Page 23 of Equilibrium
Motherfucker, I couldn’t stop laughing. My chest constricted painfully, my shoulders shook, but I couldn’t stop. And it felt fucking good.
I couldn’t remember the last time I laughed this hard, and it was a magnificent feeling. Being buried underneath the tragedy, underneath the darkness I allowed myself to sink into, I forgot what it felt like to act like a regular girl, with regular friends, who could make me laugh like this.
“So, Indigo is your brother?” I asked her.
“Don’t remind me. At this point, I will never get a chance to find a boyfriend or get married. My brother has scared every single guy in a five-mile radius, and he isn’t done.”
“Which one is he?” I looked around, noticing people staring at us. Some of them looked curious, some of them weary and some smiled at the sight of the two of us. This whole scene sounded like a bad joke.
An assassin and a waitress walked into the bar... No, okay. I sucked at jokes.
“That one.” She pointed toward a guy that stood with Atlas, who kept throwing cautionary glances toward us. Ah, the brother bear. I could feel his protective streak even from this side of the backyard, and I was positive that Zoe wasn’t joking about it. “He seems scary, but he’s actually quite cuddly.” Her eyes widened as soon as the words left her mouth. “Oh God, please don’t tell him I told you that. Knowing him, he would end up finding different ways to torture me, or worse.”
“Don’t worry, dude. I got you.” I winked at her. “But, if he is so protective, why is he allowing you to hang around here?”
This would be the last place I would expect her to be with a brother like that.
“Ah, it must be weird for you, seeing us all here, behaving like what my brother and the rest of the club are doing is the normal thing.”
“Well,” I muttered. “Yeah.”
“See that couple over there.” She pointed toward the older couple I met earlier, sitting at one of the benches, surrounded with kids. “That’s Michael and his old lady, Cassandra.”
“Old lady?” At this point, I was going to need a dictionary. There was no way to remember all these terms they were throwing around without mixing them all up. Old lady, cuts, colors, back door, I would need to start taking notes at this point.
“I keep forgetting you’re an outsider.” She laughed. “An old lady is like a wife, but we like to think that it’s even more sacred than marriage. You could have many wives, but only one of them would ever be your old lady.”
“And can girls have an old man?”
She almost fell off her chair with another bout of laughter. I swear, I wasn’t usually a comedian, but I legitimately didn’t know anything about motorcycle clubs. It felt as if everything they ever thought of me was pure bullshit, and I was only now seeing the true face of them.
“No,” she choked out. “We don’t get to have an old man, at least there’s no term for it.”
“Why can’t we create a new term? If they can call us old, we sure as hell should be able to do the same.”
“Ophelia, you’re a bloody genius.” She cackled. “I can’t wait to tell Storm all about this newfound information you got.”
At the mention of Storm, my whole body stiffened, and the anger that was momentarily forgotten, resurfaced again, making me violent. Goddammit, why couldn’t he just stay in the bed this morning so that we could talk like adults?
But no, he had to fucking disappear, and I didn’t see him yet. It was almost five in the afternoon, and he was yet to show his face.
“Oh boy, I know that face.”
“There’s no face, Zoe.”
“Uh, yes there is. That face there means, I am going to kill him.”
I groaned because she was right. I really did want to kill him. The list of reasons was getting longer and longer, and if he continued behaving like this, I was going to need a longer paper and more pens to write them all down.
Zoe leaned on the table, getting closer to me.
“Look,” she whispered. “These guys, they’re tough. But they’re also good. When we lost our homes back in Las Vegas, they made sure that all of us had a new place to sleep, that every single child had enough money to go to school. They might not show it in a proper way, but they care. They really do.”
“I still want to strangle him,” I growled.
“I get it. It’s not the same situation, but I want to kill my brother at least three times in a day, and that’s if I’m lucky. The point is, they suck at showing emotions. They think that everyone needs to adhere to what they say, and sometimes they forget to communicate things properly.”
She had a point, and wasn’t that how I behaved as well? I tried to push people away while trying to save them. I never told Ava the full truth of what was happening because I had been trying to protect her, but now that I was in a very similar situation, I hated it.
