by Tia Siren
“Good-bye, Buck,” I said.
“Good-bye, Tara.” He sighed and gave me a push toward the door.
Now that he wasn’t holding me, I felt something missing. I wanted to run back into his arms and just run away. An overpowering thought started running through my head: This would be the last time I’d see him.
I turned to look at him while I walked out the door. He smiled at me. It wasn’t his regular smile; it felt like he was trying to say good-bye and thanks for the memories.
I steeled myself and rode home. I could do little to hide my tears anymore, and they flowed freely.
6.
I tried to take my mind off the events that were unfolding. I kept wanting to get on my motorcycle and join in on the chaos that was probably ensuing. But then I would see my mother, lying in bed, barely able to move.
I knew where I was needed, and it wasn’t in a war-zone. Buck could handle himself; I just had to stay positive. I waited by the phone, expecting a phone call at any moment—one that would never come.
“You look nervous, Tara,” my mother said.
“There’s a lot going on right now,” I replied.
“What’s keeping you inside? You used to like going for rides when you were like this before. Is it something Buck did?”
I wondered if I should tell her the truth.
“No, Momma. It’s nothing. Just get back to sleep,” I said, in a vain attempt at assuaging her curiosity.
“I’m not stupid, Tara. You could just tell me that Buck is off doing something crazy, like beating up a rival gang.”
I wondered how she knew, and my open mouth and gasps did nothing but assure her she was right.
“How did you know?” I asked.
“You know I was your father’s wife,” she said. “There’s a reason there weren’t any other motorcycle clubs around when you were growing up, and I was there for most of them. Why aren’t you with Buck right now?”
“He sent me home. He didn’t want me there,” I said honestly.
“He didn’t want you there because he couldn’t stand the possibility of you gettin’ hurt, Tara.”
I knew she was speaking the truth. Buck really did love me, and I just seemed to slap him in the face every time he showed it.
“I gotta go, Momma,” I said as I ran to the closet and threw on my jacket.
“Take the shotgun with you,” she said. “I won’t need it.”
I did as I was told and lumbered out with the shotgun in tow. My heart raced, as I knew that what I planned on doing was incredibly crazy. I also was scared of what Buck would do if we actually survived this.
I rode as fast as I could. I wasn’t sure if I was headed in the right direction, but the place that was most famous for settling disputes was the old quarry. I wondered what I would do when I got there. Sometimes it was best not to know.
7.
I was still half a mile out when I heard engines in the distance. The roaring thunder of motorcycles gathered en masse. It was impossible to make that sound any other way.
Rounding the corner, I saw Buck and the gang standing in a stalemate on the north side, while Connor and his gang were lined up on the south side. I could see the two men yelling at each other, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying over all the noise.
I cut a path through the bikers, heading straight for Buck, coming to a screeching halt just in front of him.
He looked at me with rage.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he shouted.
“Why the hell wouldn’t I be here?” I shouted in response.
“Because I need to know you’ll be okay. Get the hell home. Now!”
“I’m not leaving your side, not until this is all through,” I said.
I took my place next to him, lifting the shotgun under my arm. Connor looked over at the two of us and laughed.
“I guess you guys really do love each other,” he said.
I looked up at Buck, who didn’t change his expression in the slightest.
“I won’t ever leave my man,” I shouted.
Buck leaned over and pulled me in for a hug. I forgot how strong he was; it felt like he would break me in half with the force of it. I didn’t want him to stop, and I didn’t think he wanted to either.
“Buck, I thought you loved me,” I heard a screeching woman’s voice say.
Looking over, I saw that Gracie had decided to come. I wanted to put her in her place, but I didn’t want to be the person pulling the trigger first.
“Gracie, you better crawl back into whatever hole you just crawled out of,” I shouted, only to have Buck throw his hand over my mouth.
“I can speak for myself, Tara,” he said.
He took a couple of steps forward. The lights of the other cycles were near blinding, and I couldn’t make out anyone’s face behind Connor and Gracie.
“Gracie, you know what we did. We weren’t nothin’ more than a good afternoon. Just tell your brother you’re done and then this whole feud can come to an end.”
Gracie started laughing.
“You think we were just some afternoon fun? I thought we were something more than that. My brother is going to kick your ass,” she said.
“Connor, can you control that woman? I don’t think she speaks for you,” Buck said.
Connor rubbed his forehead and clenched his teeth.
“Gracie, shut the hell up. We’re tryin’ to hash this out without people gettin’ killed, and you’re just makin’ things worse,” Connor said.
“You’re takin’ his side instead of your own sister’s?” Gracie said. “What the hell is wrong with you, Connor?”
Connor turned and gave her a good smack across the cheek.
“You heard me, Gracie. Stop talking,” he said.
Gracie panicked. She started pounding her fists into Connor’s chest, but he didn’t budge. She cried and wailed, and then she collapsed to her knees in a crying mess.
“Connor, I got no beef with you or your gang. I just want us all to walk out of here and forget any of this happened,” Buck said.
Connor thought for a moment, looking to his sister crying on the ground. I could see his embarrassment at having her by his side.
“Gracie, get up,” Connor said.
