Nolan: Return to Signal Bend (5 page)

He got down to Ian’s level. “What’s up, Ian?”

The boy shrugged, bringing a reluctant shoulder up and then dropping it. “I don’t like my dad talking to her.”

Ian was only eight, but Nolan still felt defensive for his mom. “They’re just talking.”

“Everybody wants to be my mom. I just want my mom.”

Nolan knew that feeling intensely well. After Havoc had been killed, it seemed like every single one of the remaining Horde men had decided to step into his place. Len had been the most obnoxious about it. That guy had seemed always to be around exactly at the moment that Nolan most needed to be alone, when he’d thought he was closest to just losing his shit completely. It had pissed him off so much. But it had probably kept him alive.

Even to this day, ten years later, the older Horde slipped into Dad Mode with him—Len had done it just the other night, warning him off of Iris.

“They’re helping your dad, dude. And you. Not trying to be your mom. I promise.”

Ian scowled, and Nolan stood up and ruffled the boy’s blond head. He also knew that sometimes a kid just needed to be left alone to feel angry and hurt.

When Bart put his arms around Nolan’s mom and gave her a quick but sincere hug, Ian made a strangled kind of noise and stalked off to sit alone on a bench at the end of the boardwalk.

Feeling kicked by emotion himself and needing to get out of that scene, Nolan stepped off the boardwalk and decided to go check on the loading area, where the club van and three loaners were being filled with the packages wrapped and ready for delivery. They were rolling packages from the wrapping stations back in mail carts that Cox had borrowed from his uncle who worked at the main post office in Springfield.

Iris was back there with Badger, Isaac, and Gia, Isaac and Lilli’s daughter. Fuck. He hadn’t seen Iris since the other night. With an audience, he couldn’t exactly get into a big discussion about what had happened, however, so he went up to Badge and said, “Just checking in. Everything good back here?”

“Yeah, brother,” Badger answered, jumping down from inside the van. “Everything good up front?”

“Yeah. Donations are still coming in pretty steady. Everybody’s cool and in the Christmas spirit.”

“Hi, Nolan,” Gia said.

“Hey, G.”

He shifted his eyes to Iris and smiled, trying to say something just for her with that smile. He didn’t know what he was trying to tell her, though. Not to feel weird about the other night? That he wasn’t sorry that they’d kissed? Or was he trying to apologize to her for kissing her?

The cart was empty, and Isaac came around from the far side of the van. “Time for another load.”

“I’ll go for it,” Iris offered.

Isaac cocked an eyebrow at her. “You sure? Gets pretty heavy.”

“I’ll help her,” Nolan offered before he’d thought it through. “Everything’s rolling smooth up front. I can take a few minutes and grab a load.”

Isaac gave him a smirk and pushed the empty cart at Nolan. That smirk said that Len had a big fucking mouth. Jesus, he hoped nobody had said anything to Show.

Nolan turned and pushed the cart toward the street. Iris trotted to keep up with him. When he realized that he was walking faster than she could normally, he slowed down.

At a relatively private point, along the side of the building and sheltered by a parked pickup, Iris pulled on his coat and stopped. He stopped, too, and turned to her.

“I just want to say that nothing needs to get weird about the other night. Don’t worry that I’m being all girly or anything and waiting for you to do it again or thinking it meant anything. It was nice, but wasn’t a big deal.”

He should have been relieved, and he guessed part of him was, but another part of him was a little hurt. Maybe it was just all that shit that being around Bart’s kids had dredged up. But honestly, these days, shit seemed always to be dredged up in his head.

“It wasn’t?”

Her eyes—they were pretty, a soft, sky blue, and she always wore a lot of dark liner around them, so they seemed to glow a little—narrowed at his question. “Was it a big deal to you?”

The obvious right answer was ‘no.’ Everything was simpler if that kiss had meant nothing. And it probably had. If it had meant anything, it had been too much about Ani to make him anything other than a complete shit. Iris was not Ani. She was nothing like Ani, and it was hardly fair to her for him to be thinking of his dead girlfriend while he was with her. If he was trying to fill an unfillable space because for some bizarre reason she had made him think of Ani, then he was both nuts and an asshole.

And also a moron, because Showdown would absolutely kill him if he trifled with his little girl.

“I don’t know.” Shit. That was not the right answer. But he guessed it was maybe the true one. Still, he didn’t know if he could feel anything real for anybody anymore, or if his heart was in a box in the ground in Southern California, and Showdown’s daughter was not somebody to experiment on.

“I don’t know what that means.” Iris shoved her hands into her coat pockets and stared at him, her expression open and frank, without guard or hostility.

He reached toward her face, then caught himself and dropped his hand. “I don’t, either. Iris, I’m fucked up. My head is…it’s not a good place. It’s better if it didn’t mean anything.”

She took a step toward him. “Better for who?”

Before he knew what he was doing, he was fucking kissing her again.

She leaned into him right away and opened her mouth under his. His tongue found hers, and he felt the breath of her sigh against his cheek. Jesus.

He didn’t know why he was doing it again, standing on the sidewalk around the corner from Main Street, where most of the town, not to mention all of the Horde, was working on this gift drive, but he did know he was kissing Iris. It wasn’t about Ani, not this time.

