by Paula Cox
“Come visit me at the library,” she calls at my back, but I’m already out the door, walking down the stairs, grazed bloody hands stuffed into the pockets of my leather.
I won’t think about it: I won’t make the connection between Mom and Allison. It isn’t fair. I can’t do that. I can’t keep thinking like that. But as I walk down the stairs, feeling like I did when I offered her my number but amplified—there wasn’t a kid involved then—I can’t stop myself from thinking of Mom, eyes burning into me with resentment, almost as though she wished she could burn me from existence. That’s Rust, I reflect, wishing I could stop this self-pitying horseshit. That’s Rust: never really wanted unless there’s violence to be done.
I walk out into the street, reach into my pocket for my cigarettes. I find none. I must’ve dropped them in the bar. I haven’t got a bike or a car with me, so I bow my head and begin walking down the street toward the bus station. I’ll just keep walking, focus on my moving legs, try and blot out any thought of Mom and Allison, try and—
“Wait!”
I turn at the sound of her voice, pitched high, urgent. She is jogging after me, her cheeks flushed.
She stops an inch away from me, so close I can feel the heat radiating from her.
“Yeah?” I say, unwilling to let any excitement in my voice just in case.
But she says, “I want to give it a try, Rust. Just give it a try.”
I open my arms. “Alright,” I say, still struggling to believe it.
She falls into my embrace, and then she stares up at me with those big vulnerable eyes, eyes which make me rock-hard straightaway.
“Let’s get you upstairs,” I say, and then pick her up.
She squeals, giggling, as I carry her to her apartment.
I don’t know if this will work, but we’ll try. We’ll try and make it work, and that has got to count for something, hasn’t it?
Chapter Eighteen
Allison
I sit at my apartment window and crack it slightly, letting the January biting wind whistle in through the inch or so space I have opened. I look down at the snow, which blankets cars and stores and roofs alike, and I trail my hand over my four-month bump. I think about the past months, think about how Rust and I have lived here for a few days out of the week and at his apartment for a few days. I have been by the clubhouse, too; and I have learnt that these bikers, far from being the scary men I thought them to be when I was too frightened to go to the clubhouse to find Rust before, are mostly just tough, but humane, men. I have met Zeke, who seems like Rust’s younger, slightly shorter brother to me. All in all, we are moving ahead. All in all, life has taken its course. Rust still talks about the unpatched, about Trent, the man who intimated me the day I met Rust, which seems like a long, long time ago now; as far as I can tell, the unpatched are still causing them problems.
“What about you, huh, Bump?” I ask, stroking my belly. Although Rust is convinced that the baby will be a boy, I find myself calling them Bump instead; it just feels more fair, until we know for sure. Typical man, I reflect, as I watch a fresh snowfall cascade past the window. The breeze is welcome. It is early morning, a Saturday, and I don’t have work for two blessed days. A few brave men and women walk through the snow, wrapped head to foot in coats and scarfs and thick trousers and boots; and then there are the others, the less privileged, the ones who come into my office with cold burn, shivering, and asking to be rehoused. “But let’s not think about that, Bump, not today, at least.”
I leave the window and go to the couch, stretch my legs out, waiting for Rust. These past months with Rust have been some of the sweetest of my life. At first, there was a distance between us, because after all we were strangers; the only thing we had, really, was our physical attraction. But now, I am sure something else is starting to develop. Of course, the physical attraction is still there, but there’s another element now, too. We share things: I have told him about my childhood, how my parents tried to force me into the career and a marriage they wanted; and he has told me about his far more tragic childhood. I think about his mother telling him to leave, and I clench my fist with anger. How could she do that to him? How could she do that to his father?
I think about when Rust told me, late on Christmas day, sitting at the window with a cigarette and me sitting at the other side of the room so I didn’t inhale the smoke. His back was to me, which I think is the only reason he could tell me. We’d had Christmas at the clubhouse and slept at his apartment, so he was sitting at his window which overlooks the outskirts of the city, breathing smoke into the night. And then, in halted, stop-and-start sentences, he told me about his childhood, about his father coming home with cracked skin on his hands and bags under his eyes, and then about the heart attack and his mother’s command: leave, and never come back; she was starting a new life. After he told me it all, I asked him to get rid of the cigarette, which he did; he threw it into the snow beneath the window and it extinguished with a hiss.
Then I walked across the room and sat in his lap, stroking his face. He’s grown his beard out, a big bushy tangle of brown-red; now he finally has a reason for his name. I’ve asked for his real name, but he just grins and tells me it’s his favorite color: the same answer every time. But one night, when he was drunk, he told me that when he left home he abandoned his name and took Rust because it was the color of his dead father’s eyes: a shade of brown which seemed red. He told me he didn’t want to remember the boy before he became Rust. And I understand that. He told me how he left his mother and ended up with Mouse, The Damned’ leader before Shackle, about how he learnt to fight and be tough. We’ve covered a great deal of ground in a few months, I reflect, stroking my ever-growing bump.
