Rest & Trust (29 page)

“Yeah, I’m good. How about you?”

“Good, good. I’m good, too.” He nodded. “Real good, yeah. It’s good you’re good. Tim’s good?”

“Yeah, great.” Fuck a duck, this was the worst. “Thomas. I actually wanted to talk to you about something.”

His dopey grin faltered and then fell back into place. “Okay. Shoot.”

Sadie took a deep breath, letting the air fill and expand her chest. After she let it out, she said, “I’m an addict. Heroin and Oxy.”

His face closed down like he’d dropped a security door over it. “That so?”

She nodded. “Yeah. I was hooked for almost ten years, since I was fourteen. About a year and a half ago, I had this crazy meltdown at my job, and my father put me in rehab. I was at the Bright Future Recovery Center, up in Big Bear. You know it?”

Slowly, he shook his head. The atmosphere in the room had chilled perceptibly.

“It’s cool. Like a resort. I was in for three months. I’ve been out over a year. I’ve been clean since the day I lost it at work.”

“That’s good for you, then. You got a point?”

“Thomas, are you happy?”

He stared at her, not blinking. Finally, he said, “Sadie, you’re my baby brother’s girl. I’ve met you...”—he looked suddenly lost, like he had no idea how often he’d met her or how well he knew her—“not many times. I’m old enough to be your daddy. Why do you think you get to ask me that?”

She didn’t know if she was doing anything right here. Maybe she was making things worse. She was trying to talk to him the way they’d stressed in rehab: open and kind. Honest and clear. “Because I love Sherlock, and he loves you.”

Thomas laughed bitterly at that. Since she’d been sitting in this rank, filthy room, his perception had sharpened noticeably. Whatever he was feeling had cleared his head somewhat. “You really don’t know what you’re talking about, Sadie Bug. So just get to your point and get it over with.”

“Sherlock’s worked it out so you can go to Bright Future. There’s a private room reserved for you right now. It’s a great place, Thomas. So pretty, right on the lake. And the people are…not lame.”

Thomas shook his head. “Nah, I don’t think so. Tim’s tried that a few times. Moms, too. Rehab’s not for me. I can’t have all those people in my grill.”

Sadie nodded and let it drop. She didn’t feel like she had the standing to try to strong-arm him, and she didn’t know what else to say. “Okay. I just wanted to let you know that it was arranged.”

She stood and went to the door. As she took hold of the doorknob, Thomas said, “Sadie,” and she turned around and waited to hear what he wanted to say.

“Why’d he send you to talk to me?”

“He didn’t. I asked if I could.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know for sure. I guess…I guess it’s because I know what it’s like not to be able to let anybody
know
. If that makes sense. Anyway, sorry I pissed you off.”

He shook his head. “We’re cool.”

She left his room feeling like she’d done every bit of that completely wrong. When she went back out to the living room, Sherlock and his mom both turned to her, wearing the same expression of curiosity and guarded hope.

She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I did it wrong.”

Sherlock stood and came to her. “No. You couldn’t have. Trying at all was right. Thank you.”

Over in her chair, Patty sighed. “Maybe this is just the way it’s supposed to be. Maybe this is God’s plan for Thomas.”

Sherlock tensed. “Moms, come on.”

“No, Tim. You keep trying to fix him, and you love him less every time you can’t. He’s not your failure. He’s your brother, and he took care of you. Love your brother and forget the rest. Maybe that’s what needs fixing.”

~oOo~

They didn’t stay long after that; the mood was not very social, even after Sherlock told his mom that they were expecting a baby. Patty was pleased and said all the right things, but she kept giving Sadie and Sherlock melancholy looks, too.

So Sherlock loaded the truck bed with the gardening tools Sadie needed, and they got into the truck and prepared to head home.

As the truck engine roared to life, movement at the corner of Sadie’s eye caught her attention. “Sherlock, wait.” She tapped the window glass with her finger, indicating Thomas, who was loping toward them.

Sherlock killed the engine and lowered the windows. Thomas, winded, came up to Sadie’s side and leaned in. His breath was foul, but Sadie made sure not to react to it.

Thomas eyed his brother. “Rehab doesn’t work for me. Good money after bad, remember?”

Sadie turned to Sherlock, who nodded calmly. “I remember.”

“So why again?”

“You took care of me. Now I want to take care of you. We’re having a baby in the spring. I’d like him to know his uncle.”

“Or her,” Sadie interjected.

“Or her.”

The brothers faced each other silently for a long time. Then Thomas turned to Sadie. “I guess you brought propaganda with you? Brochure or somethin’?”

She opened the glove box and handed him a brochure. He stood at the side of the truck and thumbed through it. When he’d gone through to the last page, he closed it and returned his attention to his brother. “When would I have to go?”

“They’ll hold the bed through the weekend. Tomorrow night.”

“I’ll call you.” With that, Thomas turned and walked back to the house, rolling the brochure into a tube as he went.

