by C L Green
I decide I need to take my second shot of bourbon and throw it back quickly. “I think we’ve done enough sharing for one day don’t you? I’m not going to ask any more questions.”
“Good,” he mutters as he shakes his head and refills our glasses.
*****
The pizza arrives a short while later. With four pizzas and two garlic breads spread out across the bar, my eyes bug out. “You bought a whole pizza for each person?”
“Yep, Jerry knows the drill. I give him the number of people, he builds a large pizza for each and throws in the garlic bread. Leftover pizza is popular for breakfast and lunch.”
“Right,” I mumble as I continue to stare at the enormous array.
Apart from being bountiful, the pizza looks delicious. Jerry obviously knows how to throw a mean pizza together and there are various thin and thick crusts. The cheese is thick and golden and he’s been heavy-handed with toppings. Good pizzas to rival any gourmet pizza makers you would find in Melbourne suburbia.
Clearly deciding it’s safe to approach us, Bill and Luke arrive at the bar to eat pizza. Pulling up a stool either side of me I find myself neatly sandwiched between too strange men. They are sitting close. A little too close for my liking because I feel that if I make any sudden movements, I’m going to accidentally touch one or the other of them.
Looking over to Jake I throw him a slightly alarmed look.
“Give her some room fucktards,” he growls. Without a moment’s hesitation, both men slide their chairs sideways about half a meter. Still not ideal, but better.
Leaning across in front of me, the scrawny red haired one tags a huge slice of Pepperoni pizza and jams most of it in his mouth. Chewing happily, he mutters between chews, “Since by buying pizzas, the big guy has unintentionally given us permission to approach, I’m going all in. I’m gunna ignore his threats and I’m gunna speak to you. I’m Bill.”
“Luke,” his blonde friend adds quickly as he breaks off some garlic bread.
“Uh, hi Bill and Luke,” I mumble slightly confused. “You’re not allowed to talk to me?”
“Not unless you want us to,” Bill confirms as he reaches for another piece of pizza.
He wasn’t joking when he said only if I want them to.
“Well I want you to,” I offer, and I do. I think Jake and I need to have a little conversation about human rights.
Bill grins and I hear Luke mutter “Thank God for that.”
Sliding my eyes to Luke, I watch as his face transforms with a stunning smile that reveals neat white teeth and two amazing dimples.
Holy shit.
This guy could do dental ads for great smiles. Dragging my eyes from his pearly whites, I move upwards to see a set of bright, crystal blue eyes crinkling at me. With a square jaw framed with shoulder length blonde hair that hangs haphazardly around his face, he definitely has a good look going on. Okay, so I’ve found a third reason to like bikers. Jake, Zane and now Luke.
“What do you do for a living Luke?” I ask conversationally as I carefully select a piece of Hawaiian Pizza and start nibbling at it.
“I install Green Energy setups,” he replies casually flicking his eyes to Jake. I look across to see Jake scowling at him. Swinging my eyes back to Luke’s, I find his pinned back on me. Looking amused about something he adds, “I set up and repair standalone Solar and Wind energy systems.”
“Cool.” I say as I move my eyes to study my pizza as I nibble at it. “That’d be a good job. Traveling about meeting interesting people. I bet you meet a few hippies and greenies then? You know, crazy, friendly folks who hug trees a lot and grow their own vegies and pot yeah?”
Not receiving an answer, I slide my eyes back to his. I see he has stopped chewing. He is watching me carefully, his eyes guarded. I hear Jake give a cough and Luke’s eyes swing to his. I follow suit.
“She asked a question Luke, do you meet many pot growing folk?” Jake has a grin spread from ear to ear and his eyes are flashing with humor.
“Well yeah…” Luke mutters as he swings his eyes back to me and starts chewing again. “You could say that.”
Thinking no more of it, I swing my attention to Bill. “So Bill… what do you do?”
“Drive trucks for Luke and Jake,” he answers between huge mouthfuls of pizza. I note that his teeth are not as well cared for as Luke’s and he has a really bad habit of exposing his food while chewing.
