by Hazel Parker
Chapter 10: Vance
Another two weeks went by before Vance had to go back to the greenhouse for more money, and this time, he was much more confident about the whole thing. It went smoothly; so much so that he’d far overestimated the amount of time that he’d need to make the trip, so it was barely sunset by the time he got back to the motel. Just as Vance had thought, he’d had no trouble from any police or rival bikers. Sheila and Marcos were still at work, not scheduled to close the bar for another several hours, so Vance decided that it would be a better idea to keep the money in his room until tomorrow morning when he could put it in the safe when he opened instead of trying to smuggle it in and risking one of them asking questions. Besides, he deserved a true day off every now and again, and this was as close as he was likely to get.
Speaking of hard work, Nina had finished cleaning up the parking lot—he’d have to be more conscious about throwing his cigarette butts down—and had moved on to washing the windows of the rooms. She obviously did it often enough that they weren’t filthy, but it was still clear where she’d already washed and where she hadn’t. The windows of his own room, he noticed, had been cleaned, but that was perhaps because it contributed to the look of the entire motel.
“Do you ever stop working?” he called, startling her from her work. She popped out one earbud and turned around to face him, looking tired.
“I’m like a shark; if I stop moving, I’ll die,” she quipped. “How was your personal errand?”
Vance shrugged. They’d taken to calling it that, since he couldn’t give her much detail about what he was actually doing.
“Oh, nothing special. Pretty boring, honestly.” Nina nodded, glancing down at her watch for what had to be the first time in a while, because she grimaced when she saw the time.
“Let me guess,” he sighed, “you just realized that you forgot to eat lunch, and now it’s past 6:00 and you’re starving?”
Nina smirked. “God, you must be killer at charades, if you read all that from just my face.”
“I just know you,” he replied easily.
“Does that mean you’re looking to get dinner?” Vance asked, and Nina laughed.
“It means I’m on my own for food, and so are you,” she shut him down. “I’m not looking for a rebound date just because I’m single again.”
“That’s not what I was offering,” he only half lied. “I just know you like Chinese food and I was going to order some tonight, so I figured we could order together, if you wanted to save the delivery guy a trip.” Nina pulled an amused, skeptical face, but put her wash rag into the bucket, anyway.
“Only if you’re buying,” she accepted. Vance rolled his eyes like that hadn’t been the plan all along and took out his phone to call in the order. She wanted sesame chicken with extra dumplings for them to split, and he just asked for the spiciest pork dish they had, not feeling particularly picky. He really wasn’t the biggest Chinese takeout fan, but if it meant sharing a meal with Nina and ensuring that she actually ate instead of just working through the evening, he’d make the sacrifice.
“The food will be here in half an hour or my money back,” he announced as soon as he hung up. Nina groaned.
“Ugh, great. That’s just enough time to finish the windows.” Vance reached into the bucket to remove the wash rag and squeegee before she could even make a move toward it and cut her off before she could object.
“Don’t argue,” he curtailed. “I’ve been on the road all day, so I’m dying to move around a little, and you could use a break.”
“Why would I argue with that?” she asked, sitting down on the curb to watch him wash the windows for her, looking impressed, flattered, and, for the first time since he’d met her, happy.
Chapter 11: Nina
Because even when he was doing something nice for her, Vance had to be so… Vance, he intentionally spilled water from the bucket on his shirt just so he could justify taking it off in front of her. It was a much nicer day today, not quite warm but getting there, so she was able to sit on the curb and watch him work shirtless. Normally, she’d have stopped him, told him that this was her job and that it wasn’t necessary for a guest to help her without pay, but Vance was different. She didn’t feel so bad allowing him to work on her motel because he lived here. Besides, she had a feeling that even if she did tell him that it wasn’t necessary for him to do anything, it wouldn’t make a difference. He was stubborn, just as she was, and if he had his mind set on washing her windows, he was going to do so.
