Still Standing

by Kristen Ashley

  I was going to do what I always did.

  I was going to take as good as I could get.

  I mean, it was becoming clear that was the way of my life, so I had to get used to it.

  Once, I’d reached for more.

  I’d fallen in love with Rogan.

  And he’d turned out to be like all the rest.

  As good as I could get.

  Until he was gone.

  So I’d take it, and once Buck got rid of me, I’d take whatever came next.

  And like I’d always done, I’d survive on as good as I could get.

  And I’d keep doing it until I died.

  “I can do this,” I whispered to Minnie, and this was so very true.

  It was the one thing I was super good at.

  So I could do this.

  I could and I would.

  Because I liked him, I liked his friends, and I wanted him for me.

  He wasn’t perfect.

  With what I’d just seen outside, he was far from a dream.

  But he was as good as I was going to get.

  11

  What Would a Biker Babe Do?

  “You all right?”

  Buck was driving.

  I was staring out the side window at the passing landscape.

  Earlier, Pinky had recruited Cruise to go tell Buck I was there. She’d semi-explained things and Cruise had run interference. Pinky had promised Cruise would be discreet, and she knew this because she’d lied to him and told him I didn’t see Nails, Minnie did.

  In order to cover for Buck, Cruise, who seemed alarmingly practiced with this, had launched straight into action to avoid an unpleasant incident.

  Buck found me studying hammers like they were my one life’s desire. When he found me, he’d swept me into his body with an arm hooked around my neck, then bent his head and touched his mouth to mine.

  I didn’t feel it starting like I normally did, and thus I didn’t open my mouth to invite him to deepen his kiss into a kiss.

  The minute his lips left mine (lips, I might add, that not ten minutes before I was pretty certain had been locked to another woman’s), I turned my head and pulled away.

  Lorie, Minnie, and Pinky were close, and Lorie instantly moved in for another hug good-bye in what I would realize, while sitting silent in Buck’s huge, black SUV (which, by the by, considering I hadn’t been recently beaten up or pumped full of painkillers, I had since seen was a GMC Yukon), was an effort to cover my withdrawal. Minnie and Pinky did the same.

  Buck, sensing nothing amiss (then again, he didn’t really know me as, I reminded myself, I didn’t really know him) took my bags and led me out to his truck.

  Then we were away.

  “Unh-hunh,” I muttered to the window in answer to his question.

  “Clara,” he called.

  I didn’t move my gaze from the streaming landscape. “Yes?”

  “Baby, did something happen today?” he asked in a gentle voice.

  I closed my eyes because his gentle voice hurt.

  What once was so gorgeous, in fact, it was so everything that I could convince myself it was the meaning of life…hurt.

  Why couldn’t one thing in my life—one thing—be good?

  It didn’t have to be perfect, but why couldn’t it be good?

  Like the promise of Buck had been, but the reality was not.

  I opened my eyes but kept staring out the window.

  “No, we had fun. The girls are great. I’m just tired.”

  “Too much, too soon,” he surmised on a murmur.

  “Unh-hunh,” I agreed on a lie.

  “I’ll cook tonight,” he decided. “Gear called. They got some party they’re goin’ to, meetin’ their friends before for food. I was gonna take you to the Valley Inn, but we’ll camp out at home.”

  “Great,” I replied, relieved his kids were going to be off at a party.

  An hour ago, I would have loved going out and having a meal with Buck like a normal couple.

  We’d never done that. We’d never done stuff a normal couple would do—a normal couple dating or a normal couple living together and deciding on the fly to go out and share a meal.

  Either way, I would have loved that.

  I really would have.

  And I might have even donned some of my new biker babe apparel, taken it for a test drive, assessed Buck’s reaction.

  Now I was glad we were going to camp out “at home.”

  Home.

  It hit me then, my thoughts having descended into black, that I had never actually had a home. Not really. Not even with Rogan.

