Page 22 of Sprog
"Son, if you're going to have a baby you didn't plan with a woman you didn't want, you might as well wear it on your back." He's still laughing. "Sprog."
"Take it to Prez," Cam says from behind the bar. She's smiling but she's trying not to. She doesn't try hard enough.
Cash walks over to where Razor is standing and leans in to say something. Razor listens and looks across the room at me with that unreadable expression he has, and then the corner of his mouth moves.
"Sprog," he says, loud enough to carry.
And that's it. The name goes around the room like a wave, and I stand at the bar. I hate it but I know with absolute certainty that it's mine for the rest of my life.
Cam slides another whiskey across the bar to me.
"Look at it this way," she says.
"I'd rather not."
"It means they're not pretending the Raven situation isn't happening. They're acknowledging it and making it yours. The name doesn't make fun of you; it makes you carry it upright." She holds my eyes. "That's what this club does. It doesn't let you hide from the hard things. It makes you wear them."
I look at my whiskey for a long moment.
"You've put a lot of thought into that."
"I put a lot of thought into most things. Nobody asks me about them because I'm behind a bar."
I drink the whiskey. "Sprog," I say, quietly, trying it on.
It fits. I hate that it fits.
Three months later,EJ arrives.
The paternity test isn't back yet when I first hold him, but I don't need it. I look down at this small, red-faced, furious little person in my arms and I see myself. Not what I look like now, but what I must have looked like in photographs I've seen from when I was a baby, the dark hair, the particular shape of the eyes, the expression like he's angry at the world for not being ready for him.
"Well," I say to him, very quietly, standing in an empty room, with only the crib for EJ, and a chair for me. Raven signed the paperwork that I had brought with me as soon as I heard EJ’s first cry. The paperwork also statedthat she has nothing to do with the clubhouse and that she has to find alternativeaccommodation as of tonight. It’s harsh, but what she did was wrong. Prez was right, we could be a lot worse, but we aren’t. She has given us a Black Saints’ baby and that is more than she was ever going to give us.
That’s when I walked out of the room. She wanted me out of the room the second the cord was cut, and I happily gave her what she wanted. "Here we are EJ."
He doesn't respond to this, because he's three hours old and he's asleep, but his face does something, a small shift in the muscles around his mouth, and I decide to believe it means he heard me.
Brick is standing in the corridor leaning against the door, waiting for me to invite him in. He hasn't said anything since the nurse let me take EJ into this room. We explained the situation to the nurse and she accommodated us. When I look over at him he looks up and we just look at each other for a moment.
"I'm going to be a good father," I say. And I mean it as a fact, not a hope. I mean it as the thing I'm going to build from this moment forward, the thing I'll put every piece of myself into alongside the club, because EJ didn't choose to be born. He didn't choose his mother. He didn't choose any of the circumstances around his arrival, but he chose me, in the sense that I'm what he's got, and I'm going to make sure I'm enough.
Brick stands up. He walks over and looks down at EJ, and his face does something I've never seen Brick's face do. Something quiet and completely unguarded.
"Course you are," he says. "You're a Black Saint." He reaches out and very briefly touches the baby's head with two fingers, the gentlest thing I've ever seen his hands do. "And so's he."
I look back down at EJ. He's still got his eyes closed and his tiny fist is clenched next to his cheek like he's ready for a fight, and the thought crosses my mind, unbidden, that Savannah should be here. That she’d have had something to say about him. That she’d have laughed at the fist.
I push the thought down. I'm getting better at that.
"What are we going to call him?" Brick asks.
"EJ," I say. "Ethan James." I pause. "James was my grandfather's name."
Brick is quiet for a second. His father's name was James. I know that.
"Good name," he says eventually.
"Yeah." I look at EJ, at this whole, complete, and entirely new person who is somehow mine. "It is."