While he worked, they talked. She avoided bringing up Adam no matter how obviously Vance tried to steer the conversation toward their relationship, so instead, they discussed everything else while they waited for food. The windows took only a few minutes, since she’d done most of them already, so most of the talk consisted of Nina pointing out spots he’d missed and Vance flicking water at her from the washrag. The Chinese food delivery arrived only minutes after Vance finished washing and disposing of the water in the bucket, and though Nina thought that it would be better to eat separately, they decided to go into Vance’s room to divide up the order. Once the meals were already spread out on the bed and the one small bedside table, however, it seemed a little pointless to pack it all back up and take it into two separate rooms…
“Do you not know how to use chopsticks?” Nina asked, skillfully swiping a dumpling out from under his clumsy chopstick that was poised more to stab the food through the center than to pick it up and put it in his mouth. Vance rolled his eyes.
“Don’t judge me,” he defended, “it’s a useless skill.” She slipped a second dumpling off the edge of his stick and taking a bite out of it with a teasing smile on her face.
“Is it?” she taunted. Vance laughed and batted her hands away from the food so that she turned her attention to her own meal and gave him a little break from her chopstick prowess.
“I eat a lot of takeout, so you’d think I’d be better at the technique,” he joked.
“I survived off nothing but Chinese food in college,” she said. “My blood was probably 90% MSG for four years.” She sighed. “I really wish I cooked more, honestly. I’d just started living in my own place in Portland after I graduated and was starting to cook pretty often for Adam and me, but then my dad passed and we had to move down here.”
“So you’re too busy to cook, I guess?”
Nina shrugged. “That’s part of it, I guess,” she admitted, “but it’s more so the fact that Adam and I’s schedules always clashed. He would rather go out for dinner once or twice a week and then worked the rest of the nights. It just feels like way too much work to cook for one, you know?”
Vance couldn’t help but whistle lowly. “Man, he doesn’t know how lucky he was,” he murmured. “If somebody was offering to cook for me, I’d jump at the opportunity to eat it.” Nina frowned.
“You don’t cook a lot either, I guess?” she asked, and he shook his head.
“Not exactly possible when you’re always in motels and shit.” Nina looked actually sympathetic, almost like she pitied him.
“Well,” she started after a moment’s pause, “why don’t you let me cook for you?”
“You’d want to?”
Nina shrugged. “I’d love to be able to cook for someone. The kitchen in my apartment hasn’t seen any action in months. I can go shopping for some groceries this weekend. Just let me know what you want to eat and I’ll make it.”
Nina waited for Vance to request something ridiculous, like a four course lobster dinner or filet mignon, but he didn’t. Instead, he nodded pensively.
“I’ll think about it,” he said. “Thanks.” The response was a little surprising, considering that she’d steeled herself for some teasing, but Vance was always full of surprises. If there was one thing that she could expect from Vance, it was that she never knew what to expect when he was around. It wasn’t just the thrill and the danger and the constant unpredictability of his lifestyle: no, that wasn’t w
hat surprised her above everything else. It was his personality that confused her more than anything. On the one hand, he was rough, even aggressive, and powerful in ways that terrified Nina.
However, there was a second side to him. It wasn’t soft or docile or refined, but it wasn’t as mean as he tried to play. There was a kindness to him, a good heart beneath the roughness of his exterior. She knew that she wouldn’t tame the wildness that he lived; no woman could, but that was what made him so interesting. That was what made her feel so safe around him all the time: the fact that he was a loose cannon, someone who would stop at nothing to keep her safe even while putting her in more danger than she’d ever been in before. The fact that she couldn’t control him or even foresee what he might do next only made her more eager to be around him every moment, to satisfy that curiosity and to feel alive herself.
As she sat up straighter in bed, she groaned as her stiff spine made pronounced cracking noises that put a voice to how much she was aching. She reached up and tried to rub her own shoulder, but the tension in them was so deep that there was no way that it would go away with her own delicate touch. Vance raised an eyebrow.
“Sore back?” he asked, and she groaned again.
“Tight shoulders,” she replied. “I’m not as tall as you, so I have to reach up pretty far to wash the windows.” Vance motioned for her to sit in front of him, sighing exasperatedly when Nina didn’t move immediately. “Well, come here,” he said impatiently.
