by Paula Cox
“What,” I mutter.
Kelly puts her hand on my shoulder. “You’re pregnant, hon,” she says.
“What,” I repeat.
I am pregnant with Kade’s baby. With Kade’s baby. Kade the biker, the leader of the Tidal Knights, the man I had one passionate night with—his child is inside my body. Okay, the beginnings of a baby, at this point I know it’s just a clump of stuff, but. But.
Stating it like that, clearly, obviously, undisputedly, still does not make it real enough.
“What,” I say a third time.
Then sickness comes, angry sickness, not-messing-around sickness.
I dive for the toilet, throw myself to my knees and vomit violently into the bowl, belly twisting, sweat pouring down me in buckets.
And even as I sit here, puking up my insides, even as Kelly holds my dank hair from my eyes, even as my belly feels like there are a hundred jugs of bilge water in there sloshing around and forcing themselves up and out of me, even as my entire worldview shifts and my entire life plan is changed—even with all that, as I’m wiping vomit from my lips with a piece of toilet towel I say:
“I am keeping this child, Kelly.”
Chapter Twelve
Kade
I sit at my desk at the Tidal Knights clubhouse, in the town of Evergreen just outside Seattle, my mind on the past. Thrown back to the past with all the fear and the shit it brings along with it. First Dad, drunken Dad, stupid fuckin’ old man, moron who danced around the trailer with a loaded revolver and eventually paid the price for it. That I understand, I reflect as I sit here, surrounded by framed pictures of club members, Duster pulling stupid jackass faces in some of them. That, at least, I can get my head around. He was a drunken idiot; he died. Fine. But this fuckin’ Duster shit. Duster wasn’t an idiot. Duster wasn’t a drunk. Neither him nor I ever drank to the point of getting shitfaced. We knew the damage it could do. A few drinks here and there, but never the race-to-the-end drinking of the trailer scum. Duster, man . . .
He was my age but I think of him as a kid, always looking to me for advice, always looking to me to help him out. And when he needed help, the fuck did I do? I was too busy misjudging a man I was meant to be dealing with to know that everything was about to go wrong.
I lean back in the chair, ignoring the jolt of pain from my gunshot wound. The wound is the least of my concerns. Now the Italians think the Tidal Knights had something to do with Manuel’s stupid death. Now they’re sending some hitters into Evergreen. Damn, but I’d give a hell of a lot right now just to see Lana. I keep wondering why that girl has made such an impression on me, and then I remember her breasts and her open, pleasure-filled face and I don’t have to wonder anymore. But I can’t get too close—can never get too close. Close gets you hurt. Being close to Duster is what’s making me feel like my world has been hacked apart with a machete. Duster was not just my friend. Duster was my brother-in-arms in escaping the trailer park and Duster was my second-in-command. That runs deeper than friendship.
I groan, curse at myself.
Lana would make me forget, but then—
Getting too close is a double-edge blade. Get too close, I might be made to feel this way. Get too close, I might turn out to be not so different to Dad, might warp and change, might become a drunk, might one day take one drink too many, lose the control I’ve sustained my whole life. Maybe everyone’s just one misstep away from becoming their parents.
I bring my thumbs to my eyes and massage my closed eyelids, groaning again.
I’m grateful when there’s a knock on the office door. A distraction.
“Yeah?”
“It’s me, Boss.”
“Come in.”
Scud walks and reaches the desk in two quick strides. He reminds me of a giraffe. All long legs and a long neck and long arms. Face all sharp edges. Eyes set deep and always watching. But he’s efficient. No Duster, but he’s efficient.
“You wanted to see me?”
I nod at the chair opposite me, making sure I show no grief. Can’t show grief in front of the men, ’cause grief is weakness. And when you start showing weakness, people start thinking you are weak, and thoughts like that are soon followed by blood.
“I’m promoting you to VP,” I say, barely listening to my own words, my mind faraway with Duster and Lana. I find myself wishing the two of them could’ve met, my best friend and my—my what? My woman I fucked once upon a time back in Bremerton?
Scud knows better than to show any sign that he’s pleased at this. He nods quickly, as if just wanting to get the nod over with, and then watches me. Waiting.
“I want you to keep an eye out for Italians around Evergreen. Don’t do anything yet, unless they come at you, obviously. Then you can go to work. But just keep an eye out. Put some of your men on it. Do you know how this works, Scud?”
“Yeah, Boss. I can handle it.”
Handle. Duster. I know it’s the grief which puts this desire in me, but when he uses that word I want to leap across the table and hook him across the jaw. I push it down.
“Alright, good.” I nod at the door. “Get to work, then.”
“Yes, Boss.”
