Page 99 of Salvation

We all picked up our snacks and threw them at him.

“Come on, Dante. They’re all nasty little wenches. You’ll pour me a pint, won’t you, brother?” he said, throwing an arm over Dante’s shoulder.

“It was me who cut you off in the first place.”

“The past is the past. I’ll let bygones be bygones if you make it two pints. I’ll even let you stroke my beard if you play your cards right.”

The two of them walked away, and as they were out of hearing distance, Imogen said, “he’s not wrong though. Dante is definitely a physical touch kind of guy. Eh, Rachel?”

I turned back to the table and gave them a soft smile. “You can’t have a love language if you don’t know what love is. And Dante? He doesn’t even meet the entry requirements.”

Chapter 41

Rachel

Two weeks later, and not much had changed, but my days fell into an easy routine that at least made them manageable.

I spent the mornings with Axel. We would practice his words, build bricks, or just anything fun. If it was the weekend and Bee wasn’t at school, she would sometimes join in. I had set them a project to paint one of the spare rooms, and she seemed to enjoy drawing on the walls. I convinced Dante to paint one of the walls in chalkboard paint, so that she always had a huge blank canvas to play with every day, and we assigned Greg the prospect to clean it every night.

And I’m proud of myself for never bringing up the fact that the real Malfoy could have used his wand to clean the board.

Well, I didn’t bring it up more thanonce.

That was fucking progress, and I was considering that real growth on my behalf.

Bee didn’t reveal much in her drawings. I didn’t look at it and see a perfect family, and then I suddenly knew what she needed. She drew dogs, flowers, thunderclouds, and butterflies.Standard child stuff. There was no huge revelation, but it brought her joy, so I made sure we continued with it.

She was opening up to me bit by bit. She no longer walked away when I came in the room and was even open to practicing her sign language with me. I made sure to send a mass text to everyone in the club, every single day, with links to new YouTube videos to watch, or articles to read, and everyone was improving slowly but surely. Bee had even introduced me to her therapy snake, and let me feed it one of the thawed baby rats. The box containing the rats had the word “Macbeth” written on it, which made me laugh out loud. And then I remembered the snake was called Rachel, and I stopped laughing.

Lunchtime was spent with all the kids and old ladies, helping Steph walk the dogs. It was nice that we spent every day together, and our friendships had really formed in this time. It was my mission to get Kitty on one of the outings, but she had so far resisted every effort I made.

The atmosphere of the club was much more relaxed than I had known it to be, and I found myself spending my afternoons either taking Axel to visit different members (his favourite place was the garage, surprise, surprise!) or leaving him in Heather’s capable hands whilst I helped organise things with the other old ladies, or pulled my weight around the compound. I would never get used to so many people coming and going at all hours, but I soon accepted it.

For the most part, everyone here treated me as Dante’s old lady. Even the people that came for day visits. They bent over backwards to help me; they moved out of my way if they saw me coming, and were so ridiculously overly friendly and sweet that I got toothache just looking at them.

I brought it up to Dante once, and he just shot me a look. He told me that whether I believed it or not, his club mattered. They commanded a certain level of respect, and everyone knew whothey were. Which, in turn, meant everyone knew who I was. No one wanted to get on Dante’s bad side, so they all sucked up to the old lady.

Dante had laughed at that and called me a vicious little trollop that no one wanted to piss off, either. He said that my reputation preceded me. I decided to ignore that.

My days settled, and I found myself liking the calming, relaxed atmosphere around here. It finally felt like a place I would be happy to bring up my children.

I even had a chance to go to the graveyard and cleaned up the headstones for Crash and Zach, bringing Axel and Bee with me to lay some flowers for them.

Bee asked me one day why I speak to them as though they’re still here and why I always sound so happy. I told her that it’s incredibly sad that they’re no longer here, but I don’t want to be sad over something I can’t change. I would rather spend time with them being upbeat, and keeping them updated on our lives, because their spirit is still here, even if they’re not.

She seemed to like that thought and disappeared to sit next to Laura’s grave — her mother. I wondered if she was talking to her, and selfishly felt a small pang of jealousy. But more than anything, I felt hurt. Not for me, but for Bee. Choosing to sit at her mother’s grave just proved how much she was craving that motherly figure in her life, and was a painful reminder of how much I had let her down when she had placed her trust in me,

I spent an hour with Kitty every day, which surprised even myself. Sometimes we sat in silence. Other times, I helped her bathe and brushed her hair. Sometimes I would even read to her. But most of the time, we reminisced.

She had an old video player, and she showed me her wedding video, old club parties, a fight she once had with Crash’s dad, Warrior. There was a lifetime of memories that she showed me through her grainy videos. Sometimes she pulled out a photoalbum and explained each picture to me, even though I had already seen them dozens of times at this point. I saw Dante and Macbeth as children. Although he went by his real name, Cole, at that point. I saw Laura and Dante during their ceremony, where she became his old lady. There were pictures of Warrior leading the bike runs, the bar back when it was just a shack with a few barrels, far from the empire it was now. It was nice to get this look back in time, and to understand more about the club I was now a part of, and that my children would one day know as their own.

My evenings were spent with the children, helping Bee with her homework, or watching TV with them. Because we were constantly on the go, they soon grew tired, and fell asleep not long after seven p.m. like clockwork. I spent the rest of the night in the bar with the old ladies, or working a shift, allowing Dante to deal with club business.

He went on weekly bike rides with the club every Wednesday, and Church was held three times a week. Unless there was an emergency, then one could be called at any notice. But given how calm things were, there had been no unscheduled meetings.

I asked him one evening about the Rough Riders, and he said things were calmer. Nico hadn’t been the tyrant they expected, and things were continuing more or less as they had two years ago, before Macbeth had poisoned everything.

It was a strange thing to get used to. Last time I had been here, if I had so much as even dared to blink, it felt like I missed a month's worth of events. And yet now, things moved at a snail’s pace, and I found myself with more free time than I could remember.

---