Vindication: A Motorcycle Club Romance

by Valentine, Sienna

  “Take this in to Miss Dawson for me real quick, while recess is still on. Can you do that?”

  Toby took the note in a tight hand and smiled. He nodded. “Yeah!” Immediately he turned and ran on heavy feet for the school, clutching Batman in his elbow.

  “Toby, wait!” Ghost hollered after him.

  Toby came to a sliding halt and turned. Ghost stretched his fingers through the fence again, only this time, a twenty-dollar bill was stuck between them. Toby jogged back up to the fence and took it from him with a curious gaze.

  “Don’t ever do a job without asking what’s in it for you, first,” said Ghost. “Now, off you go!” He made a whip-cracking sound and Toby was off again, both the note and the money crushed tightly in his fist. Ghost watched him wheel around kids jumping rope and playing with giant rubber balls before he disappeared inside the massive building.

  With that done, Ghost took quick steps back toward the front entrance of the Academy. He tried to sit casually on the edge of the fountain so he would look cool when Bridget came out, but the edge was way too tiny, and he decided he wouldn’t look very cool if he fell the fuck in. Instead, he thrust his hands into the soft patch of wildflowers around the fountain and pulled out a grip of tiny pink and orange blooms attached to their stems—as well as their roots, and some clods of dirt.

  Ghost was eyeballing the ugly ends of the bouquet when he heard the heavy front wooden doors open. He whirled quickly with the flowers held up. Bridget stood by the closed doors, her arms folded, an almost bewildered smirk on her face. She wore tight black pants and a scoop-neck white shirt that made Ghost salivate. Her shiny blonde hair was pulled back in a no-nonsense ponytail, revealing big, blue gems on her earlobes. His favorite part had to be the black leather boots pulled up to her knees, ready to climb on the back of his bike and ride away with him.

  That disapproving look on her face drove Ghost insane. He smiled mischievously at her, and it only made her smirk tighter. Already he could feel his dick getting hard at the thought of kissing those angry, beautiful lips.

  “I should have you arrested,” she said.

  Ghost held the flowers out further. “I can think of a way to get me into handcuffs that’s way more fun.”

  Bridget scoffed and rolled her eyes, but the smile on her face was genuine. She walked toward him, arms still crossed, her boots clacking on the old cobblestone. Whatever resistance she might have felt toward Ghost seemed like it was slowly, surely melting away. After all, she could have ignored the note. But here she was, smirking at his jokes, coming close enough that he could smell her lilac and jasmine body wash.

  She stood in front of him and raised an eyebrow. “And you’re enlisting my hapless students on your quest to get to that fun, huh?”

  “Hey, Toby came up to me,” he said. “And he got paid for his work. I’m not a monster.”

  Her eyebrows rose. “That is surprisingly decent of you,” she said.

  “Surprisingly? Ouch,” he said, grasping his chest in mock pain. “I haven’t even had a chance to prove how indecent I am yet. Can’t we have our honeymoon phase first, where the magic of my sexual prowess makes you ignore all my flaws for a while?”

  Bridget flushed, and there was a sparkle in her eye when she met his that sent a wave of lust rushing through Ghost’s nerves. That she still wanted to resist him only made it worse. “I don’t think it’s possible for you to be that good at sex.”

  Ghost stepped forward just a bit. Bridget didn’t retreat; in fact, the look in her eyes was curious. Asking what he was going to do about it. Ghost leaned over until his lips hovered right above her ear, close enough that he could imaging he could almost hear the quickened beat of her pulse. “But you’re just dying to find out if I am, aren’t you?” he whispered.

  For a split second, Bridget closed her eyes as she inhaled sharply. Her skin flushed again, and she licked her lips as Ghost pulled back and leaned over her face. She opened her eyes and looked at him. Her glare was trying to be angry, but in her eyes was pure, unadulterated lust.

  “Go to dinner with me,” said Ghost.

  “No,” she said, with absolutely no heart in it.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t date soldiers.”

  “Who said I was a soldier?”

  Bridget gave him a look. “You guys are nothing but trouble. I know you up and down.”

  “You can’t say that in front of a school!” he teased, then leaned in and added in a lower voice. “Say it again.”

  Bridget laughed and gave his shoulder a little shove. “Seriously, I don’t meld well romantically with soldiers.”

  “I’m not technically a soldier,” he said. “You really think I’d take orders from someone?”

  She hummed. “Good point. But don’t you have a boss at your biker club?”

  “Oh, yeah, I guess I do,” said Ghost, rubbing his neck. “But that’s not the same. Any drill sergeant would crucify me for saying the shit I say to Henry. In fact, Henry might crucify me one day for it.”

  “Sorry, was this part of you making your case for why I should go out to dinner with you?” she said with a disbelieving smile.

  “Delete all that!” Ghost waved his arms around and dirt from the flowers scattered across the walkway. “I’m serious, though. Let me take you out. I promise, I’m not some military jagweed.”

