Page 82 of Freak
He picked up her hand from his chest and pressed her palm to his lips. “So am I.”
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~oOo~
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“Welcome back to theKeep, Mel,” Badger said as he gaveled the meeting open. A round of applause and some friendly slaps to the back ensued.
“You look good!” Double a said. “Skinny, but good.”
Mel grinned. He hadn’t had much extra weight before, but he’d lost fifteen pounds in the four-ish weeks since the Harvest Festival. His cheekbones were sharper than usual for sure. “I don’t recommend getting gut shot as a diet plan, but I can’t deny it’s effective.”
“Tomorrow’s gonna suck for you, isn’t it?” Nolan asked. “Can you eat any Thanksgiving food?”
“I gotta watch it, and I’ll have to skip the mac-n-cheese, but me and Abs have been figuring out what I can have.”
At the other end of the table, Showdown smiled. “You two got real cozy together. She’s a good woman.”
“Yeah, she is.” About to burst with the news, he sat up tall and looked around the table. “I put a ring on her finger last night.”
This time, the Keep erupted with shock and cheer. Everybody jumped up and came to him to offer a hand, or a hug, or a amiably snarky comment.
Dom and Thumper both wore happily smug expressions; he’d told them before he’d bought the ring. In fact, Dom had suggested the jeweler with the witchy aesthetic—though Dom had called her wares ‘funky.’ He’d asked them to keep their lips zipped, but he hadn’t really expected them to. News like his was too good not to share in this nest of gossips. From the manifest surprise among the rest of the club, however, it was clear they’d honored his request.
There was a reason they were his favorite brothers and best friends.
“Okay, okay, asses down,” Badger called after a few minutes, and everybody returned to their seats.
“Fuck, man!” Tommy said. He was the only one who hadn’t gone to Mel, but Tommy was still working on reclaiming full mobility. Now that the Keep had settled down, he sent a lopsided grin down the table to Mel and said, “Mel Lind ... gettin’ h-hitched. I can’t ... re-member you even havin’ a ... girlfriend.”
Mel shrugged. “Ain’t had one since before I left KC. Thought I liked bein’ on my own. But I like bein’ with Abigail better.”
At his side, Thumper reached over and clasped Mel’s shoulder.
Badger rapped his knuckles on the table to reclaim everyone’s attention. “It’s good news, and we’ll make sure to make a deal about it at dinner tomorrow, but we gotta get focused now. I called a meeting the day before Thanksgiving because Rhett reached out. And it’s a problem.”
The last threads of friendly murmuring among the patches abruptly stopped, and Badger had the room completely. The silence deepened as everyone waited for him to say more.
“They didn’t do what we expected they’d do with Kellen. He’s still alive. They’re patching him in.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Isaac snarled and shoved his—thankfully empty—coffee cup to the middle of the table.
“That is very, very bad, Badge,” Bart said softly.
“You think I don’t know it?” Badger snapped. “Yeah, it’s bad, and so far I don’t have the first idea what to do about it.”
“Wait,” Thumper cut in, leaning toward the head of the table. “Why’s it so bad? We didn’t want him, so he’s gone. If Montana wants him—”
“Them wanting him is the bad part, Thump,” Dom said gently.
“Think, Thumper,” Badger said, letting an edge of impatience show that pissed Mel off a little. Badger had been president for a long time. He’d been handed the gavel when he was too young to bear its weight, and he’d known that, so in those early days he’d been collaborative with everyone, and deferential to the older, more experienced patches, especially Isaac and Showdown. He still gave those old men more grace than anyone else, but each year at the head of the table had hardened him a little more, until now he was pretty much a slab of granite.
“I’m thinking,” Thumper said, without defensiveness. He was the first to say he wasn’t very bright, so he took on Badger’s sniping like something he deserved. Mel thought it was bullshit. Thumper was no scholar, but he was no slack-jawed yokel, either. He just wasn’t wired to see trouble right off the bat. He tended to take the brightest view of any situation, until somebody shot out the lights. “I don’t see the problem.”
Badger sighed rhetorically, and Mel’s back went up a little higher. “Remember at the hospital, in the chapel, we talked about how Rhett and Gravy threw all kindsa shade at us for not taking dark work? The disrespect was knee deep—more than disrespect, it wascontempt.”
“We think they’re planning something,” Double A added.
