by BB Easton
And I said, “No,” with a smile on my face, a stack of hundreds in my pocket, and my first win under my belt.
It was the first cool, overcast day in what felt like years. Harley had come to see me on my lunch break, and he was wearing a busted old leather motorcycle jacket that conformed to his firm body like a layer of molten sex. It was so effortlessly chic that I wanted to kiss him and throw paint on him, all at the same time. It wasn’t fair. How did he always look so fucking James Dean with literally zero effort?
I, on the other hand, had on a shiny new maroon flight jacket that I’d bought at Trash the night before—basically, the second the cold snap had hit. Of course, I did have a much cooler, much more authentic Army-green one at home, but considering that I couldn’t even look at it without hyperventilating, shiny new maroon would have to do.
As the wind whipped through the Pier One Imports parking lot, I shivered and zipped my new frock up to my neck.
“Goddamn, it’s cold.” I stamped out my cigarette and wriggled into Harley’s arms. “It’s fucking August. What the shit?”
Rubbing my back over the slick surface of my jacket, Harley rested his chin on the top of my head and chuckled. “It’s not cold; you’re cold. I’m starting to think you only love me for my body heat.”
“‘You only love me when you want punani,’” I teased back, quoting an old reggae song.
Harley had tossed the L word around here and there, but until he said it for real—with an I before it and a you after it—it didn’t count. I’d accepted the fact that Harley James didn’t take anything seriously. I was actually great with it. I’d had enough serious for one lifetime.
But, evidently, serious hadn’t had enough of me.
My soul registered the vibration before the rumble was even audible. My breathing ceased. My ears perked up. My back went rigid in Harley’s embrace. And then I heard it, on the wind.
The sound of my doom.
I looked up at Harley with pleading eyes as the growl built in the distance. I don’t even know what I wanted him to do. Run? Save himself? Save me? Get angry and morph into The Incredible Hulk? Whatever it was, he was going to have to do it soon because the roar of Knight’s engine was only getting louder.
When Harley’s eyes broke away from mine and darted over my shoulder, I knew it was too late. We’d been spotted. And we were all gonna die.
I stood, bolted to the ground, and watched in horror as Harley casually flicked his cigarette butt into the middle of the parking lot. Then he turned around, seemingly unconcerned that we had but seconds to live, and unlocked his trunk. When the lid opened, I realized exactly why Harley was so goddamn relaxed. I also finally found out what the fuck he’d been hiding in his trunk all that time.
Harley had been driving around with a motherfucking arsenal back there—handguns, sawed-off shotguns, rifles, revolvers, laser scopes, and boxes upon boxes of ammo.
I wasn’t dating a mechanic. I was dating motherfucking Batman.
My head swiveled from left to right as I alternated between watching Knight barrel down on us at a speed that made me think he might just run us over and be done with it and watching Harley as he picked up an oil-stained rag and used it to grip the handle of a small black handgun. Careful not to leave fingerprints, Harley ejected the clip, checked to make sure that it was loaded, then popped it back in with a bloodcurdling click.
Knight lurched his Frankentruck up onto a flowerbed a few feet away just as Harley shoved the handgun into the pocket of his leather jacket—cool as a motherfucking cucumber—and closed the lid on what looked like a zombie apocalypse survival kit.
When Knight rounded the back of his truck, he looked ready to go full-on Skeletor. His undead eyes were almost clear in the overcast light. His nostrils flared. His teeth gnashed. And his camo pants and plain black T-shirt were stretched taut over muscles swollen from grueling daily boot camp workouts.
I waited for the fear to kick in—the physiological response that always gripped me whenever I was in Knight’s presence. The tightness that seized my throat and squeezed my lungs, the sweating, the racing heart. But it wasn’t there.
I wasn’t there.
Harley tucked me into his side and thrust the gun in his pocket toward Knight. “That’s close enough, jarhead.”
Knight stopped, curling his lip into a sneer and tilting his head to one side, appraising Harley. “You think you’re the only one here with a piece?” His voice was deep and clear and almost sounded amused.
