by Krane, Kasey
I closed my eyes and tried to put myself into Knight’s shoes. How had he taken a perfectly bland, non-committal statement about me moving in with him so badly?
Unless…
My eyes popped open and I stared sightlessly at the partially completed mural in front of me.
“Unless he wants more,” I said aloud to the silent room.
It made sense then. It should’ve been obvious to me before - the man could hardly keep his hands off me - but dammit, hadn’t he seen the stretch marks on my thighs? Hadn’t he seen the cellulite on my ass? He couldn’t really be interested in me. And anyway, surely he had seen the way that my hair stuck to the side of my head, smashed down flat, when I woke up every morning.
He couldn’t have seen all of that and still been interested in me, right?
But I played it over in my head and nothing else made sense and, well, he really did seem to have a hard time keeping his hands off me. Maybe he didn't mind the chunky thighs and the fat ass. Maybe he wasn’t sleeping with me just because I was convenient and willing.
Maybe he honest-to-God liked me.
And if that was true, then my trying-to-keep-it-cool attitude, trying to act as if this was just a small thing, no big deal, I would move out soon enough…it would’ve hurt him.
Nothing else made sense.
I felt the smile grow across my face as I realized that Knight really did like me. Liked me enough to want to invite me to move in with him. And…and maybe it wasn’t just temporary. Maybe, he wanted more than that. Maybe, he really wanted me.
Suddenly, I was on pins and needles, waiting for him to come home.
Home. What a lovely word. He wanted it to be our home. What a novel thought.
What a fucking awesome idea!
With a bounce in my step that hadn’t been there before, I began painting again. I pulled out my phone, turned on Pandora, and began belting out my favorite songs as my brush flew over the wall.
It was only an hour later, although I would have sworn that it was much longer than that - years, maybe - before Knight got home. He walked in hesitantly and I knew that I needed to put his fears to rest quickly. I didn't want to torture him or draw this out any longer. I turned off Pandora, the resulting silence intimidating as fuck.
“Knight, I’m sorry about earlier.” I paused for just a moment, my fears creeping back in. What if I had misread the situation? What if I was just about to make an ass out of myself?
Fuck the what if’s. I’m going to be brave.
“Knight, I like you.” I drew in a deep breath and continued quickly before he could stop me or say anything or react because if I let him, then maybe I would lose my courage and I couldn’t do that. “I would love to move in with you, for as long as you want me here. I don’t know where this,” I gestured between us helplessly, “is going, but I’m willing to see. I want to see. If you want that, too.” I swallowed hard and bit my lip and stared up at him and hoped to God that I hadn’t just made a complete and utter fool out of myself.
He stood stock still for endless moments, just staring at me, his face inscrutable, unreadable, and I was rather sure that I was going to throw up from the nerves if he didn't say something in the next five seconds.
But he did even better than that. He did something. He reached out and shoved his hands into my hair and pulled me up to him and kissed me. Kissed me with everything he had in him and I had thought that our previous kisses had set world records for being the most amazing kisses that anyone had ever experienced but this kiss…this kiss topped them all.
I couldn't breathe and I couldn't think and I just wanted. I just wanted Knight and no one else. He pulled me down the hallway and into his bedroom and showed me just how much he wanted me too.
* * *
I reluctantly put my painting clothes back on, since I didn’t have anything else on hand. He caught my wrinkled nose at the idea of putting dirty panties back on and said teasingly, “So, you wanna go get your clothes from the motel room?”
I grinned back at him, absolutely loving this new Knight - this Knight who teased me and laughed and kissed me in places I didn’t know existed and made me feel feelings I didn’t know I could. “I could be up for that.”
“We’ll ride my bike over and then you can drive your car back separately, so we can put your luggage into it.”
We packed up my stuff in the motel room, and I returned the room key to the front desk clerk. I said a silent goodbye to the room - no one else would look at the Cactus Motel and think, “Now there’s a place of romance and love,” but I knew better. I would always love that motel…and those queen-sized beds.
