Bad Like Me: Royal Bastards MC Ohio Chapter Read online

  Ray

  What was I doing with my life? It was an issue I faced each day as I laid in bed and then begrudgingly forced myself to rise out of it. Some days were harder than others, but I tried to remember this wasn’t what dad would want for me. It wasn’t what I wanted for myself either, but my self-preservation wasn’t exactly at a high point right now. For the first few days, I didn’t make it further than the bathroom and when absolutely necessary, down to the kitchen for food. Even though I didn’t have an appetite, I generally pushed something into my body, understanding I had to be semi-healthy to take care of Mom. I’d promised to essentially take Dad’s place, so that required being here, even if each time my lungs flattened upon exhalation, the wish for death tried a little more to overpower me.

  I missed my dad so much, it physically hurt. I didn’t know until he passed that sadness could be something tangible. It was an emotion everyone person was capable of, only some chose to fight it, while others wallowed in the depths of its tides. At least that was how I thought people dealt with the emotion before we lost Dad. I was noticeably wrong all those years; it wasn’t a choice at all. On occasion, people were just sad. That fact didn’t change because a person willed it to be so. It was putting a boat into capricious waters on a clear day, only to capsize minutes later by the white caps that emerged unexpectedly. A person couldn’t prepare for true, gut-wrenching misery. It was abrupt and tended to overstay its welcome in their life.

  I’d wake from happy dreams of things that happened during my childhood, like when Dad taught me how to bait a hook, only to wake up with the stupid fucking knowledge that he was no longer here. Other times, I had nightmares of him being trapped, and I couldn’t save him. It didn’t matter what my subconscious chose to slap on the projector at night, eventually, my heart always broke all over again. It was as if each day, I lost him for the first time, and my heart was bound with such power that each constriction brought more anguish than the earlier one. All I wanted to do was lay on the mattress and waste away. I really had no purpose.

  It’d been two weeks since Dad’s funeral, and the highlight of my days was playing scrabble with the next-door neighbor, Mrs. Flowers. I was going stir-crazy and had to do something to occupy my wandering mind, so board games with her was better than merely doing nothing to pass my time. It was a very welcomed distraction that kept me busy and freed my mind from the treacherous cloud that begged to submerge me entirely into mourning. I couldn’t give myself credit for the idea, she pushed it on me, offering to play every time she saw me. Eventually, I gave in to her plan and just let the rest of the world melt away. I should have been doing something more constructive with my time, like looking for a job, but I wasn’t ready to reassemble all those broken pieces. My mind had filled with guilt after the funeral, and I knew right then, I wouldn’t be breaking the promises I’d made Dad. Not only would I not move back to Kentucky, but I would also settle here for a while to keep my word to him. None of that would happen anytime soon, though. I simply couldn’t go on pretending the world was the same without him because it wasn’t, at least not for me. A very key part of my life was gone, and I didn’t know how to fill the void.

  Mom hadn’t been home too much. She immersed herself in volunteer work at the hospital against my better judgment. Neither of us needed to be there; its halls were filled with the lingering ghost of Dad’s memories. Nothing I said changed her mind, though; this was where she wanted to pass her time.

  “Penis for the win,” Mrs. Flowers chuckled as she dropped the letters one wooden tile at a time onto the board. My mouth fell open, and I didn’t bother looking at the letters she’d played at all.

  “I can’t…”

  “Good grief, girl. I said penis. I didn’t say dick.” She shook her head and took a sip from her cup, which I was questioning if it actually contained tea as she had said. My nostrils flared as I inhaled, expecting to be knocked down with the scent of liquor, and my curiosity piqued when I didn’t find it.

  My entire childhood was filled with memories of Mrs. Flowers, none of which had she ever said anything remotely close to anything she had today. Baking cookies or patching up my scrapes and scratches with a Snoopy band-aid, yes, those were the things I remembered. Yet, when she said penis and then dick, I couldn’t help except wonder what she said when I hadn’t heard her.

  “Rachel, you’re old enough to hear these words.” She set her teacup onto the wobbly table beside the game board and crossed her legs. I nodded in response unable to muster much more of a reply.

