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February 12 - February 13, 2024
So thanks, kid, for givin’ an old man hope.
There are no sunsets for men like you and women like I am at the heart of me. Only inky night that clutches at you as you tear past, moving through the darkness like we own it, like we are only free inside the shadow vortex of it.
I’d gotten through my first bout of cancer because of him and now that I was sick again, I couldn’t imagine doing it without him.
Men forget to treat women with tender affection and platonic encouragement. Lust was no worthy substitute for pure care.
The Fallen MC
“I don’t want to be Louise Lafayette anymore,” I admitted.
I’m tellin’ you to be who you want to be, not anyone else and I’m tellin’ you to do it smart,
couldn’t have him. I knew that and felt it like the echo of the bullet wound in my chest. But I could be the woman he’d created, the one he gave me the confidence to be.
In my dirtiest fantasies, she tasted like cherry lollipops, the kind she’d liked as a kid.
shoulder and I was bound and fuckin’ determined to be the voice of Satan.
Knew myself well enough to know the truth. I was a monster, sure as shit. Violence was second-nature to me. Greed was an instinct I didn’t care to curb. Lawlessness was my code and brotherhood was my anthem.
You can love an outlaw and he can even love you back, but that doesn’t make him any less an outlaw. You get me?”
Too bad I was the kind of teenage girl who dreamed of men who could murder with their bare hands, who swore like it was essential to the English language and believed in brotherhood more than the law.
Loulou Lafayette was mine and she had been since she was seven years old whether it was fucked or not.
Fuck me, had I ever stood a chance against her?
She made a man who’d felt like a monster his entire life, feel like a fuckin’ angel.
It was gettin’ harder to believe this girl, this teenage daughter of my arch-nemesis and renowned good girl, wasn’t fuckin’ made for me.
“Don’t insult me. We met amid a hail of gunfire and the first time we touched, a bullet connected us chest to chest. Don’t pretend I don’t know all that you are.”
heart where the scar we shared marked my own chest.
I craved the darkness. Even more, I craved the god who ruled from it.
I’d made a deal with the devil, tasted his brand of sin in hell and as the fables always said, once you indulged in the food of the underworld, you were stuck in its depths forever.
I wanted both. The princess and the sinner.
Little girl, I told you, I’ve seen it all. But until you, didn’t know if any of it was worth it.”
“Welcome to the dark side, then, little Lou.”
“You come for me, you do it sayin’ my name. You do it knowin’ you’ve got me inside you and you do it knowin’ all that I am.”
he treated me like gold. Not glass, not like something fragile and overly precious, something to be looked after out of necessity. No,
something made of gold; priceless, worthy, but difficult to destroy.
You’ll meet my kids and suffer through that drama with me ’cause they’re my life and so’re you. You’ll take my cock whenever I want to give it to you and you’ll take my words whenever I need to give ’em to you. And when I’m an asshole, ’cause I’m a man and I got that in me to give, you’ll give me a piece of your mind and then forgive me.”
“The day I can’t take a minute to appreciate something of beauty is the day I don’t want to be alive,”
“Such a fucking poet,” she sassed because only she would sass me while I titty fucked ’er.
“I might die,” she whispered even softer. “You might,” I agreed ’cause I wanted to be honest with her but the thought had daggers shootin’ between each of my ribs, all angled at my heart. “Do you think I’ll go to heaven?” she asked me. “Fuck yeah, which sucks for me.”
“You asked me any day ’fore I met you, I woulda said there was no fuckin’ chance I’d get into heaven. A man like me havin’ done the things I did, things I needed to do? Fuck no.”
“Now, I ain’t makin’ you any promises here, little warrior, but if your fine ass is going to heaven—and it fuckin’ well is—I’ll find a way to get there too. If I gotta move into that fuckin’ church and pay penance every goddamn hour, I’ll do it. If I gotta give up boozin’, guns and drug runnin’, I’ll fuckin’ well do it and I’d do it now if it meant I got a place beside my girl behind those pearly gates.”
I wanted to pit my guardian monster against my beast of a father and see Zeus tear him apart with his bare hands.
And to be honest with you, Benny Boy, she started bein’ my fuckin’ girl the first time you left her down in a colossal fuckin’ way, when there were bullets flyin’ everywhere and you ducked down to save yourself ’fore your kid. She became my girl the second she saw me ‘cross the lot and knew in her soul she’d found someone to take care of ’er true.
“You lose your moonbeam hair, your bombshell shape and your sexual appetite, I don’t give a fuck. ’Cause I love your soul better than I love anythin’ else and that includes the fan-fuckin-tastic package it comes in. You got me, Lou?” I couldn’t breathe because he held my breath, couldn’t think because he’d rewritten my thoughts into ones of his own making. He controlled me but only to love me, to make me understand how I could love myself better than I already did.
“Love you even when you don’t.”
“Yeah, little warrior. See, it’s important to me you get that I’m in this with you. Can’t suffer what you suffer, can’t take that pain from ya like I want to more than fuckin’ anythin’. But I can stand with you. Don’t know if you’ll lose all that hair but if you do, I wanna do it with you.”
“But I love your hair.” “You love yours. Mine’ll grow back just like yours.”
“Told the brothers why I cut off my hair. They’re here to do the same.”
“This is way too much,” I whispered because my voice wouldn’t work properly past the lump in my throat. Zeus’s heat hit my back a second before his arms wrapped around me and his voice moved through my body as he said, “Nothin’s ever too much for family.”
“Love you, little girl. Loved you for ten years and love you for ten decades more,” he told me as if it was the simplest thing to do, to declare your undying love for a person like it was nothing special.
“And while Mute finds peace in the Underworld, we’ll be busy up here findin’ justice for ’im,”
Instead, she was fightin’ for her life in a fuckin’ hospital bed and her brother, my brother, was in the cold ground. “Rest in peace, Walker Nixon,” I said, usin’ his full name for the last time. “Deserve more than this for the guardin’ you gave my girl. Wish you could know I’d sell my fuckin’ soul to get you back. For you, for me, for the club and for our girl.”
My girl was an angel and I’d taken her to the dark side like she had a hope in hell of thrivin’ there.
“He said something about God having different paths for everyone and then something about some princesses needing dragons to protect them instead of Prince Charmings to save them.”
I stared at the man that had been mine in one way or another for over a decade. The man that had raised me more than my parents had, who was my father and my best friend and my lover all tied into one complicated but beautiful knot.
“Need to take my girl on my Harley,” he muttered, distracted by my naked body as I arched it just to his liking.
