Page 12 of Bitter’s Sweet

The main room is full tonight.

Hyde stands near the bar with a cigarette in his hand and murder in his posture. Biker’s our president, and he looks like somebody carved him out of bad weather. Big shoulders. Dark beard. Eyes like a pair of daggers that make men confess before he asks questions. Beside him, Boogie leans against the wall, sergeant-at-arms patch crooked, grin the same but worse than a threat. Ghoul is at the pool table with a cue in one hand and a jar of something clear enough to strip varnish in the other. Carver counts cash in the corner because even in chaos, that man can smell a missing dollar. Scarecrow sits by the old jukebox, long and lean, quiet as a churchyard. Crypt has his boots on a chair and a medical bag beside him like he is hoping somebody gives him a reason to stitch flesh.

CSI has three screens open at the tech table, green light reflecting off his glasses. Plague is writing something in the secretary ledger with the careful hand of a man who documents our sins for fun. Our members, Sweeney, Swamp, Mask, Butcher, Tinman, and Gruesome are scattered around the room, all patched, all watching without looking like they’re watching. Prospects Deliverance and Chainsaw haul beer cases near the back. Skibidi mops a spill while muttering to himself, which is what happens when you let Boogie name a prospect after the dumbest thing he heard online.

Though her friends linger, the woman from the coffin is long gone.

Good. Probably good. Mostly good.

My phone buzzes again.

I ignore it.

Hyde’s eyes cut to me. “You done?”

“That’s a personal question, Prez.”

Boogie grins. “Heard a woman cussing down the hall. Sounded like Bitter had another satisfied customer.”

“Sounded satisfied because she was satisfied,” I say.

“Then why she call you a coffin creep on her way out?”

The room goes quiet for half a beat.

Then Ghoul spits moonshine across the pool table laughing.

I point at Boogie. “You’re a fucking disease.”

“An observant one.”

“Get that damn coffin in the damn ground fast.”

Hyde doesn’t laugh. Hyde rarely laughs unless somebody falls down stairs or the IRS sends a letter to the wrong address.

“Church,” he says.

That one word snaps the room into motion.

Jokes die. Drinks go down. Chairs scrape. Men move.

That is the part outsiders never understand about clubs like ours. They see the booze, the women, the bikes, the cuts, the black humor and blood on the knuckles. They think chaos means weak. They think men like us are too wild to be organized.

They mistake noise for lack of order and mistake no rules for no consequences.

We file into church, the old arrangement room that still has stained-glass windows from when grieving families picked casket liners under soft lighting and the lie of comfort. Now there is a long table down the center, patched chairs, a locked cabinet, and a carved wooden gavel shaped like a femur because Boogie found it at a swap meet and Hyde, against all reason, kept it.

I take my seat.

Enforcer.

That word fits me better than my own name some days. Bitter was a nickname before it became the only name that mattered. I earned it young and kept earning it until even my mama quit calling me anything else.

Bitter Adams.

The man women want for a night and know better than to keep. One brothers call when a warning needs fists. A biker who learned love can smile pretty while holding a knife behind her back.

I sit back, stretch my legs under the table, and let my face go bored. Inside, the old ache wakes up because Nevermore dragged her name out of the dirt.