  “Please tell me this isn’t the first time you’ve heard them.” She smirked and lifted her mocha-colored hand to her face, trying to hide her amusement. “Do we need to have the talk? Girl, I can tell you some stories. Speaking of…” She held up one finger and pulled a book from the shelf of the table. “Here. This will do the explaining for me and then some.”

  My eyes roamed the very familiar cover of the paperback copy of an erotic novel, and I stifled the giggles boiling out of my body. I had read the entire series at least five times and could probably quote more excerpts than most. I’d been an avid romance reader since the ripe age of thirteen, and from there, I spiraled into the erotica genre several years later.

  “Just read it, okay?”

  I rolled my shoulders and bit my lip, trying to gain some semblance of composure before I nodded in agreement. The thought of her reading books in this category both made me question a lot of things she’d said to me during my childhood and appreciate them a lot more. She had dropped hints about sex all through my teenage years, and I’d often asked myself if they had a hidden innuendo but shut those thoughts down fast. It was Mrs. Flowers for crying out loud. Apparently, I had been right all along. She was a dirty old woman and wasn’t as innocent as I believed. I guess she figured I was older and there was little point to hide anything from me now.

  “Thank you,” I politely said, shoving the book underneath my arm as I stood to excuse myself.

  “Leaving already?”

  “I have some reading to do, right?”

  “Yes. Educate yourself, and maybe the next game, you won’t choke when I play the one-eyed snake.”

  I plugged one ear and then the other with the tip of one of my fingers, wondering if I had actually heard her correctly. “Doubtful,” I barely spat out of my lips and ran toward Mom and Dad’s house in shock, my body teetering on exploding with laughter and assuming a fetal position with the new knowledge I’d been given. I didn’t look back at her to see her reaction because I couldn’t. She had a wonderful sense of humor, this much I was aware of, but apparently, I had only scratched the surface.

  6

  Ray

  “Enough is enough, Ray. You’re getting out of bed today.” Mom sniffed and wrinkled her nose as she pulled the cover off of my head and bent to kiss me on the forehead. “I miss him, too, but we both have to keep going…and showering. You need to shower.”

  “Why don’t you tell me how you really feel, Mom?” A small chuckle traveled through my body and snuck out of my mouth. I didn’t want to laugh because any time I did, it felt like I was enjoying the world when I didn’t deserve to or have the desire to do it. Various people dealt with death differently. If I could choose, it would be to avoid the whole process entirely. If someone were to place me in one of the stages of grieving, it would be denial, but that would mean I hadn’t accepted Dad was gone. I had, so who could say where I was? Instead of avoiding the stages of grief as I wished, I was experiencing all of them together. Really, where I landed in the mix of it all didn’t matter. The one thing I was certain of, I fucking hated every minute of it. I never realized how easy it was to succumb to the poison of depression. People often talk about those who didn’t do much outside of lay in the bed and wallow in their thoughts, I too was someone who was quick to judge another who did this in the past, but that was before I experienced it…before I understood.

  I had always tried to keep an open mind before, yet when i
t came to someone in a similar predicament, I sounded a bit like a broken record. “C’mon, why don’t you get out of the bed? You know there are things outside waiting for you.” Honestly, I couldn’t remember exactly what I said, but it was something like that. I was an idiot with shitty offers to someone who needed a monumental thing to move them. I didn’t realize that no matter how much someone else wanted something for you, it might not be enough. Depression and anxiety were monstrous opponents. When you thought you had the upper hand, one or both of them opened their Trojan horse, and a new wave of fear knocked you backward.

  “I’ll shower tomorrow, Mom, I promise.” I stole the comforter from her grasp, rolling away from her, and groaned as I wrapped my body into a blanket burrito.

  “No, you’ll shower today,” she ordered in a stern voice that had a hint of humor to it.

  “Tomor—” had barely left my lips as the sound of her shuffling something stopped the word from finishing. “Okay. I’ll shower today,” I spat out in a hurry, untangling myself from the cover and got to my feet as fast as I could. If she wasn’t my mom, I wouldn’t have known what she was about to do. Maybe, if I wasn’t her kid, she would have never started it to begin with. I had always been a person who was hard to wake up. The earlier in the day anyone tried, the harder it was. Hell, I set at least ten alarms on my cellphone each morning before work.

