by A. J. Downey
Wise beyond her years was a close second that I would apply to her – and I couldn’t chalk it up to her simply living underneath Abuela’s roof. While that woman was somewhat clever, she wasn’t as smart as she thought she was. She simply made up for her lack of intelligence with cruelty.
Not so with Marisol, and I wanted to know, why? What made this beauty tick?
I certainly wasn’t going to find that out hanging around here.
I sighed and looked the place over, swinging my keys around my index finger and catching them in my palm, the metal teeth biting.
“Until next month,” I said and was the last one out, locking up the doors, effectively temporarily rendering this clubhouse inert. Whether it would be permanently mothballed remained to be seen, but I sincerely hoped it wouldn’t. If it was, it would be the end of an era – for sure.
Chapter Six
Marisol…
We stopped and ate breakfast at a Denny’s. Maverick, however, didn’t care to sit with his men. Instead, he had us seated, just me and him, at a two-person table some feet away from them. I hid behind the menu while I made my decision and then hid behind it longer while I decided what exactly he wanted to talk to me about that was so important it couldn’t wait until we were over the mountain range.
I set the menu down and looked up into his disquieting indigo stare.
“So, what’s the deal?” he asked. “Why was Abuela so hard up to keep you right where you were?”
Ah, so it was about her and not necessarily about me. Or, it could be. Maybe he just wanted to know what I was supposedly a liar about. Apparently, he hadn’t been listening when my grandmother had said everything.
“Probably didn’t want me giving away family secrets, which I won’t,” I said, raising my chin defiantly.
“Loyalty or something else?” he asked, and I gave him nothing. Nothing with my eyes, nothing with my face whatsoever, my voice mute in my throat.
He nodded slowly, gaze calculating, and asked me, “I make a mistake taking you on?”
I shook my head slowly. “I say no,” I said, “but how could you believe me? According to my grandmother, your friend, I am a liar.”
Maverick laughed and it made him beautiful, the way the Japanese drew men in their romantic Manga’s.
“Your grandmother and I aren’t friends. Don’t get it twisted, beautiful.” He shook his head and raked a hand through the top of his hair, resting his elbow on the table, rolling his eyes to pin me with his gaze as he considered me and he looked predatory, dangerous…
“I’m not stupid,” I said with irritation. “I don’t want to die. Not like Anita. Not like her boys. I won’t do anything to put my brother in danger, which means I won’t tell you anything about them, and I damn sure won’t tell them anything about you.”
I stared back, mostly in an effort to convince him on this, there was no lie.
His mouth thinned down into a grim line and he nodded.
“You can keep your family secrets,” he said, and I scoffed. He sat up and cocked his head. “You won’t get to learn any of ours,” he said. “Club business is club business. I tell you to get lost, you do it. You’re there to cook, clean, and occasionally, if you’re down for it, to fuck but that last one? That’s always your choice,” he said, and I felt my brow wrinkle in a frown.
Yeah, right… I thought to myself.
His eyebrows went up and he nodded slowly, as if something had just been confirmed and I rolled my eyes. He shouldn’t automatically assume that he knew anything about me that didn’t come straight from my mouth.
Something in his expression softened and he dropped things for now. I shifted in my seat, uncertain, but kept my mouth shut. I’d learned quickly, and a long time ago, it didn’t do to ask questions. Asking questions got you in trouble and you didn’t always want to know the answer.
The same thing could be said for speaking the truth. People didn’t care. Didn’t want to hear it. You never had to take back anything you didn’t say. Never had to go into further explanations. Silence was, for the most part, the safer option.
We ate in silence, but it was a tense one, at least for me. I felt as though Maverick was trying to take my temperature. That he was trying to feel out my motives, and I thought a little less of him for it. I mean, wasn’t it obvious? Everything I did, I did with the intention to leave that place. To leave that place and to get my brother out so that he could leave with me.
I just wanted a new life. I honestly didn’t care how I got it as long as I got far away from here, with my brother. After that, I would figure it out. This was as good a start as any in finally accomplishing that goal.
Maverick paid for everyone’s tab and we left. The ride toward the mountains had me low-key excited. I’d lived on this side my whole life and had only had the occasion to cross over them once when I had been small, with my papa.
It was one of my favorite memories of him. I missed him every day. It was like once he was gone, all the happiness had gone, too. Like he had taken it to heaven with him.
I let the wind wash over me, sitting up on my seat, letting go, face tipped into the sun, arms flung wide as we skimmed over the highway. I loved to ride. One of the boys back at the grower’s village had a dirt bike. He would take me back and forth to school my junior and senior year. We’d been friends. He didn’t care about what they said about me. That I was a liar. Although, I don’t think he believed me either. No one did.
I let the wind be my therapy, chasing the bad feelings away, leaving them behind me as I tried to make room for hope, but it was hard. I felt like I was racing into the unknown… and the unknown was as scary as it was exhilarating.
Maverick sat up some when I leaned back and put one hand atop his thigh and we just rode… comfortably, in sync, each trusting the other not to fuck this ride up and send us spilling along the pavement in a bloody tragic smear.
