I watched as they talked, then Hop suddenly grabbed Lanie and I held my breath when he kissed her, hot and heavy.
I had to give it to her, she struggled.
For about five seconds.
Then her arms wrapped around his shoulders, he arched her further into the shadows, twisting his torso so I could see nothing but the indistinct Chaos emblem on his cut, and I knew they were going at it.
My eyes darted around the forecourt of Ride, where we were currently engaged in the eating and drinking portion of a Chaos hog roast. The raising-hell portion would come in about half an hour after the pig was decimated and there were more bottles passed around than plastic cups being filled from kegs.
I spied Dad, his eyes pinned to the stairs and thus Lanie and Hop, and his eyes were narrowed.
Uh-oh.
My gaze moved, and I located Tyra talking with Dog’s woman, Sheila, and she had her back to the couple.
Shoo.
“Don’t know, sweetheart, but thinkin’ that right there flies in the face of all that’s holy,” Lan muttered, and I burst out laughing.
Through my laughter, I saw him grinning down at me.
I kept laughing even as I felt something warm hit my belly, my eyes wandered from his, and I saw Shy fifteen feet away, standing with Boz, Roscoe, and Bat, looking at me, his lips curved up, his face, clear in the floodlights, happy.
His brother and his girl were getting on and just with something as simple as that, all was right in Shy Cage’s world.
Knowing that, one could say all was right in mine too.
Suffice it to say, Landon had been true to his word. The time it took for me to prove to him that he trusted me with his brother didn’t last long. It happened close after all hell broke loose with Chaos.
As for me, I knew I’d fall in love with my man’s brother when Shy, Rush, and I hit Denver International Airport to fly down for my grandmother’s funeral, and Lan was at the gate. Shy hadn’t said a word, probably because he knew I’d try to talk him out of Landon taking time out of his life and money to buy a plane ticket in order to be with me during what the Cage brothers thought was my hour of need.
Seeing Lan there, I was shocked.
Lan simply gave me a hug and muttered in my ear, “Family looks after family.”
That was sweet and all, but flying to Arizona to attend the funeral of a woman he didn’t know and, obviously, seeing as she was deceased, he’d never meet?
I would understand during the funeral why he was there when I discovered what the Brothers Cage had arranged.
This was, while Rush and I hung tight and Shy gave me his support, Lan wasted no time in his approach to Mom. I didn’t know what he said. I just knew by the look on her face when he was saying it, she heard him. He lurked close to her the entire time I was in her space, at the funeral home, the gravesite, and at Gramps’s after.
His message was clear: Don’t get any ideas about being a bitch to Tabby (and she would, it was Mom’s way, even at her mother’s funeral). You do, I’ll pounce. Seeing as he wasn’t exactly small but he was obviously a badass, Mom, who could miss the most blatant of hints, didn’t miss Lan’s message.
Therefore, I endured Gram’s funeral without having to endure my mom being a bitch. She didn’t even chance throwing a bitchy look at me. She stayed well away.
That did it for me with Lan, but I didn’t know what did it for Lan with me. I just knew I’d been let in. When he called Shy, or Shy was talking to him and I was around, he asked him to pass the phone over and we gabbed. Not forever and not deep but friendly, warm, and sweet. And now that he was up for the weekend, he joked and teased, all genuine, all real, nothing watchful, nothing fake.
I knew Shy loved it.
So did I.
The good part of that awful visit to Arizona was that Shy and Lan got a chance to see their grams. We met her for dinner. I loved her on the spot. This was because she was beside herself with joy at the surprise chance to spend time with her boys and she didn’t hide it. This was also because she flirted audaciously with Rush. It was funny.
She
was funny, and something else she didn’t hide was that she clocked Shy loved me and folded me into the family immediately.
My grandmother dying sucked but, it had to be said, gaining Shy’s grandmother was awesome.
“Good to hear you laughin’, Tab. You been quiet,” Landon observed. I gave Shy a smile and then looked up at his brother.
“I’m good.”
His head tipped to the side and his eyes held mine. “Sure?”
I shrugged but his arm didn’t leave me. “Just shit at work,” I admitted.
“Dr. Dickhead,” he stated knowingly.
As an FYI, bikers were not taciturn. I’d known this my whole life. They were in the life to be who they were and do what they wanted and that included, for those of that bent, saying whatever the heck they wanted to say whenever the heck they wanted to say it to whoever they wanted to say it to. Although some could be quiet, introspective, or mysterious, most of them let it all hang out.
