by A. J. Downey
I nodded and hung it opposite mine.
“I recognize this place from when I was a kid, but it’s a lot different,” she said. “Way more crowded.”
I nodded. “Yeah, things have changed in the Pacific Northwest in the last twenty years or so. Shit, in the last ten. It’s not the same place it used to be. Population is booming.”
Her lips twisted back and forth, and she nodded. “We’d come up this way from Oregon on family vacations – go to Seattle and the aquarium; the Pike Place Market,” she said. “We’d stay in cheap motels or hotels near the airport.”
“Ah.” I nodded. “That’s just up that way,” I said and pointed. I took her hand in mine lightly, turning to stroll, just picking a direction.
“I… I feel like I reacted badly this morning and I’m a little embarrassed now,” she confessed.
“Aw, yeah?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, eyes fixed on where she was stepping.
“Don’t be,” I said, shrugging it off. “I know the club has a rep among you citizens. It’s not completely unwarranted, either. Like anything else, the club is made up of people and this life? It can attract some rough characters.”
“That’s putting it a bit mildly,” she murmured.
I laughed a little. “Just what have you heard?” I asked.
“I told you,” she said, looking slightly uncomfortable. “I listen to true crime podcasts. Mostly when I work.”
“A lot of gruesome shit?” I asked.
She laughed a bit nervously and almost shyly.
“You could say that,” she agreed.
“Let me guess. You listened to some shit about the cartel wars?”
“The ones in the south,” she said, nodding. “Kentucky and the like.”
I nodded in understanding.
“It really wasn’t that long ago when you think about it,” she said gently.
I shook my head. “No, only like fifteen, sixteen years ago,” I said.
“When it started. But the skin-walker murders were sometime into the start of things… then there were the more recent gang wars out that way,” she said.
Shit, I thought to myself, but out loud I asked, “Just what kind of podcast are you listening to?”
“It’s called Oblique. It’s on all the major streaming services,” she said, and I stopped and looked at her, tipping her chin so she would look at me.
“You know, I’m impressed by you,” I said. “By a lot.”
“Me?” she asked, her eyes widening.
“Yes, you.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Clearly, whatever you’ve heard has you scared shitless of the patch on my back,” I said. “But you’re still here,” I said softly, touching her chin with my thumb, grazing the soft skin in a line back along her jaw toward her ear.
She held her breath as she looked up at me then finally blurted, her voice low and struggling to suppress her need, “Please kiss me again.”
“Yeah?” I asked, stepping gently and carefully into her space.
“Yeah,” she said, her voice both hoarse and breathy all at once.
I lowered my mouth to hers carefully, slow and controlled and she let me, tipping her chin up, her eyes slipping shut at the last second to enhance her sense of touch as my lips met hers.
I wasn’t so chaste this time, pressing my mouth to hers, parting my lips, hers following suit in this beautifully sweet echo to my movements – an even sweeter submission to my will to have her in my arms. I drew her close, slipping my tongue past her lips, between her teeth, desperate to taste her if it was only ever going to be this once – which ha! I sincerely doubted this was anything like an end before we’d even begun.
“Mm!” The sound was grateful almost, as she nestled closer to me in my arms, one hand on my waist, the other against the leather over my chest as my arm passed behind her, locking around her back and holding her tight, hauling her up against my body which I kept unyielding.
The kiss turned into a wild thing – deepening, passionate – until we both stood in the sunshine beating down on us, tearing away breathless from one another. The heat of that dying afternoon light was something, but it didn’t hold a matchstick to the fire ignited in my blood.
“Does that mean you think this could work?” I asked between breaths.
“What?” she asked dazed.
“Me taking you out on dates, taking things as fast or as slow as you want to, but there being a potential for an us. You think it could be a thing with me being in the club and all?” I asked.
“That depends…” she murmured.
“On?” I asked.
“Do you kill people?” she asked me, and I choked on a laugh.
