by Paula Cox
By day, I write and I explore Evergreen. Evergreen is a nice town, the sort of town I can hardly believe exists a mere ferry-and-bike ride from my home in Bremerton. There’s a bakery and a well-maintained park and an antiquated corner store and a town hall with pillars and a triangular roof which overlooks a statue of some old Civil War veteran. I walk through the park as the grass turns deep green and the flowers open their petals to catch the rays of the sun. Sometimes I take my notebook with me and sit on the bench for hours just writing. I write short stories and the beginnings of books which I will never finish. I write vignettes about Kade’s shirtless body. I write erotic scenes about his nightly visits.
It’s strange. When he came to me weeks ago and told me what he wanted, I replied that if I didn’t want it, I’d have the right to say no. But now that I’m here, I don’t want to say no. I want to fuck him. I want him to come in one night crazed with lust and tear my underwear off and ram me, hard, like the night we met. I want him to fuck me before the baby starts to show, before things get complicated fast. I write: I want to be drilled by Kade, she thought, and she was aware of how silly that sounded but it was what she wanted. I intend it as the first line of a short story but it goes nowhere. I don’t want to write about it. I want it to happen.
I go back to the clubhouse and sit at the desk and write until my eyes are tired and then I lie on the bed with my eyes closed, just thinking. Mostly I think about Kade, hoping that soon he’ll come through that door and begin tearing at my clothes. I think about what it would be like if he just marched in here and bent me over and just fucked me, hard. I think about what it would be like if he handled me roughly, flipped me over with his strong hands, yanked down my underwear, and pounded me from behind. My pussy gets impossibly hot at the thought. I close my legs tightly to fight the urge to masturbate. I can’t masturbate here, I reason. Though I’ve been here for a few weeks, it still doesn’t feel like home, not completely.
I called Mom soon after I arrived, and the conversation went a little like this:
“Hello.”
“Mom, it’s me.”
“Okay. Hello.”
“I’m moving out. Somebody’s coming by for my clothes later.”
“You’re not paying rent anymore?”
“Your check covers that. We both know it does.”
“How am I supposed to do my shows?”
By ‘do my shows’, she meant: How am I supposed to spend absurd amounts of money on pointless crap from shopping channels?
“Money management. You did fine when I was at college. I’m sure you’ll manage now.”
“Fine. When are they coming?”
“Around six.”
“Fine. Anything else?”
“No.”
“Fine.”
“Bye, Mom.”
“Fine.”
And she hung up.
I didn’t expect more from her. All my life, she has been not-really-there, a shadow. The same as Dad, who spends his time out of prison striving to get back in.
Really, it’s a wonder I’ve turned out so well-adjusted and capable, into a person who makes such mature decisions.
I snigger to myself and roll over in bed.
Mature. Capable.
Maybe one day these will be words I can use to describe myself, but right now there are others which are more appropriate. Longing. Hungry. Restless. Horny.
I close my eyes and I see Kade, imagine him kicking the door open and marching to the bed and demanding, “Get naked, now. Right now.”
I told him I didn’t want to be a whore and yet now all I can think about is being treated like one by him. I guess my body wants things my reason does not. It reminds me of the Twin Peaks, when I liked yet resented the attentions of the customers. I seem to specialize in mixed feelings.
The Tidal Knights guys are respectful but distant with me, probably because they know I’m their boss’s ‘woman.’ But one of them takes the time to talk to me now and then. His name is Scud and he’s a tall, sharp-featured man. He looks too skinny to be a Tidal Knights member. I try and see him going up against somebody like Kade and the image makes me laugh. Still, he’s a friendly enough guy. Sometimes, when I’m writing in my bedroom—which is in a separate wing of the clubhouse, opposite the bar—he’ll knock on the door and bring me in a sandwich and a Coke.
“Writing can be thirsty work, I’ve heard,” he’ll say, with a smile on his face.
“Yeah, can be.” I place my pen next to the notepad and start on the sandwich. Scud takes the spare seat, an armchair in the corner, and we sit together whilst I eat.
“How are you finding the clubhouse, then?” he says.
“Fine,” I answer. “I love Evergreen. It’s beautiful.” It would be a lot more beautiful if Kade would make good on his promise to treat me like his whore, I reflect. And if that’s the exact opposite of what I told Kade when he made the offer, I don’t care. I may not be far along, but I think it’s about time I started using this pregnancy thing to explain my irrational behavior. Oh, the joys of womanhood . . .
“Pardon?” I say, realizing that as I’ve let my thoughts fly Scud’s been talking.
“I said, what are you writing about?”
Scud reminds me of a middle-class dad at a barbeque, asking the kids what they’re up to these days. He must be in his mid-thirties, or he’s a late-twenty-year-old who’s led a very hard life. He has a slightly haggard look to him which doesn’t take away from his kindness in the least. A harmless man—if I ever put him in a story, I think that’s how I’ll describe him.
