Rest & Trust (3 page)

When she’d finally tanked, everybody had been shocked. Her work record was so good, and she’d forged such strong relationships in the company, that when she came out of her three-month stretch in rehab, a new job had been held out to her. One that took her out of the massive stress of the retail shop.

She could work from home, control her environment better. Her rehab counselor, her sponsor, her bosses old and new, even her father—they had all agreed that it was a good solution.

And they’d been right. But it did leave her on her own, practically speaking, when a stressor presented itself.

When she realized that she was on her knees in the bathroom, scrubbing the grout behind the toilet, she decided to call her sponsor. She was running out of things to clean.

~oOo~

Three days later, Gordon, her sponsor, handed Sadie a one-year chip. It was an unassuming little bit of bronze, and Sadie let it lie on her fingers for a moment and stared at it. So much about her life was different from the life she’d had a year ago.

Exactly one year since her father had dropped her off at the recovery center at Big Bear Lake. She had not relapsed once. Not once. She’d had some very close calls, and Gordon told her often that some of her coping mechanisms were their own kind of trouble, but she had not slid a needle between her toes, snorted anything into her sinuses, or swallowed any pill stronger than ibuprofen in three hundred and sixty-five days.

Gordon—a skinny black guy in his fifties who’d invited her for a bite to eat after the first time she’d spoken at a meeting and had become her sponsor thereafter—patted her arm. When she looked up and met his eyes, he smiled and gave her a little side nod. Oh. Right. People were waiting for her to speak.

Usually, people just sat around at this meeting and talked, almost like group therapy, but when somebody was getting a big milestone chip, they set up a podium and had slightly better snacks. Gordon stepped away and took a seat, and Sadie turned and faced the…well, not a crowd. The gathering. The dozen or so meeting regulars, a couple of newbies…and her father, Johnson Ballard, sitting at the back of the room in his business suit, with his arms crossed over his chest.

He looked horribly uncomfortable. But he was here. He’d been shocked the year before at how much he hadn’t known about his daughter. They had a lot of rebuilding to do. But he’d been trying to be supportive, and he was here, in this church basement, looking like a man who’d just realized he’d gotten on the wrong train and had headed into the bad side of town.

She waited until he brought his eyes back to the front of the room. When they made contact, she smiled and said, “Hi. I’m Sadie.”

“Hi, Sadie,” came the ritual response from her audience. She saw her father say it, too.

“So, I don’t really talk all that often at meetings, mainly because I’m tired of my story, and I don’t like the sound of my own voice, but since I got this shiny new trinket, and since there’s somebody here who’s only ever gotten my story in pieces, I thought I’d mark the occasion by telling the whole thing. The Cliff’s Notes version, anyway.”

Feeling nervous and exposed, she looked down at her hands, clenched into fists on top of the podium. She probably should have redone her nails or something. She habitually bit her nails and picked at the polish, so usually within a day of fresh polish, they looked liked she’d been digging through rocks barehanded.

She cleared her throat. “Okay. So, I started using when I was”—she couldn’t look at her father—“twelve. From the time I was nine, I’d go to my next-door neighbor’s house after school, because my dad was at work, and he wanted me to be safe. Our neighbors had a daughter who was in high school, and then in college, and I went over there and hung out with her until my dad got home, which sometimes was pretty late, when he had a big project or something like that. It was all cool and great until I was twelve and she had a boyfriend who’d hang out, too. They were the ones who got me high the first time. It was E. It felt really, really fantastic.”

Some of her audience nodded in agreement; there was nothing like an Ecstasy high.

Her hands were shaking, and she opened the one that still had the medallion in it. Without looking away from that little circle, she said. “Her boyfriend had sex with me that day, too.” She looked up and met her father’s sad eyes. “That’s the way I thought of it for a long time—that I’d had sex, lost my virginity. And it happened pretty often after that, until I was fourteen and my dad thought I was old enough to stay safe on my own at home. It really fu—messed me up bad, but I didn’t understand why. Not for a long time—not really until rehab, to be honest—did I understand that it was rape. I was a kid, and they’d get me high out of my mind, and he’d rape me and she’d watch. Then they’d have sex while I laid there.”