  My home with Rogan was owned by the hundreds of pensioners who paid for it when Rogan sucked away their lifeblood (though, he didn’t actually do this, he just sucked away the lifeblood of their retirement, but that was the same thing, or would be eventually).

  God, I was a mess.

  A pitiful mess.

  I pulled in a deep quiet breath asking myself, What would a biker babe do?

  I knew one thing from Minnie’s lessons that day.

  She wouldn’t think of herself as a pitiful mess.

  She’d either stick Buck with a knife or grin and bear it.

  I wasn’t the knife-wielding kind, so I was going to have to get myself together, grin and bear it.

  “You get a cell?” Buck asked.

  “Yes,” I answered the window.

  “You have a problem with the contract?” Buck asked.

  “Yes, then Minnie shouted ‘fuck’ seven hundred times at the top of her lungs and on the tips of her toes with her face an inch away from the cell phone shop guy’s face and they decided they didn’t have a problem with my contract anymore.”

  Buck chuckled.

  It was funny, but I didn’t laugh.

  “Seems you got on with them,” he observed.

  “We bonded,” I replied.

  “That’s good, Toots,” he muttered.

  I didn’t reply.

  Grin and bear it, grin and bear it, grin and bear it.

  “Clara?”

  “Unh-hunh.”

  “Babe, you wanna tell me why you aren’t looking at me?”

  I looked at him.

  Golly, he was handsome.

  I looked out the windshield.

  “It’s just pretty up here. Lived in Phoenix my whole life, and probably have been up in the mountains less than a dozen times.”

  This was true, but as a reason for not looking at him, it was a big, fat lie.

  “You have something on your mind,” he stated.

  He was right about that.

  “I spent all your money,” I told him to throw him off the scent.

  “Babe,” he replied.

  “Actually, I spent eleven hundred and sixty-two dollars of your money. I have thirty-eight of your dollars left.”

  “I didn’t give it to you for safekeeping, Toots. I gave it to you for you to spend it.”

  “Well, I did,” I announced.

  “Good,” he muttered then asked, “You nervous about meeting Gear and Tatie?”

  “Yes,” I answered truthfully.

  “It’ll be okay,” he assured.

  Right.

  “Mm-hmm,” I mumbled.

  He fell silent.

  Then, for some bizarre reason, likely because the universe hated me, he asked out of the blue, “You were with your ex for ten years?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “Why didn’t you have kids?”

  My stomach clutched.

  My mouth spoke.

  “Rogan said we had time.”

  He did say that.

  We married young and Rogan had our lives planned.

  According to Rogan’s plan, I’d be pregnant right now or already have a wee one at home. He said when I was thirty, we were going to start our family. We’d have two kids. Then we’d stop.

  And I was so happy with him, I was happy to do whatever he said.

  I would never kno
w how fortunate I was that he wanted to wait when I did not. I wanted to start a family right away. I wanted to have babies and give them everything I never had.

  But I fell in with Rogan’s plans which meant, when his life collapsed, taking mine with it, it didn’t drag down our children.

  All that had happened with Rogan was bad.

  This was good.

  “And you?” Buck pressed.

  “Me what?”

  “Did you want to wait?”

  “No.”

  “But you waited.”

  “Yes,” I pointed out the obvious.

  “Do you want kids now?”

  “No.”

  I felt rather than saw his eyes on me before he looked back to the road and asked, “No?”

  “No, Buck. I have no home, no job and my car got repoed,” I reminded him. “I need to depend on a man I barely know to keep me fed, housed and in a cell phone. I’m a mess. I’ve got no business bringing children into this world.”

  Suddenly, Buck changed lanes, going from the far left, straight to the shoulder. Then he stopped, put the SUV into neutral and set the parking brake while I blinked at the pavement ahead of us.

  After all of this craziness, I felt his attention on me again.

  “Babe, eyes,” he growled, and hesitantly, my heart skipping rather than beating, I turned to face him. “What the fuck is up your ass?”

  I stared at him.