“For what?” Nina asked skeptically. Vance rolled his eyes.
“I’m going to give you a shoulder massage,” he explained as if it were obvious. She hesitated.
“I don’t know that that’s appropriate,” she said, and Vance laughed.
“Seriously?” he demanded. “Your shoulders are too sensual for me to touch? Believe it or not, I can control myself. I just normally choose not to.” She knew that this would be another secret that she’d have to keep from Adam if she allowed him to rub her back. It was more intimate than just a friendly dinner, but at the same time, Vance was right—it’s not like she was going to be naked and oily. It was a shoulder rub, something that she and her female friends used to give each other all the time in college without second thoughts and certainly without any sexual overtones. Why should it be any different with Vance?
“Unless,” Vance taunted, “you’re worried that you won’t be able to control yourself once I start to touch your body.” At that, Nina flushed. Now it was almost a competition: if she didn’t allow him to give her a back rub, he’d assume that she was scared that she’d succumb to his rugged handsomeness and rogue charms. Even if that were true—which, for the record, it wasn’t—she couldn’t let him know that she was even having those thoughts. Nina scooted so that she was sitting cross-legged in front of him, his legs spread out on either side of her, and he rested his hands on her shoulders. They were big and warm and instantly relaxing, putting just the right amount of pressure on her sore body so that she felt a little pain in the tense muscles but not enough to ask him to stop.
He pressed his thumbs to her shoulders with the kind of masterful skill of someone who’d done this a hundred times before, but she wasn’t even thinking about that as he rubbed away all the pain from the hard work she did not just today, but every day. God, how long had it been since she’d had a massage? She was sure that she hadn’t had one since college, since her friends had all moved away once they’d graduated and this wasn’t really Adam’s wheelhouse.
“You have a lot of knots,” Vance remarked. Nina wanted to shrug, but couldn’t with his hands on her. He was right, but she didn’t exactly want to show him how much she was enjoying this.
“I sit at my desk a lot,” she dodged, but Vance disagreed.
“No,” he argued, “this isn’t just from sitting. Knots like these can’t be from anything but heavy lifting.”
“Well, I do a fair amount of that, too,” she admitted. “Sometimes I think my back is just going to be in knots forever.”
Vance shook his head. “Nah,” he reassured. “I mean, I can’t do it in a night, but you’re not too far gone.” He’d been digging at a particularly tender spot under her shoulder blade, one that often caused her pain during her day and sometimes even kept her up at night, but was seemingly having a bit of trouble with it. He reached under her shirt without asking and began to unclasp her bra, causing her to shoot up in alarm.
“Hey!” she exclaimed, jumping away from him a little. “What are you doing?”
“I need to get under your bra strap to get this knot,” he explained. “Purely business; not pleasure.” Nina slapped his hands away as he reached again, and he threw his hands up in mock surrender. “Alright, fine,” he succumbed, “if you don’t want me to work it out, I won’t.”
She hesitated. Logically, she knew that she should be leaving now. That’s what a good girl would do; that’s what Nina had always done to every guy who’d ever tried to get into her pants without making a commitment to her. However, in this moment, with no one around to see, Nina was beginning to not be able to see the point anymore. She’d already taken off her sweater in the heat of Vance’s room and was wearing just a cami top beneath it, and besides, he wasn’t facing her, so what was he really going to see?
As she unhinged her bra and tugged it out through her shirt strap, Vance began to massage her shoulders even deeper than he had been doing, and it was so relaxing that she began to feel almost a little drunk, like she was forgetting where she was and who she was with. It gave her time to think about why she was really letting Vance undo her bra and touch the bare skin around the thin lines of her top.