I should definitely feel scared right now. This is weird.
“Doesn’t matter. Whatever you got, it’s prob’ly government-issued. Fingerprints and serial numbers all up on that shit.” Harley sucked his teeth, making a tsk sound. “Be a pity for you to get dishonorably discharged before you even got to kill your first A-rab, wouldn’t it, you fuckin’ racist?”
Why can’t I feel my feelings? Am I broken?
Knight’s eyes flared. “Be a pity for you to go back to being somebody’s bitch in jail, wouldn’t it? Shooting a Marine in broad daylight?” Knight shook his head. “With your priors, you’d get fuckin’ life.”
Shit. It’s starting to sprinkle. If I don’t go inside soon, my bangs are gonna curl up.
Harley shrugged. “Like I said, doesn’t matter because you’re gonna turn around, get back in your redneck mobile, and go the fuck back to wherever you came from.” Harley gestured toward the white monstrosity before us with the barrel of his pocketed gun. “But know this. If you come around my lady again, I will fucking end you. I’d be doing the whole fuckin’ world a favor. I know what you are, what you do to girls. I know how you like to carve ’em up for kicks, you sick fuck.”
I wonder what time it is. I bet my break is almost over.
Knight took two strides forward and jammed a finger into Harley’s chest. “You don’t know shit about me! Or her!” His finger swung from Harley to me. “If you did, then you’d know that she fucking likes it!”
Huh? What did I miss? Why is Knight pointing at me?
Harley let go of my shoulders and took a step forward so that he was nose-to-nose with Knight. “Say that shit again.”
Knight sneered. “If you knew shit about her, you’d know she has my fucking name tattooed on her finger.”
Actually, it’s almost gone now.
Harley puffed up his chest, breathing audibly through his nose and holding Knight’s stare.
Knight grinned and poked Harley one more time. “If you knew shit about BB, you’d know that she’s still fucking me.”
Um, what now?
Harley’s hand flew, smashing Knight across the face with the side of the gun. As his head pivoted to the side on impact, red droplets sprayed out, dancing with the clear ones falling from the sky. Knight turned his face back to Harley and smiled, blood coating his perfect white teeth. He looked like a madman, especially when he tilted his head a few degrees to the left, which was when I knew shit was about to go sideways. Fast.
I watched from the safety of my disassociation bubble as Knight reared back and head-butted Harley directly between the eyes. Harley stumbled backward, bumping into me where I was still leaning against the back of his car.
That’s weird. I can’t feel my body either.
They were practically on top of me. All I could see were the crazed whites of Knight’s eyes and the red smears across his teeth as he pulled his fist back and cocked Harley square in the jaw. Harley’s body slumped against mine for just a moment, just long enough for me—and Knight—to think he was unconscious. Then he swung a nasty right hook and caught Knight directly in the temple.
Harley was still holding the gun, but he’d turned it around backward, gripping it like a roll of quarters to fortify his punch.
Man, Harley fights dirty.
Knight shook off the blow and grabbed Harley’s gun arm, twisting it until I thought it was going to snap right off. Harley’s face contorted into a grimace, and his knees buckled. As he sank toward the g
round, Harley suddenly wrapped his free arm around Knight’s thigh, yanked his leg off the ground, and used his body weight to pile-drive Knight backward into the asphalt.
Harley immediately pulled Knight into one of the WrestleMania moves I’d seen him use on Dave—an Anaconda Vise or maybe a Killswitch?—but Knight got a hand between his neck and Harley’s elbow, blocking the choke hold.
I wonder how much longer this is going to last. I don’t want to get written up for being late. Again.
A guttural yell, followed by the sound of something clattering to the ground, caught my attention.
Harley.
Harley needed me. But I was gone. Where was I?
Focus, BB! What the fuck is wrong with you? Do something!
Through the rain, I could see Knight and Harley rolling around on the asphalt. At first, it looked like Harley had Knight in some kind of choke hold, but on second glance, I realized that Harley’s forearm was over Knight’s mouth, not his throat, and Knight was biting the shit out of it.