He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her from the loose gravel. She didn’t resist; she seemed to have lost all interest in what was happening.
Connor pulled her back and sat her on his motorcycle. She sat without a sound, motionless. Then Connor turned back to Buck and me.
“Buck, I got nothing against you. I was just tryin’ to do right by my sister. When you said you were gettin’ married to Tara, I thought you were joking. I had a feeling you were just saying that cause you didn’t want to end up with Gracie. I don’t blame you; if she weren’t family, things would have been different.
“Get outta here, Buck,” Connor said. He backed up, eased onto his cycle, and kick-started it. “You got a hell of a girl there,” he added.
“I really do,” Buck said.
Buck turned and started walking back toward me. I was glad things had ended so easily, and without a fight. But then again, I did miss watching Buck get ornery.
“I’m the only one you should ever love,” shouted Gracie, and then she turned her gaze on me. “He would love me if you were dead!”
Gracie held up a revolver, taking aim straight at me. I started to duck, but everything moved incredibly slowly. I looked at Buck, who had a horrified expression on his face.
I could remember the first time I saw him. He wasn’t as big then, but he was scrappy. I wondered if he ever thought about me when we were younger. I knew I wouldn’t be able to dodge the bullet at this distance, but I supposed there were worse ways to die.
I closed my eyes as I heard the shot, waiting for the pain that would follow, but it never came.
I opened my eyes a second later to see Buck hovering over me. Blood poured from an open wound in his shoulder. I stared into
his big eyes, and he into mine.
“I love you,” Buck said.
“Don’t die,” I squeaked out.
“Ugh, it’s just a shoulder shot,” he replied. “I didn’t like that tattoo anyway.”
He collapsed on top of me. I hadn’t realized how much he really weighed until then.
8.
Everything was a blur the rest of that night. We ended up at a hospital where he got his shoulder sewn shut. I stayed with him the whole time, and we exchanged knowing glances.
He wasn’t the man I remembered at all. I wanted to hold him and never let him go. I knew he would always be there to protect me, and that was a feeling I never wanted to lose.
Connor turned in his own sister for what she’d done. I think he knew that if Buck decided to go after her, she wouldn’t make it far. Connor even visited him in the hospital to make amends.
The next morning the hospital released Buck. He was built like a tank, and it would’ve taken a lot more to do him in.
I met him out front with his motorcycle, the old hand-me-down he received from my father. With his arm still in a sling, he hopped on the cycle.
“I think I’ll take the lead on this one, Buck. You can’t brake with only one arm,” I said.
“This is my bike; I’m the only one in this saddle,” he said.
I cocked an eye at him, the same look my mother had given me a million times. It had always worked on my father when he was alive, and it looked like it might just work with Buck.
He let out a drawn-out sigh and scooted to the back seat of the bike. I hopped into the driver’s seat and he threw his arm around my stomach.
I finally felt like I was home.
*****
THE END
MOTORCYCLE Romance – Outlaw Biker’s Baby
1
The young woman looked over the bike. She put her hand on her chin, the way she remembered her father doing when she went with him to used car lots. He was a car guy; he loved buying old beat-up ones, working on them for months at a time, and then selling them for huge gains. She stroked her chin though she obviously didn’t have a beard the way her cuddly bear of a father had.
Her name was Vanessa Keller, and her father had been dead for ten years by the time she was staring at the Harley at age twenty-two. His name had been George Keller, and from the time her mother passed away when she was two, it had been just the two of them until he died. Mother dead as a toddler, father dead at twelve, and then she had gone to live with Aunt Kathy out in Utah.
She hated Utah. It was too hot, too dusty, too boring. Well, mostly boring. From a young age and through her teen years, Vanessa had found one thing she loved about Harrington, Utah, the small town her aunt lived in: A massive biker gang, one of the largest in Utah, was headquartered in Harrington. They were the Pythons, and the men in the biker gang all wore vests or jackets with an insignia stitched onto the back, a massive green snake coiled around a skeleton.
There were no women in the club proper, though each man always seemed to have one on the back of his bike, thick girls with massive breasts and fat asses, long blond hair, and as many tattoos as the men had.
Vanessa didn’t look like that, not as a teenager and not as a young woman. She was taller, thinner. She had rounded feminine hips and a taut ass, but it wasn’t big. Her breasts were perky, perfectly formed, but she didn’t bust through her bras the way the biker chicks all seemed too.
She was beautiful, though. Her face was angular, perfect, her lips plump, her eyes a soft blue. She’d had a long string of boyfriends throughout school, but she always went for the bad boys, and things ended badly.
Yet still she was missing something. Those boys, the bad boys of high school, they weren’t bad enough. She had a thing for the bikers she saw all over town. Not the old ones, of course, the fat guys with their big white beards—she liked the young ones, thin and tanned, with hard eyes and harder muscles. That was what she wanted.
When she graduated, Vanessa had planned on moving far away, but something had stopped her. Instead, she went to a local college and got a degree in creative writing. She had always loved writing. She lived with her aunt while she went to school, commuting to the small campus every day. And then she graduated, and she didn’t know what to do.
