Resonance (Marauders #4) (22 page)

“I am, but I don’t drink much.”

“You don’t have to worry about him,” Ahab said. “He’s the kind of person people have in mind when they say that age is just a number.”

“Where are you from?” Bear asked.

“New York,” Roach answered.

Bear talked to, or tried to talk to, Roach until Brick emerged from the office, but he didn’t get much from the kid. Brick still didn’t look convinced, but he was calmer. Whatever Veetor had said had apparently been enough for the moment, but Tommy wouldn’t bet big money on Roach ever being one of the guys that Brick asked back.

The three NY members would be living at the clubhouse, since the initial plan was that they’d stay for a couple of months, and Brick offered them jobs at the Booty Bank. They almost always had room for a few bouncers there, and Roach and Slug said it sounded fine. Ahab said he preferred his time at the strip club to be free time, but if they needed people at the garage, he’d fill in.

It was clear that Ahab was the leader out of the three, and he rubbed Tommy the wrong way. He understood what Brick had meant that it was better if people grew into a group, or it could just be that Ahab wasn’t Tommy’s kind of person. The look Ahab gave Billie when she arrived most definitely didn’t help.

“One of your girls?” he asked Dawg.

“No,” Tommy said and stood up. “
My
girl.”

“My apologies,” Ahab said with his hands up.

Tommy didn’t answer and went to meet Billie. To make it very clear that she was his, he grabbed her and gave her a deep kiss.

“What’s going on?” she asked with a big smile on her lips when he let her go.

“Maybe I just missed you,” he tried and her only answer was a cocked eyebrow. “New members visiting.”

“Oookay. For future reference: If you kiss me like that, you better be ready to take me back to your room and finish what you started.”

“For future reference: I’m prepared to take you to my room at any time.” He gave her another kiss. “I guess that’s not why you’re here, though.”

“No. I’m actually here to see Mel. Thought I’d say hi to you, too.”

“Mel?”

“Well, you asked her to find you a house, and then she somehow found out I’m going to live in that house, too, so now she wants to talk to me about what kind of a house I want. Apparently you weren’t very helpful on that front.”

He hadn’t been, and he knew it. Mel had kept asking him questions, and it was like she was talking in code when she got really excited. He’d known she’d be more than happy to help;
he
just wasn’t much help when it came to explaining what he wanted, because he didn’t know. He wanted a fucking house, he didn’t give a shit about much else than that it should have room for Billie, Felix, and maybe few other kids they’d hopefully have one day. But Mel had questions about the kitchen, the bathroom, appliances, and other stuff he didn’t know shit about. His answer that he wanted at least a double garage had meant she gave him a real stink eye while asking if he thought she was an idiot, so he assumed she had that part covered.

“Did you talk to your parents yet?” he asked Billie.

“No, I’m getting to that. It feels a bit odd, but I’ll do it soon. I promise.”

It wasn’t that he didn’t like being at the Jensens’, but he wanted them to move along and start with their own life.

“Mel’s in her office. I’ll see you tonight.”

“Love you,” she whispered.

“Love you, too.”

He watched her leave and then went back to the others. Ahab gave him a meaningful smile, and Tommy was starting to realize exactly what Brick had meant about people growing into a club as opposed to just showing up and demanding respect. And attention.

CHAPTER TWENTY

What Is It We Want?

~oOo~

IT HAD ONLY BEEN a week since I’d talked to Mel about what I wanted in a house. I’d offered to search myself, but she’d told me she knew the town better than I did, and that she was already on it. She just wanted to make sure she knew my wishes. She’d called me the day before and said she had four houses she wanted me to see. Four! She’d managed to find
four
houses in Greenville that fit my description of what I wanted. That was pretty fucking scary, and also meant we might be moving a lot faster than I’d expected. What little I knew about Mel made me sure that those houses were most likely four really good options.

So I was trying to find the guts to tell Mom and Dad, ‘Thank you for letting me stay here while my kid was sick, but he’s well now, so fuck off.’

I was thinking about trying to word that a little more carefully, though.

We’d had lunch, and Felix had left us three at the table when I finally gave it a try.

“I have something to tell you, and I’m not sure how.”

Dad put down the book he was reading and eyed me carefully.

“Is this about the house?”

“Um, yes. How did you know?”

“If you want to keep a secret, you shouldn’t tell a five-year-old.”

“Oh… So, does that make me an ungrateful bitch? That I’m moving out?”

“No. I’d say it’s about time you did.”

“Clyde!” Mom exclaimed. “He doesn’t mean it like that.”

“She knows what I mean.”

I did. It wasn’t that he’d been bothered that I’d lived with them. It was that he thought it was time I got a life.

