Page 3 of King of Clubs
Leon reaches over to the nightstand, picking up the pen and paper residing there before he scribbles down his address and hands it to her.
“Now you do.”
He sees the expression on her face. He understands her reservations. She’s been burned before. The man before him wanted a partner, someone to share his life with. She isn’t that kind of woman. She craves independence, freedom because at the heart of it, she’s a nomad, seeking out adventure and living for new experiences. Trying to stifle that would be like caging a bird, it needs to be set free, to fly.
“I’m not asking for anything from you,” he tells her resolutely. “I’ve got my own shit going on. Between my kid and the Club, I don’t have time for anything else, but it would be nice to get something in the mail that isn’t a bill, maybe see the world a little too.”
She smiles at that. He thinks she understands it in her own way. The responsibilities she frees herself from are the ones he willingly accepts. His daughter, the MC, his community. He’ll never be able to break away, but he doesn’t want to. He’s in the exact place he’s supposed to be.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she tells him before zipping up the suitcase.
“I’ll hold you to it,” he teases, picking up the luggage off the bed and tugging it through the door with him.
His fingers link with hers in the hallway, his thumb smoothing over the apex of her hand as the two of them walk down to her rental car, shoulders and hips bumping. He’s not ready to be out of her proximity just yet. He usually doesn’t have a problem with leaving but Sara, she’s different. He hasn’t felt this content in a while.
“Hit me up next time you’re in town,” he says, lingering alongside his bike. It’s a cherry red Indian Scout Classic, one that rides like a fucking dream when he has to cruise the highwayin between Sunridge and Pinehurst. “You’re a lot of fun to be around.”
He’s going to miss her, he realises. Her easy-going nature, her humor, there’s something about this woman that’s gotten under his skin, and he just can’t seem to shake it.
“I will,” she promises him, standing up on tiptoes, her lips brushing over his. “You’re a lot of fun too Leon.”
Chapter Four
Sunridge
Leon thinks of Sara often. His days are full of club business and adhering to elementary school schedules, but his nights are full of her. The feel of her skin pressing against his as he makes her say his name in that sinful way of hers, how tight she grips him when she comes on his cock. He jerks off in the shower fantasising about it all, reliving the time they spent together in Lake Tahoe.
More than anything, he misses that breathless laugh of hers when he drew her to him that night in the Casino, the glow of the fireplace illuminating her skin as she dozed on his chest after the whiskey tasting.
When he receives that postcard from Thailand, he smiles to himself because he knows that she’s thinking about him too. She’s written her phone number on the bottom and signed it with a kiss. He snaps a picture of it on his fridge before Whatsapping it to her with the words ‘Where to next?’
He receives a text later on in the evening with a picture of Tokyo Tower followed by several Japanese flag emojis. He checks the time difference on his phone; it’s her morning over in Thailand so she’s just gotten up. He finally puts his phone down after midnight because he needs to be up early to take his daughter Melina to school the next day.
Sweet dreams,she texts him and that night he dreams of her in his bed, his fingertips tracing over the tattoos that decorate her body.
Her messages become the highlight of his day after spending time with Melina. Things with the club are complicated. While his presidency is new, his leadership isn’t. He’s been running this chapter over the past year because the original president Concho had spent most of his time in Vegas shoring up their alliance with the Satan’s Kings MC.
At least that’s what they’d thought until he was killed on his way back to Sunridge by a drunk driver and Leon had taken over.
The reality, they’d discovered, was that he’d emptied the chapter’s coffers playing high stakes poker with riverboat casino owner Benedict ‘Benny’ Kelly, trying to win his way into his gambling operation in Laughlin.
Leon can already imagine the reasoning behind every stack he took out of the safe. It was an investment in the club, he would have told himself, even as he watched the cards fall the wrong way.
It was a death sentence to some of their members because that money was used to pay protection for their brothers in prison, the ones who had been expendable when it came to Concho’s schemes. He’s paying that shit out of his own funds for now but soon that cash is going to run out and the chapter has its own expenses to cover.
He’s already arranged a meeting with his counterpart King, the OG of the club, to discuss what the fuck he’s supposed to do next. It’s going to kill him, putting his cards down on the table like that, admitting how desperate they are for financing. The Palmino Cartel have been pushing him to partner up inthe past couple of months, running transport of their coke and heroin shipments over state lines but he can’t stand the misery that drugs like that bring. He wouldn’t be able to look his kid in the face, knowing he was contributing to the narcotics crisis that killed his brother, her uncle.
Sara’s communications are a reprieve from all of this; when he’s talking to her, he doesn’t have to think about this weight that sits on his shoulders. He can just be Leon from Black Bear Lodge, the one that spent three days ruining her.
He must underestimate how intuitive that woman is because she videocalls him that night. It’s the first time the two of them have spoken face to face since they parted in Lake Tahoe. She’s in a hotel room in Japan, the sun shining in through the window when she appears on the screen. He finds the knot in his chest loosen when he lays eyes on her in a dusky blue pyjama shorts set.
“Hey,” he says softly.
He can tell she’s just woken up. She has a mug of coffee cradled to her chest and her hair pulled back into a messy bun, ruby tendrils falling around her delicate features.
“You wanna talk about it?” she asks him. His lips purse together grimly because the wall of silence between his personal life and the club was always a point of contention between him and his ex. He could never discuss the shit that happened with her, the good or the bad but she would see the fallout from it. He’d withdrawn from her, so he didn’t have to see the hurt in her eyes everytime they got into another fight about the secrets he kept.
“Club business,” he says, his voice rough.