She wanted to write, to be a writer, but she didn’t know what. She felt as though she had stories within her, stories she wanted to tell, but how to get started?
She wrote short stories and sent them into magazines and websites. Most were rejected, but some were published. Still, it wasn’t enough to live on. Aunt Kathy had always loved her and taken care of her, but Vanessa could tell her aunt would be happier if, now after college, she found her own place. Aunt Kathy had been married once, but divorced since before Vanessa’s father passed away. She dated off and on but had grown to enjoy a solitary lifestyle. She had no kids of her own and liked it that way. Vanessa sat down with the older woman and told her she would be getting a job and moving out. They hugged, and Vanessa felt a bit sad. She could feel the relief flowing off her aunt.
She needed a job before she could find her own place. There were small apartments down on Mill Street, which was the main street that ran right through the centre of Harrington. She could afford one if only she could find a job.
She was drawn to a few places downtown. There was a small antique store owned by an old woman who was an antique herself. Another place was Nathan’s, a small diner. Vanessa was pretty sure she would make a good waitress. The last place she was considering applying to was the Devil Dog. That was a seedy bar at the far end of Mill Street, a place usually full of bikers, and Python’s more often than not. She could tend bar there, she was pretty sure, and she would be around the guys she had lusted after for so long.
Of course, Vanessa didn’t want to be at any of those jobs for long; they would just do until she wrote that great American novel she had in her. She ended up applying to all three places, and all three interviewed her.
In the end she was offered a job by the old woman at the antique store and Chet, the grizzled man who owned the Devil Dog. She took the job at the Devil Dog.
The hours were tough, but she had always been a night owl anyways. She worked five days a week, all nights, going in at seven and getting off at three in the morning on Mondays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. She had back-to-back days off, which was nice, and it turned out to be sort of like the weekend.
Chet was a nice man, if a bit short with his employees. She didn’t get much guidance from him when she started beyond “show your tits off and you’ll get more tips.” Luckily Susan took Vanessa under her wing.
Susan was in her early fifties, and she had been a bartender at the Devil Dog for over fifteen years. She was pretty, but her lined face was evidence of a live hard lived. She had been an alcoholic, she freely admitted, though she had managed to be sober, even working in a bar, for over three years.
She spent a week showing Vanessa the ropes, and they often worked together. The only time Vanessa tended alone was on the ultra-slow Mondays, but she had one of the two cooks with her then—both of who were large, muscular men—in case anyone got out of line.
In the Devil Dog, people got out of line often. Most of the customers were bikers, their black and chrome hogs like beasts from hell when they pulled into the parking lot, and they were parked, slanting slightly against kickstands, in front of the long porch that wrapped around the front of the bar.
Most of the bikers were Pythons, but a few other clubs frequented the place as well. When that happened, the place was always likely to go up like a powder keg. It only took one wrong word, one sideways glance, and men would be throwing punches. The bikers took their clubs seriously, and a slight against one man meant a slight against his fellow club members too. Vanessa found the whole thing a little bit silly, and by her second week there she was wondering if she had made a mistake in picking the bar over the antique shop.
As ridiculous as th
e grown men playing war was, she had to admit that the younger men were exactly the type that got her motor revving, so to speak. There were strong and tough, and they weren’t afraid to show their interest in her.
One of the most handsome, and one of the boldest, was a man in his mid-twenties named John. Of course, like most of the bikers who frequented the Devil Dog, no one called him by his real name. He had a nickname. Since starting her new job, Vanessa had been assaulted by idiotic nicknames every night. There was the Python with the bald head but walrus-like moustache called Snakebite, and a younger guy with glasses everyone called Dipstick. John, though, as far as biker nicknames went, his wasn’t bad: Tank. It wasn’t good, of course, but at least it wasn’t Dipstick.
Vanessa was fairly sure she knew why he was called Tank. His arms were massive, barely constrained by the sleeves of the leather jacket he always wore. His pecs pressed against the thin material of his T-shirts, and his legs were thick like tree trunks. He was a muscular man, and Vanessa was sure Tank could best any man in the bar when it came to a fight or feat of strength.
Tank had taken a liking to Vanessa. She had seen him with women before, pretty but overdone young girls with massive tits and short skirts. Vanessa knew she was prettier, and she had heeded her boss’s advice and bought a few low-cut shirts when she was hired, but she still was restrained when compared to Tank’s girls. He cycled through at least three, and they would come into the bar with him and giggle and laugh as he pulled them onto his lap, where they would grind their pert asses against his cock through his jeans.
The young bartender found herself growing jealous whenever she saw that. She yearned to be pulled onto his lap; she yearned to feel his dick grow hard beneath her. No matter if he was with a girl or not, when Vanessa worked, Tank was sure to spend some time at the bar, bullshitting with her.
One Saturday, after she had been working at the Devil Dog for almost three months, she finally gave in to him. It was late, nearing three, when the bar shut down and the bikers had to go find a bed to sleep it off in. Tank had come in with a girl, a pretty little blond thing named Tiffany, but she had drunk too much, throwing up, and had been taken home by a friend of hers. Since then Tank had been at the bar, smiling at Vanessa, flexing his muscles, and coming on to her in his own special way.