Page 2 of Mischief

I don't have the number saved.

I don't need to. I burned it out of my own head years ago, and my body remembers it anyway, the way your hand remembers a stove.

I answer because if I don't he'll call the club's line next.

"Son."

The word doesn't belong in his mouth.

My whole life I'd beenboy—not a name, not a son, just a thing he hadn't bothered to love.

So when he saysson, my gut goes cold before my head catches up.

He only softens his tone when he’s about to take something.

Older than I remember. Wetter, like he's talking around a cigarette, a bad tooth, or forty years of being exactly who he is.

But underneath the wear,, it's the same voice that used to come up the stairs of the house in Duluth, the one that told me to hold still, this won't take but a minute.

The voice my body braces for before my ears even catch it.

My reflection goes the color of the sink.

"You've done well for yourself." I hear him settle in, get comfortable, the wet drag of a breath pulled deep. "A patch, almost. Riding with real men. And such."

He lets the pause stretch, the way he builds everything, on purpose and slow.

"Such pretty company."

The floor goes out from under me.

I put a hand flat on the counter to keep myself standing and I make my voice into the flat dead thing I trained it into the day I put a new name on and rode south with everything I owned in a duffel bag.

"How did you get this number?"

He clicks his tongue against his teeth, a sound I'd know in my sleep. "Now, is that any way to talk to your father?"

"Let me ask again. How the fuck did you get this number?"

He laughs, and the laugh turns into a cough, and the cough goes on long enough that some sick reflex in me nearly asks if he's all right.

I hate the reflex more than I have ever hated anything.

Proof that no matter how far south I ride, some part of me is still a kid on those stairs, still loving the man the way you love a house you grew up in,, even after you know what happened in every room of it.

"Doesn't matter how I got it," he says when he's done. "What matters is I've got it, and I know where you are. I've seen you, Bodul. Turned your back on your own blood to go play biker with strangers. After everything I gave you. You don't get to leave, boy. Nobody leaves. You'll remember that, or I'll make you. You don’t get to walk away from what you are. From whatIbuilt. Blood doesn't retire, boy. You'll come home, or I'll bring the family to you."

I don't say anything.

There's nothing to say to a man who's telling you he's been watching you and letting you feel it, letting the knowledge crawl up your spine one vertebra at a time.

"You look good," he says, almost kindly. "You look like your mother."

"Don't."

"She'd be proud, is all I'm saying. Her boy, running with a real crew. She always did want more for you than I could?—"

"You donot," I say, and my voice cracks down the middle and I let it, because there are two names in the world that can do that to me and he just reached for one of them, "get to talk about her."