by Reid, Ruby
But she was looked beyond that tonight. At some point, she thought all women had to accept their bodies as they were. She knew she had it better than most but felt selfish for being so vain. Getting over that, she supposed, was also a huge step towards getting back out on the dating scene.
She was broken from her self-reflection when a waitress came by, a sympathetic look on her face. She looked to the empty martini glass and said, “Another?”
“Please,” Amanda said, and watched the waitress take the glass. She made the decision that if she had not attracted anyone by the time her next drink was downed, she would call it a night. She could get drunk at home for a lot cheaper and feel a lot less foolish in the process.
She started to look back down to her Kindle when a figure approached her table. She looked up and saw a tall, relatively attractive man standing across from her.
“Hey,” he said cheerfully.
“Hey,” Amanda said. This is it, she thought. And with that thought, she realized that she was putting far too much emphasis on a chance meeting at a bar. She pushed it all behind and did her best to stay true to herself—to bring her true personality to the center.
“There’s no way for me to say this without coming off like a creep,” the man said, “but I’ve been over there at the bar for the last half an hour. I saw you and noticed that no one has come back to claim this seat. Is that because there is no one coming to claim it?”
She shook her head. “Nope. Just me.”
“Oh,” he said. He was quiet for a moment, as if giving her the opportunity to invite him to take the seat. She grinned coyly when she realized that was exactly what he was doing.
“Would you care to take it?” she asked.
“I actually would,” he said. “It’s lonesome over there at the bar by myself.”
“By yourself, too?” Amanda asked.
“Yes. I’m in town on business for three weeks. I know no one in this city. So if you’d let me, I’d like to buy your next drink.”
As if on cue, the waitress bought Amanda’s second martini to the table. The man waited for her to leave and then took his seat.
“Ah,” he said with a smile. “Fate?”
“In a drink?” Amanda asked. “Doubtful. But nice line.”
Smiling, he reached a hand across the table and said, “I’m Mark Comber. Pleased to meet you.”
Amanda took the offered hand and looked into his eyes when she shook it. He was handsome and had a gaze that said without any sort of doubt, he was fun-loving. “Nice to meet you, Mark. I’m Amanda Randall.”
And that’s how Amanda kick-started her love life once again. There were no fireworks or grand gestures, but that was alright with her. There was a man smiling at her, wanting to get to know her. That was enough for her right then and there.
She spoke to him, finding that he was very easy to talk to. He was a definite improvement over Robert. Also, in the back of her mind, there was some part of her that liked the fact that he was only in town for three weeks. It almost made him like a test of sorts…a way to ease her toes back into the dating waters. There was no threat of commitment to muddy the water. Beyond that, of course, there was the physical thing to consider. She wasn’t even sure about the sex part yet. The thought of sex was certainly intriguing, but she felt certain that she might change her tune once things started to get hot and heavy. Would Stephen come to her mind? Would she feel guilty right in the middle of it and—
Shut up, she told herself as she sipped from her martini and had the longest conversation she’d had with a man in two years outside of the grief counselor she’d met with for six months. She was pleasantly into the conversation and found after an hour and a half of chatting, that she liked Mark quite a bit.
She was so enthralled with him that she didn’t see the two bikers come into the bar on the far side of the restaurant.
***
Alex and Slim had made a little over four hundred miles on that first day of riding. They had considered closing out the trip and potentially getting to Chicago around four in the morning. It was a grand idea that made them feel immortal, but actually doing it was a different thing altogether.
In reality, they had stopped at a restaurant for a late dinner and decided that they’d stop at the motel just up the street and catch some shut eye and a cheap continental breakfast the following morning. They stretched for a bit in the restaurant parking lot, shaking the wear of the road off of them. They walked inside, their hair blown back from the ten hours of wind they had driven through, and walked right past the hostess. The ambled up to the bar as if they owned the place, plopping down at two stools directly in front of the bartender.
Alex noticed right away that the few people situated in the bar area gave their biker attire weary stares. Alex shrugged it off. He had gotten used to that long ago and it no longer bothered him at all. He caught the gaze of a business-type group having dinner in the far corner and even gave them a nod.
The place was mostly dead, being Wednesday, so they were served promptly and were drinking their beers two minutes later. They spoke briefly, mainly to plan out the following day’s ride. When this was done, they zoned out over their beers and watched the baseball game that was on the TV behind the bar.