  He was angry and he was using his quiet, venom voice.

  “Nothing,” I whispered, feeling infected by his tone.

  “Bullshit,” he shot back.

  “I’m just tired,” I told him.

  “You get tired, you get cuddly and sweet. You do not turn into a bitch.”

  I blinked again.

  When I got tired, I got cuddly and sweet?

  “I’m not being a bitch,” I denied.

  “You won’t look at me. Your voice is flat. And what you just said was fucked,” he returned.

  “What did I just say?”

  “You need to depend on a man you barely know to keep you fed, housed and in a fuckin’ cell phone.”

  “This is true,” I told him.

  And I couldn’t believe he was ticked about it, because it was!

  “Toots, I’ve had my mouth between your legs, you’ve sucked me off, and I’ve had my dick in you.”

  “That isn’t knowing you, Buck.”

  “You liked it and I liked it,” he went on like I didn’t speak. “You want more, and I want more. You can be uptight because you’ve been taught to be that way, caution equals survival for you. But when you relax, your smile comes easy and you’re easy to be with. Now, you are not relaxed. Now, something is up your fuckin’ ass. And I’m not takin’ you home to my kids, who I want to like you, when somethin’s up your fuckin’ ass.”

  “I told you.” I was beginning to get angry so my words were short and terse, not as short and terse as his, but they were still short and terse. “I’m tired. It’s been a long day. We went to, like, I don’t know, a hundred stores. I tried on so many clothes it isn’t funny. Shopping is exhausting, Buck.”

  “Right,” he clipped, obviously, and unsurprisingly, not an experienced shopper.

  “It is!” I snapped. “And you want your kids to like me, how do you think I feel? You told me straight out Tatiana isn’t going to like me. I’ve got a black eye, I’m dressed like a librarian with a shoe fetish, and I’m barreling in an SUV toward a sixteen-year-old Daddy’s Little Girl who is not going to like me until I win her over. I don’t know how to win her over! I don’t know anything about sixteen-year-old girls! Even when I was sixteen, I wasn’t sixteen. Do I offer to give her a manicure and ask her about the boys she likes? Do I read teenage vampire novels in hopes of finding common ground? I don’t know how to give a manicure and we both know I’m not dexterous. What if I wound her while filing her nails?”

  “Babe—”

  “And Minnie and I got into it at lunch. It ended up okay, but she didn’t like me at first. We had words and everyone was tense. We worked it out and they all decided to be Professor Higgins to my Eliza Biker Babe. They think it’s fun and I don’t want to disappoint them, I like them. Even Minnie, who’s kind of hard to like. So I have to try to be a biker babe when all I know how to be is a geeky, brainy librarian.”

  “Darlin’—”

  I started to sum up.

  “So, Tia is smoke, your word, but when it’s used to refer to my best friend in the entire world, it’s not a fun word to hear. No one knows where she is, but as hard as I try to visualize her enjoying copious lattes, I’m guessing she isn’t in Seattle serving coffee drinks. Instead, she’s holed up somewhere, scared out of her brain, not only for herself, but wondering what became of me. I’m meeting your kids looking like Rocky Balboa’s sparring partner. And I’ve got three Professor Higginses who are dedicated to the cause of turning me into the Premier Biker Princess, good enough for the president of the Aces High MC.”

  “Toots—”

  I leaned in and cut him off yet again.

  “So, to end, I have things on my mind, Buck. Weighty things. Important things. So, if my voice is flat and my mind is elsewhere, you are just going to have to deal.”

  “Clara—”

  Apparently, that wasn’t the end.

  Because I kept going.

  “And I won’t take it out on your kids. Even though we’ve had sex, a lot of it, we had it all in one night. This does not mean I know you and you know me. But I’ll educate you about me. I’m not the kind of person to take my mood out on kids. You, you’re an adult. I would hope you’d eventually be able to wrap your mind around all the stuff drifting through mine and get it. Kids won’t be able to do that. So, I’ll walk into your house and I’ll do what I can to make your kids like me. In other words, you don’t have to worry.”