Sadie turned to her man, who shrugged and said, “Probably nothing.” He started the truck.

“He’s thinking about it, though. That’s not nothing.”

“I guess it’s not.”

~oOo~

Thomas called the next morning, and Sherlock picked him up before noon and drove him up to Big Bear.

Sadie stayed home; she felt awkward about nosing in like she had, even if she had made a positive difference, and she knew what it was like to be left at a place like that. That was an intimate, scary goodbye, and she didn’t belong in Thomas’s.

Anyway, she had gardening tools now, and bulbs to plant. So she’d spent the afternoon doing just that. It was a good day. She felt happy.

Being pregnant was a breeze, so far. No morning sickness at all. She got tired and needed an afternoon nap, but hey—she wasn’t working, so no problem there. She’d decided not to add finding a job to her list of new things. Making a home and a baby were enough right now, and Sherlock was perfectly content with that.

She didn’t need to work; Sherlock was kind of loaded. Being an outlaw biker apparently paid really well.

Some pretty intense stuff was going on with the Horde, that was clear. Sherlock had sent her to Bart and Riley’s a couple of times, and all the other women and the kids had been there. He’d left unexpectedly and come home in a dark mood a few times, too.

Whatever it was, it didn’t get in her way much, and he told her it was just something they had to ride out. So, okay.

She’d stopped running—all the Horde stuff, getting shipped off to Bart and Riley’s unexpectedly or suddenly having a guard on her, made it difficult to keep up a routine, and Sherlock had had a snit about her running while she was pregnant, even though it was perfectly safe.

She kept herself occupied by being a total Fifties wifey type. She kept the house and did the shopping and planned a garden. The pantry and closets were now aggressively organized. She’d already designed and redesigned and then designed again a nursery for the totally unused and empty third bedroom. Ezra came over, and she practiced mommying. She went to lunch or just hung out with the other Horde women.

She was
that
chick. And she
liked
it.

She also gamed and dabbled in writing hacking code—though Sherlock had lost his enthusiasm for teaching her.

She felt happy. Really happy.

When Sherlock pulled the truck down to the end of the driveway, Sadie, sitting on the ground placing red tulip bulbs in the neat arrangement of holes she’d made, stopped and turned, waiting.

He was smiling as he got out and came to her.

“How’d it go?”

“We’ll see. But he’s there. That’s a start.” He crouched down and kissed her. “Mmm. Dirt.”

She giggled and wiped her gloved hand across her mouth. “Sorry.”

“You made more dirt,” he laughed, and brushed his fingers over her face. She closed her eyes and savored the feel of his hands on her.

He turned and picked up the package of bulbs. “Pretty. You have a thing for tulips, don’t you?”

Sadie took the package from him and reached in for another bulb. “Red tulips were my mother’s favorite flower. I don’t remember her very much. Just a couple of things, like snapshots. I remember her laugh. I remember when she’d get the Beemer out and put the top down on the weekends, and she’d put a headscarf around my head and a pair of her sunglasses on my face, and we’d go out and be Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn. And I remember red tulips.”

She studied the photograph on the bag, showing the variety of tulip she was planting. When Sherlock went a while without saying anything, she looked up. He was staring at her, his eyes burning.

“So I guess they’re my favorite flower, too,” she added, feeling shy.

“I love you, little outlaw.”

~oOo~

“You see anything yet?”

Sadie jumped and blushed as Sherlock came up behind her. She watched his progress in the mirror she was standing before, turned sideways. Naked, because she’d been looking for a bump.

He wore nothing but jeans; he’d been in the bathroom, shaping his beard. In Sadie’s opinion, there was basically nothing sexier than a bearded man with a good body wearing only a pair of good jeans, slung low, button open.

She poked a finger into her gut. “Nope. Nothing. The app says twelve to sixteen weeks is when it happens.”

“You’re nine weeks.”

“Almost ten.”

He chuckled and kissed her shoulder. His hand smoothed over her soft, but more or less flat, stomach. She was on the thin side, but she was never going to have a body like Pilar’s. Way too much work, and there wasn’t much point; she’d seen to it that she’d never be beautiful. She was little and soft and scarred.

“So chill out, little outlaw. Why the rush?”

“I want a bump. Something I can feel.”

As he trailed kisses from her shoulder to her neck, he whispered, “Feel me.”

Sadie let her eyes flutter shut and did what he said. She stopped thinking about what she couldn’t feel and focused instead on what she could: the soft press of his lips, the cool, light scrape of his piercing, the brush of his beard, the light grit of his callused hands. She turned in his arms, her bare chest brushing his. He bent his head and kissed her, and she drew his tongue into her mouth. He grunted and closed his arms around her, bending her body backward, under him.

She knew exactly what he wanted, exactly how to move with him, the particular choreography that their bodies had learned together. It wasn’t a routine, something too often repeated. It was simply a knowing.