by Trent Jordan
“He’s scared.”
Axle nodded.
“I think he fears the Saints coming after him for their loss in the Brewskis battle,” he said. “And so he now believes the balance of power is on our side. He wants us to kill them all, so he doesn’t have to worry about getting killed.”
“But he’d still take the chance to work for the highest bidder.”
“Once a traitor, always a traitor.”
That was the nature of people who gave in to their dark sides. Once they did it once, it took a conscious effort to have to fight it. It wasn’t an automatic thing anymore.
Unfortunately, I was all too aware of this phenomenon.
“I agree with everything you said,” I said. “But it’s still just conjecture. We need something more.”
“Do you have any ideas?”
I took a sip of my beer.
“I’ll expose him.”
Amazing how something so momentous could be summarized in just a few pithy words. Axle arched an eyebrow at me, a little bit shocked at how confident I sounded.
“And you’re going to do that… how? Isn’t that the point of what we’re trying to do already?”
“I mean, I’ll expose him in real-time,” I said.
I already had the plan laid out in my head. I’d spent all the time in the hours after the club meeting figuring it out in my head, and by the time that I had gotten on the bike to meet Axle here, I already knew what I wanted to do.
But the amount that I was going to tell Axle was minimal. Like many things in this club, we operated on a need-to-know basis.
“And I’ll need your help to make this work,” I said.
“Sure, what do you need?”
“Just watch Red Raven and me from afar when we go on our mission,” I said.
Axle stared at me when I finished, expecting me to furnish more details. But I wasn’t. Sergeant-at-Arms were great at keeping all sorts of secrets, including our own. Axle wasn’t going to get me to crack, no matter how hard he may have tried.
“And… are you… going to say anything more?” Axle said very slowly as if somehow speaking slowly would get me to confess everything that I had in mind.
I didn’t say a word. Axle didn’t need me to say out loud what he already knew the answer was.
“Damnit, Butch,” Axle said. “Can you at least tell me where it is you want me to watch you two? I can’t keep an eye out over all of Springsville for you!”
I suppose that did make a difference, didn’t it? To not tell him even where I was going… I was crazy and I was determined, but if Red Raven wanted to ambush me, I at least needed backup to have a chance of being rescued. No matter how much older he was, all it took was a couple of seconds for Red Raven to raise his gun, shoot me in the back of the head, and leave me bleeding out on the street.
“The hospital,” I said.
“The hospital,” Axle repeated. “You’re going to go straight into the teeth of the Fallen Saints? You’re going to go where all of them are gathered right now? Are you insane?”
Maybe a little.
But that didn’t mean I was going to change my mind. It probably took someone with a little insanity to do what I was doing.
“Christ,” he said, muttering under his breath. “You’d just better be damn careful with whatever you’re planning.”
“You don’t have anything to worry about.”
The fact that I saw a flicker of concern come across Axle’s face, though, was probably as good an indication as any that I needed to worry. Red Raven may have been old, and he may have been out of the line of fire for some time now, but he was still entrusted with a sniper rifle in our last battle, regardless of whether he’d used it or not.
That didn’t sound like I was taking a decrepit, useless old man to his grave. That sounded like I was taking a legitimate threat to task. That sounded like I was facing off against an enemy that could put me six feet under.
I left a few short minutes after, not having anything more to discuss. Even for Axle, a man of few words and fewer emotions, I think he felt like we needed to talk more, but I stood up once it was clear we had nothing more to say. Good thing for him, I suppose, that he had Rose there to keep him company.
Speaking of company, as I walked out of the shop, fully prepared to go back to my bike, my curiosity got the better of me. I kept a distance such that Thea couldn’t see me, but I looped around to see her hunched over, her face lit up by the glow of her cell phone.
Just what the hell was she looking at? Was it a family member?
Or, worse, another club member?
I shouldn’t have felt jealous or concerned about the matter. I shouldn’t have felt anything. She was just a club bunny, and the only type of woman who had been with just one dude in our club was an old lady—and even then, let’s just say that boundaries and permissions were a little bit looser than the outside world. The quickest way to get judged and ridiculed in the club was to get attached to a woman and refuse to allow anyone else near her.
But I suppose even for the hardest of men in life, even for the most detached and cold, a woman came along every once in a while that made them feel… something.
I wasn’t willing to say Thea was that for me, but then again, maybe that was as good an indicator as any that Thea was that for me.
I looked back at the shop. Axle and Rose were engrossed in conversation. His back was to me. Rose could have seen me if she wanted to, but the way their hands were on each other, I wasn’t sure that she would have seen me if I was doing jumping jacks three feet behind Axle. I just really hoped Axle didn’t suddenly turn around and see me gawking at Thea.
I had enough trouble keeping a lot of my secrets from the club. I definitely didn’t need this.
Fucking hell.
I walked over to her car, trying to kick rocks and stomp my feet so she wouldn’t get alarmed when I knocked on the door. But whatever the text was, it had her full and undivided attention. Finally, I got to the window and just tapped the glass.
