by Paula Cox
I keep the door locked. When it begins to rattle, I back away to the window, ready to climb out and run into the street. My window opens right onto the War Riders’ parking lot. One of the first things I did when entering was make sure I could open the window. I can, but not all the way. Still, if it came to it, perhaps I could squeeze my way out. It might result in scraping my skin raw, but that’s a price I’ll have to pay. Then I hear Dante’s voice: “It’s me.”
That shouldn’t bring me any comfort. This man is a stranger, after all. And yet when I hear his voice, I relax, if only a little. I go to the door and say: “Are you alone?”
He chuckles, low so no one will hear. “Yeah, I’m alone.”
I unlock and open the door, locking it behind him. He is wearing a T-shirt. He’s been outside, working and sweating, and I can see through the back of the white shirt. Dante has thorny tattoos bristling up his arms, twisting around, and then blossoming into a flowerless, sharp garden on his back. For a moment, it makes me think of the thorny flower in my hair, the way it cut my scalp. This man could do more damage than that flower, I know, much more damage. This man could ruin me, if only just because he is a man and he is a stranger.
When he turns to me, he is chewing on the end of a toothpick.
“The other girls are starting to resent you,” he says.
I stay silent. More often than not, staying silent is better than saying anything. Better for survival, anyhow.
When he sees I’m not going to say anything, he says: “I have to put you to work, Kayla. You’ve got to cook and clean like the other girls. Alright?”
I nod shortly.
He chews on the end of his toothpick, and then moves it to the corner of his mouth. When he talks, the toothpick moves around.
“You don’t say much, do you?”
I shake my head.
“Why’s that?”
His pitch-black eyes move up and down me. The first night, one of the men dropped a bag of clothes outside my room. A bag filled with clothes I wouldn’t normally wear: spring dresses which show off my legs; low-cut tops; heeled shoes. Dante’s eyes linger on my legs for a moment. I tell myself I don’t like the way he looks at me; I cannot trust him and he should not be looking at me like this. But as he looks, I feel something, a shiver almost, whispering up my inner thighs.
I open my mouth—and then close it. I am not about to tell him about Master and the Compound and all that stuff. I can’t tell him that I have to keep running because, once upon a time, Kayla Pearson was a kid in a cult. No, I will not tell him that. So I stay quiet.
He shrugs, and takes his toothpick from his mouth. “Fair enough. I’ll see you around, Kayla.”
I nod, and step aside.
The next morning, Angelica knocks on my bedroom door at eight o’clock in the morning. She doesn’t wake me. I have been awake since six o’clock, as I am every morning. Six o’clock is early enough so that nobody else is awake and I can listen to the sounds of the clubhouse, listen for danger, listen for anybody from the Movement. I imagine one of the smiling Movement gentlemen approaching the clubhouse and asking, with smiles and politeness, if there is a Kayla Pearson here. If that happens, I will be out of the window in no time. But it doesn’t.
Angelica thrusts cleaning supplies into my hand and says: “Your job is to clean the rooms and the showers and to restock the refrigerators and to cook burgers at noon. Got it?”
I nod, and she says: “Would it kill you to say a few words?”
I shake my head.
She makes a huffing sound and leaves me there with the supplies.
I spend my days cleaning and cooking. The cooking is the best part because I get to be in the bar area, where sometimes Dante is. He’ll look up through the kitchen partition and smile at me, and though I’ll look down and pretend I didn’t see, I like that he notices me even if I don’t want to be noticed. It confuses me, because ever since the Movement I have had a cursory experience with men. Drunken and regretted one night stands, nothing more.
I steal, too, over the next few days. Little things, like knives and forks if they look expensive, sometimes petty cash left lying around, anything I can get my hands on. I can’t help it; it’s who I am. Steal, scurry, plan for escape.
Escape—but to where? That is the problem. I could escape tomorrow, but where would I go? What would I do? This is a good gig, but there’s always the danger of somebody from the Movement finding me. I am a woman without a destination. There is no end goal in sight except for the next meal, the next day, the next town. Ever since I left the Compound, I have lived by one rule: survive. But now, as I catch Dante’s smile through the kitchen partition, I begin to wonder if there might be more. I try and kill the thought, but it resurfaces despite me.
Dante knocks on my door a couple of times over the week, in the evenings. I let him in and we talk, or, rather, he talks and I listen. He doesn’t really say much. He tells me about his bike, how he needs to get a new part fitted, or how once he crashed it and slid on his leather for a hundred yards, almost dying. He tells me anything that comes to him, and I’m content to just sit there and listen. It’s like he just wants somebody he can talk to as a person, someone unrelated to club life. The men treat him like the boss, and the women treat him like some kind of high school jock, giggling if he glances at them. I do neither. I just sit, and listen.
