How great was it that, in my heart and in my head, I didn’t resent being alive?
Both my heart and my head, however, cursed the sunlight that cut past the edges of my hospital room’s ridiculously useless little blinds and stabbed me like trained assassins through my pupils. The curse spread to my lips, and though I wanted to scream it I found myself grumbling something that was a distant cousin to “fuck.”
Even this, though, was deliciously familiar enough to keep me from truly resenting the rude awakening. Sure, my skull felt like it was a few sizes too small around a brain that was a few sizes too big, and I felt like I’d been the puck in a monster game of air-hockey played atop a field of sandpaper…
But I was alive!
I laughed, groaned, and laughed some more. And the next round of “fuck”s, though half-hearted at best, were more recognizable.
Consciousness—a fuller, more encompassing version of the keyhole awareness I’d woken to—glided back, and I found myself in the room I’d only caught phantom glimpses of over…
Over…
Geez! How-the-hell long had I been there?
Machines and monitors beeped and whirred and displayed all manner of nonsense around me. Seeming to challenge the assault of medical technology, a horde of flowers, stuffed animals—most wearing hilarious mockeries of motorcycle leathers and one even seated upon a big, plastic Harley—and all manner of “GET WELL” cards. The nearest card, stood upright and partially opened, offered enough of a view to let me read its handwritten contents:
need skin?
i gots a hairy kiester
COVERED in it!
har har har
M
“Marcus,” I said aloud to myself, recognizing the “trademarked” humor of one of the Crow’s more loyal new recruits. I could even hear his “patented” laugh—Har har har, indeed—chiming in my mind as I read it.
Similar cards surrounded this one, most likely containing similar sentiments, and I couldn’t help but smile at the combined effect of all the various sentiments. It was, admittedly, a truly beautiful thing to wake up to.
But wasn’t that the point?
“Finally awake, I—”
“SWEET TITTY-FUCKING CHRIST!” I cried out in alarm, nearly throwing myself right out of my hospital bed in the process.
My head swiveled. A fresh wave of dizziness traveled all the way to my guts. A heated deliberation arose about whether or not I should puke up whatever my stomach could find. Then, deciding I was too hungry to go puking up anything, my body went to work on my heart and lungs, trying to calm the two down so that I could fuel the lecture I was about to unload on…
The nurse was folded over, nearly toppling over, and crying with laughter.
“I-I’m… I’m so-sorry, Mi-Mister Presley,” she stuttered around her cackles, “b-but th-THAT was the… the f-funniest—” She left the sentence unfinished as she doubled over yet again with laughter, forced to hold herself upright against the door frame that separated my room from the rest of the hospital. “‘Sw-sweet titty-fuck—’” she tried to repeat before another bout of laughter interrupted her. “Hoh, boy, Mister Presley! That likely just made my entire day, I’ll tell you that much right there.”
“Happy to oblige,” I grumbled, still working to stifle the urge to die, pant, or outright murder the giggling woman. “Just call me ‘Mister Laugh-Riot,’ over here.”
“Well alright, Mister Laugh-Riot,” she teased, taking a step inside and pausing to appreciate another of the no-doubt poetic sentiments scrawled within another of the cards. “The doctor’s on his way. In the meantime, can I get you anything? Some water, perhaps?”
But I could only think of one thing that I wanted at that moment.
THREE
~MIA~
I had decided that just sitting around Danny’s wasn’t doing me any good. Much as I was enjoying my time there—much as I needed the comfort it provided me with—it wasn’t doing enough to distract me from…
It wasn’t doing enough to distract me.
After a lot of convincing, Danny and Candy agreed to let me go out. I told them I had some errands to run, which, in my defense, wasn’t exactly a lie, and they agreed provided I stayed local and kept to heavily populated areas. This, I figured, shouldn’t be a problem, so I had no worries about agreeing and having it be a lie. Granted, I’d anticipated stipulations, but I’d also anticipated an extreme degree to those stipulations that would force me to lie in order to get out on my own.
