by Cole, Cassie
“You’ll have to make one of those for my momma.”
He leaned back an inch. “Really?”
“She loves cheesy yard art like that. Something for the birds to sit on.”
He shoved me playfully and we laughed, taking the tension away from the previous moment.
“What are we going to do about Sid?” I asked.
The tension came right back. Immediately I regretted bringing it up, wishing we could go back to the way things were just seconds before. When all our problems seemed a hundred miles away.
“I don’t know, Peaches,” he admitted. He took both of my hands in his. “But for now, I want to make the most of tonight.”
I squealed as he threw me on the bed, tore off my damp clothes, and buried his face between my thighs. I arched my back as he ate me like he was a starving man who craved only the taste and smell of my sex.
Tonight was for us. Tonight we were safe.
29
Charlotte
I woke to Hawk’s warm lips kissing me on the forehead. Everything was still dark, and strangely silent. It took me a moment to realize it was because the rain had stopped.
“Mornin’, Peaches.”
I stretched my hands over my head and squeaked. “What time is it?”
“Time to go home.”
I groaned. “Do I have to?” I reached for my phone and scoffed. “Hawk, it’s five in the morning.”
“I need to get you home while the town is still asleep.” He kissed my forehead again, and his voice was a deep whisper. “If anyone sees us driving together from my barn…”
“It’s going to take at least eight more kisses to wake me up,” I said.
I meant it as playful morning banter, but Hawk grabbed my head with both of his callused hands and planted exactly eight kisses all over me: forehead, nose, cheeks, chin, neck. “There’s eight,” he said, with a final kiss on the lips that lingered longer than the rest. “With a ninth as a bonus. Good enough?”
“Mmm hmm,” I hummed. I was tempted to pull him back down for a longer kiss, and a third round of sexy time, but he was already getting out of bed and walking across the room to the bathroom. I enjoyed the sight of his nude body as he disappeared, then reemerged a minute later.
“A girl could get used to that,” I said. “If you don’t go back to factory welding, you could be a model.”
That made him laugh extra hard. “You don’t see a lot of models with tattoos.”
“You could start a trend.”
He shimmied into his jeans, the fabric sliding up over his hips and cute little butt. “I prefer to work for a living.”
“Modeling is work,” I said.
“Real work, Peaches. With my hands.” He came over to the bed and picked me up. I yelped as he lifted me into the air with ease, then put me down on my feet. “Get dressed.”
He gave me a hard slap on the butt which made a loud smack. I squeaked and sent a fake angry glare in his direction, which only made him laugh even harder.
“There’s something we didn’t talk about last night,” I said. “Something more important than Sid.”
Hawk’s smile slipped. “Uh oh. I didn’t take your virginity, did I?”
“No!” I sputtered. “I lost my virginity in—you know what, it doesn’t matter. What matters is something about you. A deal breaker.”
He frowned and waited for me to answer. I walked toward him with as much disappointment on my face as I could manage. I put my face close to his.
“Simone.”
He groaned. “Aww, hell.”
“Your name really is Simone! Like the gymnast!”
He stared flatly at me. “Can we go back to making fun of my art?”
“I never made fun of your art. I thought it was special. But your name, on the other hand…” I giggled. “Was it a typo on your birth certificate, or was your weenie so small at birth they thought you were a girl?”
He grabbed me and held me close. “I didn’t hear you complain about the size of my weenie last night, Peaches.”
“It was satisfactory.”
He snorted. “I’ll have you know that Simone is a masculine name in Italy.”
“If you say so.”
“I’m serious,” he said a little too defensively. “Look it up.”
“I believe you,” I said in a tone that implied I most certainly did not believe him.
The ground outside Hawk’s barn was unpaved gravel with lots of individual puddles from the rain, requiring us to pick our footing carefully. Hawk pulled the rain cover off his bike, folded it up, and placed it on the ground next to the barn.