The ride was much longer than I anticipated, but I was buzzing with excitement the whole way. The brown gave way to green, the green to gray and a bit of snow holding onto the mountain peaks stabbing their way into the great blue sky.
Somehow, even the sky was a more pleasing blue and as I held onto Maverick as we climbed the westbound approach to the pass, I wondered about what it was going to be like having a man like him between my thighs.
I mean, he was experienced for one. I somehow doubted there would be awkward fumbling from him, but it was other things I wondered about. Was he a demanding lover? Did he give as good as he got? Did he rush things, or did he take his time? Was he rough, or would he be gentle with me?
These thoughts were paramount in my mind coming out of the pass, and the vibrations of the bike were so not helping in any way to curb my mounting arousal.
Maverick made some sort of hand signal, and midway back in the pack, Fenris changed lanes and dropped back. Derringer followed suit, and they took an exit for Highway 18 and peeled off from our pack.
I turned back around and put my arms around the corded muscles of Maverick’s trim waist, and we rode on. For another hour we traveled, the urban taking over, nature thinning out as we passed through a place called Issaquah.
More hand signaling, and several more broke off and took the Interstate 405 exit. I watched them as they took the ramp heading south toward Renton. I checked and it was just Deacon with us now. Maverick checked off to our side. Checked again, and I held on as he twisted the throttle. The bike snarled and we swept into the next lane over, Deacon with us still, even as we poured on speed.
I gasped as we came over the rise as the bridge resting on the water came into view. It was cooler on this side of the mountains, and the breeze off the lake kissed my face with the scent of freshwater. I knew this was the floating bridge over Lake Washington, but this lake wasn’t like any other I had ever seen. While you could see across it side to side, it was so long north to south you couldn’t see it end to end.
It was so blue. Not like you see out of pictures from some
place like Hawaii, but more a deep, beautiful, indigo blue, as though the night sky were trapped in the depths.
I hugged Maverick tighter around the waist, almost cuddling against his back. It was impossible to thank him in words over the roar of the bike and the rushing wind, but it was the best I could to. My sentiment of gratitude for him bringing me this way, so that I could see this… well, there weren’t really words anyway.
When we reached I-5, Deacon waved and split off going north while Maverick turned south. He put his hands over mine where they rested on his stomach, pressing them against his hard body, and I held on tighter. The reason for it became clear as we started to go over steel expansion joints in the freeway surface. Set at regular intervals, I remembered them being nothing in my father’s pickup truck but on a motorcycle? They were a completely different experience and were more than a little nerve-wracking.
He took the exit by the old Rainier brewery for the West Seattle Bridge. Unlike the I-90 floating bridge, this one was high. Like really high, and I was relieved when he took the exit for Delridge Way and we descended the off ramp back down to earth, stopping for the light at the bottom. After close to three hours, I was ready to be done.
“Almost there!” he shouted over the chug of the engine, as though he’d read my mind.
I nodded and we turned left, up the hill. At some point, we turned off Delridge and onto one of the little residential side streets. He slowed and turned again, then once more down a back alley that had deep ruts that he carefully walked us around to pull in behind a small, rundown house. He killed the engine on the concrete pad, back beneath a ramshackle, hastily erected carport, and I hopped off. Straightening, my hands on the back of my hips to aid in a deep stretch, I felt bones in my spine crackle and pop, and it left me sighing in satisfaction. Tired and sore, I longed for a decent hot shower and hoped his bathroom wasn’t excessively gross or old and falling apart.
“Come on,” he said and went up the back step. He keyed open the lock on the back door and I followed him, cautiously. If he were the type to hurt women, now would be the time to do it. Beautiful didn’t equate safe, and I knew the personal cost my being here could wring out of me. I knew it, and I was still willing to pay it.
The back door led right into the kitchen which was an odd sort of shape. There was a long closet behind the door with that slatted sort of doors that slid along a track. I figured it was a pantry or something, but there was a bit of a jut in the wall and then another set of white slatted sliding doors. I didn’t know why two sets, but I could explore later if he let me.
Though tight, the kitchen was new-ish. At least, newly remodeled. There were two doorways – well, maybe doorway wasn’t the right word. I mean, there were no doors, just open archways. Both were in line and straight across from the back door. They appeared to lead straight through the dining room and into the living room.
The kitchen was retro black and white with all modern, stainless-steel appliances, and it made me smile. I could really cook in a kitchen like this. I made a mean tamale and there could be tamales for days coming out of this kitchen if I were allowed free rein and the money for the ingredients.
“This way,” Maverick said, shutting the door behind him and I jumped slightly when he brushed past me. He slowed, but didn’t comment, and I followed him through the archway, through the dining room with its heavy dark wood table and modern straight-backed black leather chairs, and through the intersection between the short hall into the rest of the house and the living room.
The living room had nice furniture – black leather, a modern couch, recliner, and a love seat with a big screen modern television against one wall. The leather furniture was accented by a glass coffee table and three end tables all shiny, modern, and new, but that’s where the nice newness ended. The carpet was threadbare and dingy and the paint on the walls cracked. It was dusty in here; the curtains and rods didn’t look like they worked overtly well, and they also appeared as though the curtains were always closed. Cobwebs hung in the corners and from the ceiling and I felt my brow wrinkle at the state of the room.
