Long Way Home (Thunder Road #3)(7)

“Sure he is,” she mumbles, then goes behind the bar. Mom’s black hair falls forward when she places her purse in the safe. When she stands, she tucks the strands behind her ears, showing off the hoop earrings I bought for her birthday last month.

Mom and I don’t look much alike. She’s short with a small frame and has an olive complexion, while I’m built like a McKinley: tall, strong shoulders, brown hair and eyes. According to pictures, I favor my father. Mom never says much about him. The MC thinks he’s a saint. I do my best to stay neutral.

Across from me, Mom taps her finger on the bar. “Have you thought about what I said?”

The muscles in my back tense. I’m reaching a tipping point in the tug-of-war game. When I turn eighteen, the MC will expect me to continue the blood legacy of the Reign of Terror and become a prospect. Eli’s a key member of the club, my grandfather is the president and my father before his death was on the fast track to being a board member.

There’s no doubt the board will take me, but there’s a rhythm to becoming a member and I’m expected to play along. My prospect period is the initiation time frame where the club decides whether or not I should be a full-fledged member. It’ll be a lot of me cleaning toilets and doing whatever the board says when they say it.

“There’s no reason to rush this,” Mom continues. She’s asked me to push off becoming a prospect for the MC until I graduate from high school. “Once you’re in the Terror, you’ll always be in the Terror. Why not be a normal high school kid for a few months? Find a nice girl. Go to prom. Go to keggers like other boys your age, not clubhouses. Let me live the fantasy of being mom to the jock who has the high school sweetheart. If you’re bound and determined to hang out with outlaws, at least have the decency to be arrested for cow tipping the first time I have to bail you out of jail.”

Haven’t told Mom yet the football coach is unhappy with me over the Terror. After that monologue, I’ll keep it to myself indefinitely.

“Last I checked, it’s his life,” comes a familiar gravelly voice. “Not your life and not your call on how he makes his choices. And to clear up any misunderstandings, the club decides when we offer prospect, not Chevy.”

My grandfather and president of the Reign of Terror, Cyrus, sidles up beside me at the bar. Mom tenses like a cat on the verge of attacking, and Cyrus merely strokes his long gray beard as he looks at me. “Club’s been trying to reach you.”

“Must have never turned my phone back on after the game,” I lie and try to balance the power struggle between Mom and the club and that means deflection. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah. Just some bumps. Heard you had a hell of a game tonight.”

I nod. If Cyrus heard I had a good game, that must mean something major is going down. Like Mom, he’s always there, unless something with the club is about to go to hell.

“I heard Violet was at the game with Stone,” he says, and my head pops up. Despite knowing better, there’s a flicker of hope within me. I’ve got to cut that crap out or my heart will be hurting again.

“Don’t guess you knew that,” Cyrus continues.

No, I didn’t and it’s hard not to glance over at my mom to gauge her reaction. She, more than anyone, is aware how the breakup with Violet has gutted me.

Cyrus tilts his head to the exit. “Why don’t we go back to the cabin, and you can fill me in on what I missed. Some guys might be at the clubhouse. Bet they’d want to hear about the game, too.”

“Or he can go home,” Mom butts in, and she twists a dish towel as if she’s imagining strangling his neck. “His home. The one that has his room. His bed. His things. His home.”

I hitch my thumbs into my jeans and wish I could disappear. Give me a mirror, the fine art of distraction, and I could make you believe I did fade into the nothingness, but right now, I’ve got nothing. “Give me a few minutes with Mom?”

Cyrus is as big and bad as they come. Sixties. My height. Monster of a man. He proudly wears the Reign of Terror leather cut on his back: the half skull with fire blazing out of its eyes and balls of fire raining down around it.

My grandfather scares the hell out of most people, and he’s put me in my place more than once. He’s raised me, just as much as Mom. Half my time has been spent with him. Half my time with her. I love him, just like I love my mom.

He walks away, and before Mom begins to revel in her win, I lean onto the bar and say, “He’s right. It is my life and it is my call.”

She slams her hand on the bar and sets her hardened green eyes on me. “Then start acting like it. You can’t keep walking this line between the real world and the club for much longer. It’s one or the other, Chevy. Turning eighteen, you know it means you can’t have both.”

My jaw twitches. Before his death, before my birth, my father didn’t choose her. He slept with Mom, had some sort of relationship with her that neither she nor the club will talk about, but at the end of the day, he never claimed Mom as his girl and, because of that, my mother remains an outsider.

Because of my blood, I’m an insider. The club, it’s a legit club. They don’t sell drugs, guns, or dabble in prostitution. Yeah, they color outside the lines at times, work well in gray areas, but we do our best to stay away from flat-out illegal.

The club owns a legit security company that travels alongside semi-loads of expensive goods to guarantee that the truck makes it to point B from point A without any problems. People don’t know it, but trucks being jacked for their loads happens more often than one would think. The security company is a ride-along bouncer.