“Why are we taking the bike?” I asked. “Won’t I be able to hide better in the truck?” I figured I’d be ducking down in the passenger side, whereas on the bike anyone who saw us would immediately know we were together.
Hawk shook his head and gave me the peace sign with his fingers. “Two reasons, Peaches. One, it’s easier to hide on a bike. If we see someone comin’, I can pull onto a small trail or into the woods and wait for them to pass. And two, if Sid finds out what we did with Jesse and shit hits the fan, I want to be on my bike in case we need to make a quick getaway.”
He threw his leg over the bike. I approached, then stopped.
“Hey, I just remembered something. Last night, after searching the barn, Sid said they were going to check out your bike. They might have messed with it.”
Hawk paused with his keys halfway in the ignition. “Good call.” He stepped off the bike and crouched down. “I bet those fuckers messed with the brake line, or the clutch line—”
He froze with his hand underneath the bike.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said in a too-calm voice. “You got your cell phone on you?”
“I do. What’s wrong, Hawk?”
“Turn the flashlight on and give me some light, would you?”
I did as he asked, and then started to walk closer to the bike.
“Don’t come any closer,” he said casually. “Aim the light from there, Charlotte.”
Hearing him use my name, rather than my nickname, filled me with more unease than if he were screaming. I aimed my phone flashlight and he crouched to the side. His hand was on a small piece of the bike on the underside. A cylinder like a coke can.
Hawk took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Okay, that’s good enough.” He never took his eyes off the bike. “Now I need you to go back inside.”
“Why?” I asked. My tone was shaky but right then I didn’t care. “Hawk, what is it?”
Finally he turned to look at me. His blue eyes were piercing in the light from my phone. “There’s a grenade on my bike.”
“Oh my God!”
“And my hands will be a lot steadier if I know you’re not ten feet away. You understand?”
I felt like I was frozen in place. It took extra thought to force my feet to move backwards. Like I was controlling someone else’s body and there was lag between the command and action.
I slipped inside and pulled the door mostly closed, leaving a sliver where I could see. Hawk hadn’t moved since finding the grenade.
“Do me a favor and turn the floodlights on?” he asked in that too-casual voice. Like a mechanic asking for a certain type of wrench. “Switch is on the wall to your right.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off Hawk, so I felt around on the wall until my fingers found the switch. The area in front of the barn was suddenly bathed in harsh white light. Like spotlights in a prison courtyard.
“Get away from the door and windows,” he called, but he didn’t look over at me so I didn’t go anywhere.
Hawk didn’t move for a long time. He remained crouched next to the bike, one hand underneath the vehicle and deathly still. For the first time, I had an opportunity to get a good look at the bike. While other bikes were covered in shiny chrome, the components on Hawk’s bike were matte black. Even the twin mufflers on the side, and the
rims on each wheel. Only the wheel guards and engine housing were painted in burnt red. It was beautiful in its uniqueness.
It might explode at any moment, killing Hawk.
I never saw Hawk do anything. For what felt like several minutes he kept his hand underneath the bike. Maybe he was carefully probing the object. Then suddenly he pulled his hand away, with the canister in it. He walked straight back to the barn, toward me.
“What are you doing!” I demanded. “Don’t bring it in here!”
“I thought I told you to get away from the door and windows.” Sweat covered his face like he’d just run the Boston Marathon. He held out the device for my inspection, and although I wanted to run and hide under the bed in case it spontaneously went off, I made myself look. The grenade was shaped like a soda can with a thicker lip around the top. A metal ring was attached to the center, as if it could be attached to a keychain and carried around. Wire was tied from the ring to another piece of metal that looked like a bobby pin.
“This is a fragmentation grenade,” Hawk said. “RG-42, old Russian model. Pull the ring and it explodes. This wire was stretched across the bike and attached to my bike’s engine housing. The vibrations of the engine up the wire would’ve caused the pin to pull out.”
“Oh my God.” I didn’t know what else to say. I felt like a broken record. “Oh my God!”
