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“I never realized how much Shady Valley needed this,” Nyx said as she grabbed another notebook off a shelf. “But when your kid tells you last-minute that they doodled all over their entire notebook that they need for a class trip, it’s really convenient to just be able to walk down the street and grab it instead of heading out of town.”

I’d opened a small office supply store in town, just a few doors down from Nyx’s studio.

I’d been nervous that it was too niche of an idea. Especially for such a small town. But foot traffic had been surprisingly steady.

I imagined it helped that it wasn’t just pens and notebooks that we sold, but headphones, charging cords, keyboards, and even tablets. Because, well, office supplies had evolved. As it turned out, nowhere in town carried even a basic phone charger. And most people weren’t willing to wait two days for one to be delivered, and were too busy to drive half an hour out of town to buy one.

We’d filled a little hole that, in a very small way, helped the community.

The store had only been open for a few months. And those damn developers had been breathing down our necks since, apparently, they’d been planning to buy the building.

But that was just too damn bad.

I never knew that my dream job was owning an office supply store—despite my love of cubicle decorating videos—but now that I had it, I was never going to let it go.

“Hey, you have a little Picasso on your hands. You can’t be too mad,” I said, shrugging as I rang up Nyx’s order. Which included one notebook for the school trip and another one for doodling. Because she was a smart mom.

“How’re you feeling?” she asked, nodding toward my belly. That was starting to look like I’d stuck a basketball under my shirt.

“Peeing every seven minutes. But it beats the months of throwing up.”

“Getting close to the finish line now. Can’t wait to meet the little dude.”

“Me too,” I said, handing her the bag. “Go get that kid a notebook before you come home to the walls drawn on.”

“Oh, God,” Nyx said, wincing. “Thanks.”

With that, she walked out, leaving me alone in my little store that smelled like paper and ink.

My hand went to my belly as I watched Nyx catch sight of Everleigh as she was climbing out of her car to go to the grocery store, a couple little kids in tow.

Watching the women in the club be mothers had healed me in ways I never knew I could experience. To watch them cook, hug, love, and nurture their kids showed me what real motherhood looked like, taught me all the ways I wanted to parent my own child.

There’d been times in the days and weeks following finding out we were going to have a baby that I cried in Rook’s arms, terrified that I had some sort of ‘bad mom gene’ or that I was too damaged from my shitty childhood to provide a good one for my own child.

But it hadn’t just been Rook to remind me that I wasn’t my mother, that I was a good, kind, and giving person.

I had the club women and men. I had Lorna. So many people who saw the good in me, who believed in my ability to provide a good and loving environment for kids. They’d patiently reminded me how good I was with their kids until, little by little, I started to believe them.

I wasn’t my mother.

And as God as my witness, my child would know none of the heartache that I did growing up. They would be so full of love that they would overflow with it.

“Right, buddy?” I asked my belly. “We got this.”

As if understanding and agreeing, I felt the little flutter of a kick.

Rook - 8 years

“Nana!” Hawk yelled, waving an arm so hard that his whole body moved with it.

“Hey, bubba!” my mom called back, squatting low and throwing her arms wide.

My son ran at her, throwing himself into her arms to get scooped up and swung in a circle.

The sun caught on his hair that decided to settle somewhere between my reddish-brown and Tessa’s blonde, making him a true strawberry-blonde. The more time he spent outside, though, the more it streaked with gold.

And despite his mother and me both being very indoorsy, our kid was more like my mom, who always wanted to be out in nature.

I mean, the kid had his own little garden and bird feeder with a camera, so he could watch his little visitors on his TV to go to sleep to at night.

He was also the one to remind us, every two days, to wash out the darn hummingbird feeder.

“Birds will get sick,” he’d say with big, sad eyes that made either me or Tessa immediately jump up to wash out the sticky sugar water.

Hawk liked birds, plants, long walks, hikes in the Death Valley mountains, and occasional trips to the beach to collect shells.

He didn’t like TV, computers, tablets, or phones.

If you could know such things from such a young age, I imagined Hawk would be a kid who would hit eighteen and then claim he was going to go on a month-long hike in the woods or mountains somewhere. He’d be surfing in Miami one month and off snowboarding in Switzerland the next.

While his mom and I sat cuddled up on the couch with all our snacks, the TV on in the background as we watched his videos online.

“I came to steal your child,” my mom said as she hiked Hawk up on her hip and approached.

See, my mom lived with us for three years. And, honestly, I wasn’t sure how we would have gotten through the newborn stage without her ever-present, patient assistance.

But then, well, she’d met someone.

You could say the flashbacks had been incredibly intense when she told me. Her joy when she thought she’d been in love. The absolute devastation when she’d learned she’d been conned out of everything she had. The years I spent in prison. The horror of knowing she was committed because her mental health was so unstable.