You would’ve thought that Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers had just put their hands on her the way that she screamed. She collected herself quickly, but that shrill scream was the kind of thing, I knew, that hadn’t just come out of nowhere. There was something behind it—maybe her current state, maybe some history—that caused that scream to sound like the death rattle of a terrified woman.
“You OK?” I asked.
I think the answer’s pretty obvious.
“Not exactly a good thing to have your window tapped,” she said, turning on the car and lowering the window slightly. “I’m surprised to see you here.”
Something about the way she spoke suggested that that wasn’t true in the slightest.
“I was in the neighborhood,” I said. “Who were you texting?”
Thea hesitated for a second, which raised my blood pressure. It had to mean that she was texting one of the club members.
“No one,” she said.
“I know that’s a lie. Who were you texting?”
Thea still looked hesitant to answer.
“Club member?”
“Oh, that? No, no, no,” she said, the relief as palpable as the nerves from just second before. “Everyone in the club thinks that I’m yours.”
I was surprised and a little bothered with myself at how good that made me feel. It was like I had a rush of giddiness at the fact that my worst-case scenario had not come to pass. But why the hell was that my worst-case scenario, and even if it was, why had I reacted like so? This wasn’t the Butch I thought I was.
Maybe she is that one girl in a lifetime that can just make me feel a certain way. Of course, last time that happened…
The only good news in this was that, of course, my outward demeanor betrayed nothing. It would have taken a sort of sixth sense on Thea’s part to know how I had reacted, and then it would have taken courage for her to call me out on it.
“Well, who was it then?”
&nb
sp; “No one of importance.”
I let out a soft but long snort. That was a lie, but it was also clearly none of my damn business. And it wasn’t like I was a truth-teller all the time; I was pretty sure a good portion of the club didn’t even know my name, Brian Young.
Nor did they even know the secret about that.
“Can I ask you something?” she said, the words coming from her in a rush.
Well, too late now for you to keep pushing her. I nodded.
“Well, first, why don’t you get in the car? That’s not my question. I just think it’ll be easier than you hunched over like this.”
I looked over at Axle and Rose to make sure they weren’t watching me. They weren’t even at the counter of Bottle Revolution anymore. It really wouldn’t have surprised me if they had gone to one of the bathrooms for a quickie. I looked back up and down the streets, and as best as I could tell, I was completely alone.
I stood up, walked behind her car—it was an old habit of mine where I could see them act sooner than if I walked in front of the car—and got into the passenger’s side. That took a moment of folding myself properly, as being at my height and in any car took a few moments of moving me around like I was a Tetris piece. But once I was settled in, my eyes locked onto Thea.
“Saturday morning, near the end of us hanging out,” she said. “I asked you if all of this meant anything. And you responded by ‘it wasn’t nothing.’ What does that mean?”
I shrugged. I wasn’t really in the mood for an intimate talk. Too much was going on in my head.
“It just meant that it wasn’t nothing. It was something.”
“Butch, come on,” she said. “I’m at a breaking point in my life. It feels like everything that could have gone to shit has gone to shit. I just want to know you care about me at a level that goes beyond them admiring my body. Can I just know what you meant? Can I just know you?”
That was a bridge too far for anyone. I didn’t even think I’d said out loud anything about my past to Lucky, let alone a woman.
“You don’t want to get to know me,” I said. “My past is far too dark for anyone.”
“Bullshit,” Thea said, and the anger that colored her response said she was done being gentle, done trying to be evasive. “Look at me. I’m a college graduate who believes her greatest asset is her brain, not her body, and yet here I am making money because I sleep with men who smell like gasoline and, in some cases at least, look like they haven’t run ten yards in a decade. Don’t you think that indicates some shit went down in my past?”
“I killed someone who didn’t deserve it.”
Funny how those words could immediately silence any conversation at any time and any place. I called it my k-bomb because when dropped, it just obliterated everything into silence. Drop the k-bomb, and it didn’t matter if the conversation was happy, sad, angry, or neutral. Things just went quiet.
“That enough for you? You still want to learn more?”
I expected Thea to look straight ahead, not say anything. I expected her to eventually ask me to quietly leave and for her to respectfully keep her distance whenever she interacted with me going forward. A part of me really hoped those things happened. She was cute, but this was going a little too far, especially at a time like this.
“Why?” she said.
But it wasn’t said tragically. It wasn’t the kind of “why” someone yelled in pain at a horrifying loss or in anger at someone who had done something heinous. It was a curious why. It was the kind that wanted a real answer, that wanted the truth.
I couldn’t fucking believe that she hadn’t just kicked me out of the car.
“Why what?”
“Why did you kill someone?” she said. “You’re a big man and a scary man, but you’re not a sociopath.”
Don’t be too sure of that. At the very least, I’m closer to it than anyone would want to believe.
“You must have had a reason for killing someone. What was it?”
I shook my head.
“It’s not something you really want to know,” I said. “It’s just… family member of a loved one tried to kill me. So I had to kill to defend myself.”
