by Evelyn Glass
I stand up, turning away from him, and walk to the other end of the room to where my rag rests on the counter.
“Then why won’t you look at me, Brat?”
Brat . . . I remember when I was a scrawny kid and he first started calling me that. Back then we were just kids, and I didn’t have a crush on him and he certainly didn’t have a crush on me. I can’t remember the exact moment when Slick stopped being a wild older boy and became a man. All I remember is being fourteen years old and flaring with hormones and wanting nothing more than for him to sneak into my bedroom one night. But he wouldn’t. He was too respectful for that. And he had no interest in girls under eighteen. But when I turned eighteen . . . as I wipe my hands, the memory hits me, just as his thrusts hit me that night, the writhing, the shaking orgasms, the trembling pleasure of it all.
“I’ll look at you,” I say. But my conscience is heavy. This is all so confusing. I feel guilty even if him being captured had nothing to do with me. It wasn’t like I hid her from him. He just wasn’t here.
There’s a laugh in his voice. “Go on, then.”
Placing the rag down, I turn and face him. My breath catches for half a second, but I fight away that girlish response. I can’t stop my body from aching at the sight of him, however. He’s much the same as he was when he left, even if there are a few more scars on his knuckles. He’s tall with sky-blue eyes, startling eyes, the sort of eyes to make you take notice. Tall, muscular, with a kind yet tough face and oil-black hair shaved close at the sides and longer on top. Now, after his long ride, his hair droops down over his eyes. His arms—and his back, I remember—are tattooed with the roads he’s ridden during his time as a courier.
“See,” I say, smiling nervously as he just stares at me. “Looking at you isn’t a problem.”
“You seem uncomfortable,” he says, approaching me. He moves with the calm confidence of a jungle cat, his mass of muscles resting beneath his languid movements, but as I watch him, I get the feeling I’ve always gotten: that if he wanted, he could move with ferocious intent. I remember that night, when my feelings were confirmed, and a hot tingle moves down my spine.
“I’m not uncomfortable,” I say, looking up at him.
We stand close together now, about a foot apart. He wears his leather and a pair of scuffed blue jeans and workman’s boots. He looks rough, tired, and yet somehow still handsome as hell. He grins at me, that same cocky grin underlain with real emotion. “Good,” he says. “I just . . . I’ve gotta say, Brat, it’s damn strange seeing you like this. I thought by nineteen you were pretty much all grown up, but it looks like you still had some growing up to do.”
I’ve had to grow up, I want to say, but don’t.
Instead, I say, “You look about the same. Rough. Scary. The sort of man you want to stay clear of.”
“Is that right?” He steps forward, now so close that his body is almost pressed up against mine.
My heartbeat goes into overdrive now. I let my hands rest at my sides, sweating, shaking. My legs fidget, as though they either want to run or be wrapped around his waist. My mind is the worst culprit of all. My mind throws up images of Slick, memories of his naked body, writhing, thrusting, phantom sensations of his breath on my neck, his lips on my breasts.
“What are your plans now, then?” I ask, trying to redirect the conversation. It’s not that I don’t want to be with Slick—he’s come to me every night these past two years, burning into my dreams—but I can’t, not until he knows everything. He might feel different if he knew the truth.
But he doesn’t want the conversation to be redirected, I can tell. “How is it, Brat, that you can wear an overall and still look sexier than any woman in lingerie?”
I blush. I don’t want to. But that’s the effect he has on me, gazing at me—no, into me—with those sky-blue eyes. “You’re just talking to talk now,” I mutter.
“Then why are you blushing?”
“I’m not blushing!” I protest, but even so I turn my face away from him. “You’re such an ass, Sky.”
He chuckles. After two long years, hearing him laugh is about the sweetest thing there is. Having him lean over me and talk all this bullshit is just as sweet. But what would be far, far sweeter than both is to open the garage office, drag him inside, and lose myself in him for an hour.
His fingers are rough on my chin, but I’ve never minded his roughness. He turns my face back to him. “I thought about you a lot when I was away,” he says. “A damn lot. So you’ve gotta see how surprising it is to come back, not to the nineteen-year-old Brat I left behind, with the tomboy hair and the tomboy—well, everythin’—but to come back to . . . look at you, Brat.”
Without thinking—if I was thinking, I wouldn’t do it—I reach up and press his fingers into my face, enjoying the roughness. For a long moment, we just watch each other. Then I let my hand drop and take a step back. “I . . . I need to work on the bike.” I turn away.
Slick walks around me, intercepting me, and says, “I was thinkin’, Brat, why not pick up where we left off?”
Again, we are standing face to face, bodies almost touching. My nipples, hard, scream out at me to step forward another inch, let them press into his pectoral muscles. My clit aches, sending signals through my body for his rough finger to be pressed against it. My breath comes quicker, so quick I have to bite down on my lip to stop from panting. How easy it would be, to throw myself at him. I want to, I’ve thought about it countless times since he’s been away, not knowing if he was dead or alive.
“It’s more complicated than that,” I whisper, glancing down.
He lifts my gaze again. “No,” he says, “it isn’t.”
