“Oh, it’s just you,” I said, and if a voice could snarl, that’s how I spoke to Bear. Snarly. I held the phone under my chin and picked at the tall grass that had grown over from the connecting field and wrapped its way around the gate latch.

“Whatever’s going on, you got it handled?” Bear asked. “Or is this gonna end with me finding half-burnt body parts in the fire pit?”

“Jesus Christ. You put one fucking body in the fire pit and suddenly it’s a big thing.”

Bear must have been somewhere near a highway because I could hear passing cars and honking truck horns. “Seriously Prep, everything okay down there? We just hit the Mississippi state line and stopped to gas up. Figured I’d check in while I could.” Motorcycles roared to life. Men shouted to one another over the noise of their engines.

“You don’t need to check in on me. I’m not a toddler,” I pointed out, sucking on the tip of my finger, where blood had pooled into a drop from the sand spur from hell.

“Yet, I can hear you pouting through the fucking phone.”

“I just got a lot of shit going on,” I muttered, pulling the gate closed behind me. Understatement of the fucking year.

“Like someone calling and asking the whereabouts of their daughter? Yeah, I’d call that a lot of shit. What did you get yourself into now?”

“No, it’s not like that,” I argued. “It’s just some guy looking for a girl who doesn’t want to be found,” I lied, and if lying to Dre’s dad didn’t feel quite right, lying to Bear felt like I was coming down with a case of something I didn’t know how to cure.

Guilt. A disease I wanted no part of.

Telling Bear about Dre. Or my new plan to have her help me with the growhouses while I took care of the Max situation, was off the table, at least until I knew it could actually work. Getting him or Grace’s hopes up, only to crush them if it all turned to shit, wasn’t something part of my plan.

Again, omitting isn’t technically lying.

“You sure you’re not just shacking up with some chick, Prep?” Bear asked, laughing at his own ridiculous statement.

“Yeah man, forgot to tell you. Me and Sylvia got something going on. It’s real serious, too. I think she might be pregnant,” I shot back, rolling my eyes like he could see me.

Sylvia was a one of the other founding Granny Growhouses.

She was also ninety-two-years-old.

“But seriously, Prep, this girl, the one who don’t want to be found. She in some sort of trouble?” Bear asked, raising his voice above the background noise, which had only grown louder.

“She’s Mirna’s granddaughter. She showed up out of the blue, all strung out and shit, and beat the fuck up. She’s gonna stick around with Mirna and watch over my plants until the facility in Sarasota has a spot.” Which was sort of the truth.

I took the file out of the back waistband of my pants.

Bear was now yelling above the noise, when he asked, “You fuck her?”

“No.”

Although, I think about it. Although, I’ve gotten a taste.

“She’s fucking strung out, has the shakes all the time. One eye is like way bigger than the other and she’s got this huge hump on her back. I mean, I’m not against it, but it’s not like she’s first on my to-do list.”

“Does she live in a bell tower, Prep? ’Cause your girl sounds a lot like Quasi-Moto.”

“She’s not my girl. Don’t try to do that thing you do where you make this into something it’s not. I just made the shitty mistake of letting her use my phone, and now I gotta get a new fucking number so her daddy stops fucking calling me wanting to know where his junkie daughter is.”

Suddenly, I was very grateful that Mirna didn’t have a phone. If I were him, and just as desperate to get in touch with her, Mirna’s house would’ve been one of the first places I’d call.

“Whatever, Prep.” Bear laughed, like he knew something I didn’t, which pissed me off and was probably the reason why the need to defend myself had me spewing my next line of bullshit.

When did life get so fucking complicated?

“You guys are looking for new BBB’s over at the clubhouse, right? Didn’t Puerto Rican Fury and Robert Dinero leave recently?” I asked.

“Yeah, Jessica and Ivette left. Jessica is knocked up and marrying some dentist, and Ivette disappeared into thin air, but you know how that goes. We could definitely use a few new faces around the MC.” Bear ignored my use of two of the nicknames I’d come up with for his club girls over the years. I’d named the one girl, Puerto Rican Fury, for good reason, she was in fact Puerto Rican, and always pissed off about something. The other I called, Robert Dinero, because like the actor, she could pass for either Spanish, Italian, or Jewish. However, her smokin’ body was a lot more banging than her male counterpart. “Why? You think the junkie girl would want to give club life a go?” Bear asked, before telling me to “hang on a sec.” He didn’t bother covering the phone when he barked orders out to his men. I held my phone away from my head, in order to avoid permanent damage to my ear drum, as he yelled out for everyone to be ready to ride out in five. “Okay, so yeah. The girl,” he said when he came back on the line.

“She’s got Daddy issues and a drug problem to boot. Think this one was actually born to be a BBB,” I pointed out.

“All right, bring her over to the clubhouse when we get back.” There was a commotion in the background, rowdy voices and crunching metal. “Fuck me. Gotta head out, natives are getting restless.” Engines revved and became so loud I either A) didn’t hear him say “bye” or B) Bear hadn’t said it at all and just hung up on me. Knowing Bear and his stellar manners, plus the fact that the guy was allergic to shirts and all that went along with that, I went with B.

Dre jerked her head down when I turned back around, like she hadn’t been caught staring at me.

She might have been the one to try to kill herself, but I was the one on borrowed time. It was time to show Dre what else I needed out of this deal of ours, before she found out the truth about her dad and Conner.

It wasn’t like she gave a fuck about her life, I told myself.

So why should I give a fuck about ruining it?

CHAPTER TWELVE