“Besides,” he continued. “If they don’t get a house, it looks like we’ll have Tommy living here again, and I’m not sure I’m okay with that. I didn’t mind it when he was fifteen, but it’s another thing when he’s sleeping in my daughter’s bed.”

I laughed when Mom drew a deep breath in horror.

“It’s been
lovely
to have Tommy here.”

“It would’ve been more
lovely
if he’d stayed in the guest room.” Dad answered before he turned to me and gave me a wink. “Get a house, move in, have a family. I want more grandkids. Although, it sounds like you’re already working on that.”

“Felix can come and stay a night or a weekend here sometimes,” Mom said, completely ignoring Dad. “What houses are you looking at?”

It felt like I had mental whiplash. It wasn’t that I’d expected them to protest or get upset, I was almost thirty after all, but… still. And Dad’s comment about what he might’ve heard from my bedroom… I wasn’t even gonna go there. Not in a million years.

“I don’t know what to say. I can’t… I wouldn’t have been able to do this without you. And I’ll still need your help.”

“And we’ll be here,” Dad said. “That’s what parents are for.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

“What houses, honey?” Mom repeated.

“I’m not sure. Mel is looking into it. I’m supposed to look at a few of them tomorrow.” I looked at Mom. “Think you could come with me? I don’t know much about houses.”

Whenever we moved, Mom had been the one in charge of the houses. Even if we’d been assigned a house at a base, she’d still been in charge of making it livable, so I knew she’d be able to see what suited us better than I would. The woman had been able to make the on-base family housing feel okay. And once there had been some problems with our house, so we’d been forced to live at a motel for a few weeks. I was just nine at the time, and I’d thought it was pretty cool. Mom hadn’t. She was picky with her living situation, so I wasn’t surprised when she jumped at the chance to have an opinion on my future home.

“Of course,” she answered.

And that seemed to be it. Dad returned to reading his book, and Mom kept eating. I’d feared this talk for over a month and apparently… we were done.

Maybe it was stupid to think that telling your parents you were planning to move should cause a commotion when you’re almost thirty.

*

When Mom and Dad bought the house it came with an octagon gazebo and a loveseat swing. Dad thought it was an atrocity, and I was inclined to agree with him. In my case it was that I thought it looked horrible, like something out of a Jane Austen novel, but Dad was mostly annoyed at its placement. If it had been ten or fifteen years earlier, he probably would have torn it down to give us more room for training. But given his retirement, my age, and Felix’s condition, he knew there wouldn’t be much training going on anyway, so the gazebo was still there.

Which was lucky, because Felix loved to sit on the swing in the shade on both good and bad days. It was a place for him to get away, and once he became older we tended to leave him alone when he was there. He would bring coloring books or picture books and sit there alone to get some time off from his worrying mother and grandparents.

So, when I realized he’d been gone for a while, I had a pretty good hunch about where he was, and I gave him another half an hour until I went out to find him. He hadn’t brought anything with him, but was sitting dangling his feet in the air.

“Hey, little guy. What’s going on?” I asked when I sat down next to him.

“Nothing.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes.” He sighed, but it sounded like a happy one. “Is this what it’s like for other people?”

The question broke my heart. “If this is how other people feel when they’re well?” I asked.

“Yes.”

Even if I no longer asked him how he was doing each morning, he still told me out of habit, and lately they had always been good assessments. He felt ‘great’ or ‘really good,’ and they were always accompanied by a big smile. It was as big of an adjustment for me as it was for him—to accept that he was well. Even if we still had to keep an eye on him and the kidney, he was turning into a healthy kid, and I still wasn’t sure how to be a parent to one. I assumed we both had to figure that out together—being a healthy kid and being parent to one.

“Honestly, I think it might get even better than it is now for you, but on the whole, that’s probably how it feels for most people.”

“It’s nice,” he said with a big smile and looked at me. “Better than I thought it would be.”

I took his hand. “I’ll be looking at houses for us tomorrow.”

“Yeah?”

“Yup. I don’t know if I’ll find one, but at least you know we’re looking for real. That it’s getting closer.”

Felix’s feet started swinging again, and he looked over the yard with a big smile.

~oOo~

TOMMY WAS SITTING AT a picnic table with Brick and Mitch, while watching the others work in the garage.

“The one kidney thing, how does that affect you?” Brick asked.

“Not much. Need to be a bit more careful with the one I have, but in general not at all.”

“So no fighting?”

Tommy turned his head to look at Brick, but he wasn’t looking back, and Tommy’s stomach turned. “What are you saying?”

Was Brick going to try to bench him completely from club business, or just fucking kick him out?

“I was thinking about the ring. If you could go up in the ring?”

“Yeah. What the fuck is this about?”

Brick finally turned towards him, and he shook his head. “Nothing like that. I know you’ll do what’s needed. I just wanted to know if it could be a problem if I sent you up in the ring with someone.”