As it turned out, I’d been a little overzealous with my pessimism.
And so it was that I was a free woman, so to speak.
I’d decided I wanted to go to the small town that Jace had taken to me on one of our first dates. Though it was admittedly not as local as Danny and Candy would have probably liked, I figured it still counted if public transit had it on their route. I moved onto the bus, clutching the folded page I’d printed out for the bus schedule. Yeah, it was on the public transit route—and, yeah, that meant it was local—but it did require a great deal of “take this bus to catch that bus and then run a few miles to get to another bus at this route so that you can be at that stop on time to catch…” and so forth and so on. The schedule said that it would be an estimated five-hour adventure just to get there, assuming that I didn’t miss this bus or ride for too long on that bus or, heaven forbid, not run fast enough. Sure, I could always just call Danny if I got myself in a jam; he’d be quick to either ride out to fetch me or send another one of the Crow Gang’s members if he was too busy.
But then I’d pretty much be grounding myself to his house until Jace finally woke up.
If he ever—
I gave a small smirk—a “good for you, Mia”-gesture—for cutting off Depression in mid-sentence like that.
Good for you, indeed, I congratulated without a single shred of irony.
It was the little victories.
A man sitting across the aisle from me saw my self-congratulating and offered a strange leer of his own, one that would have been all teeth if he’d had any teeth to begin with. Just like that I was missing Jace even more; missing our rides on his motorcycle. There was peace and joy and freedom with him, and, on his motorcycle, there was flying. Here, on this bus, there was a stress-inducing labyrinth of routes and schedules and, on board, an overwhelming sense of being on display to the wrong sort of people. It was, unfortunately, not an unfamiliar sensation, I realized. Though it wasn’t a street corner and I was most certainly not hooking anymore, I couldn’t help but feel like a piece of meat on display. And, just like when I was hooking, the sorts of people that were prone to ogle weren’t exactly the sort I’d ever want to display myself to. Not that I was much for displaying myself for anybody else since I’d met Jace. Considering all of this, I remembered all the times Candy and I had taken the bus to our corner, already fully donned in our “uniforms.” I thought that anybody seeing us would have no problem figuring out what we were and where we were off to, but now, dressed in a pair of comfortable khakis and a loose-fitting tee, I imagined that anybody who might have ridden one of those late-night busses with me and Candy wouldn’t even recognize me now. It was crazy how much things had changed in only a week’s time.
All because of Jace.
Taking some comfort in thinking of him, I decided to close myself off from the outside world (inside the bus) and replay the fondest memories I had of him—of us. The relationship might have been young—a surprising reminder given everything we’d already gone through together—but there was no shortage of happy memories to dwell upon. After all, I was about to reacquaint myself with the small town we’d gone to together. I gazed out the window, replaying everything from start-to-finish and bringing myself back around to the present just as the bus reached the first of many stops for my journey.
I sauntered off, waited two minutes—offering polite smiles to passersby and otherwise playing the role of a normal person on the streets—and then boarded my next b
us. Even this process, one that I was sure others thought of as annoying and mundane, felt incredibly liberating for me. I was my own person now, free to make plans and commit to them without worrying about being late for a night full of alleyway blowjobs and backseat butt-sex. Sure, there were a few creeps on the bus who leered at me in ways that reminded me of the way Johns looked at me when I was wearing a whore’s uniform and standing about in fuck-me boots, but at least they were just staring. There was no unsettling questions about how much for this; no follow-up moment where crumpled bills made an appearance; no uncomfortable effort to try to upsell from my mouth to my pussy, or from my pussy to my ass. The fact that my body was mine to speak for and not seen as the permanent property of T-Built and the Carrion Crew or the temporary property of some creep with a few bucks to throw away when his hand and a wi-fi connection could just as easily get the job done. And while my life was in no way perfect—I wasn’t even totally in the clear, after all—it certainly was better than it had been. And, even if the Carrion Crew did manage to capture me again, that asshole T-Built was dead and gone.
