5. 4 - An Ugly Truth

4 - An Ugly Truth

As Griffon and I walked around the store collecting the things we both needed, he kept side-eyeing me. “What is it?”

“Um, well, I didn’t know you knew Miss Ambrose.”

“We’ve met. Her friend Shaina is gonna end up Wash’s old lady. She brought her to the clubhouse a while back.”

“She’s not like the women who come to the club,” Griffon stated.

“What’s that mean?”

He blew out a deep breath. “I guess around the time my mom got sick and I came to live with Spike-”

“Your dad,” I corrected as he rolled his eyes at me.

“Anyway, elll’s dad died then. From what everyone said, she was always super sweet and really fuc-freaking smart.”

“You ain’t my kid, Griff. Don’t care if you say fuck.”

“Right.” He hummed the word out. I knew good and damn well that Spike didn’t really give a shit if his boy cussed either. He only tried to curb the boy’s mouth when the women were around, so they didn’t give him shit.

“Anyway, Ariel has been…” He paused as if to gather his thoughts but shook off whatever it was that came to mind. “She’s been having trouble ever since.”

“Trouble?”

“She’s been getting into trouble, fighting, and her grades are shit now. I thought it was just because of her dad, and it is, but one of the girls at school yelled at her a couple weeks ago.”

“Yelled at her?” I wasn’t sure where this was going but it didn’t sound like my business at all. Besides, wasn’t that something teenage girls did naturally?

“Yeah, Dina said something about how her mom was going to take everything they had, since Ariel's dad wasn’t around to pay the bills anymore.”

That caught my attention. “What the fuck did you say?”

“Ariel's dad was messing around with Dina’s mom before he died. She was pregnant.” Griff hurried to tell me.

“Reesa doesn’t know that.”

Griff shook his head. “Nah, I don’t think she does. That’s why Ariel's been having a hard time. She said her dad wasn’t a good man. He used to be, but I guess he got mixed up in a bad crowd and I don’t know everything. Ariel's doesn’t talk about it a lot. She only told me that much because I was there and chased Dina away that day.”

“Thanks for letting me know.”

“You gonna tell Miss Ambrose?”

“Don’t you think she deserves to know before someone comes knocking on her door demanding shit that she shouldn’t have to give?” Griffon nodded his head. “You did the right thing. Plus, maybe it will help Ariel if her mom knows, and she isn’t the one keeping the secret to protect her anymore.”

Griffon blew out a breath and ran his hands through his dark hair. “Yeah, that would be good for her. Who knows if Dina was even telling the truth, you know? I was going to tell Tash, since Miss Ambrose works for her, but she’s been busy lately with Diesel.”

Tash and Spike’s kid was a holy freaking terror on a good day. The boy had twice the energy of any kid his age and he found the craziest ways to burn it off. Like running his tricycle off a ramp from the second story deck to the downward sloping backyard. It took years off both their lives when he did that and all he had were a few scrapes and scratches where the trees stopped his forward momentum. Spike turned their gorgeous deck into a sunroom after that, walls and windows, so the boy couldn’t launch himself anymore. He also fenced the lower half of the yard, so his boy couldn’t tumble down far enough to roll head over tail down the side of the damn mountain.

“You did good, kid. I’ll handle it from here. No use stressing Tash out when she has her hands full.”

“Little bro is going to be the death of her.” He grinned as we both tripped down the memory lane highlight reel of the shit his baby brother got up to. Then Griffon turned back to me and frowned. “Just-uh, be gentle with her, yeah? Ariel was giving her a hard time because I think she thinks her mom already knew her dad was stepping out on them and she’s mad that Miss Ambrose would stay. She’s mad that her dad died too, but I think she lost respect for her mom because she stayed when her dad was having an affair.”

“Reesa didn’t know.”

“How do you know?”

“Because we talked about her past before. She knew about some other shady shit her man was into, but there’s no way she suspected he could be cheating on top of it.”

“Damn. She’s a nice lady.”

“Yeah, kid. Don’t worry, I’ll break it to her gently.” As if that was really a thing. Griff was too young to understand there was never an easy way to break that kind of news to a woman. Fuck if I wanted to be the one to deliver it.

I’d seen first-hand what my bullshit had done to my ex-wife. No way in hell did I want to further taint Reesa’s memory of her late husband. He was gone. There was no one to yell at, be angry with, or divorce. Still, she deserved to know, especially before some dumb cunt came around causing more trouble for her and her kids.