I shook my head. “I’ve never killed anyone,” I said. “I’ve been arrested,” I said honestly. “A few times for stupid shit when I was younger. Fighting, possession of marijuana with intent to sell – which I wasn’t – and nothing ever harder than some weed. I’ve been in a fare few fights, but nothing any more serious than your average dick-measuring contest… but murder?” I shook my head. “No. I’m clean. Don’t even have a criminal record.”
“Can you say the same for everyone in your club?” she asked.
“You mean the club as a whole or just the guys here in the local chapters?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes slightly and said with a small smile, “Obviously you can’t for the club as a whole, or my podcasts wouldn’t have anything to talk about.” I laughed a bit and just enjoyed holding her, feeling better and better about shit as we talked. “No, I mean locally,” she said. “Anyone that might come in contact with me and my son.”
“Ah.” I nodded. “No, I can’t necessarily say the same for all my brothers,” I told her and at the light in her eyes dimming slightly with dismay, I tried to head that shit off at the pass. “But,” I said. “What I can tell you is we don’t go around advertising that shit or making a thing out of it. We’ve all made our mistakes, babe. Some of us harder core than others, but that’s the thing, the whole point of the club as a whole,” I said, rocking her back and forth slightly in my arms.
“What’s that?” she asked curiously.
“What’s done is done,” I said with a shrug. “It’s in the past. We bury that shit and move on. That’s the point. We accept each other, black marks, dirt, and pasts and all and we try our best to help each other from making the same shit-ass mistakes. We’re a rolling brotherhood, a chosen family when most of our blood relatives or society has given up on us and told us to kick rocks. We’re there for each other, and bad reputation aside, we try not to judge.”
She looked thoughtful and I couldn’t help but feel a bitter resentment for whatever podcast she’d been listening to which damn sure didn’t tell the whole truth. Hell, they never did. Those things were geared toward law enforcement being some sort of righteous paladins or some shit.
You’d never hear any LEOs talk us up for any of the good shit we did. Bet the dweebs telling their horror stories didn’t have shit to say about the charity toy drives or the anti-bullying protection services we provided for kids or any of that.
No, they only focused on the horror show resulting from the retribution we’d had on some dead cartel thugs that had come at us first. I wondered if they’d covered the fact that those happy bastards had gunned down the mother chapter’s president’s ol’ lady and several brothers in cold blood over something that prez hadn’t even done. Or the fact that they had damn near taken out his son, too. What? Were we supposed to let that shit stand?
Would anyone if it was their family?
“You’ve been so good to me and Marc since we arrived,” she said finally, snapping me out of my deepening rage spiral. I cut that shit off at the knees and focused on her.
“Seems like you guys needed a break from all the bullshit. Just one person to be fucking nice,” I said.
“Thank you for being that person,” she said, folding into my arms further. I smiled down
at her.
“I live to serve,” I said with a cheeky-ass grin and a raised eyebrow, and she laughed.
“You and Marc both, ruining the moment.”
“Ah, no,” I said in all seriousness. “I’m very much enjoying the moment.” I rocked her gently.
“Me too.” She let the confession slide easy from her lips and I smiled.
“Well then,” I said, turning and taking her hand in mine to continue our stroll. “Let’s just see where it takes us, real easy like.”
“Okay,” she agreed and the last of whatever weight or fear that I bore that she’d rabbit on me melted away, lifting off my soul. She seemed lighter too.
“I’m starving, how about you?” I asked, hooking an arm over her shoulders, and pulling her into my side.
“I could eat,” she said, nodding. “I could really use a drink.”
“God, yeah. A beer sounds really fucking good,” I said.
“Doesn’t it just?” she asked, and I turned us at the next block, away from the water and toward the strip and Wall Eye’s Chowder House. They had good shit and a decent selection of beer.
13
Cadence…
Dinner was nice, and the air felt clean and clear, both literally and figuratively as we strolled back down toward the water. We sat on a bench, watching some eagles up high, perched on some dead branches sticking up above the tree canopy.