“So justified self-defense,” Thea said, although she didn’t sound completely convinced.
In the most technical sense of the word, I suppose that she was right. But I didn’t want to rely on legal defenses for why what I had done was permissible. It still made me a murderer.
“Look,” she said. “Let’s focus on what I asked you. If you said it wasn’t nothing, then it must have been something. Right? So what I’m asking you here, right now? Show me it was something.”
Damnit. Damnit. God fucking damnit.
Thea had me feeling like no one in years had. She was supposed to be a great lay for one night. And in most cases, a woman pushing back as she had during pillow talk should have been grounds for saying that we’d never hang out again.
Why was what was supposed to happen not happening at all right now? Why did it seem like everything was getting flipped on its head?
Not like you have to go to bed soon. Not like you would even if you left.
“Come on,” I said, getting out of the car.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“To my bike,” I said. “I’m going to show you that it was something.”
Thea
Trying to understand Brian involved a hell of a lot of guesswork.
When he was in the car with me, I think he wanted to be open, but then again, his facial expressions were so muted and so motionless that it was virtually impossible to make any sense of them. When he told me that he wanted me to get on his bike, half of me believed that we were going to someplace quiet to talk, and half of me believed we were going someplace quiet so he could dispose of me, never to be heard from again.
Paranoid? Perhaps so, especially the way that he had treated me at Mama Sue’s and otherwise. But while I hadn’t seen the Black Reapers murder any girls, I’d seen a few get the boot from the club for acting too attached or being otherwise too annoying and too overwhelming. I was well aware that Brian could be driving me someplace far away, maybe even out at the beach, dropping me off and telling me to never show my face at the clubhouse.
And even with that in the back of my head, I felt the risk was worth the potential reward of being closer to him. If I read him wrong, it was just another point in a long string of horrible treatment from guys who used me for my body. If I had read him right, then he was going to continue to treat me far better than anyone else had ever been to me.
Even though I’d ridden on the back of a motorcycle too many times to count, even though by now I knew more about different brands and different customizations than anyone not in an MC, I still felt a surge of nerves surge through my body as I spread my legs and rested my hips on the backside of Brian’s motorcycle. A motorcycle often reflected the person driving it, and in Brian’s case, that meant there was a whole lot of mystery and not a whole lot of explanation. It felt like the bike could explode into forceful power at any moment, or it could remain at a steady, slightly-above-speed-limit pace.
And that wasn’t even accounting for the fact that I had no idea where we were going.
Still, I trusted Brian enough to believe that I wasn’t about to be killed or dropped off in the middle of a ghetto. For the most part, I just closed my eyes and held onto him tightly. I didn’t want to know where we were going. I just wanted to get lost in the moment, to hold on to him, and to let whatever transpire, transpire.
The ride lasted about ten minutes, and unlike rides where one’s eyes are open, that can go by in the blink of an eye, keeping my eyes closed made it seem a lot longer than ten minutes. Every single muscle twitch of Brian’s, every single lean, every single slight acceleration or deceleration of the bike was something my mind needed to process because, without the visual, there was no context. It was kind of cool, honestly, to be able to ride in this manner.
But
when the ten minutes ended and the bike stopped, I had some hesitation about opening my eyes. Only when Brian got off with my arms still around him did I open them so I wouldn’t lose my balance. We were at a hiking trail just a little bit west of Springsville—it wasn’t a real hiking trail, not in the sense that you’d find it on a map, but it was well known by locals as a great place to see the city from on high.
“What’s here?” I asked.
“A chance for quiet conversation,” he said. “And a place where I know we won’t run into anyone who might know us.”
With most people, that would have felt like an enormous insult, like I was somehow too embarrassing or too much of a secret to carry around. But with the MC situation in town, somehow, it made perfect sense.
“Are we going to hike to the top?”
“No,” he said. “Come.”
That answer threw me off a little bit. If we weren’t hiking, then what in the world were we doing?
Fortunately, I had overthought the answer. He was just leading me to a nearby bench. He sat down first, resting his arm on the length of the bench. I sat in front of his arm, maybe half a foot away. I was close enough that if Brian wanted to make a move on me, he could have, but not so close that I wanted this to turn into an intimate, erotic session immediately. If anything, I was the girl who wanted anything but sex right now—that came a little too readily and too frequently.
“You want to know my past,” he said. “You want to know about the murders? Fine. If you hear all of this and you still want to be around me, then fine. But I’m going to warn you right now that I’m not going to hide anything. If I see you react in a horrifying way, if anything, that’s going to encourage me to say things even more. I…”
I felt like he was about to say something about me, but he shut his mouth at the last second. That was fine. Brian underestimated my tolerance for tough talk.
If anything, after Shane, I wanted someone who could own up to his bullshit. The last thing I needed was a man who acted like a saint and pretended that he was a good guy, only to become a massive asshole at the moment of first stress. I liked that Brian was putting all of his worst parts forward.