by Bourne, Lena
She shakes her head and takes my hand. “It was a bullshit thing they made you do. And it was complete bullshit blaming you and Julie for the attack on your dad. That’s not what it was about. Your dad knew that and if he’d been well enough to have a real say in the matter, he’d never force you to leave. He never blamed you for any of it, not for a second.”
He told me as much before I left, though not in so many words, because he couldn’t speak very well or for very long. It feels nice to hear it, although I’m fully aware my mom’s just saying all this now to make me feel better.
“It was a mess, it was my fault and there was nothing I could’ve done to prevent it,” I say and pick up my sandwich. “Now I’m back to try and salvage what me and Julie had.”
“I’m glad you decided to do that. Love is important, it’s not something you just throw away,” she says and smiles sadly.
“How have you been doing?” I ask. Without dad, I want to add, but can’t. She hears it anyway though.
The smile fades from her face into just sadness. “I’m getting by. It’s a one day at a time kind of thing, but it’s getting better. Your brother and some of your dad’s friends look out for me, but you know how it was…”
Her voice trails off and I hope she’s done talking, because yes, I do know how it was, I know Dad was pretty much all she had, and I don’t want to hear about it right now. I also don’t want to hear about any of my dad’s friends putting the moves on her now that he’s gone. I take a huge bite of my sandwich and chew hard.
“Your dad and me had love, no matter what anyone said or thought,” she says, and I’d stop her from going on if I could, but my mouth’s full so I just nod. “Sure, I was a club whore when we met, and a lot of people thought that made me a poor choice for a wife, but he didn’t care about any of that,” she goes on. “He married me anyway, because he loved me, and we were very happy together. I wish we had more years together, but it is what it is, and we did have a lot of great years.”
She pauses to stub out her cigarette, and I have trouble getting the bite I swallowed into my stomach, because it’s clenched so tight. I wish my mom and dad had more years together too. I wish that very much, and saying, “It is what it is”, is not making me accept any of it.
“These days, the girls at the clubhouse do it for fun before moving on to something else, but I didn’t have any such options back then,” she continues.
I’m only half listening now, partly because I need to get my anger back under control and partly, because I’ve heard this so many times. I grew up with everyone at the club looking down on us over who my mom had been before she married my dad. The other old ladies never accepted her, and the hoes didn’t respect her. My father got the brunt of the mockery over it, mostly from my uncle, but also many of the brothers. But he took it like the proud and up-standing guy he was. He loved her and she loved him and that was enough. She made a damn good home for him, for all of us. Me and my brother got into a bunch of fights defending her, but eventually Dad managed to convince us there was no point getting hurt over something we could never change.
A knock on the door interrupts her story.
“Who could that be?” Mom asks, speaking more to herself than me, as she gets up and heads to open the door.
A couple of seconds later she says, “Well, isn’t this just the day of long overdue reunions?”
I lean back in my chair to see Julie in the doorway. She’s clutching a stack of papers to her chest and looking very sheepish as she says, “I should’ve come round to visit you before now, Josie.”
Took the words right out of my mouth with that one.
Julie’s mouth forms a perfect “O” as she walks into the kitchen and sees me. She mumbles something I don’t understand, but her eyes look happy. And that’s what I am too, happy, because the two women I love the most in the world are in the same room with me, and neither of them seem overly mad at me. I’ve learned to appreciate these sort of little moments of happiness in the last year.
Mom comes back to the table, pulling out a chair for Julie as she does. “I was just telling Ryan how important it is to hold on to the one you love.”
She lights another cigarette and motions for Julie to sit down, which she does.
“I was always grateful for your father and the love we had,” Mom says looking at me pointedly. “Not everyone is lucky enough to find that, so you have to hold on to it when you do, no matter what.”
She looks at Julie as she says it, then back at me. Julie glances my way and I grin at her. Mom keeps on talking, telling the story she just got done telling me again, for Julie’s benefit, I suppose. But Julie’s heard it a couple of times already too, and I think neither of us are really listening. I already heard clearly what she wanted me to hear, and I hope Julie did too.
Julie doesn’t smile back at me, but her eyes are soft and full of love as she gazes into mine. In the background, mom’s already explaining how nowadays the club whores are mostly there for free room and board and to have some fun while they pursue higher education or whatnot, but that it wasn’t always so. Not in her day, back then the girls had nowhere else to go and not much to look forward to.
“Meeting and falling in love with your father was the best thing that happened to me,” my mom concludes her story. “I’m just glad he loved me back. One of the last things he said to me was that he had no regrets, that he’d marry me all over again despite all the crap they gave us for it.”
Right now, I know exactly what she’s talking about. Falling for Julie was the best thing that happened to me too, and in no version of my life that I can imagine, is that not something that happens. I should never have left her.
Julie takes a tiny breath, her eyes still swimming with sadness and love in equal parts. I wish there was none of the sadness.
She turns to my mom, and her bottom lip is shaking, but Julie never cries either.
“I’m sorry for everything,” she says and finally releases the papers she’s been clutching to her chest this whole time. “It’s all my fault.”