Her father was crying; she could see the wet of his tears on his cheeks. She needed to abbreviate the abbreviated version of this story before she broke him. “Anyway, I came out of that with a seriously weird way of thinking about myself, and sex, and everything else. I felt all the time like I was going to climb out of my skin, and I only felt in control when I was high.” Or having sex, or hurting herself, but she didn’t need to go into the sex and self-harm details with her father weeping silently in the back of the room.

“By the time I graduated high school, I was snorting Oxy. By the time I graduated college I was running nonstop on H, swallowing an Oxy here and there to cover the dips. And I was good—nobody knew. I’m not in denial about that. I never dropped one single ball. Got the grades, did the work, got the promotions and the raises, kept the bills paid. I shocked the hell out of everybody last summer, one year ago, when I had to work an unexpected double, and I didn’t have enough Oxy to hold me over, and I lost my mind in the middle of the store.” She chuckled. “Pro-tip: If you want a meltdown to have maximum impact, really let go in a tech store on product release day.”

A few polite chuckles peppered the room.

“Anyway, in the past year, I’ve learned a lot about myself. I’ve learned better ways to think about my past and the way it changed me, and I’ve learned that shame is an incredibly destructive emotion. Maybe it’s the most destructive emotion. It’s at the root of so many others, it hides in plain sight, and it causes us to see the world, ourselves, and each other at a slant. My dad feels shame and guilt about what happened to me and the ways I ended up trying to handle it on my own. He shouldn’t. He was trying to keep me safe. It’s just been him and me since I was nine, when my mom and brother died, and he’s always tried to keep me safe. The world just isn’t a safe place. A nice, normal person can make a stupid choice to answer a text while she’s driving and then cross a median, killing a mother and her son. Nice, normal neighbors you’ve known for years can have twisted kids—who seem nice and normal otherwise. A nice, normal honor student can be slipping into the supply closet to snort a couple of pills before she goes to French class. We think the world is nice and normal, but it’s all just fucked up everywhere, and we’re all trying to hide our shame.”

Her father stood and walked out of the room. At the sound of the door slamming shut, Sadie smiled sadly and found Gordon’s reassuring eyes instead. “Shame kept me from telling my dad, and shame is keeping him now from truly forgiving both of us. We need to stop that. I’m trying to—I’m trying to own the things I do wrong and change what I can. I’m trying to remember to reach out, to ask for help, to forgive and seek forgiveness. I guess that’s what I’ve learned most—not to think I can do anything alone. Every day is still hard, but it gets easier when I remember that I’m not alone.”

She’d expected her father to have trouble hearing all this, and she’d half-expected him to leave. But it took the wind from her sails nonetheless. “Anyway, I’m pleased that I made it to one year, but I’m not proud. I’m just trying, every day, to be okay. Thank you.”

As she stepped from the podium and went to Gordon, the little group of her supporters applauded.

Gordon stood and hugged her, and the rest of the people gathered began to stand and make their way either toward Sadie or toward the snack table.

“I need to see if he left all the way or just went outside.”

“I know you do, smarty. Go on.” Gordon gave her a light push toward the door.

Her father was sitting in his Mercedes in the parking lot—the engine was running, but he was simply sitting there. Sadie went to the passenger side and knocked on the closed window. He hit the automatic lock, and she slid in next to him. The air conditioner blasted cool air and made gooseflesh prick up all over her bare arms. “Sorry, Daddy.”

He shook his head, not crying any longer, but his blue eyes were still puffy and rimmed with pink. “Sorry I walked out, honey.”

His hands were slack in his lap; Sadie reached out and put her hand over the nearest one. “It’s okay. I know it’s not your scene. Thanks for trying.”