Harley grunted in pain and repeatedly slugged Knight in the side of the head with his free hand, but it didn’t matter. Knight was a human pit bull. Once he locked on to something, it took an act of God to make him let go.
Or maybe a gun.
Like the one at my feet.
I leaned over and picked up the black 9mm, as if it were some alien apparatus that I had to figure out how to activate. I knew how to shoot it. I’d shot cans off the fence post in our backyard with my dad a million times. I needed to figure out how to use it without shooting it.
I could wave it around in the air. Fire a warning shot. I could hit Knight with it, but that didn’t exactly work out for Harley. Maybe I could just throw it at his head from here?
While I wrestled with the jammed gears in my head, I found out exactly what would make Knight let go of my boyfriend.
It wasn’t a gun.
It was police sirens.
By the time I registered what was happening, Harley and Knight had just…vanished. One second, they were locked up like a human pretzel in the middle of the parking lot, and the next, I was being blasted from both sides by the exhaust from their massive V8 engines. When the toxic cloud lifted, I realized that I was alone, in a public place, in the rain, holding a Glock with the serial numbers filed off.
That now had my fingerprints on it.
In my mind, there was only one choice—shove that fucker in my pocket and get my ass back inside. The only problem with that plan was that my pockets weren’t as big as Harley’s, so the entire black handle stuck out like a neon sign that read, PLEASE COME ARREST ME.
As the police cruiser pulled into the parking lot behind me, I did what any outlaw in the movies would have done. I stuck a loaded gun into the waistband of my jeans, pulled my jacket down over it, and kept moving.
I held my breath and walked on eggshells toward the front of the store, terrified that I was going to accidentally blow off a foot or a kneecap or one of my labia. I could see my reflection in the floor-to-ceiling windows before me, but more importantly, I could see the reflection of the police cruiser as it pulled up behind me and slowed to a crawl. The officer had turned the siren off but kept his blue lights flashing.
What the fuck did that mean? Was I being pulled over?
I played dumb and kept walking. I was almost there. The sidewalk in front of the store would be mine in three, two…
As soon as I stepped up onto the curb, the police cruiser turned and slithered down the next lane over.
Oh thank motherfucking God.
Exhaling a strangled breath, I pulled open the front door and headed back into work—with a loaded 9mm in my pants.
I clocked back in at the cash register—eleven minutes late—grabbed my purse from one of the cabinets, and headed straight for the restroom.
I have no idea how long I sat on that toilet. Maybe five minutes? Maybe an hour? It was long enough for me to stash a loaded handgun in my bag, replay my distorted version of what had just happened a few hundred times, and begin to experience the return of my feelings.
Unfortunately, they decided to come back all at once.
When my manager came looking for me, I told her I wasn’t feeling well. It wasn’t a lie, but of course, she automatically assumed food poisoning. Why did everyone always jump to food poisoning? What the fuck were these people eating? Anyway, she let me spend the remainder of my shift sorting the new fall napkin rings into their respective bins—a cush job by any standards.
As I sorted the pumpkin rings from the dried cranberry coils, I tried to sort my feelings into nice little boxes, too. Boxes labeled Anger, Sadness, Security, Betrayal, Lust, and Love. I selected the galvanized silver napkin rings to represent Harley; they looked like they’d been smudged with oil, like his hands. And I chose the black lacquer ones for Knight; they reminded me of black holes, like his pupils. Also like Knight, they didn’t seem to fit in with the others.
In my mind, I pictured a box labeled Anger and saw myself dropping a black ring inside with a plink. I couldn’t fucking believe Knight had pulled that shit again. Why did he keep showing up? Just to force me to say good-bye to him all over again? I was so fucking sick of him leaving, and leaving, and leaving. I couldn’t fucking take it anymore. I dropped another black napkin ring in the Anger box just for good measure, then tossed one into the box marked Sadness while I was at it.