One night, he wanders over my bed and lifts up my mattress with one hand, the other fiddling with his toothpick. He has this trick he does without seeming to know he’s doing it. He’ll flip the toothpick around his forefinger, and then his middle finger, and then back around his forefinger, all in one smooth movement. The first time he does it, I can’t help but stare at his hand, try and track the movements. Tonight, he lifts up the mattress and looks down at my hoard. Mugs, cutlery, a bit of cash. I seize up, fists clenched. I’ll have to fight, or run. Fight or flight. That’s what your life comes down to when you’ve turned into an animal.
But Dante just drops the mattress and says: “Isn’t it uncomfortable sleeping on a mug?”
He turns to me, smiling. His smile is cocky and handsome and I have a hard time looking away from him. It’s the sort of smile a woman like me has never had turned on her, mostly because a woman like me spends most of her time fleeing from place to place, never settling, and doing everything in her power to stop smiles like that from being turned upon her.
I don’t know what to say, but I don’t need to say anything. Dante sticks the toothpick in his mouth and swaggers past me, out the door, and down the hallway.
I lock the door behind him quickly. The tension releases only when I hear the click of the lock. Then I go to the wall and lean against it, slide down and slump on the floor, panting. He could’ve killed me for that, or beat me bloody, or turned mean and set his big man Ogre on me. He could’ve done innumerable nasty, pain-inflicting things.
“But he didn’t,” I mutter into the spring evening light.
Chapter Seven
Kayla
“Most people do not listen,” Master says, lifting his hands to the thunder-pounding winter sky, rain plastering his robe against him. “They do not hear, children. They walk with their ears closed to life around them and only at the end of their lives do they open their ears and realize that never, not once, have they had the foreknowledge to simply listen. Just listen, and learn, and learn and listen, and listen and learn and—”
I wake, sitting bolt upright, glancing around the room. It is morning, almost time for my shift, and sunlight slants through the window and rests on my face. I hate dreaming of Master, despise it, and yet what he said was true. Listen and learn. Another week has passes at the clubhouse and I have been listening. As I move between rooms, cleaning, I have been listening, and as I stand in the heat of the kitchen flipping burger patties, I have been listening.
I know that the Wraiths, the biker gang which kidnapped and intended to sell me, have been disbanded. I heard Dogma, Dante’s ginger-ha
ired VP, say between mouthfuls of burger that most of them died in the fire, including their leader. I heard a couple of the other men talking about how Dante wants to find the person who set the fire in Silvertongue’s warehouse, the fire which almost killed me. He wants to the find the man because, the way he sees it, that man has now inherited Silvertongue’s debt.
I like the way Dante talks about debt and business. Once, he leaned against the wall just beyond the kitchen partition, half-eaten burger on a nearby table, chewing a toothpick wearing a T-shirt which showed his muscles and his thorny tattoos. I kept glancing at him in secret, unable to stop myself from looking at the way his shirt squeezed his muscles, his jet-black hair and jet-black eyes making him look capable, dark, serious. “I’m getting what’s mine,” he said matter-of-factly.
I like that; he’s getting what’s his. But not in a Master way. He won’t use underhanded tactics. He won’t hurt women, or children. No, he’ll go up against men, men who owe him and men who can defend themselves, and fight them like a man. I’ve never thought much about what makes a man before, but it must be Dante.
This morning, I go into the en-suite and wash the stickiness of the dream away from me, letting the pain of the past sluice down into the plughole, and then blow-dry my hair and get dressed and tie my hair up in a bob. I’m sitting on the edge of my bed, cleaning supplies at my feet, when Angelica knocks on my door.
“Time for work—”
I open the door and she takes a surprised step back. She squints at me. “You know, most of the girls need a couple of knocks before they even get up,” she says, looking me and down curiously. There is a glint behind her eyes, an unfriendly glint. “But here you are.”
I just nod. Better that way.
When Angelica crosses her arms, her spider tattoos bunch up all over her arms, like spiders folding in upon themselves. “Are you really as fucking stupid as everybody says you are?” she asks. She knows what she’s saying to me is wrong. I can tell that by the way she glances up and down the hallway to make sure that nobody is listening.
I just nod again. It is better to be thought of as stupid than a threat.
Angelica steps aside with a look of disgust and waves down the hallway. “Get on with it, then.”
I walk by her quickly. She wants me to snap at her, scream at her that I am not stupid, tell her I have a voice. She wants me to give into pride and show a vulnerable part of myself to her, and then she can use that as ammunition against me. But I stopped giving into pride the day left the Compound. Pride has no room in a rodent’s life.
I think she’ll leave me be as I go about my cleaning duties, but after around two hours, when I’m returning to my bedroom to stow away my supplies before going to the kitchen to press the burger patties, Angelica and a coterie of club women gather around the end of the hallway, a few doors from my room, giggling loudly. I don’t mind that, but then they start talking loudly, too, throwing their words in my direction as I fiddle with the lock to my door. I never went to traditional high school—the Movement had no need of it, apparently—but they remind me of a bunch of high school girls in movies.
