Chapter 285 Wake up

Chapter 285 Wake up
Ryder's POV

The room Jaxon had told me to sleep in was at the back of the clubhouse.

It was not a comfortable room. A single bed, a small window, a dresser that had been there since before I joined the club and had nothing in it. Brothers used it occasionally when they needed to sleep on site. It smelled like old wood and industrial cleaner and the specific absence of anyone who actually lived there.

I lay on the bed in the dark and did not sleep.

Diego had left at four. He had not told me where he was going. He had finished his coffee and stood up and said he would be in Millbrook for a few days and that I should think carefully about what I was going to do next, and then he had walked out the door with the same unhurried certainty he had walked in with.

I had stayed at the bar for another hour after that. Then I had come to this room because standing in the main bar of the clubhouse at seven in the evening feeling the way I felt had a particular quality of pathetic that I was not interested in sustaining in front of the brothers.

I stared at the ceiling.

I had destroyed the best morning of my life. That was the simple version of it. The baby. The ring. The land. The future that had been sitting right there in our kitchen in the candlelight of a dinner I had planned and Tommy had helped set up. It had been right there and I had taken it and broken it with a question that had come out of fear wearing the clothes of honesty.

Diego had said my brain had found a way to protect me from the joy.

I turned that over in the dark for a long time.

There was something true in it that I had been avoiding looking at since this morning. Not the Diego part. The deeper part underneath the Diego part. The part about what happened inside me when things were genuinely, completely good. When there was nothing to manage and nothing to navigate and nothing to protect anyone from. When it was just: this is your life and it is exactly what you wanted and all you have to do is let it be.

I was not good at that.

I had spent fifteen years being the man who saw problems coming. Who anticipated threats. Who stayed one step ahead of whatever was about to go wrong so that when it did, the club was not caught off guard and the brothers were not caught flat-footed and Jaxon was not left without backup. That was the job. That had always been the job.

But Sage was not the job. The baby was not the job. The ring on her finger was not something I needed to manage or anticipate or protect anyone from. And when my brain had encountered something that was simply, entirely good, it had done the only thing it knew how to do with an unguarded moment.

It had built a threat.

Out of nothing. Out of a number and twenty minutes alone at a stove.

I was still awake at three in the morning.

I was still awake at five.

At six-fifteen I got up, washed my face, and went to find Tommy.

He was already in the main room. Of course he was. Tommy Garrett's natural sleep schedule had always been a mystery to everyone who knew him. He looked up when I came in with the expression of someone who had not expected me to appear yet but was not surprised.

"You look terrible," Tommy said.

"I didn't sleep," I said.

"I know," he said. "I could hear you not sleeping from three rooms away."

I sat on the stool beside him.

"I need to talk to you and Jaxon," I said. "About what I do next."

"What does next look like?" Tommy asked.

"Not an apology," I said. "She does not need another apology. She has heard the apology and it did not reach the place it needed to reach." I looked at the bar. "I need to do something that is not words. Something that shows her rather than tells her. Something that deals with the actual problem, which is not that I said the wrong thing but that a part of me let doubt in when it had no right to be there."

Tommy looked at me carefully.

"You've been thinking all night," he said.

"All night," I confirmed.

"And?" Tommy said.

"And I need Jaxon," I said. "Because I need to know if what I'm thinking is something that helps or something that makes it worse. I am not in a position right now to trust my own judgment about what Sage needs."

Tommy picked up his phone.

"I'll call him," he said.

Jaxon arrived at the clubhouse at seven forty-five. He came through the door in his cut and looked at me with the expression he had worn since yesterday morning, the cold contained version that meant he was not over it and was not pretending to be.

He sat down.

"Talk," he said.

"I don't want to apologize again," I said. "She has heard sorry. Sorry is not what fixes this."

"Correct," Jaxon said.

"I need to do something that proves I trust her," I said. "Not says it. Proves it. Something concrete that she can hold in her hands and look at and know that what happened yesterday morning is not going to happen again. Not because I promised it won't. Because I did something that makes it structurally impossible to pretend otherwise."

Jaxon and Tommy both looked at me.

"What are you thinking?" Jaxon asked.

I told them.

When I finished, the two of them were quiet for a moment. Tommy was looking at the bar. Jaxon was looking at me.

"That," Jaxon said slowly, "is either the right thing or a disaster."

"Which one?" I asked.

"I don't know yet," Jaxon said. "Tell me the rest of it.”