Page 38 of Rogue
“I love you,” I said.
The words came out hoarse.My voice was wrecked from crying.My eyes were swollen.I was a mess in a dim hallway in my leather cut, and I said it anyway -- not as a thank-you, not as relief, not as the payoff to a scene that had earned its emotional beat.I said it the way you say a thing you’ve known for a while and are finally done keeping to yourself.I said it because it was true and because he deserved to hear it.
Something shifted in Rogue’s face.
The hard line of his mouth softened.Not into a smile -- something quieter than that.His jaw unclenched.The watchfulness didn’t leave, but it changed, the way light changes when it moves from one surface to another, and what was left was something unguarded that the club almost never saw because the club wasn’t supposed to see it.
He cupped my jaw in both hands.His thumbs brushed the tears off my cheeks.The calluses on his palms caught against my skin -- rough, warm, familiar in a way that made my chest tighten all over again.He looked at me for a long moment.Then he bent his head and kissed me.
Once.Slow.His mouth was warm against mine, and he tasted like the coffee he’d been drinking and something underneath it that was just him.I felt my hands find his wrists and hold on, and the kiss lasted long enough I felt breathless.
When he broke it, he didn’t go far.His forehead rested against mine.His hands were still on my face.Our breath mingled in the narrow space between us, warm and shared.
Then he pulled me back against his chest.His arms came around me again.One hand spread wide across my back.The other found the nape of my neck, his fingers threading into my hair, and he held me there in the dim hallway.
I pressed my cheek to his chest and listened to his heart.It was steady.Slower than mine.The rhythm of a man who knew exactly what he wanted.I could feel the cut between us -- his leather against mine, both of us wearing the same insignia, and the weight of it was something I had chosen and something he had given.
Outside, through the wall, someone was laughing.The sound was bright and unconcerned, the sound of a person who hadn’t been in the room when Grant Stewart placed a folder on a table.
Rogue’s hand moved once, a slow stroke from the base of my skull to the place where the cut ended at my shoulders, and I closed my eyes, leaning into him.
Epilogue
Lennox
The morning heat came in through the open sides of my property cut and pressed itself against my skin like a warm palm.I’d stopped closing it sometime in my sixth month when the belly made the zipper pointless, and now the leather hung open over the soft cotton tank that was stretched tight across the swell of me.
The fire pit bench was warm under my thighs.I’d been sitting here for twenty minutes with a mug of coffee strong enough to strip paint, watching the compound wake up around me in the particular slow-motion way it did on days when the humidity sat on everything and nobody was in a particular hurry to move through it.
Brick passed by the main house with a toolbox in one hand and a half-smoked cigarette in the other.He didn’t break stride when he saw me, just lifted his chin and said, “Morning, trouble,” the way he’d been saying it since the day after the fundraiser when the first stories broke and the compound phone started ringing with calls from journalists I never returned.I lifted my mug in answer.
The compound breathed.
From the garage came the steady growl of an engine being tuned -- someone working the throttle, letting it idle, cutting it, then the metallic clank of a tool on concrete and a low curse that carried across the yard.Beyond the fence line, the cicadas had reached that particular pitch where the sound wasn’t individual insects anymore but a single continuous wall of noise that you stopped noticing until it ended, and then the silence felt wrong.Someone had fired up the grill near the clubhouse.The smell of lighter fluid and charcoal caught the breeze and rolled across the yard, and underneath it was the greener smell of the trees that pressed against the perimeter fencing on three sides, the pine and the oak and whatever else grew in the Tennessee dirt that the Reckless Kings had decided was worth putting a fence around.
I took another sip of coffee.
Grant Stewart’s name hadn’t appeared in the news in months.It had been a fiasco of epic proportions, featured on the news almost daily.But the investigation had hit a snag, and I hadn’t heard anything more.Not that it mattered.Grant was out of my life, and that was good enough for me.
My hand was steady.No tremor, no half-grip, no careful placement of the mug that said I was afraid of spilling.I set it on my knee and left it there, and my other hand came to rest on the curve of my belly where the baby was doing whatever babies did at nine in the morning -- kicking, probably, or turning, or just existing with the particular insistence of something that had decided it was coming out whether the world was ready or not.I could feel the shape of a foot or an elbow pressing against the inside of my palm, a hard, little ridge of bone or joint that moved when I pressed back.And so I pressed back and the ridge moved again.I smiled into my coffee because nobody was watching and I didn’t have to explain the smile to anyone.
“Jesus Christ, that’s the worst joke I’ve ever heard.”
The voice came from behind me.I turned to see Jinx walking backward toward the clubhouse, his hands up in surrender while Brick stood at the garage door with a socket wrench in his fist and an expression that suggested the wrench might find a new home if the joke didn’t improve.
“Come on, man, it was solid.”
“It was dogshit.”
“I’m telling you, the delivery --”
“The delivery was you standing there with your dick in your hand waiting for a laugh that never came.”
I leaned forward on the bench.The movement pulled the cut open wider across my chest, and the morning air hit the sweat on my collarbone and cooled it, and I called out, “He’s right.It was terrible.I’ve heard better material from the morning news.”
Jinx turned.His face did something complicated that started as offense and ended as a grin.“You weren’t even listening.”
“I’ve got ears.”