Ewwww.
I nod. “That’s handy having your feet in two business camps.”
“You could say that,” he mumbles reaching for another piece of pizza.
“I’m a website designer,” I announce wondering if Bill even knows what a website is.
In unison, both Bill and Luke reply, “We know.”
Huh?
My heart throws a small wobbly and stutters.
Shit.
Am I ever going to be live with the fact that obviously everyone around here knows who I am? Snapping my eyes to Jake’s I find myself sliding into a blind panic.
“Fuck.” He growls loudly and before I can register how he’s done it, he rounds the bar. Within in another instant he is spinning my bar stool to face him. Feeling slightly dizzy at the speed with which he’s appeared in front of me, I gasp. Which turns out to be a good thing because I realize I have been holding my breath. It feels better to have air.
Planting a hand on the back of my neck, he drags me forward to face plant in his stomach. Finding myself blinking against his hard stomach for the second time today I am speechless. Breathing softly, I listen to the sounds of silence around me and finally find my voice. “Um… Jake?”
“Yeah sweetheart,” I feel his voice rumbling through my forehead. Staring at the floor between his stomach and my knees, I announce, “I’m… okay. I think you could classify that as a… false… alarm. It was more that I was… well… wondering just how much these guys knew.”
Feeling his hands slide away from my neck, I sit up straight again and tip my eyes up to his. Looking at his strong jaw line bulging with tension, I add, “You know, about the other stuff.”
With a concerned look on his face he pins me with his eyes and replies. “All of it sweetheart. Anyone who sits at this bar has my full trust. Which means they’ve got your full story and know what it means for you. These men are my brothers in everything except blood and you can trust them with your life. If I didn’t trust them, they would never have laid eyes on you.”
“Right,” I murmur softly as I slide my eyes downwards towards my feet. “So there’s no need for an AA style announcement that my name is Arianna, I’ve had a bad week and I am on the run from a gun wielding mobster?”
“You could say that,” he chuckles as he comes to the conclusion that I am okay. He then leaves me to round the bar and reoccupy his seat. Swinging my head left and right I find two more faces grinning at me. With a roll of my eyes, I turn and reach for another piece of pizza.
“You guys say that a lot!”
*****
I wake up the next morning with a hangover.
A bad hangover.
This is because I drank more shots of bourbon last night than I cared to count. I also had a great time.
Bill, despite his poor food eating etiquette, was hilarious. A cheerful guy with plenty of stories to tell, I soon found myself laughing hard as he retold stories of the places he’d been and the oddities he’d seen.
Luke was nothing short of a charmer. With his crystal blue eyes sparkling with dangerous intent for much of the night, I soon found myself caught up in his blatant efforts to flirt with me. The night had only come to an end because Jake had decreed it.
He did this by appearing in the hallway outside the toilet as I stumbled out drunk off my ass. “You’re done,” he had announced in his deep, gravelly, no one is going to argue with me voice. I vaguely remember looking up at him after hearing the tone in his voice and wishing I was ‘done’ by him. That’s all I can remember.
Now I’m lying here feelin
g like I’ve thrown myself out the back of a truck again. With my eyes still shut, I decide that I won’t be drinking bourbon again.
Ever.
Realizing I am laying on my back, I decide to roll over to my good side. Resettling in a more comfortable position, I open my eyes and gasp.
Two bright green eyes are staring lazily at me.
Jake.
His shiny black hair is strewn haphazardly behind him and if I thought he was a fifteen yesterday, he’s just bounced to a twenty with the lazy look he’s got going on now. Blinking, I murmur, “Good morning.”
“Yeah,” he says in the deepest, gravelliest, morning voice I have ever heard.
“My drinking career is over,” I inform him.
I watch as he lifts an eyebrow and one corner of his mouth crinkles slightly. Mesmerized by his lips, I find myself unconsciously moistening my own. And then it occurs to me. I don’t remember coming to bed.
Fuck.
