So I turned and walked back into the shed, into the screams, to make sure the boogey man was really dead.
CHAPTER 36
CLUTCH - IT HAD TO HAPPEN
The thing about healing is that sometimes it can feel like it happens so fast that you don’t recognize what it took to heal and sometimes it takes an agonizingly long time to repair damage done… and then sometimes when the damage is too severe, it makes healing impossible.
It felt like everyone in the club was varying degrees of healing or, in some cases, in deciding if healing was even a possibility. A week after Razor took his last breath, it still felt like people were walking on eggshells. Unsure of what came next.
I stood behind the bar, looking out at the now-empty main room of the clubhouse. Everything had been stripped clean, washed away, but I still felt every wrong that had happened in this room.
Angel approached me as I took a swig of beer, murmuring under my breath,‘happy birthday baby’.A thought bubbled up, mixed with a memory of when I had first asked Bex when her birthday was, and she laughed, saying it didn't matter. When I had pushed, it had almost seemed as if she had pulled the date out of thin air. She said she had never celebrated her birthday before and that it wasn’t important. I had let it slide because it didn’t seem like something she wanted to talk about, but now…fuck,I should have asked more questions. I should have celebrated with her more… I…
“What’s that face for?” Angel asked, stopping beside me, looking out at the room that seemed to hold so many ghosts.
I didn’t answer.
Was her birthdate in the folder Cypher gave me?
He tried again, “Celebrating something?”
I grunted, “It’s her birthday, or at least…”
I didn’t know what I was trying to say, since Razor had died it felt like I had one less person to be mad at and I had too much time on my hands to think about all the ways I had failed her. Too much time waiting to be cleared by the doctor so I could go hunting. To do something with this anger and energy I had building up within me.
Angel moved beside me, then I heard the crack of a beer opening and saw two rocks glasses placed in front of me. I watched quietly as Angel poured two fingers of tequila in both of our glasses. He took a sip of his beer and sighed heavily.
“Maybe the date she decided to celebrate is more real, more important than the date she was born into that … I can’t even call what she had a family.”
I nodded, thinking about what he was saying, but that didn’t change the fact that I didn’t push or offer to celebrate it with her. That I took what she said about birthdays not meaning anything at face value and let it slide.
Angel nudged the glass my way and picked up his. He waited till I lifted my glass and he toasted,‘To Bex’.
I swallowed down the tequila, my eyes locked on the spot where she stood.
After a few minutes of silence, Angel cleared his throat, “You know I have replayed everything she said that night…”
I stood up straight, not knowing if I wanted to hear what he had to say. “Don’t…”
Angel sighed and then topped up our glasses. “No, Clutch, this needs to be said. We need to talk about this…fuck…” He shot back the tequila; I kept my eyes locked onthespot.
“I fucked up. Not just with Bex, but Mara…” A choked sound came out of him, but he swallowed it with a swig of his beer, “...with everyone. I missed so much. I let us become this… and her words haunt me.”
They haunt me too.
“And as much as that night haunts me, everything that led up to it. I think… I think it had to happen.”
My head snapped to him, a growl slipping free.
Angel looked at me with so much anguish in his eyes; I haven'tseen that kind of pain since he losther. He looked at the same spot, as if he could still see it too, “We were too far gone. Something had to snap us out of it. How much more damage couldhehave done? How much more would we have allowed to happen under this roof? She was right; they all are.”
He took a deep breath, and I watched as he seemed to work through something. Then he broke the silence, his voice so low I almost missed it, “Where are the kids?”
“What?”
“The kids, the joy, the families. This club used to be about that. At some point, that stopped. I… I keep thinking about what she said, how this is an ecosystem. Our women don’t feel safe enough to want to have babies, to grow a family… to settle down here. A world, a species dies out if you don’t reproduce… is that what they were telling us without saying the words. That they didn’t want us to carry on?”
His dark eyes came up to meet mine. “Maybe I am not making sense. But what she said has been messing with me, and then… Mara decided she didn't want to stay here. The Doctor said he had an apartment over the garage she could stay in if she wanted… she feels safer with strangers…”