We chatted, although not about the club. There was no more of that. No, we talked about each other and the things that shaped us into the people we were. Some childhood, some not, some about interests and how we got into doing the things we each did for a living.
It was nice, and I swear, Jared was the easiest man to talk to. It was effortless, and I didn’t feel like I should expect some off-handed remark that would and could hurt or even devastate me. He just wasn’t… I don’t know. He wasn’t oblivious, for one, and he didn’t seem casually cruel or even intentionally so for that matter. He seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say, in learning about me, and overall, it was incredibly sexy.
I think the sexiest thing of all was the fact that he wasn’t hyper focused on sex. He was focused on me as a whole, and not just my tits and ass. It was so easy to tell with guys, you know? Not that I had tried to date after my husband’s death and my life had exploded so spectacularly into the mess that I was still trying to clean up. Still, there had been guys. Some from work who’d never given off predator vibes before that certainly had turned out to be absolute creeps.
For real, who tries to corner and make a move on a widow at her husband’s wake? Especially knowing what a scumbag the husband was just after said widow found out for herself? That was another reason why I made the decision to come home to my mom and my stepdad and start things over here. Some of the attention from ill-meaning potential suitors back in Georgia had been stomach churning and had gotten to the point I had just wanted away from it.
Even Marc hadn’t been immune, one of them trying to recruit my baby to his cause of winning me over.
I was a proud momma bear on that one. Not only had Marc shut him down with aplomb, he’d turned the guy in to me and had told me what had happened so I could have my own go at him.
You would think all of that would have left a bitter taste in my mouth where Jared was concerned, but nope, he didn’t give off that kind of vibe at all. Was he interested in me? Yes, but none of it had felt half as superficial. With Jared, I felt gorgeous, beautiful, and not just because of my looks. I felt like he appreciated things way beyond them. He engaged me and challenged me on an intellectual level. I could tell he appreciated me as much for my intelligence as he did for what I had always been told was a pretty face, but honestly didn’t understand that.
My father hadn’t ever let me get by on my looks and when I had tried as a teenage girl, realizing that they could be used as an almost form of social currency – Lord had he and my mom been disappointed in me. It’d been soul crushing and it’d needed to be. I had never tried a stunt like that again. They had, in fact, raised me better than that. Unfortunately for me, I was already pregnant but fortunately, or so I had thought, Ben was a stand-up boy and wanted to be a father. The rest as they say was history.
“You ready to get back?” Jared asked softly as dusk was beginning to settle and I sighed.
“No, but yes,” I answered. “This has been nice.”
He smiled at me in the growing dark and nodded. “Yeah, it has.”
I held my breath, wishing he would kiss me again, and not exactly confident or brave enough to make the first move. Plenty of rejected first moves when it had come to Ben left me on uneven footing. Plus, it had been a really long time since I had done the whole trying to date or be intimate with anyone other than my husband thing so… yeah. There was that.
Whew.
I didn’t know how I managed to do this to myself; be so comfortable with him one moment and a complete nervous wreck the next, but I guess it was just my own personal superpower or something. As far as superpowers went, I felt gypped.
We stared at each other for several heartbeats, each of us, I think, waiting for the other to make a move and I sort of just blurted out, “If you’re waiting for me to kiss you, I’m sort of bad at making the first move – it’s just not my thing. I mean, I think it used to be but things with Ben and time… I am so sorry I am like this insecure neurotic mess and are you really sure you want—”
He shut up my insane anxiety fueled babbling by covering my mouth with his, kissing me fiercely and almost possessively. That last part wasn’t uncomfortable in the slightest. No, not at all. It was powerful, and beautiful, and made me positively melt. All the tension and worry caught on the light wind off the water and tore off from around me to float away.