“See the desk?” he asked and to one end of the room there was a messy glass desk with an open laptop on a leather blotter. Papers stacked at random on its surface, a window covered in dusty venetian blinds behind it.
“Yes.”
“Leave that alone. Don’t go near it,” he said flatly.
“Okay,” I said, already planning to defy him to get at those dust-coated blinds. The thick layer of fuzzy gray I could see from here on their surface driving me crazy already. I would leave the desk itself alone, but those dust bunnies would be mine. That was disgusting.
After the mishmash of old and new, dusty, and relatively clean of the living room, I started to worry about the state of the rest of the house, specifically the bathroom.
Maverick turned right down the short hall which held three closed doors—one to either side of us, and one straight ahead. He opened the one on the right.
“Spare room,” he said, and I cringed. It was full of a jumble of junk on a canvas drape laid out in the middle of the floor. Bare wires capped with those colorful little plastic caps hung out of the center of the ceiling where a light fixture belonged. There was a paint-spattered aluminum ladder standing up in the middle with a bunch of other random shit like five-gallon buckets, paint cans, toolboxes and other things piled up at its base haphazardly in the room. It was a nightmare disaster zone and I did not like it! What was I supposed to do with that?
“Don’t worry about this room for now,” he said, and I nodded, eyes still wide with my disbelief.
“Bedroom,” he said and popped open the door straight ahead. Hardwood floors, but they weren’t nice. They were scratched, scuffed, and tired—in need of a deep refinish. Again, this room had dirty paint on the walls, cracks, and even some splintered trim along the edges of the room at the floor.
The bed was large, but just a mattress on a frame with some shabby but comfortable looking black bedding. The dressers, unlike the rest of the house’s furniture, were rundown and looked like they’d come from a secondhand store or from a yard sale.
I think there was more laundry stacked on the dresser tops than there was in the drawers, but the room was otherwise somewhat cleaner. It certainly wasn’t as dusty and unused like the living room.
“Take this off,” he ordered and took the weight of my pack from my shoulders. I relinquished it and slid my arms through the straps. He set it on the floor, just inside his bedroom door, leaning it up against the side of the dresser along the wall just inside and to the right, across from the foot of the bed.
I was in a deep dread about what lay behind door number three by now, not knowing what to expect. He turned to the door on the left and I steeled myself, but I apparently didn’t need to. At least not as much as I thought I did, quite the opposite in fact.
The kitchen had been refurbished, but this bathroom had been completely ripped out and redone and was beautiful.
It had that retro vibe, much like the kitchen, but held a modern flair. The tub was a big, beautiful, and deep claw foot. It had a shower curtain that wrapped around on a free-standing rod, but I didn’t see a showerhead. There was, what looked like a square chrome vent set in the ceiling above the tub, but I hadn’t ever seen anything like it before.
The toilet, like the bathtub, was old-fashioned. It had one of those tanks separate from where you sat, high up closer to the ceiling with the old pull chain with a wooden handle to flush.
The sink was one of those beautiful old white porcelain pedestal sinks that perfectly matched the tub and toilet and I loved it. The floor was the old retro white ceramic square tiles with the black diamond tiles set at the corners where they met, but that was the last old thing that was in here.
The walls were painted a deep charcoal gray from about midway up. There was a band of narrow cooler lighter gray glass tile in narrow horizontal strips surrounding the room, and from that sort of ch
air rail band down to the floor was cool, wide slate colored tile, though I believe it was ceramic and not the actual stone. It was this funky mix of modern and old that didn’t look like it should work, but it totally did.
My first emotion upon seeing it was relief, my second one was abject dread at the potential work involved in keeping it clean… although it didn’t appear that Maverick was having any trouble doing so on his own.
“Panel for the shower is right here,” he said softly, and I turned around. Sure enough, just inside the door to the left as you came in was a touch screen panel. To the right of the door was the set of light switches.
“I don’t understand,” I said, and I didn’t. I looked back at the tub, which had its usual faucet for drawing a bath, but I still didn’t see a shower.
He tapped the button at the bottom of the screen to wake it up and showed me how to use it. Gentle rainfall started from what I assumed was a vent in the ceiling and fell into the tub.
I felt my mouth drop open in surprise.
“Want to try it out with me?” he asked softly.
It took me a second to realize what he was asking, but I was surprised that the answer was yes… I really would like to shower with him. It would be a pleasant introduction to his body.
There was a single window in the bathroom that faced out over the front yard. It was the old-fashioned kind that you lifted, but rather than clear glass, this was frosted and pebbled, allowing light in, but also keeping unwanted eyes out.
Maverick touched another button or two on the touch screen and music started—easy listening old 70s rock ballads. I knew the song, but I didn’t know the name of it or the band who played it.
He stepped up to my back, edging into my personal space and I kept my arms down to my sides, unsure what he wanted.