“It’s fine now,” he said, walking past me and into the workshop. His voice drifted out into the main room. “I’ve plugged the pin so it won’t accidentally go off.”
“You could have died,” I said in disbelief. “You almost did die! If I had forgotten to mention it…”
He returned and rubbed my arms. That simple gesture instantly made me feel better. “But you didn’t forget. You remembered just in time.” He kissed me on the forehead, and my skin felt warm where his lips had touched. “You might have saved my life, Peaches.”
“And my own life,” I managed to stammer. “Yours is a nice secondary benefit.”
The joke sounded dull to my ears, but it made Hawk laugh. “All joking aside, since that’s a frag grenade and not a concussion grenade, it probably wouldn’t have killed us. The bike would have protected us from the shrapnel.”
“Oh. Then what was the point?”
He led me back outside. “It would have shredded our feet and legs. Leaving us crippled.”
“Oh, that’s all,” I said in a small voice. I glanced down at my legs and fought the urge to vomit.
“Right?” he said with complete sincerity. “Thank goodness Sid still wants info out of me.”
“Yeah, thank goodness.”
I got on the bike behind him, winced when he turned on the engine, and then clung to him as we drove away from the barn.
30
Hawk
For all of Sid’s shortcomings, the man knew how to spread fear.
If the leader of the Copperheads had wanted to cripple me, he could have accomplished it with his crowbar and half a dozen men to hold me down, pummeling my knee caps into chalk dust. It would have been easy. He could have done it in just a few minutes.
But there was no fun in that. No anticipation, no growing sense of dread. Booby-trapping my bike with a grenade, on the other hand, created an environment of danger. He was telling me that I wasn’t safe anywhere, not even at home. That an attack could come at any moment, even when I thought I was alone on my bike.
And it worked.
The whole drive back to Charlotte’s motel, I felt cold. Like I needed to put a jacket on. The grenade might not have gone off, but it didn’t need to. The fear it created was almost stronger when I discovered and disarmed it.
I was glad to have her arms around me, her body pressed tightly against mine. Even though she kept reaching down to scratch her legs, having her with me actually made me feel safer. Less alone.
She would probably laugh at me if I told her that.
We reached the motel, and I cursed. The sheriff’s cruiser was parked in front of the lobby. “The fuck is he doing here?”
“I… I don’t know,” Charlotte said.
I drove past the motel and around the next bend in the road. Hopefully they weren’t waiting for her.
I pulled off at the first safe area and stopped the bike. “You’ll have to walk from here. The sheriff is in Sid’s pocket, always feeding him information. If he sees me drop you off this early…”
“I understand,” she said as she got off the bike. “What, um, should I tell him if he asks where I was?”
“Tell him you couldn’t sleep, and went for a walk. Rehearse what you’re going to say as you walk back there, alright?”
“Okay.”
She threw her arms around me, gave me one last kiss, and then began walking.
I rumbled my bike down the road ahead of her, passing the motel again. It didn’t look like the sheriff was inside the cruiser. That was interesting.
I put it out of my mind as I drove back home.
The thing about Sid’s booby trap was that I’d been expecting it. He did shit like that all the time when I was a Copperhead. Since he killed Theresa, I’d been as careful as I could be. I always checked my truck before climbing inside, and when I got home I walked the perimeter of my barn for signs of entry.
Being with Charlotte had made me careless. I was so busy worrying about her safety that I wasn’t worrying about my own.
That was a good way to get killed.
Last night was a mistake.
It was hard to accept while she was in my barn, in my bed, in my arms, but I could see it clearly now that she was gone. We shouldn’t have fucked. No matter how good it had been—and it had been good—it was a reckless risk to Charlotte. If Sid found out…
I shook my head. I couldn’t survive having another innocent woman’s blood on my hands. Not after Theresa.
