The Fox and the Hound |✅ Completed

Chapter Sixty Nine

24 years old

After six rounds of Oliver and Everette taking turns beating the crap out of me during just as many fight nights, I had passed the final test of my prospecting. It wasn't an official test that the club had set up. Being the maid and bartender for the members was the best of it. Running half assed errands all over the damned state and covering everyone's shifts at the garage during ragers. Those were pretty bad, but I'd do them all year.

It wasn't going to be enough for a few of them though. Mainly the ones who accepted my offer to get even. Oliver and Everette did it with their fists. Martin held onto his ticket though. The promise to vote me in was accompanied by the silent I-owe-you he'd use whenever he wanted. Getting and keeping those three votes was all I cared about.

Even with the votes secured, it had taken an entire year before they called for the meeting to decide my fate. Twelve months of being the club's bitch finally paid off. The slobbering bulldog patch was handed over with the patches to go with it. It should have been a moment that I looked back on with pride and honor.

Three years later and I was still waiting for those feelings to surface. To be embraced by the brotherhood Thunder had raised me to believe being thicker than water. Three years of hovering at the edges, standing in the back of the room and being an obvious stray begging for scraps. Instead of feeling like I had earned my place, it felt temporary. A gap filled with sand that was being washed away the longer I hung around.

"Don't you have any place better to be," Roco chuckled as he sat beside me at the table.

"You mean, like, sleeping?" I rubbed my eyes for effect, and tilted my head back. The sky was clearer than it had been in months. Each constellation is dotted in perfect alignment. "Can't do much of that with all of this happening."

"Why would that matter? It's not like you're sleeping here." I gave a half hearted shrug then took a swig from the lukewarm bottle of beer. His eyes narrowed on me. In a flash he let another chuckle rip, and let a hand fall onto my shoulder. "You have to learn to ask for help, brother."

"It's hard to tell when to ask," I muttered and choked back the bile rising from the confession. "I haven't felt that warm welcome."

"Getting involved might help," a new voice growled from behind me. Roco adjusted on the bench beside me to straddle it. I simply looked over my shoulder and found Gull glaring at the back of my head. "Stop volunteering to be the club's punching bag. Being in the ring and intentionally losing will get you nowhere, Hound. You've got to remind them who you are."

"Who I am," I repeated the words slowly, took another nasty swig then shook my head. "Not entirely sure anymore."

"You sound like a girl," Roco jabbed. He threw his hand in the air and waved for a fresh round to one of the women playing bartender.

"Maybe it's a good thing you didn't end up in my family," Gull coughed out the annoyed comment while adjusting the tubes funneling in oxygen from the tank on his hip. "I don't need a grandson with less balls than my granddaughter."

"Pretty sure there are thousands of men with less balls than TJ," I admitted.

"He's got you there, Gull," Roco chuckled as he took a fresh bottle from the bucket of beers Sadie had brought over. "That girl's stubbornness made her pretty damn terrifying."

"I'm surrounded by a bunch of pansies," the old man grumbled. The coughing fit that followed was slowly becoming a normal thing. He waved it off each time I asked him about it. A result of smoking for decades was the only excuse he could come up with and it was a pretty believable one.

"Says the softest man around," Roco teased. He passed a beer to the old man then waved one at me. When I hesitated, he sighed. "You aren't driving from the sounds of things."

I took the condensation coated bottle and studied it for a few minutes before taking a long gulp. Staying at the club house seemed like a cheap and easy solution to not having someplace to live. Winford wasn't exactly a rent friendly town. They loved the ones who were willing to buy into the community. There were a few places that currently had no openings. That left my mother's or the club house.

A twenty something year old living back at home with his mother sounded like I was a geek living in the basement. There was no way I could move on with my life if my mother was hovering. Being overly disappointed with me upon my return was expected. The cold shoulder and short answers were a little less expected. By the time she'd moved on with her own form of punishment, she was full of questions that were subtle digs about my situation.

That's what she called it. A situation. As if what had happened six years ago was ongoing. Like there hadn't been an obvious ending. I left. Door closed. She left. Door locked. That didn't seem to matter to Mo. Nope. In her delusional world, I still have a chance of getting things back to where they were half a decade ago. I lived in that world once, and I had no desire to go back there.

"You know," Roco spoke again after settling the bottle on the table, "There's an old apartment over the garage. It was originally an office, but was remodeled a few years ago. You can move in if you're interested."

"Where are the strings?"

"It's been used as storage for a few years and untouched since. You'll be on your own with cleaning it up and making it livable."

"Cost?"

"Two hundred a month if you keep working at the shop. We can take it directly out of your check." I heard Gull grunt in agreement. "It'll be quieter than this place, and private."

The second part of Roco's selling points seemed to rub the old man the wrong way. His brow wrinkled to the point that his eyes were narrowed into slits. The snarl he could have tried to bite back was in full view. Little does he know, I'm not looking for that kind of privacy. At some point, maybe, I'd find someone worth having in my life again. That wasn't going to happen until a certain little fox was no more.