Mom sighs exasperatedly, probably getting ready to give her the same speech she gave me about us not being to blame. But before she can start talking, Julie pulls out one of the papers from her stack and places it on the table in front of her.
“It’s all my family’s fault,” Julie says quietly. “Isn’t it?”
The paper is a land deed of some sort, and my mom is very pale as she picks it up to examine it closer.
“What’s going on?” I ask, feeling very left out.
Julie turns to me and grabs my arm, which sends all sorts of electrical currents through me. I have trouble drawing a breath. This is the first time I’ve felt her touch in a year and it’s that much more powerful because of it. It’s all I can do not to grab the back of her head and kiss her.
“It was all to get a stupid piece of land, Ink,” she tells me breathlessly. “Land that your father owned and my father really wanted. I can’t believe I never figured that out before. I’m so, so, so sorry.”
She turns to my mom while apologizing.
Mom’s nodding absently though. “Bullard pestered your father to sell him the land for years, but he wouldn’t do it. The attack was meant to prod him to finally sell, not to kill him. Dad was gonna sell it to him as soon as he got out of the hospital, and he regretted not doing it sooner. But he died and I inherited the land, and I wouldn’t sell it at first either. But then the attack on the MC happened and I gave in. The attacks didn’t stop until I signed the papers,” she looks up at me. “So you see, Ryan, it was never your fault. You and Julie were just the scapegoats, just the excuse for all this nasty business. If you’d called, I would’ve told you that sooner, even though Butch told me not to.”
A lot of things are going through my head right now, and none of them are pretty. Even Julie’s hand on my arm isn’t helping me feel better. I hardly feel her touch anymore.
“Butch just stood by and let all th
is happen?” I ask harshly. “He knew and didn’t do anything about it?”
Mom shrugs. “He knew and he had his reasons for not seeking revenge. That’s all he told me, I don’t know what his reasons were. Maybe your brother does.”
She says it bitterly, but in a resigned way like there’s nothing anyone can do about any of it.
“Revenge would just mean more killing and grief,” she adds. I can hear it in her voice that she wanted that revenge, that she burned for it, but that she no longer does.
“I’ll make it right,” Julie says, her voice once again firm and steady. “But we have to leave right now, before they figure out I took this.”
Her words don’t make a lot of sense, and they’re certainly not doing a very good job penetrating the thick black fog of revenge fantasies that is my thoughts right now. But I do hear them. Because I will always hear her. It’s one of those things that just are when you love someone as much as I love her.
“Go where?” I ask.
“San Diego first,” she says. “And then we’ll see.”
She turns back to my mom. “I’ll make this right, Josie, I promise.”
I know what my mom’s thinking, she’s thinking there’s no way to bring the dead back, but she doesn’t say it, just smiles and taps Julie’s hand.
“Go on, go be together,” she says. “What’s done is done. But you have a second chance now. Take it.”
I follow Julie out of the house in a weird kind of daze. This outcome, this invitation to go away with her, is better than I could have hoped for in my best daydreams. But it comes on the back of some very bleak and dark nightmare shit.
Her father, with the help of Roadside Sinners MC fucked up my life, our life, the lives of everyone I know and love. Tore it all apart and never answered for it. I want those answers, and it’s a very black wish, murder black.
Where the fuck do Julie and I even go from here?
I can’t answer that, but I know that we do go on. Everything that I am knows it. Always.
* * *
Julie
“San Diego, huh?” he asks, standing by his bike and grinning at me. Something inside me always melts when he grins at me like that, and it’s happening now too. “Wanna go right now?”
My head is still spinning from what I just told them, from finding him here where I needed him most, from the fact that all my reservations about him, and all the promises I made to myself never to let him hurt me again, never to fall for his good smiles and better words again, are simply falling away and crashing into dust.
“I need to go to my house first,” I mutter.
I don’t often get speechless and not many things unsettle me, but he’s always been able to cause both of those things.
I took a cab here and I’m holding my phone to call another one.
He straddles his bike and motions with his head for me to join him. “Come on, I’ll take you.”
The two of us being seen together isn’t the best idea, but I can’t resist the invitation.
“Where to?” he asks, his breath hitching in his throat as I slide my arms around his waist to hold on.
It’s an unconscious action, one I’ve performed thousands of times before, as natural to me as walking, but as soon as I realize what I did, I freeze and turn stiff as a board. I can’t let go now, though. I don’t want to.
I give him my address and then we’re off, the familiar sensation of my whole body vibrating with the roar of the engine making me one with it, one with the road, one with him, return to me. They come first as patches of memory, then become the here and now, as one of my biggest wishes of the last year comes true. I’ve missed our rides. Before he left, I’d daydream for hours, for days, of all the rides we would take together in our future on the road. Those daydreams were cut off abruptly and absolutely on the day he left me. But I’m living one of them right now, and I don’t want to be anywhere else but right here, on the back of his bike, my arms around his taut stomach, the two of us vibrating in perfect unison with each other and the road. I don’t want to think about anything else, least of all the problems we’re facing, and I don’t.