And I knew from him telling me and listening to them talk that Shy let it all hang out with Lan.
Therefore, it wasn’t a surprise Lan knew about Dr. Dickhead, because Dr. Dickhead had not calmed down. Gossip, proved accurate by his mood, stated his supply-room piece had called Dr. Dickhead’s wife and broke the news that her husband was a cheater. This did not go over very well and included him sleeping on the couch in his office for a week while he found a new apartment.
For me, it meant I was again, for some unfathomable reason, his target, and he’d ratcheted up the nastiness pretty significantly.
At first, I shared the misadventures of Tabby and Dr. Dickhead with Shy. Now, I did not. He was pissed, and the more I talked, the more pissed he got. Considering that my landlord simply pressed to have a twelve-month lease and Shy got up in his face, I wasn’t fired up to drive him to intervene with Dr. Dickhead, something he already promised he’d do.
So I quit talking about it.
Suffice it to say, the all good parts of Shy and I building a friendship on which we fell in love and began to build a relationship had ended. This was not to say things still weren’t amazing. It was just to say that life was life and not everything was perfect all the time.
For instance, Shy threw his clothes all over the floor, and this drove me nuts. I decided to put up with it but then, after I gathered them and put them in the hamper, Shy disappeared anytime I was going to the Laundromat.
This, I decided
not
to put up with.
“Did I get a biker badass who’s great at serving up orgasms and has a natural talent with sweet, or did I get that
and
an unpaid laundress’s job?” I’d asked irately the last time I came back from the Laundromat to see Shy in front of the TV with a beer.
“Don’t do laundry, babe,” he told the TV.
Not me, the TV. He didn’t look at me, and he certainly didn’t look at the hamper I was lugging in.
“Did you have a magic spell before me that you could cast over your clothes to get them clean?” I sniped, dumping the clean, folded hamper of clothes in my armchair.
His eyes finally shifted to me. “No.”
“So
someone
did your laundry, because your clothes are worn but they weren’t filthy before me.”
His eyes went carefully blank before he advised quietly, “Don’t go there.”
Oh God.
I went there and did so by planting my hands on my hips and stating, “Your bitches did them for you.”
“Told you not to go there,” he muttered, eyes going back to the TV screen.
“Shy,” I called. He sighed and looked at me. “Seeing as you’re here, your clothes are here, you sleep in my bed every night, come home to my place every evening, we’re essentially living together. So we have to figure out how to do that without me getting pissed.”
“All right, sugar, but like I said, I don’t do laundry.”
“Okay, boss, what
do
you do?” I shot back.
“Nothin’,” he stated and I blinked before my eyes narrowed, something Shy didn’t miss. I knew this when he warned, “Do not go off on one. I’ve pretty much crashed at the Compound for the last nine years, so I didn’t even take care of my own place. That bitch who raised me after my mom died didn’t do shit for us. We didn’t only keep our room clean and did our own laundry, we did
their
laundry and cleaned
their
house while her kids sat on their asses and watched TV. So I’ve had my fill of laundry and cleaning, and I don’t intend to do any fuckin’ more of it. I’ll take out the trash. I’ll get the groceries, since you seem allergic to the grocery store. I’m in the mood, I’ll clean up the kitchen. You got somethin’ you want me to do that doesn’t include washin’ clothes or pushin’ a vacuum, we’ll talk. But, babe, you can get pissed, you can rant, you can try sweet, I am not washin’ clothes and I’m not pushin’ a vacuum. Do you understand me?”
Pulling the bitch aunt to Shy’s future biker Cinderella card unfortunately worked, so I retorted, “Fine. I don’t like pumpin’ gas, therefore it’d be cool, when you use my car, if you would top her up.”
“I can do that,” he replied, lips twitching.
“And,” I went on, not liking the lip twitch, “put your clothes in the hamper, not on the floor.”
“Can do that too.”
“And—”
“Tab, quit while you’re ahead,” he warned me.
“Not feelin’ ahead of anything yet, darlin’,” I shared.
“I’ll pump gas, change your oil, get groceries, take care of the garbage, and dump my clothes in the hamper. Mind, I also do most of the cookin’,” he reminded me. “That’s what you got. You nag or bust my balls, I can dump my clothes wherever the fuck I want at my place or the Compound, and I won’t have a woman gettin’ up in my face about it.”
