Page 38 of Freak
Or maybe he was way deeper in with Abigail than he’d realized, feeling extra protective of her in the Hall today, like she was a rare, delicate treasure tossed into a gorilla exhibit.
Probably it was all of it, twisted up and wrapped around his spine like barbed wire.
He didn’t think he’d ever in his damn life been as tense and agitated as he was now. Protectiveness for Abigail had been a drumbeat in his brain since Marie’s, it became the whole percussion section when Montana rolled in, and when he saw her walking up with her boxes, fucking cannons went off in his head like the 1812 Overture.
She was already uncharacteristically shy about being in the clubhouse. She said she liked everyone in the club and felt safe around them, but she didn’t feel the clubhouse was her space. She didn’t know where she fit here. Mel had told her she fit with him, and he fit here, therefore so did she, but it hadn’t been enough to convince her.
Knowing she wasn’t at ease in it shifted his lens on the Hall. Yes, of course, he trusted the men who shared this table—except for Kellen, who’d lost the last of Mel’s trust today. He trusted his Montana brothers, too, as far as he knew them, but he didn’t know any of them well, and there were a few he’d never met. That was the nature of an MC, of course—you trusted charter leadership not to put a patch on trouble’s back, thus you trusted the men wearing the patch you wore.
Then again, Montana’s definition of ‘trouble’ was quite a bit different from Missouri’s these days.
And ... yeah. His own table had put the Flaming Mane on Kellen Frey’s back, and what the fuck was going on with that asshole now?
On this day, Mel was learning that his trust in his club was not unconditional.
Though he and Abigail were new as a couple, though they hadn’t talked about the ‘old lady’ thing—hell, they hadn’t even fucked yet—he’d made a show of claiming her in the middle of the room and specifically introducing her as his old lady to Rhett to create a force field around her. When the Hall was crowded, things could get pretty wild, especially as the party aged and brain cells drowned in booze and such. He wanted it known that she was not on her own.
But he didn’t know if it was enough. She didn’t look like a typical club girl, but she was a beautiful woman, and a lot of the unattached guys—and probably a few of the taken ones, too—would aim at any unprotected doe in the forest.
With all that sludge churning through his mind, Mel scanned the room and wondered if there was anyone in here who’d hurt his woman. The Montana charter worked darker than either SoCal or Missouri, and there were some real rough motherfuckers at that charter’s table. But if he considered things calmly, they weren’t all that much harder than any other one-percenter, and the mother charter itself had done some very dark shit when Missouri worked that side of the line.
Hell, even on this side of the line, the club had had to do some fucked-up shit. Hence the two cops whose bodies were now fish food on the bottom of a quarry lake near Rolla.
His eyes landed on Gravy Grayson, the Montana VP. That crusty old son of a bitch had a face that showed every minute of his brutal life, including the eighteen years’ worth of minutes he’d done for second-degree murder. His face had been cut so badly in the joint that he looked like Frankenstein’s monster. The prison doctor hadn’t bothered with the finer details, so nothing lined up right, each stitched seam joining pieces of cheek, nose, and lips slightly off of true and pulled a little too tight, turning his face into an Easter ham trussed up for roasting.
Every inch of that funky mask belonged on the short-fused bomb Gravy was.
Gravy was straight-up ugly, he was mean, and he was past sixty years old. But his old lady, who was currently sitting on his lap riding his hand between her legs, was maybe as old as thirty and had the kind of body you’d find on a summer month in an auto-parts calendar—and she was dressed to make sure everybody knew it.
Usually, Mel wouldn’t have any problem at all with a hot chick getting off in the middle of the Hall. Though you didn’t stare at another brother’s woman and keep your eyes, he generally liked the loose vibe in the Hall, where everybody was doing what they wanted. But today, he found his attention returning again and again to Gravy, and wondering if that girl was really where she wanted to be.
Nothing she’d done, no way she’d looked, suggested anything other than pleasure and connection to her man. But something about it pinged Mel’s suspicion anyway, and he didn’t think it was really about that girl he’d never seen before.
Gravy was a VP and far outranked Mel. Despite his stony meanness, by all accounts he was a good patch; his reputation was of a bad man but a true brother. Mel didn’t know him any more than that.
Still, he didn’t trust him. Not around Abigail.
She wasn’t a biker chick, in tight jeans and leather. She wasn’t hard. She was strong, but in a different, softer way. A woman like Lilli Lunden was steel, but Abigail was rubber, soft and pliant.
Maybe shedidn’tfit in here.
If she didn’t, did she really fit with him?
That was a fucked-up thing to think. Ofcourseshe fit with him—and maybe more importantly,hefit withher. When he was up at her place, just the two of them being completely relaxed, completely content, completely themselves? He would have said he lived his life mostly unbothered, but he’d discovered a whole new kind of peacefulness being with Abigail.
She fit with him, and he fit with her. Therefore, they should fit perfectly well in each other’s lives.
Maybe what he really needed was to get up over himself.
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~oOo~
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He was on his thirdbeer and trying not to go hunt up Abigail from wherever the women had hidden her when Norman Jones—Jonesy, the Montana intelligence officer—came up to lean on the bar beside him. He nodded once at Loki Mariano, who was on prospect duty tending bar, and waggled his empty Budweiser bottle.
Loki pulled a fresh one from the cooler, popped the cap, and handed it over, taking the empty. Jonesy turned to rest back against the bar and poured half the bottle down his throat. He wore a huge turquoise ring on the middle finger of his right hand. That veiny, greenish blue sucker was the size of a poker chip and really drew the eye. Though it was fairly flat and had no real sharp points, Mel figured it would leave an impression on anybody who took a punch from that hand.
