Duke (The Henchmen MC 5)

I shrugged as I moved closer, getting under the water too. "We can probably leave it off for the day. Maybe just wrap up at night in case you roll onto your back when you sleep. Though you seem more like you like to sleep-molest that body pillow of yours."

"Shut up," she laughed, tilting her head up to look at me, making the water slick back her hair. I reached for the shampoo and scrubbed it into her hair, trying to ignore the way her eyes got heavy and her nipples hardened against my chest.

She rinsed. I conditioned. I soaped her up as much as she would allow before self-consciously swatting me away.

"Alright. My turn, water hog," I said, moving her out of the way so I could move under the spray.

She stepped back and squeezed the excess water out of her hair, reaching out for a towel. "Yeah, I need to go try out that makeup stuff anyway," she said as I turned to face the water.ELEVENPennyI thought I was seeing things at first.

I thought the startled wake-up, the makeshift exam, and the almost overpowering sexual tension I felt all through the shower was somehow messing with my head.

But I blinked hard and opened my eyes to look at the back of his shoulder and, sure enough, I wasn't mistaken.

Maybe another person wouldn't have really noticed if they hadn't been really looking.

But it was Duke's naked body; I was looking.

It was a tattoo.

Or, it had been a tattoo at some point.

It was warped, light, parts of it completely gone.

It was in the process of removal.

But I could make it out.

Anyone would know it when they saw it.

And every thing in me recoiled at the sight.

What Duke had, at one point, permanently etched into his skin?

Yeah, it was a swastika.TWELVEDukeThere are some interesting facts about Arkansas.

It was the birth place of Johnny Cash.

The state bird is the mockingbird.

The pine tree is the official state tree.

It has over six-hundred thousand acres of lakes.

And it is home to more hate groups than any other state in the nation.

It was where I was born, in a town right outside Harrison. Why do I mention Harrison, you might ask? Yeah, it's because Harrison is where the director of the Ku Klux Klan, to this day, keeps his main office. It is a quaint, typical small time America place where you also just so happen to find blatantly racist billboards and people waving Confederate flags like they're still in the God damn Civil War.

I was born, the first of six children. Every last one of us were blonde-haired and blue-eyed. This was mainly because it was planned that way. My mother was blonde and blue-eyed; my father was blond and blue-eyed. So were their parents, their siblings, all my cousins.

Selective breeding, in a way.

I think it went without saying that my family was still under the misguided idea that other races were trying to overtake the country and that, in turn, the whites needed to maintain racial purity to preserve the Aryan race.

And had it maybe been as ignorant and idiotic as that, I might have been able to live with that being my family, my heritage.

But it very rarely is just innocent ignorance.

Ignorant people, well, tended to be stupid as well.

And stupid people responded to things like their fears with violence.

We were put to bed at night in a crib underneath a Confederate flag with an Aryan circle in the center.

I never knew about Sam and his Green Eggs and Ham.

I never heard a peep about Charlotte and her web.

But by age six, I could spout direct quotes from Mein Kampf.

At age ten, I protested the funeral of a gay man who had done nothing other than live his peaceful life and share his body with men.

At age eleven, I marched down the street in full Nazi uniform, spouting some shit I can't even let myself think it was so foul, using words I had no business using at all, let alone at that age.

See, the thing was, I didn't just belong to the average type of corn-fed, Bible-banging, gun-toting, Confederate flag waving, racist family. Oh, no. I belonged to a family three generations deep in hate mongering leadership. And being the oldest son, yeah, dear old Dad and Grandpa had some grand plans for my eventual leadership.

"World is going to fucking hell in a hand basket," my father told me, standing on a back porch to a farm that had at one time just been a farm.

But over the course of the prior year and a half, things had been changing. Guns and ammo piled up. A fence was erected, barbed, and electrified. Then the building started. The first one I didn't question. I figured it was another barn for the tools or the animals or prepping shit or what-the-fuck-ever else my pops and grandpop got it in their heads to do. They were forever working on shit.