“It’s a short story,” I say. “Or maybe it will one day mutate into a short story. Right now it’s more of a string of sentences which have very little connection to a narrative.”
“What is it about?”
I blush, munching on my chicken salad sandwich, and then wash it down with a sip of Coke. “Uh, it’s about a woman who moves away from her hometown to join a biker gang.”
Scud grins. “Oh, right.”
Why am I talking to this man? I mean, he’s nice enough. But it should be Kade in here taking an interest, Kade in here asking what the story is about, Kade in here smiling at me. I want him. Bad. Goddamn it. I’ve never wanted anybody this badly in my life. I’m slightly ashamed of myself for how badly I want him; it’s like I have no control over my desire.
“Is Kade in?” I ask, hoping my voice sounds casual.
“In his office,” Scud says.
I nod and quickly finish the sandwich. I expect him to get up and leave when the conversation peters out, but he just sits there and watches me eat. He’s a bit odd. A slightly odd man. Maybe I’ll describe him like this: He was a harmless, if slightly odd man. When I finish my lunch, he takes the plates and the empty glass of Coke and leaves me.
I write for a while longer, but all the time I’m thinking of Kade, thinking what it would be like to feel his lips on mine again. I mean, don’t get me wrong, having a hunky biker visit you at night to give you strings-free orgasms isn’t such a bad thing. But I want more. I want him. I want him completely.
As I write, I realize I’m writing about myself through a thinly-veiled character named Layla. Layla desperately wants to fuck the lead biker but she’s not getting anywhere so in the end she decides that she has to tease him a little. She’s never played the tease, but she decides that she has to change that, to reel him in, to give him a preview of what he’s missing. So Layla marches into his office—and then I stop writing and lay the pen aside.
That’s what I need to do, I reflect. I need to make him realize that, though these night-time orgasms are appreciated, there’s so much more we could be doing. I need to make him realize that we could be so much closer than we currently are. I know he’s busy, I know he’s reeling over Duster’s death, but still . . .
Like Layla, I have never been the teasing type of girl. But maybe it’s time that changed.
I push back in the chair and stand up before I have time
to second-guess myself. Then I march out of the bedroom, past the other bedrooms, into the reception area and then into the bar. The bar is empty apart from a couple of pledges, who stare at the ground just in case they’re misconstrued as staring at the boss’s woman. I walk across the bar, heart pounding with excitement and nerves.
When I push his door open, Kade smiles at me but doesn’t hang up the phone.
“That isn’t fuckin’ good enough,” he says. “That isn’t even close to being fuckin’ good enough.”
I see his eyes go to my legs, bare in my summer dress, as I skip across the office and around to his side to the desk. His grin gets wider. Maybe he’s thinking that I’ll wait for the call to be over. But I don’t. Instead, I lean down and press my lips firmly into his, kissing him with all the pent-up passion of these past weeks. Our tongues clashing, brushing. Our teeth gnashing together. Warmth and a thousand tingling nerves coursing between us. I moan, a sweet moan which is meant to make him think of all the dirty things we could be doing, and then, when he’s really getting into it, I pull away.
Licking my lips, I say, “That was all,” and then I skip out of the office.
I think Layla would be proud.
Chapter Fifteen
Kade
I’d have to be about the dumbest man in the world not to realize what game Lana’s playing, coming in here like that and getting me all fuckin’ riled up. Like she thinks I don’t want to go in there and give it to her, like she thinks that’s not all I’ve been thinking about. But when a man’s got a crisis on his hands it can be damn difficult to find the time for lust. And by the time I get to bed with her, normally around two in the morning, I’m too damn tired to do much else but give her a touching up.
When she leaves, my cock is still rock-hard. It’s still rock-hard ten minutes later when I have a meet with the guys, a round-table on this Italian problem. I close my eyes and use the time-worn trick of thinking about mundane things to get her out of my head. I think about chairs, and lightbulbs, and grass—anything but the way she moaned, the heat of her lips. Finally, I calm down and go into the bar, to the table where the men sit. But that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking of her, a backing track to my thoughts, always there.
I’m supposed to go with Scud to the outskirts of ’green after this, but I reckon I might be skipping that.
I sit down at the head of the table and tell myself to focus. Scud sits to my left, where Duster would normally be sitting. Seeing Scud there instead of Duster makes me want to punch the man directly in the face. Not even his fault, or anything to do with him. It’s just that Duster should be there, dammit. Duster should be sitting there cracking some moronic joke that nobody wants to hear, or saying something sincere that nobody else would have the balls to say. Or something. Anything but this. Anything but the ashy remains in the urn in a drawer in my office desk.