I climbed inside my car, stifling hot from being closed up for days on end in the Cactus Motel parking lot, and rolled down the windows while blasting the AC right on my face. I had to get the hot air out of the car before I passed out from the heat.
He helped me unload everything and carry it into the bedroom, and even made room in his dresser and the medicine cabinet for my stuff.
As I set about unpacking, he said, “Listen, there’s a Dead Legion meeting tonight. I’m going to head over for that. You’re set to go here, right?”
“Yeah,” I said brightly, trying to ignore that twinge of sadness that I felt at his leaving.
He seemed to pick up on my sadness because he suggested, “Let me stop at the grocery store on the way home. I’ll pick up some food for dinner tonight and a bottle of wine to celebrate you moving in here. Red or white?”
“White, please. I’ve never learned to love red. I just don’t think I’m sophisticated enough for red wine,” I said, making a very non-adult face at the thought.
Which is how we ended up kissing goodbye for 15 minutes. When he finally left, I couldn’t wipe the grin off my face.
And didn’t even want to.
18
Knight
The Chapel was filled with Dead Legion members, milling around, flipping shit at each other. Judge had his left arm in a sling - in his spinout on the way to the Sangre shootout, he’d torn it up pretty damn good. The doctors had said no bike riding for another week, which was making Judge…testy.
Thankfully Carmen had a high tolerance for whininess.
Slowly, the room started to settle down when Bishop took the president’s chair at the head of the imposing stainless steel table.
“All right, let’s get this shit started,” Bishop said, once the room had grown completely silent.
Always one for formalities.
“First off, let’s discuss the truck routes up to Arizona. It seems like we’re having some issues with that.” The group started into a heated debate over the best way to resolve the bottleneck they were encountering, while I just settled back into my chair, wishing I had grabbed a drink from the bar on the way through the clubhouse. I didn’t give a flying fuck about truck routes to New Mexico.
Finally, the group settled down, an agreement in place with Bishop only having to crack heads twice to get there.
He was starting to really settle into the president role. I had known Bishop since he was eleven, so I had almost…parental pride towards him, even though we were only five years apart. Fuck, to a 16 year old, an 11 year old was a baby in diapers. It had taken me a long time to shake that perception of Bishop, but the longer he ran the Dead Legion, the more I began to see how much he’d grown up.
“Knight,” Bishop barked, startling me out of my thoughts. I snapped my head up.
“Yeah?”
“What’s the update on Butcher’s long-lost daughter? Is she staying in contact with Butcher? Has she gone back to Albuquerque?”
I shifted in my seat, uncomfortable as fuck. Having every eye in the room staring at me, even if it was my brothers doing the staring, was every stutterer’s worst nightmare, and then there was the fact that Bishop was not gonna like the news I was about to deliver.
At all.
“She only visited Butcher once. Out in Playas. I went with her.” Bishop nodd
ed impatiently. He already knew all of that, even if the rest of the club didn’t necessarily know.
“Kept us outside for a while before we could go in - hiding shit f-from me.” I shifted in my seat, feeling heat rising up in me at my slight stutter. No one seemed to notice and so I swallowed and kept going because I had to.
Throwing up wasn’t an option.
My face was impassive, like always. No one knew.
“Crates in the corner. Don’t know what was in ‘em. Could have been guns or drugs or just motorcycle parts.” I shrugged. “Couldn’t pry ‘em open with a crowbar with Butcher in the room.”
“Do you think she’s actually Butcher’s long-lost daughter?” Judge asked, settling back into his chair, studying me intently.
“Yeah, I do.” A murmur went around the table. Bishop gave everyone the stink eye and the murmuring died down.
“Why?” Bishop asked, once the room was quiet again.
“She has a journal. Her mom’s. All about Butcher, back when he was with the Outlaws MC. Apparently, Butcher was fucking her on the side - hiding her from the club.”
