by Hazel Parker
As we finally exited the building, the sun having begun its descent below the horizon in the time it took for us to explore the library, I decided that there was no better time to ask my question.
“So, Jack,” I said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Something I was curious about. I noticed before that you had on a jacket with the words ‘Savage Saints’ on them. What’s that all about?”
Chapter 9: Biggie
Well, it was bound to come up sooner or later.
Everything about that first hour or so of the date had gone absolutely perfectly. No, I wasn’t the type of reader that Lilly was, and yes, I felt a little bit out of my league with her. But seeing her smile like a kid, seeing her look at me with those beautiful eyes, seeing her laugh whenever I cracked a joke, no matter how stupid, put me at ease.
Alas, no relationship could ever be one hundred percent good times. If it was, it was because it was a short-lived relationship and most certainly not a serious one. And both of those were things that I did not want to describe my potential time with Lilly. I wanted us to last a long time, maybe even forever—at least in theory. And, hey, I was the optimistic one; of course, I was going to believe that things were going to last happily ever after.
“The Savage Saints,” I said. “Where to start?”
I definitely wasn’t going to mention any of the negative things that happened. I decided not to mention the fights I was having with Uncle. I decided not to mention the ongoing, bitter feud that we had with Kyle. In fact, I didn’t even want to mention Kyle; Kyle was a conversation for a different time and place. It would come, sure, but I needed this conversation to reflect the good things of the Savage Saints, not the negatives.
“The Savage Saints are like family to me,” I said. “I’ve been a mechanic basically since right out of high school, and the Savage Saints is sort of our way of turning what would have been a normal job into a full-blown brotherhood. My brother is in it. My uncle is in it. One of my closest work friends is in it. And several other people are in it. It can be a little stereotypical masculine and a little over the top sometimes—we certainly like to party like crazy—but at its core, it’s something that makes me happy.”
“That’s great!” she said. She sounded like she just wanted a reason to believe me, that perhaps she had heard some things about us before. It wasn’t hard to find negative articles questioning us; the press hated us and liked to make us look like outlaws. But for most people who weren’t Kyle or from a rival gang, we were just a bunch of well-meaning, gruff men who liked alcohol and motorcycles a little too much.
In other words, we may have been obnoxious from afar, but up close, we were good.
“I just wanted to make sure, you know. Sometimes people say things.”
It sounded like Lilly had heard “things” that were far more negative than she was letting on, but until she elaborated on those things, I was plenty happy to stay positive and not dive into the darker side of the club.
Unfortunately, I suspected the next couple of weeks would give me far too many chances to see the dark side of the club and our rivals.
“Well, you’re the smart one for wanting to learn more about us,” I said. “So many people just make snap judgments and don’t bother to learn anything about us, but it’s the ones who get to really know us who understand that we’re not bad guys.”
Hopefully, that’s true even when they know everything. Because heaven knows, especially depending on how the next few days go…
“But, hey, I suppose you’re not ready for this date to end, right?”
“Oh, goodness, no!” she said. “But I am hungry. Did you have something in mind for food?”
I bit my lip.
“Confession. No. However—”
“Let’s go to Chopt!”
“I’m sorry?”
But Lilly was already pulling me toward a salad store. A salad store! I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten at a salad store, and now I was going to have to do so on my first date?
This was easily going to be the hardest part of the night, and it wasn’t even close.
“We could just do Chipotle right down the street, you know, it’s—”
“There’s no way Chipotle is nearly as healthy as this place,” she said. “We can’t be having all that greasy meat! Get some veggies in you! You’ll feel better!”
God help me.
I wasn’t about to fight it. With some reluctance—and fully aware that I was never going to mention where I went to dinner to the rest of the Savage Saints, ever—I walked into the shop. There were some meat options, but it was no steakhouse or BBQ joint. Lilly ordered some vegan salad, and I just asked for whatever had the most meat in it. I ended up eating some bowl with chicken shawarma, which, I had to admit…
It was tasty.
But I was never going to admit that out loud to anyone aside from Lilly, and even to her, I could only say, “It was decent.”
“Oh, you really are such a cliché dude sometimes,” she said, playfully hitting my arm. “But it’s OK. I appreciate you eating here anyways.”
“Just don’t ever make me go vegan or vegetarian or I’m going to lose my damn mind,” I said with a chuckle. “I love my meat too much ever to give it up.”
“And I would never force you or anyone to eat a certain way. I can just give you the information to work with, and then you’ll have to do whatever you want with it.”
“Indeed. Vegan and vegetarian pamphlets would make great napkins.”
She slapped my arm as I laughed. Even she couldn’t shake the guilty grin on her face.
“Come on. Let’s go to our next stop, shall we?”
“Are you going to tell me where it is?”
“What’s the fun in that?”
Lilly’s eyes narrowed at me.
“I swear, you’re trying to make this like one of my novels. But you know what? It’s about time I lived out a story like that. Let’s go.”
