by Jackson Kane
Pushing open our door, it struck me how absurd it all was. We left this small one room apartment as just another frustrated, dead-end couple, but returned to it with a fierceness of purpose. Despite the heavier-than-usual suit of sorrow Remy wore, the fire in his movements and in those dark eyes was unmistakable.
I wanted to ask him about the church car, and what had happened to him in that room, but the time still didn’t feel right. He seemed to want a little space, so I’d save my million questions for tomorrow.
Remy stripped off his shirt by the mirror and gazed into his reflection as if waiting for an answer to a question he didn’t even know how to ask. The divot scar running across his cheek from Bones’ bullet was a shadowy crater in the harsh bathroom light. Finally giving up his silent argument with the man in the mirror, he cleaned the blood off his hands and arms. Then, propped up on his elbows, he ran his wet hands over his face.
Back lit, under a shock of hair, his eyes were polished coal, and when his gaze shifted to me, through that mirror, I shuddered at its intensity.
That burning passion within him ignited my skin, goose bumps erupted all across me with arcing electricity. Even if he didn’t kill them himself, half a dozen people were dead tonight because of him. It was easy to forget just how dangerous this man was.
Remy was a force of nature.
When I started changing out of my dusty waitress outfit to get into the shower, he turned and faced me with a smoldering, unreadable expression. I had his full attention. With my clothes on the floor all around me into his hard eyes and watched them scrub every inch of skin. My naked form laid bare for him to feast on. His ravaging eyes were somehow harsher than I was comfortable with.
Was he actually seeing me at all?
I closed my eyes and prayed I knew what the answer was.
The faint foot falls of his thick, rubber-soled boots vibrated the thin carpet and up through my curled toes as he came closer. I could smell the copper of dried blood on his clothes as he walked completely around me. I braced for a touch that never came.
I opened my eyes when the shower turned on and felt weirdly dejected. Did he not want me? I slipped on a towel and patiently waited my turn for the shower. Something was frighteningly off about Remy.
By the time I got out of the long mostly hot shower and put on my ridiculous pajamas. The lights in bedroom were all off. Remy laid motionless, turned away from me in the bed. I reached over to comfort him, but hesitated right before I touched him.
I had never seen him like this. I didn’t think he’d hurt me, but I was still afraid. Quietly lying next to him in the dark room, I was overtaken by memories of these past few months. Being with him was so rewarding, but also so difficult. Remy was a lion in a lamb’s world.
How could he not see food everywhere he looked?
A thousand thoughts turned over in my head until eventually, sleep muted them all. My dreams were labored, vicious things. I was in a dark room, and for a moment, I couldn’t remember where.
The motel. I was in the motel with Remy. We lived here for now.
Suddenly, there was the startling sensation of my pajama bottoms and panties being ripped down that felt all too real. Sleep made everything hazy. Flashes of Top, and the first night at Muse’s haunted me. Tough as I was now, Remy’s brother still scared the hell out of me!
Then I felt the distinctive wet pressure of a tongue on my clit. The last of my sleep was torn from me like the last stubborn leaves from the ash tree we had in our backyard, during a harsh early-winter gale.
I moaned, but out of surprise and the inability to quickly form words, not arousal. My hands immediately sprang down to stop what was happening. It was when I felt the scar on his cheek, and the hard angles of his face, that things began to feel more familiar.
Remy, thank god, I sighed.
My body straightened when I felt his tongue push between the lips of my pussy and slowly spread me apart. Something I would’ve enjoyed a lot more, had I not been still shaking off a groggy, waking numbness.
Why now? Why not when we got home?
His touch was quick and rough, which was fine. I liked rough, but I couldn’t shake this nagging worry. There was something unsettling about the way Remy moved. Every jerk and motion had a sense of immediacy of it. There was a feeling of urgency to it all. It was all so mechanical. Like there was no “Remy” in there.
It freaked me out a little.
“I’d gotten worried,” I said tentatively trying to diffuse the mounting tension. He hadn’t said a word to me since before he walked into that post office. “Thought you—”
Remy cut me off by abruptly changing position. He was now on top of me, his hard cock slid up the inside of my naked thigh. His power and dominance still felt great, but something that was hard to place was very off. His touch was alien to me.
I didn’t know who he thought he was fucking, but it wasn’t me.
“Stop.”
He didn’t. His hands squeezed into my upper thigh hard enough for the pain to surpass the point of erotic. Now I was getting really worried. “Please, stop,” I said a little louder.
He continued. I could feel the tip of his cock brush my pussy. I wasn’t sure where his mind was at, or if he could even hear me, but this was all wrong! My heart raced, not with that amazing thrill I felt every other time he touched me, but with a rising fear like when his older brother, Top, had taken me.
“Remy! Stop, goddamnit!” I grabbed his cock and forced it away.
Remy stopped immediately. I’d finally broken through to him.
He collapsed on top of me, his head resting on my chest. I hesitantly ran my fingers through his hair and placed a hand over the scars on his back. His heart...was racing just as fast as mine, if not faster.
What the fuck had just happened?
“Are you ok?” No response. “Dammit, Remy! Talk to me!”