“At least he did that part right,” Bishop grumbled. “The Outlaws were mean motherfuckers. They probably would have gang-raped her if they’d known about her. Women didn’t hang around that club very long, at least not voluntarily. Fuckers. My dad used to tell me horror stories about them. When their numbers died down and the club was dying off, Ghost wanted to patch Butcher into the Dead Legion. I knew my dad would have fought that tooth and nail if he was still alive. Anyone from that MC was bad news.”
Obviously. When it came down to it and Butcher had to choose between Ghost and Bishop, he threw his weight behind Ghost. No wonder - the club he’d come from was full of Ghosts…or worse.
Before Bishop or Judge or the rest of the club could push me to dump Leia off onto the Outlaws’s doorstep and wish her good luck, I had to tell them about the park.
“Only gets worse. Couple of days ago, Sangre tried to kidnap her.”
“What?!” Bishop roared. This time, the noise in the room took a lot longer to die down.
“We were at the park.” I decided to leave out any mention of kite-flying. “Out of the bushes came a Sangre, in colors, cloth in hand. Pretty sure he was gonna drug her with chloroform or something. Van was waiting at the curb. I scared him off and he dove back into the van. Couldn’t get him. Mud on the plates, unmarked white van.”
“And when the fuck were you planning on telling me all of this?!” If anything, Bishop had gotten louder, not quieter, since his last bellow.
Good question.
That should’ve been my first instinct, but instead, I had been driven to protect Leia, and, well, kiss her back. It wasn’t every day the most gorgeous woman I had ever laid eyes on threw herself at me.
But since then? I should’ve said something since then. Why hadn’t I said anything since then?
Oh my God, I’ve turned into Bishop and Judge.
When they’d been chasing their girlfriends, they’d turned dumber than two rocks in a rock tumbling machine. No matter how many times I beat their heads together, I couldn’t seem to knock any sense into them.
And now…
And now I was just like them.
I turned to Bishop to explain, to make something up, to say something, when Bishop began to laugh.
“You’ve fallen for her!”
And for the first time in my life, I actually felt a blush heat my cheeks.
Which caused Bishop to laugh louder. He came over and pulled me out of my chair and gave me a congratulatory hug. I, stiff as a cardboard cutout, just stood there, unsure of what the fuck to do. I had expected many things when I started telling this story.
This? This was not one of them. Hadn’t Bishop told me not to touch Leia with a “fucking ten-foot pole”? I was starting to wonder if I was growing senile. Or crazy. Or delusional. Or something.
The other members came up and clapped me on the shoulders - even Judge, although he was doing the clapping with his uninjured right hand - and somehow, a bottle of whiskey magically ended up in the chapel. It was passed around the table, everyone taking a chug, but not surprisingly, it kept showing up in front of me a hell of a lot more times than in front of anyone else.
“Okay, so, Knight has himself a girlfriend,” Bishop said over the commotion, and the men immediately began to settle down, although if they didn’t stop passing the bottle to me, I was gonna have to call Leia and have her come pick me up.
I blinked, twice, and decided that I was already there.
“So, I think that Knight ought to keep doing his guard duty, right?” Which of course led to catcalls, whistles, jeers, and suggestions of more than a few places on her body that I should guard. And full details on exactly how to guard said parts.
Bishop rapped his gavel on the table twice, and said in the resulting silence, “That aside, Knight, Butcher is a real son-of-a-bitch. He isn’t nicknamed Butcher for no reason. I don’t know if you remember, but he was the one who killed that fourteen year old a while back.”
I nodded. I remembered. Butcher had come outside of the local grocery store and had found this fourteen-year-old boy on his bike, pretending to drive it. He’d shot him, dumped his body, and Ghost had helped him do it. Never got caught. I had only heard about the incident through the grapevine - it had never even hit the table. It was just something that Ghost and Butcher had done, because it was “taking care of business.”
Bastards.