“I did try. I always tried to make things okay for you. I thought I was doing okay.”

“I know, Daddy. It’s not your fault. You
were
doing okay. You’re a good father.” They’d been through it all while she was in rehab, during family counseling. She’d told him a hundred times, tried to show him a hundred different ways, that he wasn’t at fault. He didn’t believe it.

And the part that really sucked was that
that
—his intractable guilt—had driven a wider wedge between them than her addiction had. Her father was her entire family, and she was his. Both of her parents had been only children, and both had lost their parents young. They’d had two children: Ben and Sadie. Now there was only Sadie and her father. It hurt that he could no longer look at her without pain.

When he didn’t say anything more, and didn’t look anywhere but at the steering wheel, Sadie sighed. “I’m going to go back in. There’s a cake with my name on it, and they probably want me to cut it. You should go on home. I’ll see you soon, okay?”

He nodded, and she leaned over and pressed a kiss to his cheek. “I love you, Daddy.”

She thought he’d mouthed the words back to her, but it was dark, and she couldn’t be sure.

CHAPTER THREE

Sherlock groaned and threw his arm toward the nightstand, where his infuriating phone demanded his attention. He fumbled around until he got his hands on the fucking thing and made it shut up.

“Yeah.”

Bart’s voice slammed against his eardrum, making his head elevate from throbbing to pounding. “Dude, where are you? It’s after two, and we have work to do before the Keep. And we’re sitting Trick down.”

After two? He opened his eyes and tried to blink the blear away, then took the phone from his ear to verify that yes, it was indeed past two in the afternoon. “Fuck. Okay. I’ll be there in…thirty.”

He’d completely forgotten that Trick was back from his jet-setting honeymoon in Nicaragua and Greece, and they had some challenging news for him.

A loud quiet answered him. Then: “You okay, brother? This is becoming a habit.”

“Fuck you. It is not.” Sherlock rolled up to sit on the side of the bed. As the room heaved, he dropped his head into his hand. “I’ll be there in half an hour. You need anything else?”

“Just you, clear and able to think.”

“Fuck you,” he repeated, then ended the call before Bart could respond. He set the phone back on the nightstand and let himself fall back to his pillows.

He couldn’t let the unconsciousness reclaim him, as lovely as that darkness would be. He did have work to do, and if Bart was calling him on his ‘habit,’ then he needed to pull his shit together.

The truth was that he’d been having a rough few weeks. A month or so, he guessed. Since that last fight with Taryn—and especially since he’d gotten a two-word text from her a couple of weeks ago:
It’s done
.

Why that was rocking him so hard, he had no fucking clue. He hadn’t had a thought to be a father, and he didn’t think Taryn was such a great mother. And he didn’t fucking love her. She was a train wreck with men—never able to make up her mind about what she wanted. Dylan and Chelsea’s father had been her third husband before she was thirty, and they’d broken up and reunited several times
before
Sherlock had entered the picture and gotten hung up in her merry-go-round. She wanted to call all the shots in life and none of them in bed. Even as a booty call, she was a fuck ton of work.

Looking through the lens of reality, he knew she had made the right choice, and he was better off. They both were.

But he couldn’t shake the thought that he’d almost had a kid. It made him feel…lonely. He missed Dylan and Chelsea, and sitting down to dinner, and just having that little borrowed family. Even during their off times, he’d not felt this alone and unmoored before, because he’d always known that she would call, or he would call, and the time would be right for him to go back.

Maybe she would call again at some point—he doubted it, but maybe. But he knew he wouldn’t go back. That last fight had been of the terminal variety. He wouldn’t be able to look at her the same way again. She had said things she couldn’t take back and he couldn’t forget, and he felt like an idiot for sticking around as long as he had and letting her yank him back and forth. He hadn’t even realized that he had been so whipped, and for what? A family that wasn’t his?