He leaves, and I go back to leaning back in my chair and groaning and thinking about all the things me and Duster used to get up to back in the day. I think about the time we made a poorly-constructed human model from junkyard scrap and draped it in clothes stolen from clotheslines and left it outside a bully’s trailer and waited for him to come out and see who was stupid enough to just stand outside looking at him like that. And then we pounced on him, a boy twice our age, and even when his friend came running out from inside we stood tall.
I shake my head and rise to my feet. I can’t deal with this shit right now. I need a woman. A woman who’ll make me forget. I need a woman and that woman has to be Lana. Even the thought of any other woman just makes me bored. I don’t know why Lana has this hold on me and I don’t need to know. It’s enough to know that she does.
I pick up my jacket from the back of my chair and leave the office, walk through the bar, past the framed photographs of Tidal Knights members and old antique pistols and the pool table and the rows and rows of whisky bottles and out into the Evergreen early-summer sun, across the sunlit parking lot and to my Harley.
I’ll get the ferry to Bremerton.
I’ll pay Lana a visit.
Chapter Thirteen
Lana
“I am sorry,” David says, and he really looks like he means it. He’s not a bad man, not at all. His face is soft and his eyes show genuine emotion. I ask him to change his mind, but after around ten minutes of back-and-forth I can see that he’s not going to. Terry is already in the locker room, packing away her stuff. “I really am sorry,” David goes on, as I’m about to leave the office. “But I can’t have my staff leave the premises unattended during opening hours for any personal reason whatsoever. I need staff I can rely upon. I hope that makes sense to you.” He looks at me as though he wants me to tell him it’s okay that he’s firing me.
I leave the office and go into the locker room, where Terry is stuffing her belongings into a backpack: spare T-shirts and bottles of perfume and nail paint and makeup palettes. I take my bag from the bottom of my locker and begin doing the same.
“I’m sorry, Terry. I really am.”
“It’s not your fault, hon. I’m the one who dragged us out there. I just wasn’t thinking. Well, I was thinking, but I was thinking that we needed to get you sorted. I just didn’t think past that, you know? I should be the sorry one. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.” She closes her locker and turns to me, mock-pouting. “And now, you little slut, you’ve robbed me of the best job I ever had!”
If it were anyone else, there would have been a serious fist fight. Instead, I mock-pout back at her. “Don’t call me a slut, you whore!”
We grin.
From the office, I hear David on the phone, arranging for some of the other girls to come
in this morning to cover the shift. Part of me wants to go back in there and plead our case one more time, but he has us in black-and-white, right there in the employee manual. And even common sense. Procedure would have been to call someone in to cover before we left. We didn’t. We need to live with the consequences of our actions. Hey, sound familiar?
I finish packing my things and then Terry nudges me on the shoulder.
“Let’s get going, then,” she says. We walk past the foldout table, stopping for a moment and looking down at it, and then toward the big oval door. Terry stops and turns around, waving a hand over the place as though leaving a treasured site. “Here two women met, one beautiful, glamorous, and talented, the other . . . called Lana. They met and they became friends.”
“Screw you.”
I prod her in the arm and, dressed in casual clothes over our bikinis, we walk out into the street.
“Do you want a ride?” she asks.
“Yeah, if that’s alright. What do you think you’re going to do now?”
“‘Now’ today, or ‘now’ in general?”
“Both, I guess.”
“Today I am going to go to the nearest bar and drink as many cocktails as I can without falling over and then drink until I do fall over and maybe find some nice innocent young man I can take to bed and whose life I can change completely. In general, I am going to look for another job and do as much illustrating as I can; maybe this is the kick up the backside I need to make a real go at it. How about you?”
I hear the growl of an engine and for a moment I dare to hope. It’s faraway, approaching from the ferry side. As soon as I hear it, I’m thrown back almost two months to the misty morning, the morning Chester crossed the line and a mysterious biker put him in his place, the morning which became the steamiest night of my life.
“Lana?” Kelly prompts, and begins walking to her car.
“Oh. Uh, I don’t know. Maybe try and write something. This is awful, to be honest, because now it’s going to be even longer before I can move to Seattle, start the third year of my course. But, hey-ho . . .”
The growl of the bike gets louder and I let my words trail away, listening to it as it stamps out other noises, as the whispering wind and the scuttle of critters underfoot become inaudible over the dominating guttural roar of the bike’s engine. I tell myself it could be any bike, lots of people have motorcycles, and yet my heart begins to pound with excitement. Terry watches me closely, her forehead creased, most likely wondering what has made her strange friend suddenly stranger. And then she tilts her head as she, too, notices the approaching engine.
“Oh, Lana . . .” She sighs. “Lots of people have—”
We turn as the engine suddenly cuts short, tires screeching to a halt on the asphalt.
He removes his helmet, revealing his manly-featured face, somehow sharp and well-defined and square all at once, and revealing his eyes which make me think of oceans thousands of miles away, oceans far away from Bremerton and my problems.
“That’s him,” I mutter. “That’s Kade.”