  Bridget didn’t reply. She was looking up at him with those big, blue eyes, thinking. He could almost hear her brilliant mind turning.

  “I have to run out of town for the next few days. Let’s have dinner when I get back. And if you don’t say yes, I’ll come back here and make Toby give you love notes every day until you surrender, or until I’m bankrupt. And then I guess I’ll just become a panhandler outside the school.”

  Bridget gave a cute little giggle. “You know these kids are rich, right? He’s probably just going to use those twenties to wallpaper his treehouse.”

  “See what I’m already sacrificing just to get near you? This is the total package, babe,” said Ghost, doing a little twirl on his boot heels.

  Bridget rolled her eyes, but she had really never stopped smiling, not once during the entire visit. She looked off into the distance for a moment, thinking, until a high-pitched artificial bell sounded in the schoolyard. She gazed casually toward the kids as they began to gather up to return to class.

  For a moment, she just looked at Ghost, watching him, like she was trying to translate something. Then she glared, and snatched the flowers out of his hand. Dirt showered on the cobblestone at their feet.

  “Gimme your hand,” she said.

  Ghost smiled and held his right hand forward. Bridget took it in hers and he felt a jolt of fire race along his nerves, through his chest. He watched her as she pulled the black sharpie from the lanyard dangling around her neck and wrote her phone number on his hand. His eyes traced the delicate line of her jaw and neck, and he imagined nibbling on both of them.

  Bridget said nothing, but only gave him a sassy look as she recapped the marker on the lanyard. Ghost looked at the number, and then back at her with a satisfied grin. She turned and sauntered back into the school without looking back at him, and Ghost couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so lightheaded around a woman.

  ~ SIX ~

  Bridget

  Heels clacking on the burnt orange tile, Bridget headed down the hallways of the Academy, smiling to herself and feeling a million miles away. That feeling became a bit more literal when she looked up and realized she’d taken wrong turns back to her classroom, and somehow wound up outside the girl’s locker room, in the area of the academy that had been added to the original structure. She whirled around, self-conscious, but the hallway was devoid of witnesses. Bridget laughed at herself and shook her head before righting her course.

  The classroom was still empty when she arrived. It usually took a mighty effort for the yard matrons to gather the kids in orderly lines when recess was over, so what was suppo
sed to be a fifteen-minute break went closer to twenty, and Bridget was glad for it. She sat down in her cozy, wood and leather chair and tried to gather her thoughts back to the tasks at hand.

  Ghost’s note sat on the desk, distracting. She smirked as she picked it up and read it again:

  Look, if you have a problem with my love for Squirtle, I’m willing to challenge you to a Pokémon match right now outside by the fountain. Bring your best cards. XOXO

  Instead of writing his name, he had hastily drawn a tiny little ghost with hearts for eyes. Bridget couldn’t help but crack up at the note, even if it was completely ridiculous. It also occurred to her that if some other, wimpier dude had tried this same thing on her, she would have rejected it outright as mushy nonsense. Flowers and nice dress-up dinners were one thing, but love notes? Bridget wasn’t sure she was that type of romantic.

  Yet the butterflies in her stomach made her feel like a school girl, reading a note from a boy she had a crush on who passed it to her in class. Whatever it was about him, she liked this treatment from Ghost. It was a very foreign feeling.

  But this was probably all a setup, she told herself. Biker guys, men like Ghost, why else would they cultivate such knock-‘em-out charm except to bed as many women as fast as possible? After so many years of it, they probably got bored having willing pussy handed to them and started chasing after the more difficult game—the married housewives, the preacher’s daughters, the upper-middle class elementary school teachers. It wasn’t hard to imagine them making an actual, club-wide competition out of shit like that. Soldiers did it all the time.

  The competing thoughts and feelings wouldn’t settle in her gut. They just sloshed around, refusing to blend, a grumpy mixture of oil and water that left her with more questions than answers.

  Tiny, excited voices echoed down the hallway, and soon after the kids started filing into the room, trying and mostly failing to come down from their exercise high and settle at their desks. Bridget smiled at them as they passed, tucking the note from Ghost into the thin top drawer of her desk. Near the end of the procession, Toby Cary came in, glowing and grinning and swooping his Batman doll around in dizzy circles.

  Toby. Bridget was shocked when he brought her the note. All morning she had been a wreck, trying to teach the class and simultaneously watch him for signs to confirm that he was the one who had called her the other night. Hours of internet searching and phone calls had yielded nothing about the number, except that it was local. She couldn’t see any signs of trauma on the boy, but he’d always been pale, quiet, and tired. She felt like she was starting to understand why.

  She had tried to catch Toby’s eye throughout the morning and somehow signal to him that she knew, and that it was safe to talk. It was hard not to let the thoughts become obsessive; she felt like she was tied up and watching a lion stalk up to eat him. The recess bell had been a respite, and as she sat at her desk trying to compose herself, Toby had come running in with the note, looking happy as a clam, like he did now. Before Bridget could use the alone time to talk to him about the phone call, he had shot back outside to the playground.