“Just one warning. You’re not going to be able to ride the bike with me. We have to take an actual bus over.”
“What?” she said, pretending to be in a great deal of pain from hearing the news.
“And we’re going to have to go to New Jersey.”
“What?” she said, pretending to double over as if I had just shot her. “The horror, Jack, the horror! Don’t make me go to New Jersey! Anywhere but New Jersey!”
“I know, I know. But it’ll provide some pretty views of the other side. Quite literally.”
I knew she was just playing, though. She hopped up almost as quickly as she had fallen over, and once again, she took my hand as we walked through the streets of the Big Apple. I definitely wasn’t overly thrilled about leaving my motorcycle behind, but in a place like New York City, you could never really keep a vehicle in perfectly pristine condition. If it got too beat up, I could always take care of it when I returned home.
We walked through many of the midtown attractions, all the way down to 34th Street, where we waited for what looked like one of those small club vans, painted all white, to seat us. When we got in the van, Lilly snuggled up close to me, and I put my arm around her. The timing would have been perfect for a kiss—really, the timing for a kiss would have been great pretty much from the moment that she walked downstairs from her apartment—but I decided to hold off just a little longer.
After all, the night had a way of creating the most romance of all.
And sure enough, after about a twenty-minute van ride, we found ourselves in a seemingly suburban part of New Jersey, with only a high hill to climb to our destination.
“I can safely say that I have never written about a place like this in any of my novels,” Lilly cracked. “I’ve written about hell, the underworld, lairs, alternate dimensions, and a whole lot more, but New Jersey? You might as well have me writing about a completely different universe.”
“Ah, well, you’ll get a good luck at the universe you do know well,”
I said.
I led her right up to the destination of the evening—the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway. There was perhaps no better place to capture the entirety of New York City, both because one could see almost the entire skyline of Manhattan and just how ridiculously far it stretched, and because it was in a quiet part of town. The boroughs to the east of Manhattan often afforded few moments of silence, and even in good spots, most of the Manhattan skyline overlapped with each other.
But here, from the railing that we stood at, it felt like we could see everything from Tribeca all the way up to Washington Heights. Maybe the actual view wasn’t quite so literally far, but for as much as we could see, we felt like we could see the world.
“Crazy,” Lilly said silently. “It’s like I’m seeing my entire world right here.”
“Yeah?” I asked.
“This is where I grew up. My parents still live on the upper west side,” she said. “I know a lot of people talk about wanting to see the world, but I feel like New York City is a little microcosm of the world. I’ve met so many people from so many different walks of life; it’s like I know what Earth feels like in just a plot of land a few acres large.”
I’d heard plenty of people speak effusively about the great city, but hearing Lilly speak about it seemed to click something into place for me.
“It makes sense that you became a writer, huh?”
“I guess so,” she said, leaning forward, her forearms resting on the railing. “I actually first started writing because it felt like a world I could control. No matter what was happening in the world around me, I could control what happened in this one. I could make people do as I wanted. It wasn’t some sort of power grab for control. It was more like…it was just a chance for me to escape the insanity of the real world.”
“How so?” I asked.
I realized that for as sweet as Lilly was and as much as I admired her creativity, there wasn’t much that I actually knew about her and her background. I had only just learned, after all, that her parents were here in New York City; for all I knew, they could have been dead or living in a foreign country. I had apparently done a poor job of understanding Lilly, though it had only been a few days of knowing her.
I knew things took time, but I also knew that I wanted to know as much as I could about her.
“I had a good upbringing, don’t get me wrong. My parents were wonderful. No siblings, but they didn’t spoil me. They took good care of me while disciplining me as needed. But I’m definitely an introvert at heart. I don’t think you can be a good author if you’re an extrovert.”
“Sucks for all those people, huh?” I said with a smirk.
“I know it’s an exaggeration, but I’d say the tendency is most definitely toward introversion. I don’t think anyone would argue with that. The other part of me is that I like to be a peace-maker. I don’t like it when people fight with each other. So I do whatever I can to prevent bullying and fighting, but sometimes, that would take a lot out of me. I’d go home and just start writing as a way to recover from all that thinking and all that protection that I did. And, of course, being in a city like this has a way of overwhelming even the most extroverted of people.”
Oh, I knew that all too well. I was a gregarious guy who loved to laugh, and even I had days where I just wanted to ride my bike all the way to Maine without looking back.
“But getting the chance to take a step back like this and overlook the city makes me realize how happy I am to be here.”
She looked at me. I knew instantly from the look what it meant. This is the time.
“And how happy I am to be with you.”
I smiled. I bit my lip, put my hands on her shoulders, and gently leaned forward.
My lips pressed to hers, and my hands went around her as I kissed her as if we’d been together for years. The kiss felt natural and easy; it was both sweet and gentle. Lilly kissed like she’d waited for this moment for quite some time, which, judging how she’d looked at me when I first arrived, was probably true.