Thinking of Harley, I dropped a silver napkin ring into the box labeled Security. I wasn’t mad at him for starting that fight even though he’d left me holding the bag—or the gun, so to speak. In fact, I was proud. I’d been praying for someone to protect me from Ronald McKnight since the day we met, but no one had been up to the challenge until Harley. And talk about being up to the challenge. Motherfucker didn’t even sweat. Didn’t even flinch. And he’d thrown the first punch.
Was that something he’d learned in jail?
I vaguely remembered Knight saying something about Harley being in jail. Whatever. It was probably for shoplifting or some stupid teenage bullshit. I probably needed to talk to him about why the fuck he’d been driving around with a cache of firearms in his trunk, but honestly, I was too turned on by his badassery to care.
Plink into the Lust box.
There were only two boxes left—Betrayal and Love. Looking back and forth from black to silver, I eventually selected a third napkin ring—one with a stupid-looking turkey on it—and dropped it in. That napkin ring represented me. I was the betrayer. I’d betrayed Harley by sleeping with Knight, and now he knew it. And there had been betrayal in Knight’s eyes when he saw Harley with his arm around me. Knight had obviously thought things had changed between us since our last encounter, and I hadn’t told him otherwise. I’d moved on, or tried to, and Knight’s surprise upon discovering that fact twisted in my gut like a knife.
The only box still empty was Love.
And that’s exactly how I left it.
I peeled out of my parents’ driveway the next morning with a black-market Glock under my seat and a crumpled piece of paper smashed between my hand and the steering wheel—two separate issues that needed to be addressed. Immediately.
I tried to avoid looking in the rearview mirror as I flew down the highway. I was operating on zero sleep and even less food, I’d applied new eyeliner over old, and my hair was a fucking train wreck. After being caught in the rain the day before, my inch-long, grown-out strawberry-blonde buzz cut had curled into little Betty Boop-style flips all over my head, and my overgrown bangs were so damn wavy I’d just pulled them to one side and pinned them with a barrette.
I shivered inside my new jacket and debated whether or not to turn on the heater. I didn’t want to. By turning on my heater, I would basically be admitting that something was seriously wrong with me. Normal, healthy people don’t wear down jackets and run their heaters in Georgia in August—cold snap or no.
But I had more pressing matters to worry about than my dwindling body mass index, so I sai
d, “Fuck it,” and cranked that shit up.
For starters, I had to figure out where to go first. To a sane person, ditching the handgun would probably seem like priority number one, but sanity and I weren’t exactly on speaking terms right then. I was being pulled by a force more powerful than logic. It was as if the letter in my hand was steering itself straight back to its author. And I went along for the ride, if only to give that motherfucker a piece of my pissed-off mind.
I let the letter lead my feet up those rickety wooden stairs and guide my fist to pound on that all-too familiar weather-beaten door. I’d been coming to that house since my very first boyfriend, Colton Hart, lived there with his sad, bedraggled single mom, Peg. When Colton moved out, Peg took Knight in. He could have afforded his own place with what he made at the tattoo parlor alone, but for some reason he preferred Peg’s nasty old house. I think it was because being there made him feel useful. He was always fixing things around the house and taking care of her geriatric German Shepherd. At Peg’s, Knight had a purpose. At his step-dad’s house, he had a restraining order.
When the door swung open, what I saw standing on the other side of that threshold made me feel as though I was looking through a portal into my past. Everything in Peg’s house was exactly as I remembered it—itchy brown ’70s decor, the smell of cigarette smoke thick in the air. Even the boy standing before me looked exactly the way I remembered him looking first thing in the morning—bare feet, tight Levi’s rolled up at the bottom, white Agnostic Front T-shirt, half-untucked, red braces hanging from his waist instead of stretching over his shoulders.
I thought for a moment that I could just step across the plane of the open door and into the past. Into Knight’s waiting arms. Into a time when my only worry had been keeping my mom from finding out that I wasn’t actually spending my Friday nights at Juliet’s house. But as soon as my eyes made it up to Knight’s face, my fantasy popped like a delicate, beautiful bubble, revealing the harshest of realities behind it.