“Don’t got table service,” she warned, starting to pile shot glasses on the bar. “You boys are gonna have to cart this shit to your women.”

“Just serve the drinks, Reb, without the attitude, you got that in you,” Boz shot back.

“You lose your memory?” she returned.

“You don’t got that in you,” Boz surmised on a mutter.

Reb didn’t reply. She turned to the shelves at the bar’s back and nabbed a full bottle of Patrón.

They hadn’t asked for top-shelf Patrón but none of the brothers stopped her.

“What’s takin’ so long?” Elvira called.

When she did, Reb frowned at Boz before asking, “What’s that about attitude?”

Boz decided not to engage.

It was a good call.

The men carted the shit to the table.

The women drank, babbled, and cackled.

Kellie hit the jukebox.

Roscoe showed with a biker groupie. Pete showed alone. Snapper showed, also alone. Malik showed to join his woman. And through this, Reb’s meager regulars hit the joint.

Millie had been right. She needed Chaos back. It was plain to see.

Justine took her turn at the jukebox and then women lost their minds and sang Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” at the top of their lungs while the men grinned and Elvira glared, mumbling, “One a’ you boys needs to get a sister up in this joint so I can counter Bon Jovi with some Fiddy.”

It was then, feeling it, High turned his attention back to the bar.

It was not a surprise Reb had her eyes on him.

She also had a shot in her hand.

She lifted it his way, then she threw it back.

After that, she set the glass aside and moved, frowning, toward a man at her bar.

She was happy for him. For them. That was what she was saying and that was all either of them were going to get even if it was Millie who talked High into taking Chaos back to Reb’s dying bar.

High turned his attention back to his girl. She had her arms thrown around Lanie, who had her arms thrown around her. Millie’s head was thrown back and her mouth was open, loudly shouting the words to a song whose popularity, after decades, never died.

He spent the night only getting loose while his girl got hammered.

But High didn’t need booze or anything else.

All he needed was the high of watching Millie let it all hang out in her classy sweater, her tight jeans, her high-heeled boots, all of this in a shady, run-down biker bar that was owned and operated by a bona fide bitch.

And when he’d had enough and she definitely had, he took her home.

Kind of.

Once there, he got blown but she didn’t swallow. He finished after he made her come, watching her ride his cock.

They slept tangled up.

He woke getting blown.

She didn’t swallow that time either. He fucked her on her knees, his eyes glued to his mark on her back, drawing it out as long as he could, wishing he could fuck her until his last breath, which brought the bonus of forcing two orgasms out of her while he was at it.

Then, once they cleaned up and spent some time cuddling, she sat next to him in his RV as he drove them home from Scruff’s parking lot where they’d spent the night.

*  *  *

“Gonna go up, see if it’s safe to return,” High muttered as he put his empty beer bottle on the table beside him with all the others (not on a coaster—they had them for the fancy furniture from Millie’s old pad that was in their new living room; they had them nowhere else in the house).

He got out of the recliner that was angled toward a now blaring TV to commence what he knew from practice felt like a yearlong journey to get to the kitchen, and he did this as Alan, in the other recliner, muttered back, “Don’t get lost.”

He felt his lips twitch but he didn’t say anything as he moved to the door that led to the stairs.

“Logan.”

High stopped and turned back to the man, a man who had not called him by that name since he told him not to do that shit months ago.

The instant Alan got his eyes, he lifted his bottle of beer.

“Proof,” he stated.

“Proof, what?” High asked.

Alan swung his bottle around before his gaze went to the ceiling and back to High.

“Proof you’re real.”

The words were quiet and they were few.

But they said a lot.

Enough he’d let the man get away with calling him Logan.

He didn’t reply. He just nodded and left the room.

Alan was there because the women were over. They’d showed two hours ago. When they did, he and Alan immediately absented themselves for reasons that were obvious.

But now he was hungry.

He was a fuckuva lot hungrier by the time he hit the kitchen.

Even so, once he got to the doorway, he stopped.

This was not because Freddie had shouted, “Pink stinks!” and when he did, High made a mental note to bring the boy with him and his father the next time this crew got together.

No.

It was because the huge-ass space was a mess. Plastic tiaras scattered everywhere. Feather scarves. Crumbs and spent wrappers mingled with half-eaten cupcakes. Glow sticks snapped and glowing. Wineglasses. Wine bottles. Pop cans. Opened bags of chips. Sprinklings of pink and white M&M’s.

It was like Cleo’s thirteenth birthday was happening, not like the women were planning it.

High saw Chief picking his way across the top of the kitchen table with no one grabbing him to put him down (as usual).

Poem was sitting in Veronica’s lap, being stroked, looking like she was asleep.

And Logan was taking Poem in as Katy declared, “I want a pink birthday too, Aunt Millie.”

“Aunt Millie gives you one every year, honey,” Dot returned.

“Well, I want another one,” Katy told her mother.

“You can have whatever you want, sweetheart,” Millie told her niece.

“Millie,” Zadie called, and his woman looked to his baby girl who was wearing a tiara and had a feather thing wrapped around her neck. Then again, so was Millie. “On my birthday, I wanna be queen.”

“You’re always queen,” Deb muttered, grinning at her daughter and sitting across from Millie at their huge-ass kitchen table (also wearing a tiara and a feather thing).

Zadie turned to her mother. “I wanna be more queen.”

“Do not deviate from that dream, sister,” Kellie advised, smiling at his baby girl. When Zadie looked to Kellie, she finished, “Live for it.”

“I already do,” Zadie informed her.

High swallowed a grunt of laughter.

“What Kellie’s saying is, you can have whatever you want, too, darling,” Millie told Zadie.

Zadie gave her attention back to Millie and beamed.

Millie beamed back.

Seeing that, High no longer felt like laughing.

No, looking at his daughter and his woman, he backed out of the doorway.

He retraced his steps down the hall, but this time, he did it looking at the walls.

Walls Millie had covered with the pictures she’d had in her pad in Cheesman.

Pictures that now mingled with framed photos she’d unearthed from that crate. Photos of him and his woman from years ago.

There were also photos of him and his woman now. His girls. His brothers. All of them together. Even photos from back in the day of Keely and Black.

He moved up the stairs, the walls there also covered with photos.

At the top of the stairs, he turned to his and Millie’s bedroom.

He walked straight to his side of the bed.

The very first night they moved in, he got in bed beside his woman and when he did, he saw she’d put it on his nightstand.

A blown-up eight-by-ten in a silver frame.

It was a picture of them at a Chaos cookout years before, Millie sitting on a picnic table pressed into him, High standing beside her with her in his arms.

He remembered that shot. It was the first photo she’d placed in the first album of them she’d made.

It was the first picture of them ever taken.