My stomach clenched at the thought of Molly not hearing from me for days then having to deal with my mother. “Is Mom here?”
“Nah, she’s at home with the girls,” he answered, referring to Lily and Rose. If they weren’t at our house, they were together at Casper and Farrah’s place. They’d always been really close, but I wasn’t sure if they’d spent a day apart since the day Lily had gone blind.
“Alright,” I said, setting my mug on the bar. “I’ll stop by later and let Mom know what’s up.”
“Probably a good idea, seeing as how she was planning on stopping by Molly’s with dinner tomorrow,” he said dryly.
“Christ.” I walked away and without thought, found myself moving toward Mel and Rocky.
Mel was on Rock’s lap and they were talking quietly when I sat down at their table. Before I could even open my mouth, Mel’s head was turning toward me and her entire body had stiffened.
“All good?” Rock asked nonchalantly, his arm tightening around Mel’s waist.
“Yep,” I answered, wishing I hadn’t put my coffee down so I’d have something to do with my hands. “Mel,” I greeted.
She glared at me for a long moment before Rocky nudged her and she replied, “Will.”
“How’s Reb?” I didn’t want to ask. I wanted to make a clean break. But I couldn’t stop worrying about the kid.
Mel pulled her phone out without answering, and I waited impatiently as she messed with it for a minute before setting it down on the table between us. “She’s fine,” Mel said emotionlessly.
I didn’t reply. I couldn’t make myself say anything at all. Right there on her phone was a photo of Molly and Rebel in a hospital bed. Reb was sleeping, her mouth barely hanging open and an IV in her arm. She looked okay. Really fucking small in that hospital bed, but fine otherwise.
It was Molly that caught my attention. She looked like she hadn’t slept since the night I’d been with her. There were dark circles around her eyes, and her face was drawn with exhaustion. Her arm was lying over Reb’s belly, and she was pretty much curled around the baby, her knees pulled up under Reb’s feet and her head lying on the pillow, her lips pressed against Rebel’s head.
“That was before Reb woke up and ripped her IV out of her arm and all hell broke loose,” Mel said, laying her hand over the phone and pulling it back across the table.
“She alright?” I asked roughly, scratching at my beard. My heart was pounding and I could feel a headache starting at the base of my skull. Everything I felt showed on my face, and I knew it. I wanted to fucking run from that table, but I couldn’t let Mel see that she’d gotten to me.
“She’s fine now,” Mel replied, stuffing her phone back in her purse.
“And Moll?”
“She’s fine, too.”
“Good.”
“Yep.”
I glanced up to see her staring. “Thought you’d be ripping my head off about now,” I mumbled.
“I don’t have to,” she said quietly. “This is your place, so it’s not like I could do much anyway, but I don’t have to rip your head off.”
“Oh, yeah? Why’s that?”
“Because you’re done. It doesn’t matter what you do from here. You could go straight to Molly’s, but it wouldn’t make a difference. She won’t see you.” She wrapped her arms across her chest and sat up straighter. “You fucked yourself over far worse than anything I could do to you.”
She couldn’t have stunned me more if she’d reached across the table and punched me in the face. And the way her words came so easily, like she was talking about the weather, made it that much worse. She wasn’t trying to convince me. She didn’t need to. Because she was completely confident that Molly was done with me.
It was what I’d wanted, wasn’t it?
I sat there silently, seeing nothing as Mel asked Rock to take her home. I didn’t move when they got up from the table, and I didn’t acknowledge Rock when he cuffed my shoulder as they walked away. I’d wanted to be done with Molly. It was for the best. We weren’t working.
Except that we had been. We’d worked. Shit had been easy with us. No drama, no games.
As I sat there at the table, I realized that somewhere in the back of my mind, I’d convinced myself that if I could find a way to have the club and Molly, I’d get her back. She loved me. She hadn’t said it, but I knew she did. I hadn’t really let myself believe that what I was doing was final.
The chair across from me screeched across the floor and I glanced up to find Poet, the former vice-president of the club, sitting down across from me. The guy was grizzled as shit and had given up his seat when the old president, Slider, had died in the shooting at our barbeque. He’d said he just didn’t want the title without his best friend at the helm. We’d all understood it. He stuck around, though, still part of the club. Hell, his daughter was married to the current president, so it wasn’t as if he’d have gone far anyway.