  Toby was not an outgoing child, but for some reason, he had walked right up to Ghost and spoken to him. The revelation was mind-blowing for Bridget. What had Toby seen in Ghost to trust him so quickly? Why couldn’t she replicate it and get Toby to open up to her so she could help him?

  She almost hadn’t answered the note. But it occurred to her that if Toby had taken so quickly to Ghost, it probably meant something. Maybe Bridget could use that to help him somehow. She wasn’t sure how, but she couldn’t ignore it, not when she was so certain Toby was in danger. So she took a chance on Ghost.

  As she stood up to quiet the class down and launch into the day’s history section, Bridget heard a little voice in the back of her head argue: That’s not the only reason.

  It was seven thirty, and Bridget sat at the shiny, mahogany bar of the Red Door, working on her third draft beer. Her hopes to get home and in bed by eight had been shattered when Muriel Green, the third grade instructor, came rushing into her quiet classroom not an hour after the students had been dismissed for the day. She’d misplaced a pile of tests and mistakenly thought she handed them back, but found them ungraded in the backseat of her SUV when she went looking for her pair of spare sneakers. Together, they huddled around clustered desks in Muriel’s classroom and quickly graded the science tests before throwing them into each student’s cubby box.

  Muriel offered drinks to thank her, and Bridget decided it had just about been that kind of day and accepted. Her fellow teacher was one of Bridget’s small social circle, and it had been a while since they had spoken outside the Academy. They didn’t spend a lot of time together, but she valued the woman’s insight and willingness to always help Bridget out of a jam. They were different in a lot of ways—Muriel had grown up in and around the richer parts of LeBeau and was genuine upper class—but the profession seemed to have a way of smoothing out a lot of those differences. Having someone to share the pressures of teaching made the days much easier.

  Next to her, Muriel was flagging down the bartender to order her third martini, and Bridget shrugged and put in for her fourth beer early.

  “You know that kid, Tommy Cavanatti?” said Muriel, leaning into Bridget’s shoulder.

  “The one with the lisp?”

  “Right. Last week, during first recess, I was passing out the materials for the art project and I accidentally kicked over his messenger bag, and a freakin’ porno magazine fell out.”

  Bridget almost lost a little bit of her beer. “Are you kidding me? In your class? They’re so young!”

  “I couldn’t believe it,” said Muriel, shaking her head. She was much smaller than Bridget, with soft shoulders and brassy brown hair cut clean mid-neck and in choppy bangs. Her glasses were those wide, round owl-style from the seventies that only made her feminine features look smaller and more delicate. “I know every generation has complained about the younger ones being more horrible, but things really are changing.”

  “What did you do?” asked Bridget.

  “I took it out of his bag and put it in my desk. He hasn’t said anything about missing it yet,” said Muriel with a shrug. “Frankly, he’s such a good kid otherwise that I don’t feel like embarrassing him to his parents if I don’t have to. I figured I’d wait and see if he does it again before I call. Is that awful?”

  Bridget took a drink of beer and shook her head. “No. Anyway, if he hasn’t asked for it back, maybe he’s not the one that put it there. Maybe his old man needed a quick hiding place.”

  Muriel rolled her eyes. “Wouldn’t be the first time. Some of these guys are complete pigs.” She had a sour look on her face as she sipped her martini.

  Sharing the horror stories of parent-teacher conferences was a yearly ritual for the Academy’s faculty; they had a dark corner booth reserved at this bar just for the occasion. Miss Moses, the beautiful, multiethnic dance teacher, currently held the record of worst interaction, when a visiting father propositioned her for sex in her ballet studio with his wife and daughter ten feet away.

  “I think I’m mostly shocked they still make porno mags,” she said. “Who’s paying for those with the internet around? This is the fifth or sixth porno mag I’ve seen in the last week, for hell’s sake.”

  Muriel gave her a funny look. “You don’t say?”

  Instantly, Ghost returned to Bridget’s thoughts, and she sighed with a heavy smile. She put her beer down and rolled her eyes at herself just a little. She was a little annoyed to discover she didn’t have the balls to actually look at her friend as she spoke about him. “I went to visit Gramps after class Friday and drop off a prescription the idiot pharmacist fucked up, and there was this guy there hanging out with the vets. He was bringing them rum and porno mags.”

  Muriel’s eyebrows went up and she laughed, red-faced. “To the old folks home? He didn’t get in trouble?”

  “Staff there
will never confiscate something unless it’s a danger to the residents, but they also won’t get them certain things. Apparently, this guy’s been… taking care of their more debauched needs.”

  “That is hilarious,” said Muriel. “An angel of sin.”

  “Oh, he’d love it if he heard you call him that,” said Bridget, laughing.

  “What’s this guy’s name?”

  “Ghost McBride.”

  “Ghost McBride, you say?”

  Bridget nodded. “You heard me correctly.”

  “Is he a magician?”

  “Dang, that’s what I should have said…” Bridget stared at the ceiling wistfully.