It wasn’t long, though, before I felt sure that her current choice was a good, solid man. In fact, he happened to be a retired therapist. A career path he’d chosen to try to understand his own mother’s struggles with schizophrenia.

Joe, well, he got it.

My mother’s mental health, our complicated history, my concerns.

And perhaps a lot more important than all that, he loved my mom. And if there was ever a woman who deserved that, it was her.

“Yeah? Where are you taking him?”

“G-pa Joe and I wanted to go to the Inyo National Forest today. We thought our little buddy might like to join us.”

“Yes!” Hawk cheered, eyes full of excitement.

“Yes!” my mom parroted. “I printed out an animal checklist. We’re gonna see how many critters we can find.”

“I expect pictures.”

“Gotta get my camera!” Hawk cheered, wiggling.

“Let’s do that. Plus anything else we might need,” my mom said, setting Hawk down, taking his hand, and walking into the house.

Watching my mother with my son had healed something in me.

Tessa asked me once, as she caught me watching them play in the backyard, if it hurt or made me resentful to see my mom giving my son the childhood that I didn’t have.

I maybe even expected to feel that way myself.

But it was never that.

It was, I don’t know, validating in a way. That everything I believed down to my core about my mother was true. That she had the capacity for so much love and positivity. That it was just her mental health that held her back.

I’d gotten snippets of my mom’s goodness.

My son got all of it.

It was a beautiful thing.

“Okay. We got a change of clothes, sunblock, bug spray, his water bottle, and his camera,” my mom said when the two of them reemerged a few moments later.

“Sounds like you have everything you need. You guys have lots of fun, okay?” I said, rubbing my son’s head.

“Have a nice day with your wife,” my mom said, giving me a smile before walking off with my son.

I stood there on the lawn, watching them pull away.

I made my way back into the house, seeing traces of all three of us scattered around. My laptop was still open on the coffee table next to three of Hawk’s wilderness books and Tessa’s chunky inventory notebook for the office supply store.

In the kitchen, my circuit breaker mug sat next to Tessa’s mermaid one and Hawk’s breakfast plate that he’d made at a pottery place with my mom and had little bees and flowers painted on it that had been outlined by my mom and messily painted by my son.

I’d barely gotten a chance to clean the dishes before I heard the front door close and the jingle of Tessa’s key.

“My son just waved at me from the back of a passing car,” she said, coming into the doorway of the kitchen in one of the flowing sundresses she started wearing when pregnant and had just gotten attached to, watching me with her head tilted to the side.

“He’s being kidnapped.”

“Oh, good,” she said, making me smile. “Off to do something outdoorsy, I assume.”

“Always.”

“It’s weird how little he got of the two of us,” she said, shaking her head.

“To be fair, the only way we could get him to sleep sometimes as a baby was to tap away on creamy keyboards.”

“True,” she agreed.

Hawk had been a terrible sleeper. I wasn’t sure he slept through the night until he was two.

If we’d ever entertained the idea of having more kids—and we honestly hadn’t, ever since Tessa had finally delivered Hawk, held him for the first time, and declared, ‘I love you. I love him. But I am never doing that again.’—his refusal to sleep erased that.

As much as my club brothers all seemed to like to breed entire litters of kids, we were more than happy with our one little dude.

“So,” I said, grabbing her hips when she drew closer. “We have a day all to ourselves.”

“And no little eyes or ears to worry about,” she agreed as I lifted her up and set her down on the counter. “Whatever could we do with the time?”

“Hmm, I can think of some things.”

I slid her skirt up her legs, then lowered down between.

Her breath caught as my lips pressed into the side of her knee, then started to drift upward.

Her legs spread wider, inviting more. And I was happy to oblige, pulling her panties to the side, and running my tongue up her cleft, loving the whimper she made just before my tongue started to circle her clit.

Her hand slapped down on the back of my neck, holding me against her as she rocked against my mouth.

My fingers slipped inside her, fucking her hard and fast until I felt her walls pulsing around my fingers as her cries filled the kitchen.

I got back to my feet, my fingers still casually working her as she came back down.

It wasn’t long before her hands were roaming and tugging at clothes.

I’d always loved her desperation when we were together, the way she ripped at my clothes and pushed my hand where she wanted it most.

So when she tugged my shirt, I moved my hands out from between her legs so she could pull it off of me.

Her hands slid down my chest, then stomach, fingers tracing along the indents of my muscles on her path down to my button and zipper.

She wasted no time reaching inside my jeans to grab my cock, stroking me hard and fast.

“Rook, please,” she whimpered, hips wiggling impatiently, likely already imagining my cock inside her instead of in her hand.

“Please what?” I asked, reaching down to tug her panties down, hearing a little rip in the process. She made a little moan as my finger tapped against her clit. “Please fuck this sweet little pussy?” I asked, slipping a fingertip into her.

“Yes. Please . Now.”

Well, I couldn’t refuse her, could I?