Actually, Alex wasn’t really watching. He’d never liked baseball; he was more into rugby and soccer, high speed games that require endurance. He simply stared at the screen and felt something stirring in him—maybe a sense of being compelled to do something. Slim was his best friend in the club and they’d shared a lot of secrets together during their time on the road. Surely Slim would provide an ear if he, Alex, ever decided to exorcise the one secret he had never been able to tell anyone. He wanted to tell someone. Hell, he had gone to church a few times over the last few months just hoping that God (if there was one, which he was still not sure about) might move him to talk to a pastor. But no such prompting had ever come and his secret lay buried in the graves of his memory.
If he ever told anyone about what he’d done all those years ago, it would be Slim. Slim would understand.
He felt his tongue loosening, ready to tell him. The idea of getting it out in the air, of actually verbalizing it, was both relieving and terrifying all at the same time. He took a swallow of his beer, fully ready to reveal the secret he had been living with for the last seventeen years of his life.
And then he saw the woman sitting in the corner.
She was holding a mostly-empty martini glass and speaking with a tall man. They were engaged in what was apparently a humorous conversation because they were both laughing. But Alex didn’t care about the conversation they were having. And he didn’t care about the man she was speaking to.
All he cared about in that moment was her. It was weird because if he was being totally honest, there was nothing staggeringly noticeable about her. Her hair was blonde and caught the moody bar lighting in a sexy sort of way. Her lips were thin but her smile was wide. And there was a sparkle (although Alex hated that word, it was the only one that fit) to her face when she laughed.
She was beautiful in a sensible sort of way. Alex knew he was staring at her but did everything he could to stop himself. He blinked and turned away, his attention back on the baseball game. Not two seconds passed before he was looking at her again. This time, she saw him looking. He didn’t look away instantly, but let their eyes lock for a moment. She looked away first, flustered and awkward.
Alex then did something he was slightly ashamed of. He looked to her left hand, looking for a wedding ring. He saw none and was slightly angry with himself when he delighted in this. Apparently, the tall man was a boyfriend at best…nothing substantial or concrete.
Not that it really mattered in the long run. In the course of his time with The Unknowns, he had taken his fair share of women home. Some of them had been wearing wedding bands and he had never had any issues with it. He figured if the women weren’t being satisfied at home, that was the husband’s fault.
Why the hell should he feel guilty about a lame ass husband’s wife taking him to bed?
But that didn’t matter now, anyway. This woman was unattached. She was—
“Alex?”
Slim’s voice slapped him out of his stupor. He thought he was blushing and was glad the bar was dimly lit.
“Yeah?” he said, trying to act as if he had not been zoned out over a woman he had just seen for the first time. He sipped from his beer as a sheer act of normalcy.
“Tired?” Slim asked. “You looked like you were in LaLa Land there for a moment.”
Sort of felt like it, to tell you the truth, he thought. But he said, “No, I’m good. Just thinking about Chicago.”
Slim nodded, tapping the bar to let the bartender know it was time for a refill.
Alex gulped the remainder of his own drink and did the same. He looked to the woman sitting in the corner one last time and kept his eyes there until she looked his way. When she did, he broke his gaze first this time and made himself find something to talk with Slim about.
But the entire time, he was aware of the woman in the corner, keeping tabs on her so he would know when she left.
***
Amanda was trying to decide if the guy with the long blonde hair at the bar was a creep or if he was just stoned. He kept looking at her and she did her best to pretend not to notice. He was devastatingly handsome, but there was something in his stare that was like ice. The third time she saw him looking her way, she decided that he was either tired or working on one hell of a bender.
Besides, he was distracting her from Mark, whom was currently asking her a question about what she was reading. He nodded to her Kindle as he asked.
“Just some boring old memoirs,” she said. “The life of Emily Dickinson.”
He smiled at her and, as if he had rehearsed it a million times, said: “Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me…”
“The carriage held but just ourselves,” Amanda added. “And immortality.”
He shrugged. “I might have taken a poetry module in college.”
“Impressive,” she said.
“I’m glad you think so,” Mark said. “Some might call it sad.”
She laughed and shook her head. “No, no, not at all.”
God, he’s great to talk to, she thought. And while she then tried to observe the way his mouth worked when he spoke (in order to get a better representation of what it might feel like for him to kiss her), she kept thinking of the blonde guy at the bar. She looked back to him and saw that he was speaking to the slender-looking man he had come in with. From their black leather jackets and the unkempt-but-cool nature of their hair, she assumed they were bikers. Something about this intrigued her, but she had no idea what it was.
“…so what do you think?”
She realized that Mark was asking her another question and she hadn’t heard him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I totally blanked out there for a minute. I’m so sorry. What were you saying?”
“I was asking if you wanted to get out of here,” he said. “Nothing presumptuous at all. Maybe some coffee. Or a nightcap at my hotel bar?”