  “Baby, shut…up.”

  I shut up.

  Buck studied my face.

  Then his lips twitched.

  Then he asked, “A librarian with a shoe fetish?”

  Argh!

  I turned to stare out the windshield and crossed my arms on my chest.

  “Babe,” Buck called, and I ignored him. “Toots,” he called again, and I ignored him. “Clara,” he called yet again, and I spoke to the windshield.

  “I’m hungry and I want to get this over with. Are we going to stay on the shoulder all night? Because, if so, I have thirty-eight dollars in my purse and I’m walking to the nearest fast food place on the nearest off ramp and getting myself dinner.”

  Suddenly, my seatbelt was released. It zipped back, and I jumped, uncrossing my arms to avoid seatbelt injury. Just as suddenly, I was pulled across the cab and found my torso pressed to Buck’s, both his arms were wound around me, and his face was in mine.

  “The nearest turnoff is three miles away. You couldn’t make it in those shoes,” he informed me.

  “She’s hungry enough, a woman can do a lot in her quest for food,” I replied.

  He grinned.

  It was close up and his grins close up were the best.

  My heart skipped just as I felt pain slice through my belly, and I realized the despair was back. It had disappeared while my life shifted, but it was back.

  I was going to have to learn to live with it again.

  “I’ll get you home, you’ll meet my kids and I’ll feed you as soon as you kiss me.”

  My heart skipped again.

  “I’m not in the mood to kiss you,” I stated firmly, because I definitely wasn’t.

  “Then we’ll sit just like this as long as it takes for you to get in the mood.”

  I glared into his eyes.

  Eyes, incidentally, whose laugh lines had deepened.

  “I’m learning something about you,” I told him.

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “You’re annoying.”

  His arms spasmed around me as he laughed.

  I did not laugh.

&n
bsp; I kept glaring.

  His laughter died to a chuckle and then he said, “Somethin’ else you should know about me, Toots.”

  “And that is?”

  “I’m stubborn.”

  Oh, for goodness sake.

  I lifted up and touched my mouth to his then pulled back.

  “There, happy?”

  His brows went up. “Are you shitting me?”

  I tried to push my hands between our bodies, but failed, gave up and answered, “No.”

  “Babe, kiss me.”

  “I did, and we need to get a move on. I don’t think it’s illegal to hang out on the side of the road embracing, but it is likely something the Arizona Highway Patrol frowns on.”

  “Don’t give a shit.”

  “Buck—”

  “Kiss me.”

  “No, I’m—”

  “Babe, kiss me.”

  “No! I think—”

  His arms squeezed. “Clara, stop fuckin’ around.”

  “Oh, all right,” I snapped, lifted again, tilted my head to the side and put my lips to his.

  I knew that wouldn’t be enough, so I touched the tip of my tongue to his lips, those lips opened, and I slid my tongue inside.

  God, I hated that I loved the way he tasted.

  And I loved it.

  Enough for my body to melt against his, my hands, which were on his shoulders, slid around to his back, and I pressed in, drinking my fill.

  He forced my tongue out of his mouth, his tongue invaded mine, his arms tightened, and he took over the kiss.

  It was amazing, beautiful, wet, deep, wild and all of those enough to make me forget he’d given the same thing to another woman not very long ago.

  In fact, I forgot everything but Buck, his body, his mouth, his tongue, and the fact that I was happy that in that moment they were all mine.

  After a while (a long while), he lifted his head, and I opened my eyes to stare into his.

  His were dark and hungry.

  Delicious.

  “Now, I’ll take you home,” he murmured, his rough voice thick.

  “Okay,” I whispered.

  He gave me another squeeze then he did something wrong.

  He angled his head and kissed my nose before depositing me back in my seat.

  That slid next to the despair, souring my stomach.

  Buck put the truck into gear, released the parking brake, flipped on the turn signal and pulled into traffic.