But it was also a kiss that promised things weren’t just culminating in a quickie. If it got that far tonight, well, I sure wasn’t about to say no, but I also knew that it wasn’t going to just abruptly cut off tonight. I knew that we’d go beyond this evening and see what more we could have with each other. That, more than anything else that came tonight, stirred my heart.
“Well, I’d say something back to you,” I said as I pulled back. “But I’m no wordsmith. So I’ll let the master craftswoman do her thing!”
Lilly laughed and pressed her head into my chest. I brought her in and gently swayed with her, overlooking the city skyline. A few clouds in the distance threatened to blot out the moon, but for the moment, we’d have plenty of night sky to relish in.
“Well, we do have to get back eventually,” I said with some remorse. “I imagine that you probably want to have some sleep so that you can get plenty of writing done.”
“Eh,” Lilly said before she laughed. “Nice thing about being a writer is that I can sleep in if I want or need to. I might do that tonight. But I would be happy to retire for the evening to one of our places.”
“Retire? What are we, fifty?”
We both laughed, but it also gave me a chance to realize what she was offering—for me to come over to her place.
“Hey, us introverts can act like old souls really fast,” she said. “Besides, you showed me the library of New York; now I have to show you my library.”
“So you’re saying I can read you like a book?”
We both laughed at how terrible that line was. Like I said, I was not a wordsmith by any stretch of the imagination. But if I could make Lilly laugh, then I suppose there were worse things to be.
“Yes, you can do that,” Lilly finally said. “Take me home, Jack.”
I did so, but not before bringing her in for one more majestic kiss. This one was a little more intense, our tongues pressing on each other, but it still maintained that same romantic feel that the first one had had.
Of course, taking her home was not a slow process. We had to take the bus back into the city, walk back to my motorcycle, and ride all the way back to Brooklyn. But in this case, slow was better. It let us learn more about each other, trade more stupid jokes, and share more intense, arousing kisses.
By the time that we got on the bike, I was having to walk behind her so that she wouldn’t see the bulge in my pants. She had me riled up to the highest degree, and I had to move some things around to not make it painfully obvious how I felt. But I had a feeling, as we got on the bike, that she felt the exact same way.
As soon as we pulled up to her place, I had a vision in my head of us quietly moving into her apartment, making some small talk, and then letting the night take its course. But as soon as she unlocked the door and I was inside, she pressed up onto me, kissing me far more aggressively than she had earlier.
The night was now going to end with us in bed.
Chapter 10: Lilly
Jack probably had no idea how horny I was for him until I pushed up against him in the apartment and started the process of undressing.
All night, I’d had it in my mind that it was a strong possibility I’d end the night naked with him. But as soon as he had taken me to the view, and as soon as I’d opened up about my past, that’s when it was a done deal.
It wasn’t like I had some elaborate, mysterious past that required a heart-to-heart conversation. In fact, in comparison to a lot of people, I felt like I had a pretty tame upbringing. My parents and I got along fine; I helped the bullied, but never really suffered bullying; and aside from the standard teenage insecurities, I never had that many serious concerns.
But that didn’t mean that talking about who I was and where I’d come from was just an easy conversation. The very fact that I was an introvert meant that I had trouble opening up about anything about me, let alone my past. Jack was easy-going and very engaging, but I could have just as easily seen his lau
gh as obnoxious and rude in a different setting. In fact, in many ways, I imagined that if he had come to the coffee shop while I was working or just minutes after, this would never be a thing.
But here we were. It was most certainly a thing. And now, it was time to culminate that thing.
I started by lifting his polo shirt to reveal his muscular chest and thick torso. I was right—he was definitely built like an offensive lineman, but a healthy lineman at that. He didn’t have the six-pack muscles of a professional body-builder, but he still had a rock-solid core and the muscular definition that, frankly, even most skinny guys didn’t have. He wasn’t perfect, but that made him better. I didn’t want perfect; it would have intimidated me.
He worked his hands to the back of my shirt and lifted it off. Then, with one hand, he managed to undo my bra. I pressed my chest against his body, craving the skin-on-skin contact. I moaned when he breathed heavily into my ear, uttering my name with a warm breath.
“Lilly.”
God, hearing him say my name sent such a shiver down my spine.
We moved about in the apartment until we eventually reached the bedroom, in the process kicking off shoes and somewhat working our socks off. The way that we tumbled meant that he wound up on top of me first, and he again breathed into my ear and kissed my neck. I was burning with erotic passion to have him naked before me, but he had control of me and would dictate who went first.
Which wasn’t the worst thing in the world.
“I’m gonna make this better than anything you’ve ever written,” he said.
Such a line might have produced an eye roll before we’d gotten frisky, but now, it was just making me hornier. I wasn’t going to say that it was impossible for Jack to say something that would take me out of my aroused state, but it sure would be pretty damn difficult for him to pull off. And that was assuming he tried to say something corny and stupid.