Why ride a bike when you will just end up in jail, mortified and needing a biker to bail you out?
“How’s the fishing, gentlemen?” the officer yelled.
Tourmaline closed her eyes, cringing.
“Been better.” One of the men tossed his line. “Loud tonight. Dumbass bikers acting like they always racing somewhere.”
“Ahhh . . . ,” the cop said. Gravel tumbled, as if he were sliding down the embankment.
No. No. No. She held her breath.
“Just so happens, I’m after a bike. Looking for a girl on a motorcycle.” He was just around the corner now. Three more steps, and she’d be caught.
She tried to keep from breathing, but then her heart felt as if it were going to explode in her chest, and she sucked in a deep breath of the heavy river air.
The guy fishing shrugged. “Well. I don’t know about a girl, but I seen a motorcycle pass by here no more than a minute or two ago. What was it?” He looked at his buddy. “Harley. What year, do you think?”
The other guy readjusted his hat. “Oh. Hm. I’d say a ’sixty-nine, ’seventy?”
“So it went over the bridge? North on this road?” the cop asked.
“Yes, sir. Headed right into Iron Gate. Didn’t know you were looking for it.”
“Thank you for your time.” His boots thumped away.
Tourmaline eased a long breath out, but didn’t move.
After a few minutes, the guy fishing cast again. “He’s gone,” he said.
She slumped over the handlebars. Relief flooding through her.
He snorted and shook his head.
His buddy outright laughed, and hollered, “Hey, man, you gotta see what this cop was after.”
Someone else was hiding from the cop, apparently. He cut out of the bushes no more than five feet in front of Tourmaline in a blur of brush and sticks.
She shot straight up, eyes wide.
Wayne.
In the light of day, he looked older than Tourmaline remembered. Balding. Camo T-shirt sticking to his concave chest. He looked terrible, really—as if a crow shit him on a fence and the sun hatched him out. His expression clamped down tight and he started toward her with a steady look in his eye.
So much for avoiding him until she left town.
Blindly, she scrambled for the kick start. She would not cry. Or stop. Or be scared.
She was just going to fly. Standing over the handlebars, she kicked. The engine coughed and didn’t turn over. In the moment she needed it most, it wasn’t going to start. She dropped her eyes, panicking.
Mistake.
A scabbed, dirty hand clotheslined her, crushing her windpipe and snapping the back of her head against the concrete pillar.
“Hey there, T,” Wayne sneered. “Long time no see.”
He squeezed and she was choked down to the past.
The clock said six a.m. She could taste the sugary cereal she poured herself while watching This Old House. She could taste the warm milk. The feel of the scratchy carpet under her legs because the couch was too disgusting to sit on. The way a younger, less haggard-looking Wayne had kicked through the living room in his boxers, sat on the broken couch above her, and silently poured cereal into a cup. How his leg had hit her arm and not moved, and the milk in her stomach had soured. How she pulled herself tighter into a ball and realized, with her mother still sleeping in the bedroom, why Dad forbade her to come over here. Why she had to lie and say she was at Anna May’s if she wanted to spend time with her mom.
It wasn’t because he hated Mom. It wasn’t even really the drugs. Wayne had chewed and stared bleary and red-eyed at the television, and even though she’d moved, his leg had found her arm again. He could hurt her. There was no one here to stop him.
He finished his cereal and Mom woke up. Tourmaline left when the sun hit the cardboard on the windows and the air was filled with the deathly fumes that smelled like dead cats rolled into burning carpet. And for that day, she was safe. On her way home, she promised herself she’d never come back again.
But she had.
Just once.
And now she was here, pinned under his hands, with no one to stop him.
She clawed at his hands. Tried to kick out his knees with her one free leg. She was going to stop him. Snarling, she got her hand up and shoved her fingers into his eyes.
“Bitch,” he exclaimed, twisting away, hand slipping.
She pushed him off and righted the bike, heaving all she had down on the kick start.
Still. Didn’t. Start.
Wildly, she looked for Wayne, trying to see him before he caught her unawares again.
His friends had him by the arms, dragging him away. “Cut it out!” one of them yelled. “Don’t you know who that is?”
“Oh, I know.” He shook them off and started right back for her.
She kicked. The engine choked and died. Her pulse seemed to slam out the curses. Shit. Shit. Shit.
“Her daddy will kill you, man. That’s Harris’s kid. Remember Ray?”
Somewhere in her panic, deep inside, she froze and looked at the men, all tangled up like wildcats on the bank as they tried to hold Wayne back. Who’s Ray? Her leg was already coming down hard on the kick start, and underneath her, the engine exploded.
Wayne paused. He remembered Ray.
The question still hung in the air—horrifically unanswered—but Tourmaline popped the clutch and hung on. Without even realizing she knew what to do, she slipped the clutch and sank back.
It was just enough.
Tourmaline’s throat ached with the worst sore throat she’d ever had, and her fingers trembled from the pain throbbing in her right arm and leg. But she was committed.
