Chapter 181 Morning of
Ryder's POV
I barely slept.
Every time I closed my eyes I saw Jaxon's face in the hospital when he gave me his blessing to serve as acting president while he recovered. The trust in his words and actions, and the weight of the responsibility to handle the club well. and I kept wondering if that look would still be on his face today when he saw Sage and me walk through that door together.
I gave up trying to sleep around five in the morning, lay in my bed in the dark for another twenty minutes telling myself to relax. I then got up to make coffee because it was better than staring at the ceiling any longer.
Sage had stayed at the clubhouse overnight in one of the guest rooms, keeping things appropriate even though we both would have preferred otherwise. It had been the right call. Everything was new and fragile and the last thing either of us needed was to give Jaxon more to process when we were already walking into enough chaos as it was.
I drove my truck to the clubhouse through empty early morning streets and found her in the bar area already awake, sitting at the counter with her hands under her chin, looking as exhausted as I felt.
"Couldn't sleep either?" I asked.
"Not really." She accepted the coffee I handed her and held it with both hands. "Too nervous about today."
We sat at the empty bar and drank in silence for a while. The clubhouse was quiet around us. It should have felt peaceful. But we were both lost in our own thoughts about what Jaxon might say or do when we arrived.
"What if he changed his mind?" Sage asked quietly. "What if he spent all night thinking about it and he decides he can't handle seeing us together? That it's too close, too complicated."
"Then we deal with it," I said, though the thought sat in my stomach, forming knots there. "We're together regardless of what Jaxon decides. But I really hope he doesn't make us choose."
"Me too." She looked down at her coffee. "I don't want to have to choose between you and my brother. That would break me again and I don't think I would recover from it easily."
"You won't have to choose," I said. "Jaxon loves you more than he loves being right about anything. We just need to show him this is real and that I am going to treat you the way you deserve."
"You'd better," she said.
"I know." I looked at her. "I'm going to."
She nodded once, accepting that, and went back to her coffee.
At nine thirty we got ready to leave. The drive to the hospital was twenty minutes, which would put us there right at ten the way Jaxon had asked. I helped Sage into the truck and we pulled out of the clubhouse lot. The morning was grey and still, the kind of early Saturday that felt like the world had not quite decided what it wanted to be yet.
The drive felt endless even though it was twenty minutes. Every red light seemed to stretch longer than it should. Every turn brought us closer to a conversation I had been running through in my head since the phone call ended last night. I had not managed to feel prepared for it no matter how many times I rehearsed it.
Sage reached across the console and found my hand. I held it tightly, grateful for her presence beside me even though I knew she was carrying the same nerves I was.
"Whatever he says," I told her, "we're in this together."
"Together," she agreed. She said it like she meant it.
We drove quietly for a while, the road stretching in front of us.
I thought about the conversation Jaxon and I had in the hospital in the days after she left for Arizona, when he had looked at me from that bed and told me in plain language that I was an idiot for the way I had handled things. He had not been wrong. He had said it without cruelty, but the point had landed clearly. And then I had gone ahead and proved him right by spending two week in silence while Sage was in arizona.
What if that was exactly what he wanted to address today? Not just us being together, but me specifically. My track record. Whether I had actually earned the right to stand in front of him and ask him to accept this.
"You're thinking too loud," Sage said, squeezing my hand.
"Sorry." I exhaled. "Just going over everything he might say."
"What are you most afraid of?" she asked.
I thought about it honestly. "That he looks at me and decides I am not someone he trusts with you. That he can forgive me for everything else but not for that week in the hospital. Not for leaving you alone when I should have been there."
Sage was quiet for a moment. "I've already forgiven you for it," she said. "That has to count for something."
"It counts for everything," I said. "I just hope it counts for Jaxon too."
"We can't control his reaction," she said. "We can only control how we show up and what we tell him. If we go in there honest and he can see that we mean it, that's all we have."
She was right. There was no version of this where I could script what happened on the other side of that door. All I could do was walk through it.
The hospital came into view and I pulled into the parking lot and found a space near the entrance and put the truck in park.
We sat there for a moment without moving. The engine ticked as it cooled. Through the windshield the hospital entrance looked ordinary, with people moving in and out like it was any other morning.
"Ready?" I asked.
"No," Sage admitted. "But let's do this anyway."