His lips were warm against mine, kissing me with a near-bruising force that felt so good, as though his kiss alone could silence my fears and drive the worry right out of me. I only wished exorcising my demons could be so easy, but God… seventeen years of nothing but lies and liars surrounding me, my trust was so far eroded I didn’t know if I had much left. I couldn’t in good conscience, expect any man – especially not a man like Jared – to be patient with me while I still floundered, struggling to get my fucking shit together.
Still, while he held me like this, kissed me like this, all of that just sort of fell away and left me floating in this pleasant void that felt so calm and so safe, the sensation a ridiculously addictive one.
When Jared broke the kiss, he smiled gently and ordered me, voice rough and husky with desire, “Stop overthinking things, baby. You’re fine.”
I swallowed, speechless, and nodded slowly.
His smile grew and he said, “I’ll remind you as often as I need to until it takes.” I smiled because the way he said it didn’t sound demanding or impatient or exasperated in the slightest. It sounded like a gentle promise.
I nodded, my hair shifting against my face where it was trapped beneath his hand and I just couldn’t seem to remember when he’d captured my face between them, but I liked it. I liked it so much. It was different but in all the right ways. The good ways.
“Come on, let’s get you home.” He let me go, fingers trailing in a touch, down my denim-clad arm to slip gently along my palm, grasping my fingertips with his as he stood and drew me to my feet. He wound those same fingers between my own and I leaned into him, hugging his leather-clad arm as we walked, a slow lover’s stroll out of the park and back in the direction of his motorcycle.
The temperature was dropping, and I was a bit chilled by the time we reached my house. It was unusual going to the front door when I was so used to entering the house through the back. He walked with me, to my door and I took my keys from my jeans pocket. He stopped me after I’d unlocked the door and I looked up at him.
“You have your choice,” he said softly.
“Choice?” I asked, staring up into his eyes which held such a light in them.
“You can either have
me kiss you goodnight and leave you here at your door like it’s the fifties or some shit…” he said and then paused.
“Or?” I asked, cautiously, my curiosity eating me alive.
He leaned in and put his lips near my ear and said, “Or, I kiss you like I’m putting the breath of life back into you, you wrap your legs around my waist, and I carry you to your bedroom and really give you the ride of your life. I mean, rock your world until you can’t walk straight for days afterwards.”
Holy shit.
“I’ll take option two, please,” I said, my voice a bit high and breathy in excitement and anticipation rushing through me and forcing the nervousness and even a bit of dread so far out of the way, so far down, the latter drowned completely in my desire for what he was offering.
“You sure?” he asked, and I could tell, this was my last stop to get off this train before it took off and whisked me to destinations unknown.
“I’m sure,” I said, and it was all the permission he seemed to want or need before turning the intensity up to a thousand. His mouth came crashing down over mine and he pulled me by my hips into the front of his body even as he stepped forward and fetched my back up hard against the siding by my front door.
I couldn’t help myself, I moaned into his mouth, and he swallowed it, swallowed me whole. His tongue glided against mine, his body pressing hard to my front, the siding digging in at my back as his hands swept down my body, one going to my hip, the other continuing on, sliding over the denim over the outside of my thigh. He bent slightly, never tearing his mouth from mine, and dug his fingers insistently at the back of my knee.
I raised it, pressed safely between him and the wall, and allowed him to take me off balance in that security. He stepped in, grinding against me, showing me without words just how excited he was to be here.
Though my eyes were closed, I felt them roll to the back of my head as a certain thrill swept through me at the hard, hot contact of his throbbing cock against me, even through the multiple layers of our clothes.
I moaned again with an almost desperation when he pressed into me harder, my arms going unbidden around his neck and shoulders, pushing my fingers through the back of his close-cropped hair, sable soft and bristling between them as I pulled his mouth against mine and kissed him back with every bit of fervent passion that he kissed me with. He growled against my lips, and somehow, his other arm found its way between my back and the house. He pulled me closer to him, his other hand raising my knee even higher over his hip as he made good on the second part of his promise and lifted me clean off my feet.