Page 37 of Mustang

Then the table exploded.Loch slapped the oak hard enough to make every plate jump.Socket howled, a full-body sound that started in his chest and came out unchecked, his head going back, cookie crumbs flying.Screwball pointed at me with a drumstick in his other hand and barked, “I fucking knew it!”with the vindication of a man who’d been right about something for fifteen years and had finally been given the evidence to prove it.Even Ace, who didn’t laugh at anything that hadn’t killed someone first, let out a short, genuine sound that might have been amusement if you squinted.

I picked up my fork and went back to my chicken.The teasing continued — someone brought up the time I’d called relationships “emotional ballast” in a church meeting, someone else mentioned the betting pool that had been running since 2012 on whether I’d ever claim an old lady, the numbers getting worse every year, but it had shifted into something warmer.The camaraderie of men who loved each other enough to tear the walls down and then help rebuild them, stronger than before.

I watched Hannah pass the bread basket down the table.Her hand on the wicker, her fingers brushing Socket’s as she handed it off, and she was already in conversation with him about the cookies — something about doubling the chocolate next time, Socket nodding with his mouth full, grease on his chin, the attentiveness of a man listening to a woman he respected completely.Across the table, Screwball was telling her about the Softail he’d been rebuilding in the garage, his hands moving through the air the way they always did when he talked engines, and Hannah was nodding, asking questions, the same focused attention she gave everything that mattered to someone she cared about.

She belonged here.Not the way something foreign belongs after enough time, the way something essential belongs, as if the space had been shaped around her absence for years and only now made sense with her in it.These men, my brothers, the only family I’d chosen — leaned toward her the way plants lean toward light, and she gave it without reservation, without performance, the same warmth she’d shown in a log cabin six months ago when she’d hung herbs on a windowsill because the room was cold and she could fix it.

I’d spent twenty years building this.The club, the brotherhood, the architecture of loyalty that held us together when everything else fell apart.I’d built it brick by brick, fight by fight, the hard way, because the hard way was the only way I knew how to build anything that lasted.And somewhere in the process — between a kitchen at midnight and a cabin at dawn and a courtyard full of cordite and a clubhouse where twenty men raised their drinks to a woman wearing my cut — she had become the center of it.Not the reason for it.The center.The thing the rest orbited around without being asked, because her gravity was the kind you didn’t fight.You just adjusted your course and were better for it.

The table hummed around us.Forks on plates, the low rumble of men eating good food after a long day, Hannah’s laugh cutting through the noise at regular intervals like something that tuned the whole room to a better frequency.I finished my chicken and reached for the bread, and her hand found mine under the table — a brief press of fingers against my palm, there and gone, the shorthand of a touch that had stopped needing translation months ago.

Socket reached for the last cookie.Hannah slapped his hand away and pointed at the prospect, who hadn’t gotten one yet.Socket looked wounded for exactly three seconds before breaking into that grin that meant he’d been testing her and she’d passed, and the table settled into the warm, ragged rhythm of a Tuesday night with no agenda beyond the food and the company and the particular satisfaction of watching something you built hold the weight it was designed to carry.

I sat back in my chair.Watched my woman feed my brothers.And didn’t say a single word about any of it because the words would have been inadequate and everyone at the table already knew exactly what I meant.