He leans down. We’re about to kiss. In the split-seconds between his words and him beginning to lean down—less than a second, the breath of a moment—I no longer care about my reservations. Slick has had his effect on me, as he has many times before. And I welcome it, despite the complications. An hour, two hours of pure pleasure. Then, the complications will be aired.
His lips brush mine. I let out a small moan.
“Brianna!”
Dad’s voice cuts through the moment like a butcher’s cleaver. I place my hand on Slick’s chest and push away. Slick steps back, a bemused smile on his face, and then the bemusement turns sour as he sees Dad—or Grizzly, to Slick—standing there with one of his angry looks. Dad has an entire assortment of these, one for each occasion. This one isn’t blind rage, more like understanding anger; he understands why we might want to kiss, but he does not condone it. All of this displays itself in the deep-lined etches of his wrinkled face. Even now, at twenty-one, I find him imposing. Not as tall as Slick, but wider, bald but sporting a bushy grey beard, his eyes a deep brown, he looks like some old great bear, gnarled but still tough.
“Boss,” Slick says easily. “Bri was just tuning up my bike. Long ride back.”
“Right,” Dad says. “I’ll send one of the pledges out.”
“I can do it—”
Dad barks, “You need to pick up your daughter. That damn babysitter isn’t going to take care of her for the rest of her life, you know. I’ve had her on the fuckin’ phone—the club phone—askin’ how much longer you’re going to be. You said you’d pick her up in the morning.”
“Oh,” I murmur, remembering. I’d only come into the garage area for my car keys, which I’d left on the counter yesterday before crashing in the clubhouse after a long job. Heather had taken care of Charlotte overnight, but she has work this morning. But then I’d seen Slick and just sort of went into auto mode.
“Daughter?” Slick says. “Daughter? What the . . . I thought you . . .”
“I better go,” I say quickly.
I don’t look at him, can’t look at him, or these past two years will spill out in a jumbled mess. I pace away from the counter, reach Dad—who stares down at me with his disapproving bear’s stare—and then have to return to collect my keys. I pick them up and leave the garage as quickly as I can, head b
owed, annoyed at Dad for interrupting us, annoyed at myself for being so rash with Slick, for letting my defenses down, and most of all annoyed with those bastards in Seattle for taking him hostage to begin with. All of this would be so much simpler if Slick had been here for the last two years.
Climbing into my car, I start the engine and make my way toward my apartment building. I keep thinking about the kiss, the almost-kiss, the barest touching of lips. I keep thinking about how it would’ve felt to press my lips hard into his, to reach down and squeeze his cock, a cock I’ve only ever felt inside of me once. Sometimes, since he’s been away, I’ve woken up in the night with my hands wedged between my legs, in my crotch, fingers rubbing furiously at my clit and Slick naked and sweating and manly as hell in my mind.
I push those thoughts far down, but then my mind just turns to Dad and Slick, to wondering what they’re talking about. I hope Dad doesn’t confront Slick about it; I hope he just leaves it, pretends he didn’t see anything. Dad is a good man, but it seems that nobody is good enough to even broach the idea of being with me. He says he wants me to settle down and find somebody, but every man is a monster and he doesn’t want me or his granddaughter at risk, especially after Mom. Mom . . . That’s why Slick was so surprised, I think. I once told him that after I learned what happened to my mother—she died giving birth to me—I would never have children of my own.
“Well,” I mutter, pulling into my apartment building’s parking area, “things change.”
I walk past the people leaving for work, swipe into the building, walk up to the second floor and enter the apartment. Heather barely has time to be angry before she gives me a peck on the cheek and rushes out to work. She was my mother’s best friend, and she’s taken me under her wing since I was a little kid. It’s not like Grizzly was going to show me how to use tampons and remind me to use condoms. Though that second lesson didn’t sink in so well. With her short, dyed red hair, fierce and loyal, Heather Chapman makes the perfect babysitter.
I find Charlotte in her bedroom, sitting on the floor, flipping clumsily through one of her picture books. “Panda, panda, panda,” she says, pointing at the panda. “Mommy, Mommy, panda, panda!”
I go to her, kneeling down. She’s got a head of sparse, thin, bright red hair, a wide open face, and looks especially pretty this morning in her pink outfit.
“Hey, princess,” I say, kissing her on the forehead.
She beams.
“Mommy, horsey!” She flips the page, but when she can’t find the horse, she begins to cry.
I flip through the book for her and find the horse, which stops her weeping only after I’ve pointed at it a dozen or so times, and repeated the same number of times the word, “Horse.” I love Charlotte, more than anything, more than life, but as I point at the picture book I think back to that quick brushing of lips, to Slick, and can’t help but wish Dad had walked in one hour later.
Chapter Three
Slick
Grizzly doesn’t mention anything about me and Bri. He just stands there as she leaves, and then nods for me to follow him into the clubhouse. He doesn’t say anything, but I can see the disapproval in his old gnarled face. I can see it in the way he looks me up and down, and I can hear it in the sharpness of the words he speaks to Bri, before she leaves. He doesn’t want me near his daughter, which seems damn strange to me considering that, other than him, I’m probably the one person alive who’d never let anything happen to her.