“Which means you not only have to protect her from the Sangre, but you gotta protect her from Butcher too. Is she still insisting on visiting him?”
I shrugged. “Hasn’t brought it up since our first visit.”
I’m not the only one who has completely forgotten my purpose and what I’m here for.
But seriously? I couldn’t be expected to think when I saw her tits…and her ass…and her mouth…and her hair…and her cute pink toes…
Another swig of out of the bottle. It didn’t seem to be getting any lower, and I wondered if they’d grabbed a second one to keep me drinking.
“Well, try to dissuade her. And if she insists, go with her. I don’t want her to have any alone time with that man, father or not.”
I nodded. That part, at least, was not going to be a problem.
“Okay, last piece of business,” Bishop announced. “Just wanted to let y’all know that I think I’m going to hire a bookkeeper. I know we’ll have to vet him, or her, seven ways to Sunday before we trust ‘em, but before, when most everything we were doing was illegal, it wasn’t hard to keep the books. We only had to put in about an entry a week. But now…we’ve got more legit clients than ever, and the paperwork is starting to stack up. I know that this has always been the president’s job, but that’s because there was so little to it. I’ll keep y’all updated on how that search goes.”
The meeting broke up then to a sharp rap of the gavel, and the Dead Legion began to scatter, a couple still coming up to congratulate me. It was true that I had never had a girlfriend before, but I was starting to think that the MC’s reaction to my hooking up with Leia was a little over the top. It wasn’t like I had lived the life of a eunuch up to this point.
Whatever. I stood up from my chair and wavered around a little on my feet before the world calmed down, but didn’t move from the table. I had to talk to Bishop.
The room cleared out, until Bishop looked over and said, “Got something on your mind?”
I blinked, twice, until Bishop came into focus. I probably should not have taken that last shot. Or the two before that.
“I can help,” I said.
Bishop waited for a moment, and then when I didn’t continue, prompted me, “Help with what?”
Oh. Right. I should probably explain.
“I could help with the bookkeeping. Maybe. I’ve never been a bookkeeper so I’d probably need classes, but math makes sense.”
“What? Are you fucking with me right
now?”
“No, not fucking. I like numbers. Always have.”
“Oh God, man, come with me to the office. Let’s get started now.”
“Right now?” I blinked again. I wasn’t sure if learning bookkeeping while completely blitzed was a good idea. I put my hand on the stainless steel table, letting the cold of the metal spread through my hand and up my arm. I just have to stay upright…
Bishop looked me over. “Yeah, maybe you’re right. How about tomorrow? We’ve made it this far - the books aren’t gonna go up in a flaming inferno in the next five minutes. Let’s get you home. Or do you just want to crash here?” I shook my head vigorously, sending the world spinning. But crashing at the clubhouse, preferable in the past, was now abhorrent to me. I could go home and be cradled to Leia’s delicious chest. Who would choose a regular pillow over her? Insanity is what that was.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t choose here over Jules either,” Bishop said as he threw my right arm over his shoulders. Bishop had always been short on anything but muscles, so it wasn’t hard for him to support me as we walked to the door. “Let me see if Judge is still here. He’s driving his truck right now, so he could give you a lift.”
But a quick scan of the main bar area of the clubhouse showed that Judge had already cleared out.
“Okay dude, semi-truck it is.”
Which is how I got delivered to my house in a Dead Legion semi, my bike loaded into the tractor trailer. The cabs and grilles of Dead Legion semis were distinctive, to say the least, and so when Leia came outside to see what all the fuss was about, her eyes grew wide at the sight.
The semis were meant to scare off would-be hijackers, while also providing for a hell of a branding scheme. The grilles had a row of jagged white teeth on top and bottom, giving the semi the appearance of a giant, growling mouth about to swallow its prey whole. The teeth even had lighting in them, so at night, the effect was even more creepy. Between the cabs being painted blue and the teeth in the grilles, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind when they’d seen a Dead Legion truck.