“No. It’s not like I’ve been careful with my kidneys so far, and they’ve survived just fine. What’s going on?”

“Roach. When you’re fully healed, I want you to take him up in the ring. Test him out, see if he’s really as experienced as Veetor made it sound. Try to piss him off. I wanna see how he reacts.”

“What did he say about him?” Mitch asked. “I’ve done some searches, but I didn’t find a lot on him. Some shit from when he was a minor, but that’s about it. Couldn’t even find any school records.”

“He’s a street kid. His parents died when he was eight and his sister thirteen. When Social Services tried to separate them, they took off and managed to stay away. Guess it’s not hard to disappear in New York.”

“That why they call him ‘cockroach’?” Tommy asked.

“Yeah, uncanny survival instincts, apparently. He said we might need someone like that, and that he’s good with a gun and really good at hand-to-hand combat. Guess he had to learn those things. I want you to test him. Both in the ring, but what he’s like with a gun, too, and if he can take orders.”

“Sure.”

“Not now. You can wait a while. Doesn’t matter yet, and we’ll see how he makes it as a bouncer, too. Might have some work for you tomorrow, though.”

“What?”

“We’re gonna go and have a talk to our favorite detective—Gordon,” Mitch answered with a big smile.

Mitch really, really hated Detective Gordon. Along with his partner, Evans, he’d given Mitch a hard time about a couple of murders that later turned out to be on Hump, not that the cops knew that. A little later, Gordon had realized that Mitch wasn’t really the kind of person you wanted to mess with, since he was a very good hacker. Tommy could use a computer to find porn and pay his bills, but that was about it. He’d never been interested in them. But for Mitch, there weren’t any limitations to what he could find or get access to with a computer. And in the twenty-first century, everything a person was could be found in computer systems.

So, Mitch had found out everything he could about Gordon, which included an affair with Evans and some serious gambling addiction problems—he was about to lose his house at the time—and these days they went to Gordon if they wanted to know what the law was up to. They paid him for it, not so much because they thought the guy deserved money, but because every dollar he accepted gave them more power over him.

“What is it we want?” Tommy asked.

Not that it really mattered, he’d do it anyway, but he’d noticed that he wasn’t as satisfied with need-to-know anymore. Having people outside the club to protect meant he needed to know what was going on.

“We want to know if they’ve taken notice or an interest in our patch-overs, how they’re connecting that to our visit in Amsterdam, and just generally what they’re up to, if anything, when it comes to us.”

“What time?”

“Lunch. Just get here by eleven.”

When he came home—or not home, but to the Jensens’—he went into the kitchen and found Leah cooking and Felix sitting on the bench watching her. Felix smiled when he saw him.

“Mommy’s gonna go look at houses tomorrow.”

He assumed that she’d talked to her parents, and for a second he wondered if he was in trouble. He’d thought she’d totally overreacted when it came to telling Clyde and Leah, but she knew them better than he did. When he looked at Leah, she gave him a smile, so she wasn’t about to stab him, at least. Or at least not in front of Felix.

He picked up Felix.

“Is that so?”

“And she said she’d pick a house that was close to a school, and that I maybe could start a regular school this fall. Like normal kids.”

“That sounds great. You’ll do great in school, just like your uncle Zach did. Have you had water?”

There were still some diet restrictions for Felix—no added salt, low fat, lean meats—and some things he needed to avoid since they interfered with his immunosuppression medication, but it was a lot less than it used to be. His appetite was increasing, and Tommy was convinced it had as much to do with how much better the food was as the fact that he was feeling better. There would be even fewer restrictions later on, but he’d still have to be careful, and he had to make sure he stayed hydrated. It wasn’t just about the kidney, though. His stomach wasn’t used to a lot of the food since he’d been on a diet since he was two. Staying hydrated was currently the biggest problem, and they all tried to remind him to drink water.

“Yes,” he answered with an annoyed voice. “In the new house, will I have a normal room?”

“What do you mean?”

“No hospital stuff, just a normal room?”

He gave Felix’s cheek a kiss. “How about this, we’ll fix your room together, so you get exactly the kind of room you want?”

“Yeah?”

“You know there’s things we’ll have to keep an eye on, but I’ll make sure none of that is in your room. How does that sound?”

“Good,” Felix smiled.

He put Felix down and went up to Billie’s room for a shower before dinner.

Afterwards, while he was standing in front of the mirror, he drew his fingertips along the scar from the surgery. Felix was fascinated by it, and sometimes he wanted to see it. He would pull up his own shirt so he could compare the scars. Tommy had never been embarrassed about any of his scars, even felt some pride in some of them, but not as proud as he was of the scar from where they took out his kidney and gave it to his boy. He’d lost weight, and he’d probably lose more, but he didn’t care. It was worth it, and he’d get it back.