Good luck finding a sociopath to replace the likes of him, I silently challenged, remembering my old pimp’s routine of rape and scare-tactics to keep us controlled.
Meh, another thought chimed casually, they’d probably just kill you for the inconvenience.
My breath caught at that and I clenched my eyes shut. Behind my lids, I saw T-Built’s dead body, bullet-riddled and slumped in Candy’s and my old kitchen, surrounded in the flames. The fire licked at his corpse, then recessed abruptly like an animal might after it’s tasted something foul, and his eyes snapped open like a pair of traps that caught me in their sights.
“It’s only a matter of time, whore!” the ghost in my mind taunted.
By some miracle, I managed not to scream at the waking nightmare.
I committed to keeping my eyes open and my mind in the present for the rest of the trip.
****
The rest of the trip was enough to get my mind off of all the ugly thoughts I’d dredged up early in the journey. I’d made good enough time in switching stops, and was even able to duck inside a nearby market to buy myself a Coke and a random magazine boasting a celebrity I didn’t recognize and the promise of “59 WAYS TO PLEASE YOUR MAN” on the cover. As the last bus carried me into the small town, I made a game out of challenging each of the fifty-nine “ideas,” realizing most of them were either weak variations on the same thing. Almost half of them were total nonsense, and of the ones that had any merit to them only a half-dozen seemed even remotely promising. Deciding that the woman who’d wrote the “article” had obviously never consulted a man—I’d honestly be surprised if she’d ever even tried all of what she was suggesting—I began to play with the idea of writing one of these myself.
While my whoring days were over, I figured there was nothing wrong in carrying what I’d learned over to educate other women. If nothing else I’d be doing a service—without actually doing any service—to the men those women went on to hook up with.
Tucking the idea away for future consideration, I glanced back out the window as the familiar landmarks of the small town came into view. A few of the taller buildings of the market poked up in the distance ahead, and I found myself getting excited. For a Monday, I was happily surprised to see that it was packed. Though I wasn’t sure how likely it would be that any members of the Carrion Crew might be out this far, I knew how important it was to stay in crowded areas.
The bus finally came to a stop, and the hydraulics hissed; the street seemed to rise up. Finally, the doors opened, the sound of life and activity slipping in the greet me, and I made my way out. Stepping off the bus, I paused to look around, appreciating how different everything looked this time around. It had been darker during our date, and an annual festival called “Canal Days” had been in full swing. The main street had been closed off to traffic, and all of the shops and businesses had either been operating outdoors or featuring a great deal of their goods out on the street. And while much was different, I still got a very homey and comfortable impression of community from the stretch. Realizing I was smiling, I started on down the road, letting my eyes lead my way.
I’d made a loose decision, though I wasn’t sure quite when the decision had been made, to get something for Jace while I was out this way. The decision, existing like an apple bobbing about in a washbasin of water, had been there for quite some time, though every time I tried to grab at it for a specific idea of what to get it would sink away into dark depths and refuse to come back up until I abandoned the effort. Wandering the stretch all over again, however, it dawned on me that I already knew what to get him; in some ways I’d known ever since the night Jace had first taken me here. Satisfied that I had a plan, I committed to enjoying myself for the time being until I finally came upon my decided target.
Stepping over to a vendor selling a variety of chocolates, I bought myself a small bag of chocolate covered pretzels. Once again walking through the market, I thought back to my first date with Jace.
“So you’re a dessert-before-dinner sort of girl?”
“When I can be.”
“I like a girl with an appetite.”
“Then you’ll love me.”