Reaching down, I grabbed her knees, pulling her up as I moved in closer, then surged deep inside her.

“Fuck,” I groaned, pressing my forehead to hers as her walls closed around my cock.

Tess’s hands went to my ass, digging in, and her hips started to rock against me, needing friction.

I took one steadying breath, then I gave her what she needed.

Hard and fast, like she was begging for.

After one orgasm shook her system, I pulled her down off the counter, turned her, then bent her over the kitchen table and slammed deep inside her.

Tessa’s deep moan spurred me on as I thrust so hard that the table danced across the room until it slammed into the wall just as another orgasm slammed through Tessa.

That time, she took me with her.

We stayed there afterward, panting for breath, bodies overwhelmed with pleasure.

“You know what would be perfect right now?” Tessa asked a few minutes later, coming out of the bathroom all red in the cheeks still.

“What’s that?”

“A nice, long drive to a really good pizza place.”

God, I somehow accidentally married the perfect fucking woman.

Tessa - 28 years

“Hey, Ma,” Hawk’s voice filled the store as his face filled my phone screen.

He had sunburn on the sensitive skin under his eyes and what looked like a bruise on his jaw.

My adventurous, outdoorsy kid. All grown up. But just as prone to accidents as he’d been as a boy.

He looked so much like his father, even if he’d inherited my eyes. Even that strawberry hair that had been his as a boy had darkened to his father’s darker reddish-brown. He kept it a lot longer than Rook ever had. It gave him a roguish look that no doubt helped him attract all those girls who were constantly showing up next to him on his social media accounts. Not one of them seemed important enough to ever tell us about.

And, hey, so long as he was happy, we were happy with whatever relationship situation he had going on.

He was that, too.

Happy.

Even-tempered.

No signs of mania or depression.

And age-wise, he was past the point of most people’s onset of bipolar disorder.

It seemed like all those experts we’d worriedly consulted once were right.

“Hey, bud. What are you up to?” I asked.

To that, he gave me a big smile.

“I’m coming home.”

“What?” I gasped, heart swelling.

He did come home whenever his journeys brought him in the general vicinity. And, of course, on Christmas, as well as Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.

“Whoa,” Hawk said, wincing, making me realize I may have just squealed. A little.

“Sorry! When?”

“Well, tonight. If my flight takes off on time. Any idea what Uncle Detroit is making for dinner?”

“Well, now he’s making all your favorites,” I said, getting a laugh out of my kid. “What’s the occasion?”

To that, he took a slow, deep breath that had my spine tingling, worried he’d broken a leg in three places or something.

“I’m prospecting.”

“Wait… what?”

While most of his cousins had been talking since childhood about wanting to be part of the club someday, Hawk had never said anything of the like.

“Feels like the right time,” Hawk said, shrugging off my shock.

“But… since when?”

“Since I’ve been thinking about it.”

“When’s the last time you even rode a bike?”

“Been a bit. But I hear it’s… you know… like riding a bike.”

“That’s bicycles.”

“Eh, all the same. What, you don’t want me back in Shady Valley?”

“Of course I do. I just never heard you say you wanted to be a biker is all.”

Something off-camera caught his attention for a second before he looked back at me. “Ma, I gotta get going. We can talk about it when I get there, okay?”

“Okay. Let me know what time you’re coming in, so Dad and I can come get you.”

“Nah, I’ll meet you at the clubhouse,” he said, waving me off. “Love you, Ma.”

“Love you too,” I said just as the door to the store chimed.

Hawk ended the video call, and I looked up to watch his father walk toward me.

Rook had aged almost annoyingly well. Whitish-blond had started to streak through his red hair, and time had etched his features into those ruggedly handsome angles that men of a certain age all seemed to luck into.

The jerk hadn’t even gained a pooch or a pinch of fat anywhere.

“Who do you love?” he asked, eyes bright, the skin next to them crinkling.

“You,” I told him. “But also, your son.”

“Yeah? What’s he up to? Scaling a mountain in Nepal? Wrestling gators in Florida? Playing with creepy-crawlers in the rainforest?”

“In an airport about to fly home.”

“Wait… did I miss a holiday?” he asked, face a mask of genuine fear.

“No. No, he… he is going to prospect.”

“No shit,” Rook said, brows pinched, making me realize I wasn’t the only one who had never heard him talk about joining the club.

“For some reason, I feel like we should be, I don’t know, worried. Like, did he get himself into some sort of trouble and wants the protection of the club?”

“Maybe,” he said, shrugging. “Wanna know what I bet?”

“What?” I asked as he reached for my hips, pulling me against him.

“If he’s in some sort of trouble, I bet there’s a woman in the center of it.”

“I want to object to that. From a feminist standpoint. But after decades of watching that be truer and truer in and around this club, I kind of just have to agree with you.”

“You were the best kind of trouble,” Rook assured me, pressing his forehead to mine.

“And you were the best fake husband ever.”

XX