The Bike
Women
He’d tried his best to instill those qualities in me, to prepare me for when it was my turn to become President of the Rogue Rebels. It was just that sometimes I got the order of things mixed up.
“Yes, Sir,” Big D said and went back to working the bar. A lot of people liked to call Dad Sir or just Elwood. He never corrected them. We were one big family, a family of brothers as Crawford used to say, but Dad made sure that everyone knew who the head of the family was. It was him. And it was going to be me.
He caught my eye and raised a glass like a salute, I did the same and we drank to that.
“So how was she?” Slade had sidled up to me while I wasn’t looking. I turned to him, a little confused. Who was he talking about?
“The tits you scored last night. Man, I heard her screaming!” he said with a chuckle and drank some of his beer. I couldn’t help but wondering which one’s screams he heard.
“You want me to invite you to watch the next time I have a girl bent over my bike?” I asked. King and Girth laughed. Slade shrugged his shoulders and sat back in his chair, tipping it dangerously backwards but keeping it balanced perfectly.
“Maybe I’ll learn something,” he said with a laugh and I shook my head.
Slade was all right. He was new to the Club, just a pup, but he had my back. Which meant, that I would always have his.
xxx
We were fucked. How long had we been drinking? Time had overlapped and meshed together, to form one long stream of booze and bad jokes.
“Which one of you is gonna tuck my man into bed tonight?” a woman’s voice interrupted us. We all turned to the door of the bar in unison and saw Jewel Elwood standing there, with her hands on her hips. Her wispy brown curls were framing her face, and her eyes were stern.
Mom.
“Elwood, your old lady’s here to collect you,” I heard Crawford joking and Dad passed him a smile. Mom’s gaze searched me out in the dark crowd of the bar and she rolled her eyes at me. She’d married a biker. She’d raised a biker. This was the life she’d had to settle for, not the one she’d chosen and sometimes, I felt sorry for her.
I saw Dad lazily slip off his stool and reach for his leather jacket, while Mom remained standing at the door, watching Dad’s every movement.
It took a lot of trust and a lot of guts to forge the solid marriage that Mom and Dad shared. It wouldn’t have been easy for her. Dad’s code of life included women. They were at the bottom of his list of priorities, but they were there. I didn’t have to rack my brain hard to recall how many times she’d caught him with someone else, and how many times she’d threatened to leave.
I blamed Dad then. Blamed him for how much pain he caused Mom, and I vowed that I would never put another human being through it. I wouldn’t put my kids through the heartache of watching a family fall apart. It was why Moira left the first chance she got. She couldn’t stand to see Mom being broken, over and over again. Even though Dad hadn’t been unfaithful to her in over eight years now, Moira had just always expected it to happen again. She didn’t want to be around when it did. Now she lived in the other part of town, and secretly I was glad she stayed away from the Club. It gave the boys less chance to drool over her.
Some of the guys hooted and cheered when Dad walked up to Mom. I’d seen photographs of the two of them together when they’d just met, before Moira and I were born. They were hot stuff and probably still were.
Dad grabbed her by the ass and pulled her to himself, before kissing her. I rolled my eyes and looked away. I’d grown up watching the two of them slobbering over each other. Fucking gross.
“Go home!” I barked at them, and the others continued to cheer. When Dad released her, she looked directly at me and arched her eyebrows, before turning to the others.
“You all should go home. It’s late, boys,” she said, in a threateningly authoritative voice. Over the years, she had slipped into her role as the matriarch quite well, and I knew it had only strengthened the marriage between the two of them.
“Jewel is a gem, get it?” Slade joked and I shook my head indulgently.
“How’s Moira?” Girth asked, knowing exactly the effect it would have on me.
My head was already swimming with alcohol and I was fighting the urge to take Mom’s advice.
“Safe now that she’s away from you,” I said to him and he sniggered. Moira was off-limits and they all knew it, but that didn’t stop them from taking potshots at my peace of mind.
“Hey, aren’t you satisfied with one guy’s sister?” Slade was quick to interject. Girth had recently started seeing Sophie, Slade’s sister, and they had embarked on a strange life together. A relationship that none of us thought was going to work. Sophie was sweet and knew what she wanted. Girth was young and scruffy and had too much going on in his family to recognize he had a good thing with her.
But he enjoyed how much this was annoying Slade, nonetheless.
King made to stand up. I could see it on his face that he was done. Since Dad took him under his wings four years ago, we’d been best friends.
“Where are you going?” Girth asked him and King pointed to his watch. It was three in the morning.