Page 23 of Thunder

Always was.

I've got reasons to know it that have nothing to do with a busted hip.

I shove every one of them down where they belong, because she's kneeling in the dirt trying to figure out if I've done myself permanent damage, and it'd be a low thing to be thinking about her mouth right now.

"It's not the joint," she says, half to herself. "You'd be screaming if it was the joint. It's the muscle. It seized around the fragment and dumped you."

She looks up at me, and her hand's still on my thigh, warm through the denim, and she seems to realize it the same second I do, and she doesn't move it.

"You could've broken your neck, you know that? A gate that size comes down the wrong way, and it's not your hip we'd be talking about."

"I know."

"Then why, Thunder?" It comes out raw. "Why are you out here doing this alone? You've got a whole club of men who'd hang that gate in ten minutes. You've got a cane. Why in God's name are you⁠—"

"Because I can't be the man who holds the cane."

It comes out flatter and harder than I mean it to, and it shuts her up.

I look away from her out across the lot because it's easier than looking at her face while I say the rest.

"I've been the Sergeant at Arms of this club for years," I tell her.

"You know what that is? It's the sword. Phantom points, I go. Somebody threatens this family, I'm the one who walks into the dark and makes it stop, and I've been that man so long I don't know how to be any other kind. It's not a job. It's my purpose."

The gate lies in the dirt where it fell. I don't look at it.

"And a few weeks ago a man walked into our bunkhouse and I couldn't stop him. Took a bullet trying and it wasn't enough, and now I've got a piece of him living in my hip, and every morning I wake up and find out all over again that the sword's got a crack in it."

My jaw works.

"Club's stretched thin right now. Real thin. Somethin's comin' and every man's pulling double, and I'm out here provin' to a fence gate that I can still pull my weight because if I can't do that, Presley, if I'm not the sword anymore, then I don't rightly know what I am."

She's gone very still, crouched there in front of me. "You're a father," she says quietly.

"Yeah." That one I can answer. "That's the one thing left I know I'm still good for. My girl, and this club. Those are the two things I'd crawl to that gate on both broken legs for."

I finally look at her.

"The club's my whole life, Presley. It and Raine. That's all I've had for years and it's been enough." And here's where I should stop.

Here's where a smart man stops, a man protecting himself, a man who remembers she ended it and walked out his door and told him no more lies.

I know exactly where the edge of the cliff is.

I've known the whole time.

I say it anyway.

"The club, and my daughter." I hold her eyes. "And now you."

She doesn't move.

The words sit there in the hot noon air between us, three of them, and now you, the closest I've come to saying all of it out loud.

They hit her as hard as a slap, her lips parting, her eyes going bright, her breath catching somewhere in her chest.

"Thunder—"