The rest of the guys are here, too: Mountain, Earl, Glover, Barge, Noname, Fowler, and Copeland. All of them in their leathers and most of them with worried expressions on their faces. The Italians have been spotted around Evergreen and more than once our guys have gotten into fights with them. Nothing serious yet. Fistfights and shit like that. But sooner or later, there will be blood.
“We’re here to talk about the Italians,” I say.
And that sets them off. All at once, they’re shouting, talking over each other, talking about how the Italians are moving in and half of their contacts in Seattle and Portland won’t talk to them now, about how people are running scared and pretty soon it’s going to cost us more than we can take. Pretty soon the Italians are going to bleed us dry and the clubhouse and their own apartments and their bikes and their families will go to ruin.
“Enough,” I say, when I’ve let the yapping run on for a while. You always have to let the men have their say. Otherwise you’re just asking for them to turn on you, like the crew of a pirate ship who won’t hesitate to make their captain walk the plank if they get tired of him. That’s a motorcycle club for you. Fierce men have fierce rules and I wouldn’t have it any other way. When I say enough, the men stop at once. Right now is when Duster would say somethin’ to disarm the situation, make some kind of joke. Scud sits silently.
“We know this is fuckin’ bad and crying about it won’t make it any better.”
The men nod. Mountain looks like a giant sitting at a kid’s play-table with his shoulders hunched over and his knees pressed against the table, chair pushed back. He shakes his head slowly. “I saw him today, Boss.”
A hush falls over the table. I don’t much like the look of it, the way the men glance at each other, like they’re not fierce outlaws but little girls running for their lives.
“Him being Enrique,” I say. Enrique is Manuel’s brother, second-in-command of this branch of the Italian mafia, and a sadistic psychopath if reports can be believed. He’s as crazy as his brother but not the sort of crazy which makes a man weak. He’s the sort of crazy which makes a man deadly. Rumor has it that he’s dropped around eighty bodies, which if you account for how rumors are more often than not horseshit, is still probably around twenty. An impressive figure, but no more impressive than me and Mountain and maybe Earl.
But the men are worried; the men aren’t seeing clearly.
“I heard he’s killed one-hundred and twenty men,” Noname says. Noname is one of the younger guys, around twenty-two, with a goatee which makes him look like Disney villain and an egg-bald head. He’s capable enough, but can be skittish at times. “I heard he has connections with police commissioners all over the States, and he can get away with anything he wants. I heard he once wiped out an entire Mexican gang in one night with an MP5 sub-machine gun. I heard he just gunned them down.”
“Don’t be a fool, boy,” Earl says, and for a second I think thank god somebody’s going to talk sense. But then Earl mutters: “It was not an MP5 and they were not Mexican. It was an M16 assault rifle and they were Irish. A drug deal went wrong and the Irish didn’t want to pay so Enrique ambushed them with an M16 assault rifle and gunned every single one of them down. You’re right about the police, though. At least that’s what I heard. He can get away with anything he wants.”
I sit back and watch as the men, tough men all of them, spout nonstop horseshit. I think about Lana. All I would have to do is walk across the bar, into the dorms, down the hallway and into her room. And I will, I tell myself. I will when this is done. But if there’s one thing a president never does, it’s leave his men at a time like this. Goddamn, but I wish Duster was here. He’d know the exact right thing to say to put everybody at ease. He’d say something about Enrique shooting lightning from his dick and everybody would laugh. I could say that, sure, but it’d sound odd coming from me. Like I was making fun of them or something.
“I saw him today,” Mountain repeats. “I saw him just outside ’green, sitting on the hood of a Chrysler, a black Chrysler. He was just sitting there and looking at the town. Looking at it like a man who had blood on his mind.”
“What did he look like?” Noname says, way too eagerly. A little kid asking what Santa Claus looks like.
Mountain shrugs. “Like an Italian. Slicked back hair. Grey suit. He wasn’t a big man. Well, he was shorter than me. He was tanned. He wasn’t wearing any jewelry which was strange because you know how much those mafia guys like jewelry. He just looked like a man.”
The men are about to start up again when I cut in: “Mountain says this Italian looked like a man and that’s ’cause he is a fucking man. Look, this man’s brother killed himself because he was looking down the barrel of a gun like a fucking idiot. Now the Italians want our blood and that’s okay with me because, just like you, the only reason they think they can take it is this Enrique fuck. They have put all their faith into this one man and when this man is dead they won’t have any faith left. Fuckin’ hell, fellas, this is one man. Don’t underestimate him, but don’t overestimate him, either. Put a bullet in his head and he will bleed, like any other
man.”
The men begin muttering amongst themselves at this, as though they don’t believe. I keep thinking what it’d be like if Duster was here, how he’d somehow make all this make sense.
It makes me so goddamn angry seeing them like this that I jump to my feet and slam my fist down on the table. A few of the guys have glasses of whisky in front of them; they lurch up and clatter back down.