She stashed the bike in Alvarez’s empty spot and slipped into the woods on foot. Hunkering in the brush where she and Virginia had stood just the night before, she now watched. The clubhouse sat inside a burst of liquid heat that had broken off the sun to linger under the pines. In this world, where it was just her and all that seemed pitted against her, she wanted to see this place apart from its enchantments.
They came for church. To pay respect and worship at the altar of brotherhood. To become–together–more than one man in a great big world. To drink beer, smoke like a chimney, and laugh loudly about not-that-funny things.
The ghost of Wayne’s fingers lingered on her throat as she counted off each man and each bike, studying them as if seeing it all for the first time. There was nothing between her and the world as it truly was. No one to stop Wayne. No filter or veneer. No safety. This was the world she had inherited. A world she had, in part, made. What other things had she not seen? Who was Ray?
The sun dipped behind the edge of the mountains, spilling emeralds licked in flames and trails of molten fire across the valley. All she had become was because of rules being made about her and applied to her. Rules she had no say in but was complicit in affirming. Things she called fate to avoid confronting them. Wayne. Alvarez. Her mom.
And, absolutely, the tall shadow standing watch in the yard while everyone else collected inside.
Shaking out the tangled blond lengths of her hair, she stood and headed for the clubhouse, keeping to the darkness—afraid that in the weak shafts of crimson light spilling through the branches, her already flaming edges would burst into all-consuming fire. At the edge of the trees, she pursed her lips and whistled a shaky version of the long trill of the whip-poor-will—the bird that sang only at sunset and dawn. A herald of change.
Cash twisted, scanning.
She took one step out into the purpling shadows.
He found her, eyes wide.
The full, unadulterated shock of seeing him, in this world, without being afraid to look him full in the face rushed straight to her head, dizzying, and stunning, and pumping from her ears to her fingertips. Without hesitating, she plunged forward into the open, striding for the night that had collected under the eaves of the clubhouse.
Cash looked pani
cked. The chains on his belt jingled softly and his boots thumped in the grass as he rushed to catch her.
They met in the shadows.
“Jason has Sauls out looking for you,” he whispered, putting his arm up against the side of the building to shield her from sight of the entrance.
“Ask and you shall receive.”
“What happened?” He looked at her arm.
“Oh. Shit.” She glanced at the shallow, bleeding scrapes all down her arm and leg in the faint light. Bits of black asphalt were stuck in the edges. It looked rough. “Learning curve. I’m good now.”
He looked over his shoulder at the door.
It was a simple steel door, battered with black boot kicks and smudges under a floodlight. But the whole club lay on the other side—save Sauls and Cash, and Cash wasn’t allowed to attend church as a conscript. There would not be laughter if they all caught her here, in the shadows, with him. The shame would be public and it would be brutal. The thought spurned her on, some bitterness cementing her body in determination.
“What are you doing?” Cash asked, moving closer.
It was the first time she’d seen him act like a conscript—namely, slightly terrified and on edge. “I’m . . .” And then she stopped, mouth half open and the question hanging, because really, she didn’t know what she was doing except that she’d begun to look her fears in the face and couldn’t stop until she’d placed them all.
“You’ve got to get out of here. Go home and wait for your dad there.”
“I didn’t come to see my dad.”
He met her gaze then—something unspoken surging in argument between them in the twilight. “You can’t be here.”
“Don’t quote the rules to me, Cash Hawkins. I was born on those rules.”
“We both were,” he reminded sharply.
He was right. And she fell half in love with him right then for that reason alone. She crossed her arms and leaned against the rough-cut boards, the smell of pine and motor oil in every breath. “Been up to much this summer?” she asked with a smile, as if they weren’t hiding in the shadows and she wasn’t talking in a whisper.
“What the hell, Tourmaline?”
She ignored him, looking off into the woods. “I’ve been kind of busy, too. Thinking about maybe starting a project, though. I got this bike thing. I don’t know.”
He sighed. Looked toward the door. Back to her. Hesitation and panic caught in his body, though he wore them well enough. Lowering his head, he stepped forward, a breath of space between them now.
She gulped and straightened. Nothing nonchalant or low-key about this.
“I don’t want to see it go this way.”
“How did you expect it go?” she asked through clenched teeth, annoyed that he thought he could avoid this. Like she hadn’t been the one to warn him.
“Slower, for one thing,” he snapped, leaning even closer. “Patched in, for another.”
She swallowed. She’d forgotten he was trying to smash through worlds of his own. She looked to his eyes in the shadows.
The tree frogs sang.
And in the middle of nothing but fear and anger, she was consumed with the idea that he might . . . just might . . . kiss her. And as soon as she thought it, she saw he was thinking it, too, and it was all very confusing what exactly they should be doing.
He swallowed, the thick movement in his throat nearly undoing her. “We both know it’s not the time or the place. For this.”
For kissing or for making a scene? She nodded, but her body didn’t seem to know, either.
“I want to do it all the right way,” he continued. “For my dad.”
She pulled back; satisfied to see he stayed where he was, tight and hanging on the edge. “You can do the club the right way. But anything . . . between us . . . is always going to be wrong.”
He shrugged.