It had to be a one-time thing. I needed to keep it in my pants from this point on. Not just for my own potential grief, but for Charlotte’s. Even if we managed to keep it secret from the Copperheads, I couldn’t let her have feelings for me. Her grief for me would crush her when I was gone.
Because that was the ultimate truth in all of this: I was still a dead man living on borrowed time. The grenade on my bike was proof that Sid was toying with me like a cat. And like all cats, eventually he would get bored. He’d roll up to my barn while he was especially strung out and impatient, put his crowbar to my head, and beat me to death.
The closer I got to Charlotte—and the closer she got to me—the more that eventuality would crush her.
As I rode through the early morning twilight, I wished I was strong enough to just keep riding and never stop. To leave town, riding away from danger the way Charlotte had suggested.
But even just entertaining that thought filled me with pain. Leaving would be abandoning Theresa’s memory. It meant accepting that Sid got to do whatever he wanted without consequence. I couldn’t leave until I’d made Sid pay.
Even if it killed me.
I got home and lay in bed for a while. The remnants of Charlotte’s smell still lingered on the pillow and sheets, like a beautiful ghost. I closed my eyes and inhaled it again and again until I could no longer detect the wonderful scent from the normal smells of the room.
Finally I got up, took a shower, and got ready to go into town. I checked the underside of my truck before getting in, but I still cringed as I turned the keys in the ignition. No bomb exploded underneath me, though.
This time, a voice whispered in my head.
Charlotte was waiting on the bench by the community center with two coffees. “Mornin’,” she said with her normal smile as I pulled up. “Got you a coffee.”
“What a coincidence,” I said casually. “I accidentally made an extra sandwich for lunch.”
“Well isn’t that lucky?”
She smiled, and we shared a nice secret moment. Just the two of us. I wished I could pull her inside the truck and kiss her. Being unable to made me feel like I was ba
ck in the sheriff’s jail cell.
Charlotte lingered outside the passenger door. “You gettin’ in, or what?” I asked.
She held up a sheet of paper. “Mindy gave me today’s marching orders. Weed pulling all along main street.”
I squinted over at the diner. Mindy was taking someone’s order in the window. “Is that legit, or is she just trying to get us to clean up the ratty yard around her diner?”
“I made the exact same joke to her when I saw today’s chore,” Charlotte said. “Let’s get to work.”
I sipped my coffee while Charlotte gathered the trash bags, gardening gloves, and weed killer from the community center. Then we walked along the street pulling weeds from the side of the road. The weeds growing just off the road weren’t bad, but the main street had been paved so long ago that the edges were frayed and cracked. Those weeds were a huge pain in the ass to yank out.
One of us pulled weeds while the other held the trash bag in one hand and sprayed weed killer with the other. Since the weed pulling was hard on the back, we alternated jobs. Although I crouched down to pull them, Charlotte bent over at the waist, giving me a wonderful view of her plump ass in her cut-off shorts. I didn’t know if she was doing it on purpose or not, but it made it tough to look away.
When we switches again, she grinned knowingly at me. Yep, definitely on purpose.
It was slow work, but the sun was blocked by the clouds which kept the temperature cool. We moved up one side of the street to the north, one weed at a time, until we reached the “Welcome to Eastland” sign. Charlotte paused to take a selfie with the metalwork art statue next to the sign, joking that she would print it out and get me to sign it. I laughed it off, but deep down it was kind of nice having someone appreciate what I did. Sometimes I didn’t know if I appreciated it myself.
We went back down the other side of the street, and by the time we reached the community center it was time for lunch. We ate quickly in case the sheriff or Judge Benjamin happened to come by, then got started on the southern part of the road leading toward the motel.
The public aspect of our work helped keep things platonic, but just barely. If we were in private on some abandoned road I wouldn’t have been able to keep my hands off her. Now that I’d been with her, ripping her clothes off and fucking her until my cock ached, I was struggling to resist pulling her into a kiss every five minutes. Depending on what the worksheet dictated, tomorrow would be tough.