“Alright. I’ll put someone on that. Anyone want to place their bets now that it’s a woman and she will bring trouble to the club?” he asked, looking around.
“Shit, man, who would take that bet? Haven’t they all brought trouble so far?”
They had.
Harmon.
Saskia.
Shy.
And now… Lark.
“I guess we are lucky that the women bring the trouble and that the club doesn’t,” Huck mused.
“Hey, man. You can’t go around saying shit like that,” Eddie said, throwing up a hand. “Just inviting that bad luck to us now,” he grumbled, reaching for some more spices and adding them to his dish. In a cross pattern. Like he always did.
“So are you heading back over there?” Huck asked, ignoring Eddie’s bad luck comment. He was full of strange superstitions. He made everyone eat twelve grapes on New Years Eve. He was forever putting glasses of water on top of the fridge to “absorb the negative energy.” He made sure he never swept over anyone’s feet or they would “be single forever.” And, to Eddie, Tuesday the thirteenth was much more unlucky than Friday the thirteenth. So we all kinda just went along with whoever new superstition he had to share with us.
“No. I’m staying the night here with the animals,” I told him. “I think they have been missing me.”
“Fuck you, Benny,” Mackie, the macaw, declared.
“Yeah, really missing you,” Huck said with a smirk. “Let me know when you come up with a plan for handling this Locust shit once and for all.”
“Will do,” I agreed, deciding that if I was going to be home, that looking over the file while I hung out with the dogs and cats was probably a good way to spend my time.
Because as nice as it was to have Lark practically all to myself at the safe house, it wasn’t what real life was going to be like. She needed to be able to go to work, to see her people. Hell, she needed to be able to go and shop or walk her dogs without worry.
And it would be nice to be able to go out with her too. We’d taken the one chance with the taco place just because it was a place with people I was familiar with. But now that Myles had been put at risk, we all decided going nowhere but the backyard was probably the best bet.
It was just time.
I hadn’t spent much time paying attention to what happened to the Locust Crew after we’d taken out a few of their own. But it was time to figure out how they’d been handling that situation, since it was possible they’d locked down their organization more. They’d likely closed ranks. And, worst-case scenario, they’d added more members out of desperation.
So I’d put a call out to Arty to see if he could get me some surveillance footage. If not, I would have to spend some time sitting on them myself.
And what was the first reason that came to mind for why I didn’t want to do it?
Not too many hours sitting in a hot car.
Not the risk of getting seen myself.
Oh, no.
It was that the time spent doing that could be time I’d much rather spend hanging out with Lark.
So, yeah, you could say that I had it pretty bad.
I guess I was supposed to be freaked out by that. Especially after an entire lifetime of nothing but casual encounters with the opposite sex.
I don’t know, though.
There was just none of that.
Maybe because I’d seen some of my brothers before me—Huck, Che, and McCoy—fall first and build pretty incredible and fulfilled lives with their women, but still getting to be major parts of the club had managed to alleviate a lot of the concern I’d had about the whole concept.
The carefree biker life was great, don’t get me wrong. Parties and random women. It had its place in my life. Until, I guess, it didn’t anymore.