But it doesn’t last.
Before I know it, we’re in the parking lot of my condo, dismounting, my mind and my body still shaking and vibrating even though my feet are on solid ground now.
“Lead the way,” he says.
I nod and start walking, feel him follow, because we’re still connected by the rhythm of the road we shared moments ago. Actually, it’s more than that. We’re still connected by the love we once shared and still do. That connection is whole and unwavering, bubbling and sparkling inside my soul, buried deep beneath all my reasons for why it should never be again, but resurfacing fast. Those reasons why it shouldn’t be just love between us again are already very transparent and flimsy by the time we reach my front door.
I knew I still had feelings for him, that I never truly got over him, but I didn’t expect them to come back like this, all in one whooshing tidal wave, as soon as I saw him again, spoke to him again, touched him again. But they did. They returned with a force I don’t think I can fight.
7
Julie
“Nice place you got here,” he says as he walks into the living area of my third floor condo. The floor to ceiling windows here open onto a large, covered balcony, which overlooks the ocean, and it’s this view that has him hypnotized.
“I knew you’d like it,” I say, telling him the truth, telling him exactly what I thought when I chose this place to live in.
He looks over his shoulder at me and smiles, and there’s something so inviting, so raw, so pure, so vulnerable, and so loving in his face right now, I know only the need to be near him, to touch him, to always have him by my side, in my arms, and looking at me with this kind of love. I don’t even feel the floor beneath my feet as I walk to him.
He takes my hand and guides me until we’re facing each other. We’re so close I can feel his strength and the power coiled in his muscles, as his heat and scent envelop me in a cocoon of rightness and belonging. The reality of our relationship now versus feeling like this about him all the time suddenly erupt in stark opposition to each other in my mind. The split makes me lightheaded and turns my whole body soft. Sharp desire and hot love get added to the sensations bombarding me, as he wraps his arms around me and pulls me close. I missed his hard body pressed against mine. I missed it so much it hurts.
We shouldn’t be doing this, I’m not sure I’m ready to give him another chance yet and besides, we don’t have the time, we need to leave town….and yet, my arms move to wrap around him all on their own.
“I missed you a lot. I missed you all the time,” he tells me, pulling me even closer. I can feel the slight pulsing of his body, created by his heartbeat, or the vibrations of the bike, or the love we share that’s boiling and overflowing now, making nothing of all my good reasons why this shouldn’t be happening.
“Don’t you hate me now?” I ask. “After what I just told you and your mom, I mean.”
His eyes darken for a moment and the pulsing of his soul starts tapping against me with redoubled force, but then he smiles.
“I don’t hate you, Julie. I love you,” he says. “And I want to kiss you right now.”
I sigh, just about all of my reasons why not melting away in the pleasant heat created by his words, his body, his smile and his eyes.
“We should—” I start, but I don’t get to finish the sentence before he does what he said he would. He kisses me, deeply, yet gently, the way only he can, and all the memories of the two of us in love flood back into my mind, fill me as though they were never the past, as though they were always the present, my present, ours.
I slide my hands under his t-shirt, running my palms over the bare skin of his stomach like I wanted to do back on the bike. I feel bumps I don’t remember being there, but that doesn’t change the fact that I remember all else—the heat and softness of his skin, the exact taut
ness of his muscles, the curve of his waist and rise of his pecs, and above all his kiss, which is more than just one thing, more than just taste and touch, it’s the sound of birds singing, waves crashing against the shore, warm wind licking my skin and making the grass and trees whisper, it’s the sight of rainbows, of cats playing and children laughing.
His kiss turns fiercer as I return it, deeper, wilder, yet loving still. He unzips my dress, and I wiggle out of it to let it fall around my feet. His shirt is off and his jeans follow. His hands are roaming across my bare back and stomach, my sides and my neck, my bra-covered breasts and my ass, caressing and squeezing, kneading and stroking. They’re everywhere and always exactly where they should be, sending shivers that turn into earthquakes of desire and need all through me.
I haven’t felt this good, this light and this present in years. I’ve never felt as good as I do when we’re together.
He stops kissing me, and I open my eyes to see why.
Then I shriek and laugh as he scoops me up in his arms.
“Let’s take this somewhere a little more comfortable,” he says, grinning at me. I grin back and point to the end of the hallway to our right.
“The bed’s through there,” I tell him and wrap my arms around his neck.
I didn’t make my bed this morning, and it’s covered by stacks of clothes I didn’t have time to finish packing before I left for work, but it’s not like he’s gonna care about the mess and neither do I.
He lays me down on my back and hovers over me, looking so deep into my eyes I get lost in his. Then his lips are on mine again, bringing me back to the now. They only linger for a breath or two, before moving to that tender spot on my neck that only he can find. My moan still echoes on the air, as his kisses move to my stomach, then to my right nipple and my left right after, teasing them into pulsing hard nubs through the lacy fabric of my bra, which I’m still wearing for some bizarre reason. I arch my back and reach behind to unclasp it, sigh and moan as he pulls it off and his breath hits my tingling nipples.