Did he want a family? Since when?

And now he found himself trapped in a weird, too-early midlife crisis or something. Which he was navigating with the help of his friends Jack and Jose.

It was possible that they were leading him astray.

He rolled back up and out of bed and shuffled to the shower. Turning the water on cold, he stood under the frigid stream until the shock had cleared his head and opened his eyes. When he felt like the first wave of hangover had been banished, he added hot water to the stream, washed, and got out. After he was done with his ablutions, he went to the kitchen to nuke a couple of frozen sausage biscuits. The grease would settle his stomach.

While the biscuits were in the microwave, he filled his electric kettle from the tap and plugged it in, then dug around the counter for a clean-enough mug, rinsed it out, and dropped a coffee pod into it. The water was hot by the time the biscuits were cooked. He made his coffee, unwrapped his breakfast, and shoveled it all into his gullet as quickly as he could.

When he mounted his bike, he felt human and was only running about fifteen minutes behind.

~oOo~

It was almost three o’clock when Sherlock knocked on Bart’s office door. “Hey. I’m in.”

Bart looked up from his massive computer screen, where he was working on a spreadsheet. Probably club finances. When Jesse had been exposed and dealt with as a rat last year, they’d lost their PR Officer. Lakota, formerly the Secretary, had taken over that time-consuming role, and Bart had picked up the records and financials—for the shop and the club, both. They’d considered bringing one of the other members up as a new officer, but nobody who’d be good at the record-keeping wanted it. And Hoosier and Bart were feeling raw and guarded after the mess Jesse had made, so they’d been content to shrink the circle of officers.

“You look better than I expected.”

Sherlock didn’t respond to that. Instead, he asked, “You need anything I don’t know about already?”

“No. Just the logistics for the two new runs and deets for the meet next month. And Trick’s in the shop. Con’s calling him over as soon as all the officers are here, which is now. Don’t get comfortable. We’ll be in the Keep in a few.”

Nodding, Sherlock knocked once on the door frame and turned back down the corridor to head to the Hall. He needed more coffee.

Shaylee, a new club girl, blonde, pert, and on the young side, was standing on a ladder behind the bar, long bare legs holding up a tight round ass barely covered in black Spandex booty shorts. She had all the bottles down and jumbled across the bar while she washed the mirror and shelves.

Bibi was on a cleaning kick in the clubhouse. In a few weeks, a major national charity run would arrive in Los Angeles, and the Night Horde was one of the host clubs. The Missouri mother charter would serve as an overnight waypoint, and SoCal would serve as a terminus. They would be wall-to-wall bikers and old ladies for a few days, and somehow Bibi had decided that all those rough people would give a shit if there were smudges on the mirrors. She already had her T&A army going room by room and scrubbing top to bottom.

She wanted to paint the Hall, too. Hoosier seemed of the mind to let her have her way—and that meant the Horde would be painting, not the women.

Sherlock did not understand this compulsion women had to clean like crazy before an event that would fuck everything to kingdom come and leave a disastrous mess in its wake.

Of course, he couldn’t understand a compulsion to clean, period.

At any rate, in this particular moment, he couldn’t get to the coffee. So he walked up behind Shaylee—whom he’d fucked a few times in the couple of weeks she’d been around—and grabbed her by the hips. As she squealed, he lifted her off the ladder and set her down, out of his way. Before he could turn and move the ladder, she caught hold of his kutte and tucked herself into it.

“Hey there. I can take a break if you want.” The fingers of one slender, long-nailed hand came up and combed through his beard.

It felt good to have her hands on him, so he hooked one of his own hands into the deep ‘v’ of her snug belly shirt and rubbed his fingers against the soft swell of her tits. “Tempting offer, sweetheart, but I got work to do.”

She made a pretty pink pout. “Okay. Well, look me up after the Keep. I’ll be pining for you until then.”