Tipping my head downwards I drag the top sheet downwards and gasp. First I gasp at the fact that I am wearing one of Jake’s Harley t-shirts and just a pair of panties. Second I gasp because he is butt naked. And he is sporting morning wood.
Big morning wood.
Ripping the sheet back over us I close my eyes and the words, ‘What has been seen cannot be unseen’ flash through my brain. The vision of all that hard muscle and manhood etch themselves into the back of my eyeballs.
Holy cow.
Opening my eyes again, I see that Jake’s face is now full on smiling and he is shaking slightly as he chuckles silently.
Scared to ask, I do so anyway. “Did we? Uh… You know…”
And then I instantly wish I hadn’t asked.
I wish this because he instantaneously stops chuckling, his jaw clenches and his eyes turn hard. Knitting his eyebrows he growls, “Fuck no.”
Taken aback at his ferocity I physically recoil and push back across the bed. This turns out to be a second thing I wish I didn’t do. I wish this because the look on his face turns from hard to clearly pissed. A look that as hot as he may be, it’s a look I don’t like.
Preparing to take my chances at a fast launch from the bed with no consideration to my now healing injuries and my hangover from hell, I suddenly freeze solid at his next words. “I wouldn’t want to hurt you sweetheart.”
Blinking rapidly at him, I find my eyebrows knitting harshly together as I consider his words. Registering the meaning behind them, I catalog my injuries, including the stitches that are down there.
Jake senses that I have reached a level of understanding and his face softens. His green eyes however, remain serious and they are pinned on mine. “Not that I wouldn’t want to,” and then with a smirk, “I think we have clear evidence of that.”
“Oh,” I almost whisper.
Reverting to a serious look, he slides up on an elbow, the sheet falling down his side, dangerously close to exposing him again. Moving closer to me he continues talking.
“Do you know how hard it is to sleep in a bed next to you and not touch you? And when I say not touch you, I mean that both sexually and just normally. Avoiding all your sore parts is kinda hard when you keep rolling about and snuggling up to me.”
“I snuggled up to you?”
“At one stage you were wrapped around me so tight I felt like I was a piece of driftwood and you were lost at sea.” Grinning again he adds, “It was only my fear of your back that stopped me throwing an arm around you to make sure you didn’t … drown.”
“Oh,” I murmur again.
He’s such a good guy.
Then a second thought hits me. Maybe he isn’t.
“You undressed me,” I announce in an accusatory tone.
“No I didn’t,” he starts chuckling again.
What the? If he didn’t undress me, who the hell did?
“Huh?”
“You undressed yourself. Well undressed could be a loose term for what you did. You stripped yourself, slowly. After sitting me in the chair next to the bed and telling me not to move a muscle.”
I did WHAT!
“Considering the limited movement in your right arm as well as the gauze all over your back, you did a pretty good job of it too. Stripping off your rib cage bandage sexily was something a guy doesn’t see in many porno’s. Well to be honest I’ve never seen it done on a porno, ever. At a guess, I’d say your display was a world first. And I’ve seen a lot of porno’s so I’d know. You were fucking hot.”
He is flat-out smiling at me now.
“I did WHAT!” I screech.
Ignoring my screech, he stares at me a beat or two and then rolls away. Throwing back the sheet and stepping out of the bed in all his naked glory, I find all the wind taken out of my screeching sails. My breath leaves my body in a huge whoosh, and I nearly swallow my tongue as his muscled back ripples above his very firm ass.
Striding towards the door, he turns his head back over his shoulder and grins cheekily. “Just joking sweetheart. When I went and kicked Bill and Luke out, I returned to find you already in that t-shirt, passed out in bed.”
Watching as he disappears through the door I grunt, “Bastard.”
But I can’t help smiling as I say it.
Chapter Six
Emma
I’m standing at the mirror in the bathroom dabbing concealer over the yellowing bruises on the right side of my face. My first round of online shopping purchases started arriving two days ago and with healing wounds, new clothes and new make-up, I’m finally starting to feel like I’m alive again.