I paced in front of the bar at the clubhouse debating whether I should call Reesa or show up to her work to deliver the bad news. Part of me wanted to go half-assed stalker and find out from Quickshot where she lived, so I could deliver the news to her in her home, where she could at least kick me out and have a good cry in the sanctity of her own house afterward. Considering my troubles with checking in on my ex-wife after we split, I didn’t think that route would go over too well with my VP.

“What’s eating your ass?”

I glanced up to see Snake standing by the bar watching me. There was a time when we had been the best of friends. That came to an end when he made it clear that he would steal my wife from me if I didn’t get my shit together. It was a warning that I didn’t heed until it was far too late. Truthfully, he would have probably tried his best to steal Poppy too, but she moved away and found a new love before he had the chance.

We were both left floating in the wind after Poppy moved on, and it was only then that I realized my best friend had been in love with my woman and the bastard stood by and watched my life implode.

That wasn’t fair. I needed to fucking get over that train of thought. He tried his best to get me to do right by her back then, but I was too fucked in the head to listen. Couldn’t even blame the fucker for falling in love with her. Poppy was a treasure. I’d been an idiot and now she belonged to someone else. Truth is, and it took a long time to realize this, Poppy was only ever meant to be a part of my life. It was something I’d grown to understand over the past few years.

She was happy. It was time to put the bullshit behind me completely, and that meant mending a fence I’d broken with my best friend years ago too. Besides, if anyone had any insight into how to break this type of shitty news to a woman, it was probably Snake – since he’d been there to see it happen with Poppy.

I stopped pacing a couple feet from him before moving to the barstool beside the one he occupied. “I need advice.”

“If I remember correctly, you ain’t too good at taking it.” While there was a nip of truth to his words, they were issued playfully.

“Fair enough. Still, I have some shit news to deliver to someone and I don’t know how to go about doing it.”

Snake sat up straighter after hearing that. “Lay it on me.”

He tapped the wooden bar between us and seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say. So, I laid it all out for him. Everything I talked about with Reesa, seeing her at the store completely overwhelmed dealing with a teenage girl with too much attitude and a preschool aged boy who was sick and whiny.

“Wait, you took care of the sick kid for her while she finished her shopping?” Snake’s eyebrows were damn near to his hairline - what should have been his hairline, if he didn’t shave it bald.

“Yeah. She only had to check out, but she looked like she needed a fucking miracle. The least I could do was keep an eye on the little guy for a few minutes.” Snake nodded his head, but didn’t say anything else, so I continued putting it all down for him.

“So, now it’s on you to go tell this woman, a single mom with a teenage daughter and a preschool son, that her late husband was not only a gambling addict – which she already knows – but was possibly cheating on her and maybe even had a baby with another woman?”

I nodded, took a sip of my water, and listened to Snake as he threw his head back and laughed. “Holy shit, brother! When you land in it, you really land yourself in deep.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

Snake shook his head back and forth, took a sip of his beer, and all the while never dropped eye contact with me. He was getting on my damn nerves. No wonder we weren’t close anymore. I stood, ready to get the fuck out of there before I punched him in his smug face for laughing at me, at a situation that was anything but funny.

“Calm your tits, man.” He tapped the bar again, in a gesture meant to tell me to sit my ass back down. I crossed my arms over my chest and stood there with my feet shoulder width apart while we stared one another down. “Didn’t mean shit by it.”

“Funny, the laughter and whatnot kind of proves you wrong.”

He shook his head again as if I was missing something. “Been waiting years to get my buddy back.” He threw me for a loop with that admission, especially since he had been the one to stop talking to me first. Sure, I was angry with him for wanting to go after my wife at the time, but I couldn’t blame the guy either. Even he would have been a better choice for Poppy than I had been.

“Been here this whole time,” I finally said.

“Nah. You haven’t. First, there was the idiot who threw the best thing in his life away because he was angry with himself.” I didn’t bother interrupting him because he wasn’t wrong. “Then there was the asshole who went around throwing himself a pity party after stupidly ruining things for himself.”

I rolled my eyes that time. Maybe he had been the wrong person to ask for help.

“But after you lost your patch, there was the man who only had one thing on his mind. I worried that you would fucking off yourself for a while, especially when you saw how happy she was without you. The only thing that kept you hanging on was proving that you belonged in that kutte, with a real patch on again. That man remade himself. Watched you go from a boozing, whoring pity-partying asshole to a serious brother in the making again. Then you gave up the booze, told the women here to piss off, had Spike teach you some new skills and the student surpassed the teacher in that regard too. Then there was the fact that you’ve been working your ass off for a club who hasn’t had much to do with you outside of official business.”