“I’m sorry,” Remy let the near whispered words out in the same breath as a heavy sigh. His voice was strangled by sorrow. “Last night... I... I lost my way.”
“Lost your way? How?”
I didn’t understand. When I walked into that doxa cooking room last night and saw him on the ground holding that dead woman’s hand... I almost didn’t recognize him. And when he didn’t answer me, I thought I’d lost him forever. I was lucky he snapped out of it when the Lobos showed up or things would probably have gone much, much worse for the both of us.
Seeing him sitting there catatonic was more terrifying for me than when he was shot. At least when he was shot there was something I could do to help him. The bullets were physical. I knew where the wounds were and what happened. As hard as it was, I could wrap my head around what needed to be done.
But seeing Remy hollowed out like a jack-o-lantern scared me on a whole different level. There was nothing I could do to help him! PTSD was something I knew nothing about. All I could do was wait and hope for him to return to me.
If he returned to me at all.
“What the fuck happened to you in there?” I asked cautiously.
“The Knights were holding kids as hostages so their mothers would work and stay in line,” Remy reluctantly began. “That’s why I went in.”
I was so pissed when I saw him disappear, especially after he reassured me that he wouldn’t! Right after I stopped the biker from leaving, I ran into that building, not just because I was worried about him, but also because I was fumingly angry! I was angry that he’d do that to me after he expressly told me he wouldn’t.
Hearing what his reason was made me feel like such an asshole.
“Kids? I didn’t see any—” It started to dawn on me. My heart started rising in my throat when I summoned the courage to ask him, “What happened to the kids?”
I felt my chest crush with dread at the anticipation.
“Most of them escaped with their mothers. I gave them our car keys.”
“Oh.” That couldn’t have been it, but it didn’t feel like that was it.
Seeing the woman dead was shocking to me, but with all he’s been through with the club it couldn’t have been to him, at least not shocking enough to put him in this kind of mood.
It had to be something else.
“The woman that you saw…” Remy paused struggling to get the words out, “I killed her.”
“What?” I couldn’t think of any situation where that made sense.
“She’d taken several rounds from one of the Knight’s AK and wasn’t going to make it. She was holding a little boy when it happened. And he…”
No. My eyes shot open. I knew what he was going to say and I felt nauseous. I didn’t think anything of the bulge under the sheet and the additional red spot at the time.
“Oh, God.” I gasped. Remy watched a little boy die.
“Yeah.” Remy stopped to collect his thoughts and calm himself. “His mother whispered something to me when she knew... When she knew he was dead. She begged me to—”
“You put her out of her misery?” The words felt disgusting in my mouth. This was a human being not a sick, stray animal.
“One round through the heart.”
“Remy that’s awful. I’m so—”
“There’s more,” he interrupted before going into a long pause. He swallowed hard and then said, “Before you came in I put the gun to my head and pulled the trigger. But the gun was empty. Used my last round on her.”
I covered my mouth. I was speechless. It was horrible. My, God—Remy tried to kill himself! “Jesus, Remy!” The thought of finding his dead body next to that woman in the post office made me almost start crying. I didn’t want to imagine being without him, especially not there, surrounded by Lobos.
I suddenly got so angry at him! How could he do that to me? I wanted to scream at him! To slap him for almost leaving me! The anger quickly turned into guilt over my internal reaction.
This happened to him, not me, I scolded myself.
I immediately felt horrible for thinking such selfish and shitty thoughts. I could feel the incredible amount of grief within him. He opened up to me because he trusted me! I couldn’t betray him with that kind of thinking.
He needed my support, not some self righteous judgment.
I didn’t have the right words to say, if any even existed, so I pulled his head onto my chest. Rapid, heavy exhales blew across my breasts, and then his tears rolled down my stomach. I couldn’t imagine how hard this bloody lifestyle was on him.
The slayings last night, Lorenzo and the kill teams sent after us. The death of his blood brother, Bren, before that, then losing the rest of his club family afterwards. Having to work with the Lobos to save his club after those very people caused the situation that killed his wife, and shot him nearly to death... All that he shouldered alone. That weight. That pain he must have felt was unfathomable.
How could anyone keep it together like he had?
It stunned me at how strong he had to be to survive all that. It was hard to breathe just thinking about it, let alone going through a fraction of what he went through.
That’s why the sex felt so wrong. He wasn’t fucking me; he was coping with the pain the only way he knew how. Sex was his only escape from the all the madness that swirled around him.
“You’re not alone anymore,” I told him after desperately searching for other words that just weren’t there.
“Yeah,” his word was pushed out in a slow voice that was laid low with gravel, broken glass, and heartache. He kissed my stomach sweetly, and with the sound of budding relief filling his voice, he whispered, “I know.”
I held him as tightly as I could. We laid there in silence until the soft hues of morning crept through the cracks in the shades, and as exhausted as we were, sleep finally, mercifully embraced us.
Chapter Nine
…
Star
The phone Bones gave Remy vibrated in a semicircle on the nightstand. Remy answered, but mostly listened. It’d been almost a week since the ghost town and the hard night that followed.