I’m thinking about all this when the door opens and Rust walks in. “Morning, little Mama,” he says, and without turning I can hear the smile in his voice. “I’ve got bacon or yogurt. Little Mama’s choice.”
“Since when did you start buying me yogurt?” I ask, climbing to my feet and joining him in the kitchen.
He steps forward, looking wild with his beard and his grown-out hair, and places his hand on Bump. “Since my little boy started getting bigger, little Mama. That’s when. Now, what do you want…yogurt or bacon?”
“Sushi,” I mutter. “I am desperate for a truck-load of sushi.”
Rust rolls his eyes. “Well, that ain’t on the menu, and if you think I’m goin’ to be one of those guys who go running back out into the cold because my whale is demanding some specific dish, you’re dead wrong.”
“Your whale?” I giggle, slapping him across the face. “I’d prefer to be a little Mama than a whale, you animal.”
He takes a step back and then juts his chin out. “Hit me again, whale woman, but really put your all into it this time. A whale like you should be able to hit harder than that.” He chuckles, black eyes glinting with embers of playful light.
“You’re an evil man,” I say, offering a melodramatic pout.
He takes the bacon from his brown shopping bag and tears it open with his teeth. “I thought I was an animal,” he says, spitting plastic onto the floor. “And now I’m evil, too? You need to make your mind up, whale-woman.”
I giggle and shove him in the chest. He opens his arms and wraps them around me, enveloping me, trapping me, but being trapped has never felt this good.
Chapter Nineteen
Rust
As I walk around the store, a shopping basket on my arm, I’m still in shock by how four months can change a man. Four months can turn a man from a confused, uncaring animal to…well, to a confused animal who cares a little more, now. I think about Allison, think about the close nights we’ve spent together, think about how Bump is growing larger day after day. I have always tried to stamp out my emotions. I have always tried to tell myself I do not have a heart; hearts are not meant for men like me. But lately, I have started to believe that, just maybe, a man like me could know what it means to have a heart, to have gen
uine feelings. It’s soppy as hell and I never talk like this to Allison. She knows I care without me spewing all that shit out there, I’m sure. But still, it’s there, this change. And perhaps the strongest evidence for it is that here I am, shopping basket on my arm, looking around for some sushi.
It’s Monday, and all weekend Allison’s been going on about sushi. She’s hinted several times for me to go and get her some, but I’m not about to go out of my way for it. I might have started caring way, way more now that she’s holding my child, but I ain’t about to turn into one of those soft-faced, hen-pecked guys who nod numbly every time their woman gives them an order. Fuck that. But I’m already here, so I might as well pick some up. I find the sushi, drop it in the basket next to some other groceries—the fact that I’m even grocery shopping is still slightly absurd to me—and go to the checkout. At the checkout counter there’s a short red-headed woman with a neck tattoo of some kind of bird and makeup around her eyes which makes her look vulnerable. She gives me the look, which I know well ’cause women often give men in leather the look. I don’t so much as look her in the face after she gives me that look, and the rest of the interaction is passed in awkward silence. I’m not straying, not from Allison, not from my kid.
I go out into the snow to the pickup, load the groceries, and then drive to the library where Allison is working. I’ve asked her to take time off, but she’s told me in her professional-lady voice that she’s going to work right up until she drops, and I guess I can’t argue with that. If I’m not going to become hen-pecked, it seems she isn’t going a meekly obedient girlfriend, either. Girlfriend, I reflect, as the tires cut through the piled-up snow. Girlfriend. That seems like too much for a man like me. I never have girlfriends. Ever since I left home, I’ve never had a girlfriend. And yet it seems too little at the same time. She’s holding my child. Can she really just be my girlfriend?
In the library parking lot, I get the sushi from the shopping bag and make my way inside. The heat of the library—which is nothing like a library from when I was a kid, with computers along the walls, touchscreens, play centers for the toddlers, and even a café off to one side—is damn welcome after the biting cold of Motor City’s January. I nod to Marjorie, the head librarian, and she nods back with a smile. Marjorie sometimes gives Allison a hard time, but she’s become a lot easier to deal with since finding out Allison is pregnant. Turns out she’s not the dragon-woman Allison mistook her for.
I go down the corridor and peek into Allison’s office. Something catches in my throat when I see her like that. I tell myself not to be a soft bastard, but I can’t help it. She’s just sitting at her desk, ankles crossed and visible under the desk, biting her lip as she leans over a piece of paper and jots at it with a pen. That desk…that’s where our baby was conceived, must be. Strange to think that not too long ago we were just two strangers fucking on a desk.
I don’t knock, just push the door open and walk in, holding the sushi behind my back.
“Hey!” She gasps, and then deflates when she sees that it’s me. “Oh…You scared the hell out of me, Rust.”
“Maybe you ought to be scared of me,” I say. “Maybe you ought to run and hide someplace.”
“Ha ha,” she mutters. She looks at her computer screen. “It’s one o’clock already? I didn’t even realize.” She makes to stand. “I better go get some lunch.”
