“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 the media room. I cracked a smile and thought, here we go…
“You got this?” Dray asked of me from back over at the bar and I nodded.
“Yeah, Slice and I will get ‘em started,” I replied and got up.
“I’m on popcorn duty already,” Slice said and lifted the leaf at the end of the bar to get behind it and head over to the industrial kitchen hiding behind it.
“Popcorn?” I heard Reaver ask from inside.
“Fire up the microwaves,” Slice answered. “The horde has arrived.”
I got up and before I could take any of the stuff Harmony carried off of her, Dante materialized to do it.
“Hey!” he said and smiled at her.
“Hey, Dante.” She smiled back. I shook my head grinning and turned to head past the fishbowl, my eyes finding Eden standing quiet and unobtrusive in the hall. She looked eager, but she wasn’t looking at me for once. She was looking at Harmony and I thought to myself, must’ve been a while since she’s seen her.
I went to edge past her, surprised when her attention didn’t waver off her best friend, Dray’s words coming back to haunt me… “Women don’t wait around forever…”
I found myself startled for a second time in a pretty short span of time when I realized that I was disappointed. That I missed how her face lit up when she saw me. The fact she had missed me brushing by her completely; well, it kind of hurt.
That had me fucked up. I mean, I wanted to be invisible. Didn’t I? Except now that I was, it damn sure didn’t feel good.
I went into the media room and over to the projector at the back. We’d overhauled the shit out of it when I was a teen and the brood of kids just kept growing. We knocked out the back wall, building risers, making it into a real movie theater experience with couches and recliners set in a tiered setup so you could see over the row in front of you. It was three rows down, the back wall painted white, black curtains hung to either side, track lighting along the tops and sides of the room, rope lights on a dimmer switch set into the floor marking out the aisle leading down.
It was pretty impressive, and it’d been fun to help Slice’s dad and the rest of the guys build it. It’d been the summer we’d fully learned the whole drywall trade. It was a useful skill to have, let me tell you.
Someone had already set a stack of movies back here by the projector and I went through ‘em. Looks like they’d already stacked them in order – good deal. Made my life easy. We were starting with The Nightmare Before Christmas. It was tradition, starting easy and progressively getting more fucked up as the younger kids knocked out.
Looked like this year went Nightmare, Gremlins, Die Hard, and finally ended on Krampus. That last one was both fucked up and hilarious. A sort of gore-fest horror movie that threw back to shit like the Evil Dead, only truly Christmas.
Underneath Krampus was Edward Scissor Hands and a couple of more kid-related backups in case the youngest ones were still up and at ‘em and we had to put the heavy shit off just a little bit longer.
Shelly would straight murder us if her little Miracle came home with nightmares.
Everybody knew when it came to her and Ghost, that Shelly was the one you had to worry about. Motherhood hadn’t done shit to calm her tits. If anything, she just diverted a lot of her fire to becoming an intolerable mamma bear. Especially where six-year-old Miracle was concerned.
She’d had more than a few miscarriages before Miracle was born six years ago, capping off her and Ghost’s brood at six.
They had Harmony, Eldritch, Cadence, Dalton, Ranger, and finally little Miracle. It got to the point that any time Ghost announced they were pregnant again, it’d been met with groans and the occasional ‘get off of her, man!’
None of us would trade any of the kids for the world, though. Even the ones who had their mother’s personality. Thirteen-year-old Dalton and twelve-year-old Ranger were seriously handfuls at school. Lucky that they hadn’t had their little asses whooped for turning into a pair of bullies. Club didn’t fuckin’ play that shit – we had a bad enough rep and a hard-enough time as it was, so it’d been a group effort to curb stomp that shit.
“Hey, Dice! What’s first?” Dalton asked.
“Nightmare Before Christmas,” I called down to him as he and Ranger got set up on the floor down in front.
“Aw, man!” Ranger complained. “Again?”
I counted to five silently in my head and said, “Can always have your pops come and get you, take you back home.” I knew it was harsh, but I wasn’t putting up with preteen or teenage bullshit tonight.
“I didn’t say that!” Ranger cried.
“Then quit your bitching,” I called down.
He mumbled something I didn’t catch and Eden barked out sharply, “Hey! Apologize!”
Her sharp tone made everybody jump.
“I’m sorry,” Ranger mumbled and ducked down in front, laying on his stomach and hugging his pillow.
I met Eden’s steady, warm brown gaze, and she gave me a nod as I slid the first disc in the tray. I gave her a nod back. Not sure what he said, and I was curious, but she’d shut it down. I didn’t want to make it a thing, so I let it go.
I got the movie going, and the kids settled down after that. Reaver brought in two big bowls of popcorn, and I mean big, giant metal mixing bowls that were capable of holding like three or four bags of the microwave stuff.
“Kettle corn,” he said, thrusting one of the bowls at Eden and her face lit up, which just seeing it made me smile. I felt a weird stirring in my chest as I tried to figure out what the fuck? I mean, seriously… what was up with me?