I feel something kick in my belly. I know it’s just nerves, I know I’m nowhere near far along enough for the baby to be kicking. But I feel it kick and I imagine it’s mine—his—our baby kicking.
“I’ll wait near the car,” Terry says, backing away.
I’m about to walk toward Kade when he spots me and paces over to me so quickly and with such confidence I barely have time to move. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up when I see him, my toes curl without me telling them to, my fingers begin to worry at the fabric of my overcoat. After a couple of seconds, I realize I’m toeing at the gravel of the side of the road like a nervous high school kid awaiting her date.
“Lana,” he says, seeming bigger than he did before. His eyes are impossible to ignore. They were impossible to ignore when he was just a hot-as-hell guy. Now that he’s the father of my unborn child—a child he doesn’t know about, but still—I stand no chance at all of turning away from them. They make me think of blue eyes and the azure sky and wishing I could fly away from my life here in Bremerton to lands far, far away. They make me think of escape. He takes another step forward and says, “Aren’t you goin’ to say something?”
“I just—I’m surprised to see you.” Part of my mind screams at me to tell him outright about the child. But that might scare him away and the last thing I want to do is scare him away. “What are you doing here?”
He grunts out a laugh, gives me a cocky smirk. But there’s something behind the smirk this time, something that wasn’t there before. “Why do you think I’m here?” he says. “I want to take you back to that motel room.”
Terry must be within hearing distance because I hear her mutter: “Cheeky.”
She’s right, I know. It is cheeky. It’s more than cheeky. And yet just looking at him I can’t help but be turned on by the cheekiness. It isn’t every day you get a biker with sea-blue eyes asking you to come to bed with him. It’s a once in a . . . well, it’s a once in a two-monthly experience. But that’s the thing. I remember how world-rocking that night was and the thought of doing it all over again makes me want to leap on him right here and wrap my legs around him and sit down hard until I feel his cock press firmly into my pussy through my coat and pants and bikini bottoms.
“I—can’t.”
It’s like I hear myself say the words instead of actually say them.
He squints. I’m right, I know I am. Something has changed in him since the last time we met. “Why not?”
I gesture at my bag. “I’ve just been fired.”
“What? Why?”
“I just . . . we left the Twin Peaks unattended for an hour. It’s in our employee contract.”
“Why did you do that?” he asks. Not accusatory, just curious.
“We just—we just did.”
“Let me go and talk to this guy,” Kade mutters, already turning.
“No!” I exclaim, leaping in front of him. David knows about the pregnancy test. Tests. He might tell Kade. “No, don’t do that. It’s okay. It’s just—well, I’m a bit down, that’s all. Now I’m not going to be able to move to Seattle like I planned. There are expenses that are going to eat into my savings until I find a new job. Food, water, rent; she makes me pay rent even though she could easily cover it herself.”
“Listen,” Kade says, looking at me with lust-filled eyes, eyes which hint at dozens of things he wants to do to me, wants me to do to him, wants us to do together. “I’m goin’ to be straight-up with you, Lana. The truth is a very good friend of mine was killed a couple of weeks ago and it’s fuckin’ me up and I came here wanting a woman, wanting you. So I’m going to make you a proposition.” He takes another step forward, blocking out the sun, looking so imposing and strong and sexy I have to clench my fists to stop from reaching up and grabbing his shoulders just to feel the muscle through the leather. “I want you to live at the clubhouse, rent free, and in return all I want from you is to keep my bed warm when I need you for it.”
It is an appalling, offensive request. It is something which should make me ashamed. It is the sort of request that should be met with a slap across the face and nothing more. I should kick him in the balls and march away to Terry with my head held high. And I would. I normally would. I really would. But I’m starting to realize that in life what would be appalling if it came from one man is alluring coming from another. If Chester, for example, said this to me, I would spit in his face. But Kade . . . I already feel my body going into overdrive at the mere thought of it: nights up in bed writing as I wait for Kade to return and climb into bed with me; riding on the back of his bike, the back of the father of my unborn child’s bike; endless orgasms burning within me.
It is an appalling, offensive request, and yet it is a request I cannot dismiss out of hand.
He just stares at me with those eyes that make thinking of anything other than him, naked, muscles tensed, hands grabbing my breasts and my ass, sluicing throug
h my hair—staring with eyes that make thinking of anything else impossible. He smirks, a casual smirk, an in-control smirk.
“I am not a whore,” I say.
Behind me, Terry mutters, “Damn right.”
I want Terry to walk out of hearing range but I also get that she just wants the best for me. So I just go on, knowing that she can hear every word.
“I never said you were,” Kade says casually.
“What you’re asking me to do would sort of imply otherwise.”
He shrugs. “Alright.”
“Alright?” I raise an eyebrow. “That is your eloquent reply to my very understandable objection?”