I smiled at the memory, continuing to look around the market. Then, finally, I happened across what I’d been hunting for. The vendor, a local photographer who’d made a career out of traveling and snapping pictures abroad, still operated from a kiosk on the side of the road. A fair number of prints hung like fruit from a bizarre tree with no real symmetry or reason to their placement, and a small pang of worry started to creep up my spine as I realized I couldn’t find what I’d decided to come here for. I was growing evermore certain I’d have to begin an awkward line of questioning with the photographer to track down the particular image before…
“I’ve been here before,” Jace had said, referring to the scene depicted in the photograph, when we’d first come across this exact same print on that first night.
“Really? Where is this?”
“It was a small fisherman town in Rome. My family went on a vacation there before my brother graduated high school. We ended up getting lost and stopped at a small restaurant to get something to eat and get our bearings. The view we had from there wasn’t much different than this picture, actually.”
“Wow, that sounds amazing. I’ve actually never left the States. I always wanted to travel, but never got around to it.”
“You still could,” he’d assured me then, sporting one of his broad, promising Jace-trademarked smiles.
Smiling just as much in response to the memory as at the find, I grabbed the photograph and stepped over to the vendor. My smile only grew as I paid for the purchase, parting with it only long enough to let it be bagged and returned to me, and I practically skipped off, holding it to my chest.
“You still could.”
The words held promise of an adventure yet to come; of a life that we’d be sharing. This picture, something I’d subconsciously wanted to give to Jace even on that first night but had no way of offering, would be a symbol of both what had been as well as what would be.
“You still could.”
I wanted to do that. I wanted to go all around the world with Jace. My hand went to the pendant—the bird captured in mid-flight—against my neck, the one he’d gotten me that night from another vendor, and I gently squeezed it as memories and plans swirled in an excited storm within me. Freedom. The pendant and all the memories of the night that brought it to me, the events with Jace, and everything I dreamed we could do together…
It all made me feel so free!
As I continued through the market, I looked around at various shops and stores and all of the items they offered, wondering if I should buy anything else for Jace. I looked back down at the photograph and ran my thumb over the edge that poked out from the bag, imagining myself there, in Rome, with Jace.
I was so entranced
with the fantasy that I could almost smell the sea water.
“Looks like you’re letting your mind wander, eh, sis?”
The familiar voice was like a dark claw rocketing up from those black-and-white waters—something too dark and far too sinister to grace the scene in my mind—and yanking me back into the unforgiving depths of reality. The unforgiving depths of reality, where I was supposed to be keeping an eye out—where I was supposed to be mindful of my surroundings—so I didn’t wind up back on a street corner or, worse yet, wind up dead.
But this…
I froze at the voice, not wanting to believe I was hearing correctly.
It couldn’t be him.
He was in prison…
Right?
Still chastising myself for getting distracted, I turned towards the source. Clearing my thoughts, I glanced up into the familiar blue eyes. I hadn’t been wrong; it was my brother. It was Mack. I blinked, shaking my head a bit, still trying to figure out how this could be, and took a cautious step back. Then, remembering myself, I looked around at my surroundings—saw that, yes, I was still out in a public place and in broad daylight, no less—and squared my footing, narrowing my eyes.
My brother met my one-step retreat with a one-step advance of his own, but there was no threat to the motion; he was just maintaining the distance. Reminding myself that this was family and not a member of the Carrion Crew, I suppressed the instinctual urge to withdraw again. As I looked him over, I realized he hadn’t changed at all. His blond hair had been cropped short in what could only be a prison-fashioned hair style and his skin had gotten paler since our last encounter. Being locked up could do that, I supposed. He was still tall and lanky, he had lost some of the muscle he’d had before getting into trouble. But he had those eyes. Deep and cunning and mischievous; eyes that everyone used to say we shared, but now I hated to imagine that being the case. On him they looked untrustworthy, the eyes of a plotter, and I didn’t like the idea of giving off that impression. Worse yet, the way those eyes looked at me, seeming to study me, trace me for some future reference; all the while appearing to suck in details that made me feel like I was standing before him stark naked.
Riding On Fumes: Bad Boy Motorcycle Club Romance (The Crow's MC Book 2) Page 6