Since then, a faint brightness had returned to Remy. He looked lighter somehow. That fire was still there, but that wasn’t the only thing that scorched his dark orbs.
There was hope.
We’d had sex every night since. It wasn’t just sweaty, mindless sex, or shared mechanical release. He was having sex with me, not because of some coping mechanism or a need to feel something other than constant pain, but because I understood him now.
Because I let him lose himself in me.
“It’s on. Lets go.” Remy hung up, kissed me, then threw a few things into a bag.
Aside from the guns, one change of clothes each, and a few odds and ends, everything else was abandoned. We paid for the room in cash, under fake names, so we didn’t bother to check out or anything.
To look at us, with everything we left with, you’d think that we were only headed out for a few hours.
“Wait.” Remy stopped in the doorway right before closing our room for the final time and went back in for something. Whatever it was it had to be important for him to pull a full stop and go back for it.
“What is it?” I thought going over everything we’d packed in my mind. We had all the ammo magazines, and weapons cleaned, and ready to go. It wasn’t something stupid like the keys to the bike, was it? “What’d we forget?”
Remy returned with the Friends DVD boxed set.
“Yeah?” I asked, not containing my smug smirk. “OK.”
“Don’t judge me.” He kissed me firmly, then put the DVDs into the duffle bag. “And for the record, they were not on a break. Ross is just a fucking idiot.”
I laughed so hard that Remy had to drag me to the bike.
And just like that, we rode off and left a whole life behind.
All the frustration of trying to stay on the right side of the law was gone. I looked back at the motel fading off into the distance, and I felt that limbo, that fake middle-life, fading with it. I would never miss it the waitressing, the struggle for money, the long hours with no respect. All that toil and at the end of the day I never had anything to show for it.
That life wasn’t us.
It was time to forge a new future that wasn’t burdened by the exhaustive rules of society. This would be a future that we were good at, one that made sense to both of us. In the past six months, there had been so many no-turning-back moments for me that now they just felt like phases of my life. We were crabs outgrowing seashells one after the other. Soon, Remy and I would find the perfect fit.
For now though, we had to make it through the next twenty four hours. Now there was only Remy’s plan or death. Either way, the life we’d been leading these last few weeks was over and I had completely come to terms with that.
After a day’s worth of riding through New Mexico, Texas and then Oklahoma, we finally pulled into a decent looking hotel about an hour outside of Leslie just before dusk. We parked at the edge of the sea of chrome and rubber. There must’ve been thirty bikes lined up.
Los Lobos had beaten us here.
“That’s gotta be loaded with the heavy weapons.” Remy cocked his head over to a generic white van with New Mexico plates that was parked next to the bikes. He texted Bones to let him know we’d arrived. “Assault rifles, shotguns, SMGs if they have any. They can get away with hiding a few pistols in the bedrolls strapped to the back of their bikes, but anything bigger than that and they run a real risk of the cops being called. For something this important they won’t take any chances they don’t have to.”
“If that truck doesn’t make it to Leslie, the Lobos lose a huge firepower advantage,” I replied.
Remy nodded at me and smiled with his eyes.
It felt like we were partners now more than ever. I loved it.
We removed the bag and started walking inside. I spotted two Lobos lingering around the van smoking cigarettes and chatting.
“Looks like they have people watching it now, and if it’s that valuable, I’d imagine they’re
going to have people watching it all night.” I leaned in and whispered, “How are we going to stop the van and not have the Lobos immediately know it was us?”
“I have an idea…”
“But?” I waited for the other shoe to drop.
“I’m going to need you to run a distraction.” Remy exhaled, looking almost guilty.
“Distraction, huh? Is this going to be a thing we do now?” I smiled at him. “Some couples just do a board game night, you know.”
“We’re not those couples.” Remy stopped me and looked for signs of hesitance. “Are you all right with this? I might be able to figure something else out.”
“No, it’s fine.” I kissed him on the cheek. I was reminded of the strip club. Terrifying at first, but it was great to be able to actually help him. He counted on me and I came through. It was a great feeling. “Besides, I’ve never successfully completed a game of monopoly before.”
“No one has.” The corner of his mouth crept up on one side.
Remy had me grab a liter of Coca-Cola and a few other things from the overpriced convenience store across the street, while he checked us into a room that overlooked the bikes and more importantly the white van. Our room was on the fifth floor and was surprisingly comfortable. I came back with what Remy had asked for, and some dinner for the both of us. After we ate and I took a quick shower, Remy set the alarm and explained his plan. Then we both crashed out for what was basically just a long nap.
At three AM the screeching alarm went off, and my first coherent thought was that I was late for school. Years later and I still had that same stupid fear. The more things changed the more they stayed the same too.
I chose to interpret that fear as despite me having changed so dramatically since meeting Remy, I was still deep down the same person at heart. Murder and mayhem hadn’t stolen that from me which was actually a little encouraging.
“Time to get up, my little actress.” Remy yawned, rubbed his face, and got dressed. “Once you’re ready and you see one of the Lobos on watch head in to take a piss, I want you to open the curtains and flick the lights on and off a few times to let me know.”