  “I can’t believe you were going to pour water on me,” I said with a roll of my eyes. “I’m not a teenager anymore.”

  “Then quit acting like one and go wash your ass.”

  Again, another chuckle floated from my body, and I shook my head. She wasn’t backing down from this, and she had a point. I lifted my arm and was almost knocked down with the proof. “Fine,” I simply answered, stripping my shirt off and throwing it into the laundry basket beside the door.

  “I’m going into town today with Wren. We’re going to get our nails done,” Mom called through the door and opened it as soon as I closed it. “Do you want to go?”

  “Thank you, but no thank you.”

  “Maybe next time. Love you,” she suggested in a voice full of disappointment as she kissed me on the cheek, and I did the same to her.

  “Love you, Mom. Next time, I’ll go. Promise. That shit is horrible for your nails, you know that, right?” I wasn’t sure at what point in this entire debacle I began lying to my mom, but each one came easier than the last. I told myself it was what was best for her healing process, and I’d figure out mine later. I refused to give myself a timeline because I didn’t see an end in sight. I felt like a complete asshole for not bouncing back and being there for mom in the ways I should be, but I never expected this to be as hard as it was.

  When Wren and I were younger, a day at the nail salon followed with dinner and a movie was something we always did with our moms. After I moved and started working in the hospital, I wasn’t allowed to have acrylic nails—it was an infection control thing. It wasn’t until I actually gave my nails a break that I realized how much damage applying fake nails did to my natural ones. I used that as an excuse now, and I knew it, but it was the only feasible one I could think of.

  She frowned and silently shook her head. “Might be, but they look nice.” She clicked her nails on the door, letting them disappear one at a time with her and closed the door behind her.

  I loved my mom for all she was doing and what she wasn’t. A few weeks had passed, and it took until today for her to get back to her pushy self. Dad was no longer here to act as a buffer between us, therefore, from now on, it would be us raw and unfiltered. The reason we clashed as much as we did wasn’t that we were so different we couldn’t get along, it was that we were more alike than either of us would admit out loud. Of course, I had gotten a good portion of my personality from Dad, but the strongest parts came from Mom. Now, we were two very opinionated, headstrong women living under one roof again. I bet Dad was laughing his ass off wherever he was. I hadn’t decided what I believed about where people went or did in the afterlife, ergo I couldn’t begin to guess where his spirit was or if he had one flying about in the first place.

  As early as she woke me up, I thought for sure Mom and Wren would catch a matinee and a quick lunch, and Mom would be home by now. When five came around, it was obvious I was wrong. The hour between five and six ticked by agonizingly slow, and I considered crawling back into bed. The only thing that stopped me from doing so was knowing that if she came home and I was laying down again, she would use the bucket of water she almost threw this morning.

  By six-thirty, I decided to go out on the back deck and swing. Mom and Dad’s house wasn’t in the heart of Cleveland, it was tucked away in the rural area of Cuyahoga County. It was close enough that driving to the city wasn’t a pain in the ass, but far enough away that it was peaceful. When a lot of people who had never been to Cleveland thought of it, they immediately connected it with the medical field, considering the large hospital here. They were rarely aware of the beautiful countryside where I had grown from a child to an adult. When people living in Kentucky found out where I was from, they automatically asked about the city. It never included the peacefulness of fishing off a dock or watching wildlife from a porch, both things I loved about this area.

  The breeze swirling around me was warm but had a slight whisper of dampness in its breath. I deeply inhaled as much of it as I could into my body and smiled. The smell of rain was one of my favorite things in the world. There was nothing like it. It was the serenity that flowed through the world before the clouds burst open and rain fell from the heavens. Not even meteorologists could quite pinpoint what a storm would do, they had a good idea but had no way of being one hundred percent certain. Nature was volatile, and I loved it for that very reason. It made me crazy, but I didn’t like things to be predictable. It was when I could guess every movement before it was made that I lost interest in a subject. I wanted to be shocked and living a life worthwhile, not mindlessly shuffling along from day-to-day.

