Page 103 of Resilience

Jay laughed and punched him hard in the arm. “You sound like a chick, Dunc.” He flipped his hair and put on a high-pitched voice. “Oooh, I really hope everything is going good in your relationship! You two are so cute I could die!”

Duncan rubbed the punched spot. “Fuck off. Like you’re not all in your feelings about your relationship these days. Asshole.”

Sam let those two play out their dumb scene and focused on his burger. The group of patches who had begun calling themselves the ‘Young Guns’—Jay, Duncan, Chris, Monty, and Sam—were all off the clock at the same time for the first time in pretty much ever, and they’d decided to ride out together to see Gunner in the hospital. First, they’d stopped at Hal’s for a good greasy lunch.

It was a couple days before Halloween, and the diner was festooned with orange and black decorations: blinking lights and twisted crepe paper draped in the windows, black cats and ghosts hanging from the ceiling, and pumpkins made out of that funky accordion paper on each table. Most of the decorations looked like they’d seen a few Halloweens; the pumpkin on their table had several old grease spots. Still pretty festive, though.

He answered Duncan’s question. “Yeah, things are good. Between us, things are great. For her, it’s been ... well, you know Athena. Her feelings about it all are hard to suss out completely.”

Tough but not stoic. It put Sam in a weird place. Seeing that she was hurting while hearing her insist she was not.

Tomorrow morning, Sam was driving Athena up to Kansas and Planned Parenthood. Her appointment was first thing Halloween morning, so they were going up a day early and staying the night in a nearby motel. In fact they were staying two nights, because the she was doing a medication abortion, and they wanted her to stay close for a while to make sure everything went right.

Sam felt strange about the whole thing. Not that she was having an abortion—he was a thousand percent on board with undoing the last of what that asshole had done—but he had a lot of feelings about everything that Athena was dealing with, and how little she allowed herself to take comfort from anyone, and what his role was now. He understood that his role was to ‘be there’ for her and of course he wanted to be there, and was, would always be, but Athena’s need to be tough and her insistence that she wasn’t especially upset by it all worried him a lot. He felt like he wasn’t doing enough for her by doing only what she told him she needed.

But she’d asked him to be the one to go with her, and that was an active thing he could do: he could take care of her before, during, and after the procedure. They would have an interpreter there for her, but he hoped they’d let him stay with her the whole time.

He hoped she’d want him to. He hadn’t asked about that yet.

For all the reasons Sam’s family and hers had discussed over dinner the other night, the whole club knew most of the details about what they’d done to Hunter and why. For obvious reasons Athena hadn’t wanted that, but she understood it was unavoidable. If there were any negative consequences for the club, they couldn’t be blindsided.

The news was good regarding the chance for negative consequences. The expedited autopsy had confirmed the initial finding about cause of death: extensive trauma from a car accident. The police had closed the case. That boded well for the club—but they knew better than to relax completely.

The very next day after they’d talked about it at dinner, Athena had sat down with Eight and worked her will on him, as Sam had figured she would. Eight was still angry about such a big thing happening without the foreknowledge of the club, but he wasn’t calling it a betrayal or throwing around words like ‘treason’ anymore. And he was all squishy about what Athena had gone through. He’d told her he would have been in line right behind her father to hurt that bastard if he’d known. The whole club would have been there.

The issue was that they’d gone behind the club, not what they’d done while they were back there.

So here Sam was, packed into a booth at Hal’s with the four patches he was closest to in age—the table really was starting to split in half between the old dudes and the young guns—trying to talk about the Big News in the club without saying anything Athena wouldn’t want him to say.

“I can’t believe we were nice to that fucker,” Jay said, leaving off his bullshit attempts to joke around. “Such a pretty-boy shithead, so many chances to fuck him up, and we hung out with him.”

“Not that much,” Chris countered. “He didn’t like us much.” He smirked at Sam. “And he fuckin’ hated you.”

“Likewise,” Sam said. “And I think here’s where we should change the subject.” They were sitting in the middle of a diner, getting too close to things that should not be said in public.

Monty jumped in right away with a change. His mouth full of meatball sub, he said, “What’s the latest word on Gun? Anybody know?”

Gun was Sam’s actual blood uncle, so he knew. Mom and Leah took turns daily at the hospital, and he and Mason went in together at least twice a week. “If all goes well, he’s had his last surgery for a while. Once he heals up from this last one enough, they’ll get back to therapy.”

“They put one of those bags in, right?” Duncan asked. His old man, Maverick, was Gunner’s best friend, so the Helms were keeping informed as well.

“Colostomy, yeah.”

“That sucks,” Jay said.

“It does.” And Gun would agree. He was extremely unhappy about that kind of business happening in bags, but he had no control or feeling at all from his waist down. The details were gross and depressing, and Gun wouldn’t like everybody talking about it, so Sam didn’t say anything more.

“Is he getting anything back in his legs at all?” Chris asked.

“Not yet. The doc says probably not ever.”

“Damn,” Monty muttered. I can’t get my head around Gun like this. Dude’s legs were never still. Even when I see him, it’s like I can’t really see him. Probably sounds nuts.”

“No, I get it,” Sam said. “I think Gun feels something like it himself. Like he doesn’t know who he is without working legs, or being able to ride.” He sighed and pushed his plate away. “This is all hard as fuck.”

Duncan leaned back, too. “Our dads’ll get that trike done and get him back on the road. Once he gets right with that idea.” Sam’s dad, Maverick, Apollo, and Rad were working together on a custom-build trike with mods so that Gun could still ride.

Jay shook his head. “My dad says Gun told him to shove that bike up his ass, so he’s a long way to right with the idea.”

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