That last part hurt because it was true. Up until the party where I met Reesa, no one bothered to really talk to me much. That was the first time I’d talked to Quickshot about anything outside of club business in years. This was my first time speaking to Snake in years too and we shared the same space on a damn near daily basis.

The only club member who really bothered with me was Spike and that had more to do with the fact that his woman, Tash, didn’t see things like the other old ladies who ran with the S.H.E. MC. She felt their anger at me was misdirected. I agreed with her, not that it mattered one bit. So, they were the only ones to invite me to club shit that took place outside of the compound.

When Griff came around, Spike introduced us, and I liked the kid. Took him under my wing because Spike had his hands full with Tash and Diesel. Not that he didn’t love his older son, who he had just found out about, but it had been a rough transition at first.

“Not sure where your mind just wandered, but I can take a guess,” Snake stated before sipping on his beer again. “You got your patch back and then probably questioned the fuck out of why you bothered. Didn’t feel like a brotherhood to you anymore, am I right?”

I nodded in answer and Snake tipped his head in agreement as well.

“Everyone was still waiting on you to decide what kind of man you wanted to be. We were all waiting for the day you either started joining in again or took off for a new fucking adventure.”

It was my turn to laugh. “Yeah, you fucks really made me want to join in.”

“You did though. Been helping Spike out with his boy. Shocked every motherfucker in here the way you took Griffon on and became the kid’s mentor. Wouldn’t surprise a single fucking one of us if that kid asked you to sponsor his patch instead of his own old man.”

“Griff wouldn’t do that to Spike.”

“Because you wouldn’t let him. You have both of their backs, and every fucking brother here knows that.” The way he acknowledged it as a fact, and did so adamantly, made me take a step back. Had I been wrong about my club brothers for all this time? There were always doubts in my mind about them, more to the point about them wanting me here in the club, but the doubts had become my reality for a time. It was why I’d considered giving up my kutte and moving on more than a few times.

Snake sighed and dropped his empty bottle onto the bar before turning so that he was facing me fully. “Man, we’ve just been waiting on you to decide what you wanted out of life. You were lost for a good long while. Hell, brother, you were lost before everything went south with Poppy. You had the image of your old man, and the way things used to run in Tallahassee, holding you back. That mingled with all the shit going on your head about how you weren’t worthy… I didn’t really put it all together until far too recently when I saw the man you were growing into. Sucks that Griff’s mom got sick, but honestly, him being sent to live here was the best thing that could have ever happened.”

“You lost me.”

“That kid gave you another purpose, a closeness with a brother that wasn’t there anymore. He brought you back into the fold you didn’t think you belonged in. It wasn’t on us to pull you back in. You had to want to be here.”

“I see.” I did, but at the same time, I didn’t. There was something broken between the club and me. We both failed each other in different ways.

“Anyway, my laughter earlier was just because irony, much like karma, is a bitch.”

“Not following.”

“The first woman I’ve seen you take a genuine interest in, since Poppy, happens to be a single mom. You’re damn near a single dad yourself with the amount of effort you put into Spike’s kids. Dude, you turned out to be the most family-oriented man of all of us and your biggest fear – the one that almost cost you everything – was that you couldn’t be a family man. I think you had to lose Poppy to see that family can be created in a lot of different ways. You’ve always had it in you. Even Poppy used to always say that you’d make a great dad someday if you got out of your own way about it.”

“She did?”

“Why the fuck do you think she tried so hard to make it happen with you for all those years?”

I shrugged. “Because it was always her dream.”

“True enough, but that woman wouldn’t fulfil that dream with just anyone. She believed you’d be great at it.”

“Okay, well enough reliving a past that’s done. What the fuck do I do about the situation at hand now?”

“Call your woman and tell her you need to talk.”

“She’s not my woman.”

“Yet.” I turned my back on him. “You forget, I was there when you fell ass over teakettle for your ex-wife. Watched you two the other night. Haven’t seen you that engaged with a single human, outside of Griff, in years, brother.”

I nodded my head as I walked away thinking about just how long it had been since Snake called me by that title.

“It was good to see, Walker.”

I threw my hand up in acknowledgment of his final statement. Shit news needed to be delivered to a woman who didn’t deserve to hear it, and I had to be the messenger. No use celebrating the fact that I felt an instant connection to her, or that my club brothers didn’t still hate me, especially since I didn’t deserve another chance at happiness like that.