He looked innocent enough and while the better part of her told her to decline the invitation, there was something exciting about it. This went beyond meeting a man to get over Stephen; this went into the realm of having done nothing exciting and reckless since college.
She knew she would accept the invitation, but didn’t want to seem too eager. She decided to make a game of it, to stretch things out a bit to see how Mark reacted.
“I don’t know.”
“Your call,” he said. “Again…there’s no motive here.”
“Yeah,” she said. “But you’re quoting Dickinson to me. Next comes Poe and absynth and then it’s all over.”
He grinned and said, “My hotel bar doesn’t strike me as the type of place that keeps absynth in stock.”
She shrugged and smiled back at him. “Then, sure. I’d love to.”
When she answered, she looked briefly back to the bikers at the bar. The handsome blonde one that had seemed so interested in her wasn’t there anymore. A small part of her was very sad about this. She’d liked the attention, as sad as it seemed.
“Which one?” he asked. “Coffee or bar?”
She smiled and, when she answered, gave just the right hint of flirtatiousness to not seem overzealous. “Let’s start with coffee and see what happens.”
“Fair enough,” he said and motioned for the waitress to bring the check.
Amanda smiled. He heart was beating like thunder in her chest and she realized she hadn’t felt this anxious about spending time with a man since…hell, since she didn’t know when. It was more like meeting a boy in secret in middle school and wondering if you’d get kissed.
When they got up to leave, Mark placed his hand ever so lightly on her lower back. And it took just that for Amanda to know good and well that coffee would not last long and that she would be taking him up on that nightcap.
CHAPTER SIX
Four beers in, Alex realized that he had to pee something awful. He told himself he’d have just one more beer because the motel was half a mile up the road and he wasn’t sure how the cops were in this area.
“Gotta head to the john,” Alex said, slapping the bar.
“Have fun,” Slim said, working on his fourth beer and staring absently at the TV.
Alex walked to the side of the bar and to the small hallway that held the restrooms. As he reached the door, he went for the knob and found it locked. Someone on the other side of the door gave a muffled “Occupied! Sorry!”
Alex frowned. The restaurant was a small one—not a chain, but not a hole in the wall, either—and he was surprised the restrooms were a one-john affair. With a sign, he shrugged and headed back to the front of the place. He passed the hostess and walked out into the night.
He walked slowly along the sidewalk at the edge of the parking lot, heading for the back of the restaurant. What he was about to do wasn’t a big deal to him; he’d urinated in parking lots before, often in daylight. So relieving himself behind a restaurant in the dead of night didn’t bother him in the least. Besides, he and Slim were about to wrap up a fifty dollar tab, so he figured he had every right to piss behind their dumpsters.
He came to the back of the restaurant and slid behind the trash area. He unbuttoned and relieved himself. As he did, he thought of Chicago and what it might be like to start over in a new place. He knew he would be a permanent member of the club, so starting his entire life from scratch was out of the question. But there was something about going to a new place where no one knew you…something about the idea that if you wanted, you could almost be someone else.
These were fanciful thoughts he sometimes allowed himself to get lost in. It hurt to know the entire course of his life could never change, but he was also proud to be a part of something as sturdy and reliable as the club.
That made him think about how close he had come to telling Slim about his secret. Now that the moment had passed, Alex found it terrifying to know that he had almost spoke it out loud. He felt that memory rolling around in his mind, as if letting him know it would be there forever, hidden and tucked away from the rest of the world.
Alex finished up, zipped his fly and then walked out from behind the dumpsters as if he had every right to be there. But there was no one to spot him as he walked back into the parking lot. This edge of the parking lot was dead, occupied by only two cars. The light was almost no-existent and—
He heard the sound, just barely, to his left. It was coming from one of the cars parked at the far edge of the lot. There were actually three sounds: a brief and muffled moan, a man’s curt voice quietly whispering something like shut up and then a soft punching noise. Alex thought nothing of this at first, assuming it to be two men having some sort of physical confrontation. Alex knew all too well that it happened a lot in bars…particularly in the darkened corners of th
eir parking lots.
But when he snaked the most casual look in that direction, he saw the woman. It was the woman he had seen in the bar. She was being pulled into the car, and there was a man’s hand around her mouth. This wasn’t some cutesy little dating game…not some weird foreplay. This was a woman in serious trouble.
Without even thinking, Alex walked quickly over to the car. He could hear the jingling of keys and another soft sound that made Alex think of what a solid right handed punch sounded like when it landed in someone’s stomach. The overhead light in the car was off, but the driver’s side door was open. As Alex approached, the door started to close. He got there just in time, catching the door before it could slam shut. He kicked out his right foot, his boot catching the door before it could close.