“I miss my mom,” she whispered desperately. “She would know how to navigate this.” She knew how to get what she wanted. “It feels like she died, but I know she’s still there, at least. I’m sorry that your dad won’t ever come home. I’m sorry you’re here without him.”
He nodded, rubbing the back of his neck and looking back to the door again. “Okay. Thanks.”
She was screwing this up. What should she have said? What did he need her to say?
“I’m—” She looked around. “I’m going to go. I’m sorry.”
He nodded again, still looking at the door.
She was on a roll with disaster. Throat thick, she rushed for the woods. The feeling of being caught prickled against her back, spurring her onward until she slipped into the darkness of the forest.
Shit. She swiped at her cheeks with both palms, forgetting how she’d even gotten there until she smelled the exhaust and rubber on her hands. Her life jumbled together, crossed and crisscrossed in a flurry of roads in her head that she couldn’t untangle. And all she wanted, at that moment, was to be home in bed, safe. She sniffed and stumbled up into the woods, not hearing anyone behind her until he grabbed her wrist.
Cash pulled her back. She was still crying, still caught in the tangles of her head.
She fell into his chest and forgot everything but his abrupt solidity and his warm hand gently coming to rest on the back of her neck.
His breath flooded her ear, making her knees quiver, and he whispered the numbers, hurriedly. “Text me,” he finished, squeezing her neck and releasing her back to the woods.
She stood frozen, heart slamming wildly as he jogged back out into the dark yard toward the floodlight reflecting on the long row of motorcycles.
He stopped, spread his legs, and crossed his arms over his chest.
The night was still. The birds all nestled down. The frogs continued their chorus and the wind kissed the tops of the pines.
And in the light silhouetting him in the distance, she could just make out the rapid rise and fall of his chest.
The thing about having Wayne choke her was that everything else in Tourmaline’s life immediately adjusted to that standard.
Almost arrested? No big deal—the cop wasn’t trying to kill her like Wayne was.
Scrapes all down her arms and legs? Hell, they were almost a good thing, simply because they were self-inflicted.
Ray? Was he in pursuit? No? Then she didn’t give a shit who Ray was.
So, when she sped away from the clubhouse, cheeks still hot and the heat from Cash’s hand still pooled on the skin of her neck, Tourmaline didn’t head home. She’d already paid up the suffering required to get the bike and herself out on the road; she was damn well going to make use of it. Somewhere out in the humid darkness, Sauls, Wayne, and at least two cops were all looking for her, but she had a fast bike and the number of the boy she liked safely tucked into her phone with instructions to text him, so really, she was invincible and they’d never find her.
First, she drove back and forth in front of Anna May’s house until Anna May came out—her stern-looking father and Dalton close behind.
“Thanks for returning my texts!” Tourmaline yelled as she drove past again. She left, keeping an eye out for cops while she got herself to the drive-thru.
Two men came up to her while she sat eating French fries off the gas tank. They wore T-shirts and unlaced boots, but instead of giving short answers with her eyes down, in the hope that they’d leave, she leaned back and smiled. There was nothing here to fear—and if there was, somehow, she’d face that head-on. The standard wasn’t to remain untouched and perfect in her room of white walls and Van Gogh’s Almond Blossoms, the standard was to remain alive. And if she failed, what did she care? She would be dead.
She sat there as a girl freed. A woman released. A woman without fear of men. And she marveled that at her most hunted, this was what she’d feel and where she’d be—sitting in a dim McDonald’s parking lot answering two strange men’s questions about the bike.
1972 FLH.
Not a Panhead. A Shovelhead. See, the top of the h
eads here are a little scooped out, look like a shovel?
Yeah, the original came with saddlebags. They’re sitting on the garage floor.
There’s a wiring issue. Only a kick start for now.
A pain in the ass? Tell me about it.
I laid it down being stupid. I’m fine. These just look bad.
Her arm and leg hurt, but the injuries weren’t as bad as they looked, even though her fingers trembled as she ate fries, and when she shifted her weight on her leg, her thigh shook like a sewing-machine needle.
“Is it yours?” one asked skeptically. “Or, like, a boyfriend’s or something?”
“It’s mine,” she said coolly, determined to make it be so. She’d buy it from Dad if he made her.
He looked to his buddy and they both shook their heads and smiled at the ground, as if they didn’t know what to do with a girl eating French fries off the gas tank of a mean old Harley.
It was like catching a glimpse of herself in a mirror. She was that girl they thought she was, in part.
She had long known she was the girl who already had too many shoes in her “to college” pile, still wore bows in her ponytails, and kept her nails done even though it made no sense when she worked landscaping.
But now she saw that she was also the girl with deep curves, cutoff shorts, and tangled hair, sitting on a bike, with all the wild and messy history that came with the last name Harris. That she’d been that all along, and no matter what she did, that history would work itself out in her bones. And love would be someone who would understand all of who she was and not be afraid.
Courage bolstered, she picked up her phone and pulled up Cash’s number. I think the engine on this bike is running a little high. I might have made that up, but that’s what I’m feeling about it. Any thoughts?
Done Dirt Cheap Page 13