She broke away first, taking back the step she’d made earlier and dropping her eyes so she was looking at the ground. “Nolan…”

He dropped his eyes, too. She was wearing bright red cowboy boots, and it made him realize that he didn’t think he’d ever seen her in any kind of shoes but cowboy boots. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I keep doing that.”

Her head came up quickly, and she frowned as she stared right into his eyes. “Well, that sucks. Don’t do it again until you know why.”

She spun on her heel and began pushing the cart up the sidewalk. Nolan stood there like a jerk for a couple of seconds, watching her walk away. Then he shook some sense back into his head and ran after her.

When he took charge of the cart, she didn’t protest, and they walked together to pick up a load of gifts.

~oOo~

Christmas with the Horde was always happy chaos. For Nolan, the morning started out calmly enough; he’d spent the night at home with his mom and brother, and they’d opened their presents to each other and had a little bit of breakfast.

Usually, he was hung over from the club party the night before, but this year, he’d bailed early, while he was still sober. Show and Shannon and all of their kids had been there, and Nolan didn’t trust himself to get drunk around Iris. Even sober, his lips had a tendency the past few days to get stuck on hers, and he didn’t even know if he liked her that way. Or if he was even capable of it.

So he’d bailed while the club kids were still around and the party was still at a PG rating. He’d tried to ride, but it was too cold, even for him, and he’d turned around and headed to his mom’s house after about half an hour. He’d been stretched out on the sofa watching television when his mom and Loki had gotten home from the party.

His mom had given him one of her patented looks that said,
I know something’s wrong, but I know you’re not going to tell me what, so I’m not going to ask, but now you know that I know
, and then she’d sent Loki to bed. Once he was down and had sworn to stay in his room until morning, she’d come in with a glass of Jack Daniels for Nolan and wine for her, and they’d put all the presents under the tree.

Afterward, she’d turned off all the lights except the tree and the lights she’d strung around the windows and fireplace, and they’d sat together on the sofa, drinking and staring at the pretty tree. Nolan had put his arm around his mom’s shoulders, and she’d rested her head on his chest, and he’d known right then that it was the best moment of the whole holiday.

The morning, as usual, was all about Loki. He didn’t believe in Santa anymore, but their mom still liked to do the holiday up as big as she could. Nolan understood it, and he was a little envious, too, in a retroactive, nostalgic way. When he’d been little, his mom had been dead broke, and his bio-dad had been a deadbeat, and they’d never had anything. Most of the time, they’d been living on the bleeding edge of homelessness. Christmas had never been a big deal. He’d never believed in Santa, because his mom hadn’t been able to afford to pretend the old dude was real.

Things had been a lot better, moneywise, since Loki had been born. Their mom wasn’t rich, but Havoc had left her some decent bank, and money had been stable. The past few years had been really good, financially. There were a lot of presents under the tree, and, as always, Loki’s eyes about bulged out of his head when he saw the spread in the morning.

Nolan enjoyed watching his brother open his gifts. Loki was a good kid. He appreciated every gift, and his mom, or Nolan, got a hug and a thank you for each one. The thank you was a real one, with a little explanation about why he liked the gift.

After breakfast, Nolan helped Loki put together a LEGO Star Wars set while their mom made some kind of casserole to bring to Badger and Adrienne’s, where the real chaos would happen. When the casserole was ready, Nolan packed up his mom’s SUV with gifts for the rest of the Horde, and they headed over.

By noon, the whole club—all the members, their old ladies, all of the kids, and even a club girl or two—was at Badger and Adrienne’s house, and the din was overwhelming. There were something like a dozen little kids in the Horde family now, all of them hopped up on the rush of sugar and new toys, and it was too cold to send anybody outside to play.

He was tense about Iris, too, trying to navigate the narrow path between obviously avoiding her and getting too close to her. She seemed to be using the same map. They kept catching each other’s eyes and turning away.

Before dessert had been served, Nolan had had all he could take.

It was easy to disappear in all that noise and activity, so he grabbed his coat and slipped out. Then he started walking.

When he was a kid, he used to walk all the fucking time. Whenever his head got too loud, he’d just walk until he could think clearly again, and then he’d walk until he’d gotten right with whatever was bugging him. Or right enough to rejoin the world, anyway. Since he’d had a bike, now he rode. There had been times that he’d put a few hundred miles on his bike on a single trip, never with any destination in mind.

For almost as long as he could remember, his head had gotten loud, and he’d had to move to make it stop. He remembered the first time. He’d been maybe eight, and his mom hadn’t been able to pay the fee for a field trip his class was going on. They’d gone without him, and he’d spent the whole class day, until the last bell, sitting in the office next to the secretary’s desk.

Even that young, Nolan had understood how hard things were for his mom. His bio-dad had been gone most of the time, so it had been just his mom and him, struggling alone, and he’d seen a lot more than she thought he had. Until Havoc, Nolan and his mom had never had anybody in their corner except each other.

So on that day, as lonely and ashamed as he’d been, he hadn’t blamed her at all.

He’d been furious and hurting, but he’d had nowhere to send it. It had just churned and churned in his head and his gut all day long, while he’d sat in that little student desk next to the secretary and been made to stay quiet and do worksheet after worksheet.