He grinned and bent down to lay a good, long, deep kiss on her. When he backed off, she caught his bottom lip between her teeth, pulling gently on the piercing there until he rocked his hips forward with a groan, pressing his erection into her belly. She laughed and let go.

Feeling better than he had since Bart’s call had scraped him off the floor of hangover sleep, he smacked her ass. “I will. Right now, I need coffee and to get to work. Looks like you’ve got plenty to keep you occupied, too.”

“That’s a fact. Bibi is going fucking psycho with all the scrubbing. Driving me up the wall.”

With the carafe in his hand, Sherlock paused and looked sidelong at Shaylee. “Careful, girl. You’re new, but you need to learn quick to watch the way you talk about old ladies. All of ‘em, but especially Bibi. In this clubhouse, they are your betters.”

The girl blushed bright red and dropped her eyes. “Sorry,” she muttered.

Sherlock had the sense that it wasn’t all contrition that had her looking away. He thought he read some offense in her aspect, too.

He knew more than most what circumstances brought girls onto the club roster, because he ran checks on them all and verified that they got regular med checks, too. Some girls were just regular ol’ groupies, enjoying the biker mystique that was equal parts fantasy and mythology, with a dash of reality. Those girls liked to party and hang out with rough men, and they were game for the things the men wanted them for. But they could be dangerous, too, because they were the most likely to be on the hunt for a member’s ink, and when they didn’t get it, sometimes a little
emphasis
was required to get them in line. It was on Sherlock to ferret out girls who might be there with the express intent to claim a member for her very own.

The Night Horde SoCal had a reputation for being an unusually good-looking charter. Many of the patches had been recruited to their previous club with an eye toward their on-screen potential, back when that club’s mother charter President had stars and dollar signs dancing in his jaded eyes. So they had a healthy number of club girl wannabes at every party.

They were selective about whom they added to the roster, though. The roster meant protection and some support. In return, girls were expected to be sexually available for the patches who wanted them, when they wanted them, and they were expected to cook and clean as Bibi assigned. They didn’t get paid—they weren’t whores—but they could come to the clubhouse when they needed help, and they would find the help they needed.

Many of the girls who weren’t groupies were there for the protection. Some of them were hiding out from abusive husbands or boyfriends, men who refused to acknowledge that they were exes. Maria, the girl who’d been around the longest and was the de facto assistant manager, had come to the Horde escaping a pimp who’d broken her face. When said pimp had brought his massive balls and tiny brain into the Hall with the intent to drag Maria back out, the Horde who’d been present—Muse, Connor, Trick, and Ronin—had seen to it that he would never be a threat to Maria or any other person ever again.

They’d been working purely straight in those days, but none of them had batted an eye at the work they’d done that night.

Sherlock knew that Shaylee had come to the club for similar protection. Her pimp had been persuaded to release her free and clear after a ‘chat’ with Connor and Demon. The Horde’s reputation these days was again formidable; Sherlock couldn’t imagine anybody being stupid enough to think they could storm the Hall without an army at their back and survive.

He was of a mind that women who came to the Horde like Maria and Shaylee were the best, most reliable girls. They had lost their rose-colored glasses long ago, and they understood the value of the club for them, and vice versa. They knew their place. A man could let his guard down a little and enjoy a woman’s company if he didn’t have to look out for her claws to sink into his kutte. So he was surprised to get attitude from Shaylee.

“You know how this works, Shay. Don’t get bent.”

Looking up at him, she smiled brightly and nodded. “You’re right. Sorry. See you later?”

Before he could answer, he saw Hoosier, Bart, Connor, Lakota, and Trick walking single-file to the Keep. He had to go. He bent down and kissed Shalyee’s cheek, which still had a pink scar from her ex-pimp’s fist. The heavy flowers of her cologne filled his nose and didn’t play well with the lingering traces of his hangover. “Yeah. I want to get my hands on your bare ass.” He smacked her again, and she gave him a playful swat.