I follow Grizzly, still reeling from the revelation that Bri has a daughter. It gets me thinking. How old? When did she become pregnant? Who’s the fuckin’ father? Of course, I reflect as I walk past the framed photographs, the bar area, the pool table, the kid could be mine. It’s possible. But if that’s the case, somebody would have told me. Grizzly, when he sent word down to Seattle like he did every so often, would’ve sent word about a kid, surely? Or Bri would’ve told me just now? Maybe she was nervous ’cause there’s a dad in the picture; maybe Grizzly was disapproving ’cause he knows the dad and doesn’t want to see him offended. Because, the way I see it, if I’m the kid’s father, what problem could Grizzly have with me kissing her mother?
I push all these concerns aside as I step into Grizzly’s office. It’s a large room, dominated by a wooden desk in the middle, the type you see in a CEO’s office, huge and wide. On the walls, the old club members in black and white stare down from their place in history. An old-style varmint rifle is secured to the wall above the desk. And Clint leans against the wall, just under the rifle. Clint, my father’s successor, and the man who currently has the job I want for myself. Clint is tall, thin, and gentleman-like, which is to say he dresses prissy. He wears a button-up shirt, creased trousers, and shiny shoes. His face is birdlike, all pointy, and his eyes are beady and a brown so light they’re almost yellow. He looks like a math teacher, but I know he’s tougher than he looks, much tougher.
Grizzly takes his seat: a large throne which is meant to intimidate anyone sitting opposite, I guess. I sit in the small guest’s seat, and Clint remains leaning against the wall, arms folded, watching with his beady eyes.
“So,” Grizzly says, “what the fuck happened in Seattle?”
“Don’t you know?” I reply. I thought one of the Skulls would’ve told him.
“I know they took you hostage. That’s it.”
“We want to know how and why they deemed it necessary to take you hostage,” Clint says, in his scholarly voice. “And what precise reason they had for keeping you as long as you did.”
“It’s pretty fuckin’ simple,” I say, not liking the way Clint looks down his nose at me one bit. “They took me hostage ’cause those guns you sent me up there with were useless. They were replicas that couldn’t fire a single goddamn shot.”
“Liar,” Clint mutters.
“Liar? Fuckin’ liar?” Rage boils in me. “I’ve been beaten and caged and starved for two fuckin’ years and when I come home you call me a damn liar?” I slam my hand on the desk.
“Easy,” Grizzly says, looking at Clint. “Let the man finish his story before you jump down his throat, eh?”
“Fair enough,” Clint says. “I’ll let him finish his story.”
It doesn’t take a genius to work out what that emphasis means, but I let it slide and lean back.
“So my story goes like this,” I say, flashing Clint a smirk. He wriggles like a worm on a hook when I smile at him, flinching away. He must’ve heard some of the stories, even if he doesn’t know all the details. He must know that fucking with a man like me—a man who has been kept caged like a lion these past two years—is a damn bad idea. “I offer them the weapons, they test ’em—they had this range out there—and none of the bastards work. So they start coming in on me—the leader, Russ, the crazy bastard with the pink Mohawk and ten studs in each eyebrow—puts me on my knees and puts a katana to my neck.”
“A katana,” Clint mutters.
“Why the fuck would I make that up?” I say.
“Just let him finish.” Grizzly says, glancing angrily at Clint and then back to me.
“So I punch this bastard in the fruits, and make for my bike. They don’t shoot at me ’cause Russ wanted me alive for questioning, so I managed to get to my bike. And then, when I go to start her, the clutch turns to jelly and I can’t put her into gear, so I’m stranded there revving like an ass, going nowhere. That’s when they catch me, and put me in their fuckin’ cage, and start with that torture shit.”
“Torture.” Grizzly nods. “What kind of torture, Slick?”
“The usual kind. The asshole kind.”
“That’s not very specific,” Clint says, pushing away from the wall and standing at Grizzly’s shoulder. It’s a presumption, standing at the Boss’s shoulder like that, like a fuckin’ guardian angel, and even though Grizzly doesn’t look too happy about it, he doesn’t shrug him away. I guess it would make them look like they’re not all roses and cooperation: a unified force, that’s what they’
re presenting.
“Do you really need to know the specifics of the torture?” I ask.
My voice doesn’t shake, but I’m pretty sure it would if I wasn’t being vigilante. I’m no coward, but when you’ve been beaten and forced to fight and kill and you’ve lived two years in the heart of the inferno like some patched Dante you’re bound to have an wash of fear when you remember it all. I keep my face calm, placid, like a pool of water without a ripple.
“Yes,” Clint says, a hungry glimmer in his eye.
I swallow, push my fear far back, and explain about the torture. I tell them about the concept of the Masked Man, how I would never know which member of the Skulls was wearing the mask. I tell them about the times one version of the Masked Man would go crazy and grab a whip, a pistol, a blade, once even a fifty-pound metal dumbbell. I tell them about the fights I was forced to participate in with other prisoners, and how I was forced to dig their graves. I tell them all of this and more in a low, calm tone, showing no sign of the pain it causes me to drag it all up.