Page 38 of Angel’s Doll

DOLL

Angel has been weird all day, and nobody else at this party has noticed.

Not quiet. He’s been talking, laughing at Maverick’s terrible jokes, hauling ice, letting Bandit put a paper crown on him at the horseshoe pit and leaving it there for a full twenty minutes. Calm. Loose. My man is never loose in a crowd. He reads a party before he parks his bike, and today he isn’t reading anything.

He’s also checked the clock four times.

The party is at full volume. September sun, the good kind, the last honest heat before the rain comes back for eight months. The speakers are going in the lot, brothers arguing over the grill, Phoenix carrying two trays and no patience. Birdie and Sweetheart have Bandit pinned at the end of the table, working out how many shifts she can trade before Christmas. Darling in her chair, watching all of us like a woman admiring her investments.

Angel sets his beer down, announces to nobody that he needs a wrench, and walks off.

He’s a terrible liar. He’s a great liar to everyone else, and a terrible one to me. I love that so much I let him get thirty feet before I follow.

The garage door is open a foot. Music comes through the wall. Inside it smells like clean oil and warm concrete. His bike is up on the stand with nothing wrong with it.

He’s standing at the tool bench with his back to me, not looking for a wrench or anything else. Both hands flat on the wood.

I lived over a garage once. I lean in the doorway of this one because I want to be here, with him, and nobody on earth knows where I am. My choice, my minute, my man.

“You’ve been weird since breakfast,” I say.

He doesn’t jump. He just says, “Close the door.”

“Are you asking?”

“I’m always asking.” His shoulders drop. “Please close the door, Doll.”

I close it. The party drops to a bassline and a muffled roar when someone scores at horseshoes.

He turns around with a bundle over his forearm. Black leather. Small.

I go completely still, which is his trick, not mine.

“Jericho.”

“Give me a second.” He sets it on the bench like it’s a live thing, smooths it flat with one hand, and doesn’t look up. “I had this made six weeks ago. It’s been in that cabinet since. I’ve come out here to get it maybe nine times.”

“Nine.”

“Nine.” Now he looks up, and there it is, my unbothered VP, nervous down to his boots. “Every time I decided you’d say yes for the wrong reason. Because the club’s your family. Because you owe me. Because you’re happy and I’d be pushing on a happy woman.”

“And today?”

“Today Bishop told me I was being an idiot in front of Compass. Compass agreed. I’ve got no dignity left to protect.”

I laugh. He lets me laugh at him.

He picks the cut up and holds it. Not out to me. Holds it.

“You’re mine where it matters,” he says. “I know it, you know it, everybody in the club knows it. That’s not what this is.” He turns it so I can see the back. “This says it out loud, in the only language this club speaks. It’s my name on your back. I don’t get to put my name on your back unless you decide to carry it.”

I step closer. There it is, stitched clean.

Property of Angel.

A year ago that word would have gone through me like a spike. Property. I’ve been that. I was a line item, an unpaid decade, an asset handed across a desk to settle a debt I never took out.

I look at the leather and wait for the flinch. It doesn’t come.