“I heard she was kicked by a horse,” Angelica says, just loud enough for me to hear.
“Oh, I heard she was kicked by multiple horses,” a short big-breasted blonde said.
All of them—seven attractive young women—giggle in my direction.
“I heard she was a highway hooker before coming here. A real slut. One of the girls you see standing on the side of Interstate 70 with her skirt around her ass giving old men the eye.”
Another round of giggles.
I keep working the key, but for some reason it won’t go in the lock. It takes me a moment to realize my hands are shaking. The key is scraping against the lock, but not sliding in. I am reminded for a moment of the way the belt buckle would not slide into the bolt of the mattress back in that awful room. I am reminded of fire, and near-death, and I try not to—I really do—but I end up letting out a whimper. The women take this as a sign that they’re winning, and press on.
“Oh, yeah, I heard that, too. I heard that she was a coke whore, a real scummy slut, and that she’d let ten truckers gangbang her if it meant another hit. She wouldn’t even charge cash. Just another hit.”
I reason with myself, trying to stay calm. I tell myself they are just threatened because I am the new girl. I tell myself they are just protecting their little harem of women. I tell myself—But then my anger and my shame overrides any logical thought. Shame! Shame! And why do I feel ashamed? It is not like anything they are saying is true. No, but they’re saying it and getting away with it right here in front of me, and I am standing here whimpering and saying nothing. I want to turn to them, to say something, to defend myself, but all I do is fiddle with the door.
It still won’t open. This is absurd. I take a deep breath, but the moment I go to let it out, slowly, measured, one of the women snaps: “Look at her huffing and puffing over there. What’s wrong, honey? Been too long without an old man’s cock? Getting withdrawal symptoms?”
Another round of cackles at that.
Okay, just put the key in the lock. Simple. This is not a complicated operation. Just calm down, focus on the lock, and the key, and insert it into the lock and turn the key. I take a breath—and then another woman chimes in.
“I heard she’s actually mentally handicapped. Like, medically. Like she should be in a mental hospital because there’s something really wrong with her. You’ve seen the dopey way she looks around when she’s flipping the burgers, that stupid way her mouth is always falling open. A proper idiot. A certifiable moron. A pathetic loser. Yep, that’s her, alright.”
If I was somebody else, I would feel bad about not sticking up for myself. But it has never been a question of sticking up for myself, not for me; it’s always been a question of getting the hell out of the situation as fast as I can. So when I finally get the key in the lock and it clicks—that welcome, comforting sound—I push open the door and prepare to flee.
As I open the door, Angelica says: “She’s the biggest slut this state has ever seen. A complete whore. A real—”
“Kayla.” His voice is quiet, and yet it cuts through the women’s tittering.
I turn, poking my head from the open doorway. He is stood at the end of the hallway, one hand at his side, the other fiddling with his toothpick. He looks at me, just at me, though I know that the club girls are doing everything in their power to make him look at them. I don’t even have to turn around to know that. It’s the same every day. Once, I watched three of them literally take off their pants when they heard he was passing through. It turns out some of them wear sexy shorts under their pants for that express purpose. I feel them behind me, a writhing mass of attention seekers.
“Yes?” I manage to say.
A few of the women make small gasping noises. It’s the first time some of them have heard me speak. Maybe they really did think I was simple.
Dante slips his toothpick into his leather jacket pocket and strides down the hallway to where I stand, standing over me. At once, I feel my heart begin to pound in my chest. He looks down at me with those jet-black eyes which make me think of faraway oceans, night-time oceans, dark and crashing waves.
“Are you okay?” he asks, voice low, a voice just for me. Even if Angelica and her coterie lean in to listen.
“Yes.”
“Alright, then.”
He turns to leave, and then turns back and says, “Oh, Kayla?”
“Yes?”
Then he leans down and presses his lips against mine. I am caught off guard and for a few moments he’s just pressing there, firm and hard and present, but then I sink into the kiss. Despite myself, I sink into it. I feel my body responding, long-dormant pleasure centers waking up, flaring into life. He grabs my shoulders forcefully, lifting me off my feet a couple of inches. I open my mouth, and Dante opens his. Our tongues brush once, teasingly, and then he takes a step back, break
ing it off.
“Can I talk to you in my office for a moment?”
I am too stunned to say anything, so I just nod.
I close and lock my door, and then Dante and I walk down the hallway, away from Angelica and the other girls.
I don’t have to turn around and see their rage- and jealousy-filled eyes to know how they feel.
Chapter Eight
Kayla
We walk through the bar, past a few of Dante’s men, and into his office. The bar is open-plan, with tables and chairs scattered across one side, the other given over to a pool table and a long conference-style table where they sit for all-hands meetings. On the walls, photographs hang of dead or imprisoned club members, special events with all current members, and a few stock photos of Missouri. A few leather jackets have been pressed flat and laid in frames and hung up, too.