Alive as one can feel after being nearly dead.
Alive as one can feel when life as you know it ceases to exist and you have to start again. Start again with no family, no home, no car, no personal effects, nothing.
Zip, zero, zilch.
Nix, nada.
Not that I can say the loss of my dismal excuse for a family is something that is going to affect me. Not in the least.
With no clues on the identity of my father, I was the only child to a woman who shouldn’t have been allowed to bring a child into the world in the first place. She has to be one of the number one reasons society should bring in breeding licenses for women.
A mean, self-centred egotistical bitch, Patricia was so self-centred that she drank and smoked her way through her unwanted pregnancy. She did this focused on how pregnancy was an inconvenience. An inconvenience that made her fat and unattractive to the constantly revolving door of men in her life. An inconvenience that was endured with the support of vodka and cigarettes.
I haven’t spoken to my mother for over ten years. Having moved out of home on my eighteenth birthday, she made a few weak attempts to contact me over the next few years before her efforts stopped.
And I let them.
Happily.
And now I have a fresh slate, with a new look and a new life. I’m thirty years old and starting off with a whole new me.
As I dab the concealer on, I marvel at the sight of the new me. I now have shoulder length, chocolate brown hair. I also have shiny bright green eyes. A far cry from my normal natural look of golden blonde hair with cornflower blue eyes. It feels like I’m under a strange spell looking into the mirror to see a whole new version of me.
Spells aside, I do love my new eye color and I dig the new hair, thanks to Dingo’s wife, Eva.
Eva had arrived at the front of the shop two days ago. Bustling through the piles of stock carrying her bags, she had not hesitated to barge straight past the dazed biker at the front counter and through the door to the communal room.
On entering the large, open room, she had scanned the half dozen or so pissed off looking bikers standing and sitting around the room before pinning her eyes on her husband. Not caring the room was wired at the presence of yet another unwanted female in their inner sanctum, she had ordered Dingo to, “Go get me my girl.”
She had then thumped various shopping and beauty bags on a table, wandered to the bar fridge, gr
abbed herself a beer and plonked herself down on a barstool to wait. Which is where I found her after Dingo timidly sought me out in my room to let me know that his wife had arrived.
My first thoughts on Eva when I entered the room were that she was a Pink lookalike. Small and dainty, she had short, spiked, white-blonde hair with slashes of pink coloring through it. Dressed in black leggings, shiny black high heels and a killer silver tunic with belt, she oozed fashion. Something that didn’t gel with the look her husband had going on.
His was the look of a grubby biker.
Some of his look was to do with Dingo’s role as the shop’s resident mechanic. Some of it was just Dingo. As a mechanic, he was always wearing dirty black, grease covered jeans, loose fitting Harley t-shirts and oily black biker boots. As Dingo, he wore similar outfits, minus the grease.
Taking a second look at him after meeting his wife, I soon realized that underneath all that grub was an average looking brown haired man with perfect teeth and kind brown eyes. A man who may have looked average on the outside, but once he smiled and his eyes crinkled at you in their soft, friendly way, you could see was far from average on the inside.
Filing this information in my new mental register of people I trust, I listened through Dingo’s brief introduction to Eva. He then left me sitting at the bar with his wife and vanished with the rest of the men out to the garage.
Spending the afternoon with Eva had been refreshing. A qualified hairdresser and beautician, she kept the beers coming as we sifted through magazines to find my new hairstyle and hair color. As she gabbed to me about her salon, her children and her friends, I found myself relaxing fully for the first time in over a week. Even shuffling my way between the small bathroom and the communal room to rinse out hair and eyebrow color, I felt like I was having what I could call a normal day.
Leaving late in the afternoon, she pecked me on the cheek and promised that she would be back Friday night. She did this vowing that now she’d breached the inner sanctum, there was no way the men would be keeping her out. It was obvious that Eva was not one of the women who had been happy about her inability to set foot in the Harley shop. Having now broken the seal on the inner vault, there would now be no holding her back.