He Cheated With His Ex, So the Club President Claimed Me novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Her Old Cut

At the Friday party Rae wears Hallie's old leather vest, and Hallie plays the recording over the speakers. The door opens and Gage is standing in it.

By Friday night Brock had thrown a party, and Dot told me why.

"He's naming her," she said. "Rae. In front of everybody. He wants her patched in as his old lady before Gage gets home."

I was standing at her stove with a spoon in my hand.

"That fast?"

"He wants it done before there's anybody to say no."

I turned off the burner.

"Can you watch Eli for an hour?"

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to make him say it with my face in the room."

Dot looked at me for a long moment.

Then she picked up her purse and found a thumb drive and a cable in her junk drawer.

"The speakers in the main room take any phone," she said. "Third input from the left."

I put on my jeans and a gray shirt and nothing else of the club's.

I kissed Eli's head and walked back to the clubhouse alone.

The yard was packed.

Music thumped through the walls, and the whole club was inside, forty men and their women, drunk by nine o'clock.

I walked in through the front door.

People saw me.

The laughing near the door stopped, and then the quiet spread through the room.

Brock stood on the pool table with a beer.

Next to him stood Rae.

She was wearing my cut.

It was my vest, the one I had dropped on his sandwich, with the club's patch on the back and my name stitched under the collar.

She had picked a pen out of her pocket and crossed out HALLIE, and written RAE in marker over it.

Even from across the room I saw the marker had bled.

"Look who came," Rae said, and a few brothers laughed.

Brock didn't laugh.

"Hallie. You're not welcome here tonight."

"I won't stay long," I said. "I came to hear the announcement."

I kept walking until I reached the bar.

The man behind it was a prospect I knew, and he looked at me, and then at Brock.

"The third input," I said. "Please."

He didn't move.

"Do it," said the old brother with the gray ponytail, from the end of the bar.

The prospect plugged in my phone.

Brock jumped off the pool table.

"Don't," he said. "Don't you touch that."

I pressed play.

The music cut off.

My own recording filled the room, scratchy and loud.

"You kissed me first! You came to my room that night!"

Somebody gasped.

Brock got to the bar and reached for the phone, and the old brother with the ponytail put a hand flat against his chest.

"Let it run, Brock," he said.

"You've been fucking me every day for a month, Brock. I'm the one you really want."

I looked at the room while it played.

Every woman in there was looking at the floor or looking at Rae.

When the clip ended Brock stood very still.

"That's fake," he said.

A woman near the couch said, "Come on."

"It's cut up. She edited it. Hallie wants the house and the boy and she's making things up."

"It's got your voice on it," I said.

"Anyone can fake a voice."

"Then say my name," I said. "Say it right now, and tell me you didn't touch her."

Brock opened his mouth.

Rae crossed the floor so fast she nearly tripped on my cut.

"Don't you talk to him," she said.

"Take it off," I said.

"Excuse me?"

"That's mine. Take it off."

Rae stared at me.

Then she swung, open-handed, and slapped me across the face.

My head turned.

The room made a sound.

I stood there, with my cheek burning.

Then I stepped in and slapped her back as hard as I could.

The crack of it was louder than the music had been.

Rae stumbled into the pool table.

Her hand went to her cheek, and she stared, and her red lipstick had smeared across her teeth.

"You little bitch," she said.

"That's my vest," I said. "Take it off, or I take it off you."

A woman beside the pool table said, very clearly, "Give it back, Rae."

Another one said it too.

Then three of them were saying it, and then the whole bar.

Rae looked around.

She had walked in a month ago expecting a warm welcome from forty men and their women, and she hadn't gotten one.

She yanked the vest off and threw it at my feet.

I picked it up.

The marker on the back had soaked through the leather, and the stitching was torn.

I did not put it on.

"That's the last thing I take from this room," I said.

Brock was breathing hard.

"You're done, Hallie. You hear me? You're out. You and the boy."

"Brock."

The voice came from the front door.

It was low and flat, and nobody had raised it.

The whole room turned.

A tall man stood in the doorway in jeans and a white undershirt, with a duffel bag over one shoulder.

His hair was shorter than I remembered, with gray at the temples.

There was a burn scar on his left forearm.

Gage Rutledge looked around the room once, slowly, and then he looked at me.

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