Page 72 of Sprog

She needs a minute and she won't ask for one, she'll just keep going until someone makes her stop, which is something I know about her now. I know a lot of things about her now that I didn't know when I was eighteen. Six months of mornings will do that.

We sit on the step outside the side door, the one that doesn't have blast damage, and I hand her a coffee from the pot one of the old ladies pressed into my hand on the way out. She wraps both hands around it and leans against me. We look at the compound in the early morning light.

The sky is growing pale over the trees. The birds are waking up. The bikes are lined up in their row, undamaged, and I'm glad for that in a way that probably says something about me.

The brothers are working on the clubhouse. There's noise and movement and purpose, the particular industry of men who deal with hard things by fixing what can be fixed. Brick is directing, which means it'll be done right. The old ladies are moving between the house and the yard with food and coffee. In a few hours this will start to look like something we can come back from.

Decker will come back from it too, in time. I know how this kid is made. He'll be angry first and then he'll find a way to adapt and then he'll find his way back to something. He's a Black Saint. We don't let that go.

Sav is quiet beside me, and I let her be quiet.

After a while she says, "Your road name."

"Yeah."

"SPROG." She says it the way she says things she's turning over. "I never asked you what it means."

I look at the sky.

"When I got patched in," I say, "Seb came up with it." I pause. "Sprog means kid in Australia, according to Seb. He called me it and Cash overhead him.”

She goes completely still.

Then she starts laughing.

Not a polite laugh. A real one, the laugh she does when something has actually got her, shoulders coming in, coffee nearly going out. I wait it out because there's no stopping it and honestly, I've been sitting with this road name for ten years. It's notnotfunny.

"They named you," she says, when she can speak again, "after a child."

"Cash thought it was hilarious."

"It is hilarious." She wipes her eyes. "You walked around for a decade in a cut that says SPROG on the back and I never..." She starts laughing again.

"It's a term of endearment," I say. "In certain circles."

"In what circles?"

"Circles where Cash and Ramsey make the decisions."

She gets herself back under control and looks at me with the wide-open look she has when she's happy, when all the careful holding-together she does by default has just dropped off completely.

"You're still an idiot," she says.

"Your idiot."

She kisses me. Slow and warm in the early morning light with the birds going and the brothers working behind us and the sky coming up pale over the trees.

When she pulls back, she settles against my shoulder and looks at the compound.

"Yeah," she says, after a moment. "Mine."

And that's that.