Was he serious?
“Are you threatening me with leaving?” I asked.
“I’m sayin’, quit while you’re ahead,” he returned.
“So you’re threatening me with leaving,” I surmised.
“I’m sayin’, you want me here, you are in the know about the kind of man you picked. I laid it out. It’s the way it is. If you don’t like the way it is, I can make alternate arrangements.”
“Therefore threatening to leave,” I finished for him.
“You either want me like I am, babe, or yeah, I can find a place where I don’t have hassle.”
“Which, just for your information, Shy, would mean me having a home without the additional hassle of cleaning up after two people and doing two people’s laundry.”
“Yeah, sugar, you’d also go to bed alone with no one to eat your pussy,” he retorted.
Since that nearly made my head explode, I decided, because he wouldn’t clean it up if brain and skull fragments were splattered all over the living room, I should extricate myself from the conversation pronto.
This I did, grabbing the handles of the hamper, storming off, slamming the bedroom door behind me, making a lot of noise when I put away the clothes then locking myself in the bathroom with my phone.
Of course, I hefted my behind up on the vanity, called Ty-Ty and shared with her, at length, about Shy and my fight.
This conversation didn’t go much better.
“Tabby, honey,” she started, using a cautious tone that made me brace, “your father has not vacuumed a floor in the years we’ve been together. To be honest, I haven’t even asked. Kane Allen is not a man who vacuums floors.”
“Well, I’m not you and Shy’s not Dad and I didn’t ask him to vacuum floors. We were negotiating and he cut me off before things were balanced and that’s uncool,” I fired back.
“No, you are not me, but Shy
is
Tack but younger, and I know this isn’t what you want to hear but he’s also not wrong. You’ve lived your whole life with your dad and his brothers, honey, so you also know it.”
This sucked but it was true.
“Love you, Tabby,” she went on quietly. “And I’ll listen to anything you want to share with me. I’ll also have a mind to not oversharing with you. What I will say is, there are a variety of ways your father makes putting up with all his extreme, uh…
man-ness
worth it. You need to hang in there and see if Shy makes it worth it.”
I got her though I kinda blocked out some of the parts I got.
She was right, of course. Shy already made it worth it, of course. But I was too stubborn to admit defeat (yet), of course.
I rang off with Ty-Ty, called Natalie (again), got no answer (again), and avoided Shy by hanging out in the bedroom until bedtime.
Or, I should say, I avoided Shy until Shy was done with me avoiding him.
I knew he was done, because he made this clear by walking in the bathroom while I was brushing my teeth. His hands at my hips, he turned me, lifted me, planted my behind on the vanity, pulled the toothbrush out of my hand, and tossed it into the sink.
Then he leaned into me, hands on the counter on either side of me, and ordered, “Stop bein’ pissed. You know you don’t give a fuck if I vacuum the fuckin’ floors.”
Truthfully, I didn’t. Rush used to vacuum until I made him stop because he sucked at it. It wasn’t like I didn’t know this was his ploy. It was just that it wasn’t worth the headache of calling him on it when I could just vacuum and be done with it. And I discovered it wasn’t worth the headache because I’d spent years getting a headache calling him on it before I got smart, gave up, and just did it myself.
At that moment, however, I had a mouth full of toothpaste foam and face to save.
Priorities, I twisted, spit the foam in the sink, reached and grabbed the hand towel, wiped my mouth and tossed the towel on the counter.
Then I glared at him and shared, “Just so you know, there’s really only one kind of biker. He might share his feelings, he might not. He might fuck around on his woman, he might not. He might carouse a
wee bit
more than is healthy, he might not. But down deep, a biker is a biker and I know you’re a biker.”
“All right, and…?” he prompted when I shut up and didn’t keep going so I kept going.
“There’s only one kind of biker, Shy, but there are three kinds of old ladies. One lets her man walk all over her. One turns into a bitch like Mom or Mitzi. And one is like Tyra, who gives but also expects to get her take. I’m like Tyra. I’m not
Tyra
, but you should know, I’ve considered the options and chosen that biker-babe life plan. You don’t wanna vacuum, I’m not gonna make you. But don’t cut me off by making asshole remarks because you’ve decided the conversation is over. Respect me or, truthfully, I love you, you know it, you mean the world to me, but that will dig deep, fester, and there will come a time when I don’t mind your clothes are on the floor at the Compound.”