Nina couldn’t help but think about the fact that she was, in fact, single now. It wasn’t as if that had been a factor in the breakup, and she certainly wasn’t happy about what had happened between herself and Adam, but it meant that she was, for the first time in years, free to date whomever she chose—and to sleep with whomever she chose. She wanted nothing more than to flip over and kiss him, to rip his shirt off him and just give in to what they both knew they yearned to do, but that would be a bad idea. She was still in a pretty angry state of mind from what had happened with Adam, too, and she shouldn’t be making any big, rash decisions, no matter how good they might feel. He was a customer here, and one who didn’t really have a choice but to stay, possibly for quite a long time.
On the other hand, Vance, no matter how much she didn’t want him to, would eventually go away. That was why he was staying in her motel at all, she knew—because he needed to be able to get out at a moment’s notice. He’d have his “family,” his brothers, and every other bridge in his life was designed to be burned. That was why Nina shouldn’t get close to him. Already, so much trouble had come from it, and if she had to guess, Nina would say that the danger was only going to escalate. However, the safest place she could find to shield herself from the danger that came with being near Vance was right by his side. She wanted to tell herself that she needed to be there rather than wanted to, but as his warm, magic fingers massaged away all the tension from her upper back, she knew that to say that would be to lie to herself. She wanted him close to her because she liked him.
Vance’s hands were slowly moving down Nina’s back even though she’d reassured him that her problem area was the upper back, finding all the knots that had been there for so long that she didn’t even realize that they were there. She’d been living with low-level discomfort for so long that she’d gotten accustomed to it and didn’t even notice it until Vance began to get rid of it.
“That feels good,” she said softly, melting into his touch. He kneaded her back lower and lower, pushing her shirt out of the way but not taking it off completely because that would have been a step too far and they both knew it. Neither of them spoke, and since there were few other guests in the motel and cars rarely drove past, it was quiet enough night that they could hear the crickets outside, the wind blowing and rattling the windows, and the low pulse of m
usic from one room over. He pressed one spot on her lower back that made her fully wince, and he frowned.
“That’s a bad knot,” he informed. “Here, lie down. Otherwise I can’t get it out.” A bit reluctantly, Nina spread out so that she was lying on her stomach on the bed. There, she felt comfortable enough to allow him to slip her shirt over her head, since he couldn’t see anything, anyway, and as he worked at the knot in her back, she let the weight of exhaustion and relaxation pull her eyes shut and she drifted off to sleep with him still on top of her, massaging her back.
Chapter 12: Vance
When Nina had fallen asleep in his room, Vance had decided that it wasn’t imperative that he wake her and make her leave. She was clearly exhausted and needed the rest, so he decided just to let her be. He took the blanket from the bed and wrapped it around her as best he could, leaving a barrier between them so she didn’t freak out on him in the morning, and fell asleep next to her.
Surprisingly, the next morning, he didn’t wake up to her screaming at him for how inappropriate it was to have allowed her to stay in the bed with him. In fact, he didn’t wake up to her in his room at all. Sometime during the night she’d grabbed her shirt and bra and left without so much as making a sound, and he regarded himself as a fairly light sleeper. For her to slip out without him noticing meant that she’d intentionally crept out as quietly as she could, almost like a walk of shame but without the fun parts.
His alarm had just gone off, which meant that it was time to go get ready to open the bar. Vance hopped in the shower and got changed into acceptable work attire, deciding that he’d grab a cup of coffee and something to eat at a gas station along the way instead of going into Nina’s office for a complimentary cup of joe from her personal coffee pot (which, she kept reminding him, were for guests, which he was not, though she never actually stopped him from filling up his thermos on his way to work). The decision turned out to be made for him, however, when he found that the door to Nina’s office was still locked and the lights were still off. By the time he was ready to go to work, she’d usually already been working for some time, and he’d never seen her take a day off, so it made him curious enough to go to the door and try to peer through the window. The shutters were closed, making it impossible for him to see inside, but it was clear that there was no one there. Now too invested in the mystery to leave without finding her, Vance wandered down to the last room on the strip, the one that Nina usually stayed in when she was too tired to go home, and knocked lightly on the door. If her phone had died or she’d been too tired to set her alarm on it and she’d overslept, she’d surely be angry with herself, so he figured that she’d appreciate him giving her a wakeup call.