That’s when I reveal the sushi. Her eyes go wide when she sees it, and she even claps her hands together. Allison has a shifting personality: one moment she’s the professional social worker; one moment she’s a little girl excited at some sushi; and the next she might turn into the horny-as-hell woman who fucks in side streets and offices. I hand her the sushi and the plastic fork. She snaps it out of my hand, and then we go and sit on the couch, with the parking lot to the side of us, blanketed in snow, with more snow drifting lazily down.
“Good day?” I ask, as we sit side by side. I stretch my legs out, laying them on the coffee table. Allison shoots me a judgmental look, but I don’t move my legs.
“Stressful,” she says. “But you know how it is.”
“Winter,” I mutter.
“Winter,” she agrees.
Allison deals with a lot of homeless people, I know, which means she hears a lot of sad stories and works to help a lot of sad people who are spending their nights crusted with ice and snow, shivering to the depths of their bones. The Damned tries to help out where we can too, but the truth is that a lot of folks end up on the street because they need a more involved amount of help than we can give. But still, we do what we can. It’s been cool, finding the ways that Allison’s work and my family cross paths. I wrap my arm around her, massage her shoulder, not ’cause I feel like I have to, but ’cause it feels good to do it. That’s another shock to me, a constant one. I want to make her feel better. I want to her to happy. Never had that with a woman before.
Allison tucks into the sushi like a madwoman, demolishing it, and then goes to the cooler and gets herself a cup of water. She drinks half the cup down in one gulp and then returns to the couch, laying her head on my shoulder. Outside, the wind whistles softly.
“Rust,” she says quietly.
“Yeah?” I reply, liking the way her hair feels against my bearded cheek as I rest my cheek against the top of her head.
“Do you think…”
She trails off, and for a while we say nothing, just content to sit here. The sounds of the library, the raised voices of people on computers, the heavy footsteps, the toddlers in the play area, seem faraway.
“Do I think what?” I ask after a while.
She swallows—I hear it, a loud gulping sound—and then says, “Do you think we are in love—”
As she speaks, I catch something at the periphery of my vision. Enforcing hones your senses so that they are fine, so that you catch things you’d normally miss. I know that the flitting at the corner of my vision could be nothing, but my gut tells me otherwise. I turn and scan the parking lot. When I see him, trying and failing to duck down behind a black SUV, my throat constricts. I let out a growl, and everything else but him goes dark: he is the only thing I can see.
I know it is Trent even from this distance because of his stupid Viking haircut, one side of his head completely shaved and the other hanging down, wet from the snow.
I’m on my feet in a second.
“What is it?” Allison says, sitting up.
“Unpatched,” I grunt, and then jog out of the office, slamming the door open.
I rush through the library, head down, arms pumping, as fast as I can, anger moving through my limbs, propelling them. Trent, who over these past months has been like a fuckin’ specter, Trent, who has been selling heroin like The Damned don’t even exists, Trent, who thinks he can do whatever the fuck he wants—and now he’s here, spying on my woman, the mother of my child. I clench my fists as I barge out into the snow. I head toward the black SUV, which is slowly becoming white in the snowfall, and walk around it, looking for him. He’s not here. I look at the snow, trying to see footsteps, but plenty of people walk to and fro around here and finding any particular set of footsteps is impossible.
“Where are you, you cowardly fuck?” I growl, turning full circle, looking toward the main road, the library building, the park which is off to one side, the swing and the climbing frame deserted. “Where are you, you unpatched fuck? Spying on my woman…spying on my fuckin’ woman!”
I punch my chest, unable to halt my anger, but no matter how much I scan my surroundings I can’t see him. A few people walk toward or from the library, glancing at me like I’m some crazy guy and giving me a wide berth. I bite down, my jaw tight, temples aching, head fogged over. He must’ve had his bike nearby, I reason, and now he’s gone. But I didn’t hear an engine. Maybe he had it down the road some, and he jogged to it, and he’s left. But why was he here? For me, or for Allison? Goddamn, I’m goin’ to have to put a watch on the library from now on. Or maybe I’ll watch it
myself. God fuckin’ damn it.
I return to the library, feeling defeated. Allison is waiting for me in the lobby section, eyes wide with worry. “Did you find him?”
I shake my head. “No,” I say darkly. “No, I fuckin’ didn’t.”
Allison approaches me as a woman would approach an angry lion and I can’t blame her; I feel like one right now. But when she lays her hand on my shoulder, I feel myself calming down, my jaw unclenching. The fog in my head ascends and disappears and I am able to think properly. I place my hand on Bump, stroke it. “If anything happened to you…” I swallow, unable to complete the thought. “I need to go to the club, tell the men what I saw. I’m going to arrange for a look out to watch your workplace. You don’t leave this building without protection.”
She rolls her eyes. “Rust—”
“No,” I interrupt, voice stern. “We can’t risk it. Don’t leave this building today until I arrange protection, alright?”
I stare at her firmly, leaving no room for argument. I won’t hear anything else. We need to keep her safe; we need to keep our child safe. She must sense that I’m not messing around, ’cause she bites her lip and nods. “At least let me see you out.”