They wouldn’t get me anywhere, and since I couldn’t fix the past, I’d have to stay in the future.
Especially since the past needed lots and lots of alcohol to maneuver the minefield that was my memories.
“Hey, let me hold her!” I heard a whine to my right.
I looked over to see Wade holding out his hands as if I would give her right up.
“You can fuck right the hell off,” I said as I snuggled the sleeping girl closer. She wrapped one of her tiny arms partially around my neck and flipped her head so that she was drooling down my neck, melting my heart. “I just got her.”
“But I never get to hold her,” he said.
I grinned and offered him my free hand. “How’s the leg?”
I hadn’t seen him in quite a few weeks. He and his wife and newly-adopted children had gone home to visit with their parents early before the holiday, celebrating because Wade’s parents had decided to go on a month-long cruise around the world for the majority of the next three weeks.
It was weird, because I usually saw Wade more often, but lately with all he had going on, I hadn’t had the opportunity.
He wasn’t only my friend, but a good buddy that I counted on to be one of the go-betweens for inter-department cooperation. He worked for the Bear Bottom Police department, and he and I shared information that connected with multiple cases.
“It’s doing great, actually,” he admitted.
I studied his face and realized that he was, in fact, doing great.
A while ago, if I’d been doing the same thing I was doing now, I would’ve realized he was lying.
Yet neither one of us would’ve called him out on his lie.
Because I was hurting just as badly as him, but in a completely different way. Who was I to call him on his shit when I wasn’t even acknowledging my own?
“That’s good to know, man,” I said, eyes going around Wade to look for his wife. “Where’s that woman of yours?”
He gestured with his chin in the direction of the bathrooms. “One of the kids needed cleaned up after having some cake.”
I snorted, which caused the little girl in my arms to shift and start to stir.
She sat up sleepily and blinked, unsurprised to find herself in arms that weren’t either of her parents’. She wasn’t picky about the club brothers or their wives, but that was where the line was drawn. If they weren’t her tribe, then they weren’t allowed to hold her.
Lucky for me, I was part of the select few that she allowed the privilege.
Her smile was heartwarming when she saw who was holding her.
After taking a few long blinks, she threw her arms back around my neck and stayed there, causing me to nearly weep.
I missed this.
God, did I miss it.
“She being good?” Rome’s voice came from behind me.
I turned slightly to see Izzy darting away to the food table, and Rome walking closer and closer to us, his eyes on his daughter and nothing else.
“Yep,” I said. “I’ve had her for all of two seconds, though. You can’t have her back yet.”
Rome grinned as he arrived and ran one finger down the line of his daughter’s spine, causing her to giggle.
She didn’t let me go, though. Only tightened her hold around my neck.
She didn’t realize it, but she was giving me something that I wanted badly.
I closed my eyes and relished the way it felt to have tiny arms around my neck again, laughing in my ear, and when I opened them once more it was to have three men looking at me like they knew my secret.
They did know it, of course.
That was one of the deciding factors as to why I was allowed into the MC at all.
I wasn’t sure what brought me to Bear Bottom.
Hell, I’d just driven away and hadn’t looked back that horrible day.
I wasn’t sure why I stopped in Bear Bottom. Hell, I wasn’t even sure why the hell I’d done what I’d done in leaving in the first place.
I should’ve fought. Should’ve made it to where Cher had a fight on her hands.
But I didn’t want that for my nephew. I didn’t want him to have to fight between two people, one that really did only want the best for him, and one that only felt an obligation.
The day I’d left had been the hardest day of my life. Literally, walking out that door and getting on my bike had been seriously wrong and foreign. I felt like I should turn around every single mile that had spread.
Which had partially been why I’d landed in Bear Bottom.
At the time I’d arrived and pulled up a chair in a diner in a town that I hadn’t even looked at the name of as I’d entered the city limits, now I felt the town’s name was fitting. I really was at the bottom. Seriously, there was nowhere else that I could go but up from that point…at least that was what I’d thought.