on it until the ink blurred again.
Night rides make me a person who felt alive. I took my bike out on county roads that know me better than some men do. The wind scraped thoughts out of my muddled head. Trees pulled their shadows across the asphalt like curtains cloaking me in the safety of darkness. Headlight turned deer eyes into coins and then out again.
At a crossroads I stopped and cut the engine and let the kind of quiet you only get in the middle of nowhere lay over me. Somewhere far, a dog barked. Closer, something small moved in leaves like it didn’t know men ruin everything they touch.
“I’m not going to ruin you,” I stated to the dark, and if that makes me a crazy old bastard talking to night like it’s a confessional, then put it on my list. I was already halfway to insanity anyway. I got myself twisted and tied up in a woman more than half my age playing a game with her mind, body, and spirit that I never should have started.
I cranked the bike and headed toward her parents’ subdivision without letting myself decide not to. I rode past their house slow knowing the code to get in. Shanks sat two doors down in a Jeep that used to be neon green and now was black and set up stock just to remain anonymous. He tipped two fingers off the wheel. I didn’t stop. I wanted to. Men who want to do right sometimes do worse because of it. I kept going.
On the way back through town I rolled past city hall and looked at it like you look at a man who thinks his money can turn law into leash. A late light burned in Stanley’s office. He wasn’t there; his assistant was. The building had a new security company sign out front—a dog with its teeth out on a blue shield.
“Cute,” I told it, and kept rolling.
At the cabin, the lock turned clean. New bolt set with long screws. The way you make a door less easy to kick. I set the envelope on the table where I couldn’t miss it in the morning and shook two pills into my palm I don’t like admitting I take. They’re not for pain. Not the kind you can mark on a chart. They slow a heart that thinks it’s a hammer.