  That was one area Logan always surpassed any other man I met—not that there really had been someone else important because there hadn’t been. Maybe that was the reason I compared all men to Logan, not ever giving the others a chance to win my heart. Perhaps, I would constantly do so merely because I had nothing else to compare. Who knew? Life with him was exciting, and I didn’t know from one second to the next what we would be doing. At this moment, I allowed myself to admit I missed that part of him and nothing else. It couldn’t hurt to open that door a tiny crack, right? As long as I didn’t leave it open wide to let all the old feelings rush back in, I didn’t think it could cause too much damage. So, I unlocked that part of my life and invited a tiny glimmer of light into the thoughts I’d buried deep within myself so many years ago. The door was only open for a second, and then I forced myself to think of something else. Anything that didn’t involve him. The problem was, once I started thinking of him, I couldn’t stop. I was such a fucking dumbass; there was a reason I didn’t ask Wren about her brother.

  Pissed at myself, I uncrossed my legs and jumped off the swing, grabbing a towel off the banister, not caring if it was even clean. There was one thing I could do to drown out the thoughts, and if I had to, so be it.

  I was terrified of deep water. Even though I chased the unstable things in the world, I feared the unknown. It made absolutely no sense, but the truth was, I couldn’t shake the fear of what laid below its surface, which was why it usually took a Xanax or a few shots to get me in that shit. However, Dad was a huge believer in facing one’s fears, and being his child, he instilled that into me. A lot of times when I didn’t want that value to be a part of me. It was ironic, whenever I wanted to clear my head, all I had to do was swim away from the shallows. Maybe it was simply that my fear and need to survive overshadowed any other thoughts attempting to travel through my head. I really never figured it out, and I didn’t give a damn about thinking about it anymore.

  It wasn’t that Logan and I ended on bad terms�
�we didn’t necessarily—In my opinion, it was worse because we never really had an ending, didn’t have a chance to scream or cuss at each other. It was as if we were a fire that burned strongly one minute, and the next, a gust of air blew through with such strength, we were scattered too far to reach one another again, unable to rekindle our heat. All the pieces were still there, the embers lightly glowing, but ultimately, that too lost its luster.

  Once I reached the spot my toes couldn’t touch, I lifted my feet, and the water surrounded my head. When I spread my arms away from my body and panic thrummed through me, I was reminded that this was probably one of the stupider ideas I had come up with. Was it actually a bad thing that I thought of Logan? The answer was yes. I couldn’t fall down that rabbit hole again. My mind was already so fucked, adding one more component into the mix, might push me over the edge. I wasn’t taking care of Mom as I should’ve been; hell, I didn’t really even care much for myself. I hated that I’d become a stigma of what a daughter did after a parent died. I wished for strength as I closed my eyes and let the water support my body. I didn’t want to be like this forever, in a constant halt, but once my life stilled, I didn’t know how to find my way back to movement again.

  7

  Crow

  I’d seen Mary in town in passing but hadn’t gotten to carry on what one would describe as a meaningful conversation. Ray was never with her, so maybe, she’d moved back to Kentucky.

  I was curious, and the obvious way to get answers would be to ask my sister, Wren, but that would mean admitting she was right. She’d dangled her continued friendship with Ray in front of my face for years, waiting for me to crack and tell her I regretted not moving. Parts of me did think I was a dumbass for letting Ray go so easily, but others were happy I still called Cleveland my home—mainly the portions bursting at the seams with satisfaction that I was a Royal Bastard in this chapter. It was something that gave me pride because even though we did a fair amount of shady shit, we also did things for the community, too. Things that helped our household out when I was little like our annual toy drive. There were countless Christmases Mom brought us to the event, and the toy the brothers gave us was the only one we got that year. The club did these things to help out, but it didn’t hurt that charity events were one of many unspoken reminders for the town of all the good we did. It helped them to turn a blind eye when we did illegal stuff because everyone had a little bad in them, right? No one was one-hundred-percent good, not even the best of people. My measurements leaned more toward the bad and horrific side of the scale, but I still had my morals that kept me from completely toppling over into Hell. In cartoons, the characters always had a tiny angel and devil sitting on each of their shoulders who helped them remain moral. I really thought both of mine wore horns, but on occasion, they decided it was best to take the high road when making decisions. Who the fuck knew?