Hard Rider

by Lydia Pax

  June and Ram passed through the party, never quite staying long enough for anyone to probe too deeply about the nature of her and Ram’s relationship. There were all sorts of beats on the time line that wouldn’t work, but their basic cover story, repeated again and again throughout the night, was that they had met during a long road trip of his and then corresponded over the internet, with him meeting her in Austin every few weeks.

  When asked, she built him up as a model boyfriend, always insisting on driving to meet her so he could treat her with meals.

  A few women asked to see her ring, and of course June had to comply. Ram had hustled it to her quickly after Theo growled at him in the entry. It was a respectable gold band with a decently sized stone—no way of knowing if it was a real diamond, though June doubted it.

  Ram wouldn’t say how much it cost—or even if he paid for it at all.

  Honestly, she hoped it wasn’t very much. Even for a real marriage, she had never wanted some expensive ring—and certainly with this all being fake (except for the rapidly growing and increasingly undeniable arousal she felt for him) she didn’t want to put him out of any money.

  Ram continued not to disappoint her intentions with the dress she wore. Its daring neckline drifted his eyes downward every few moments, and she took to holding her breath and then letting it out slowly just to watch his gaze glue onto her chest for longer and longer intervals.

  She was playing with fire, turning him on like that. But she couldn’t help but enjoy herself.

  After socializing for close to an hour and gingerly eating a hamburger (her dress was just a few months old, something picked up after everything with Simon fell apart to help her out on the rebound scene, and she hardly wanted to stain it), her father began to call everyone up to the patio.

  “Another speech,” she grumbled to Ram. “He’s always making speeches. Can’t get elected without them.”

  “I haven’t heard any of them.”

  “They’re all the same. They start with, ‘My friends and fellow citizens of Marlowe. What a true pleasure it is to see you all here tonight…’”

  Sheriff Colt cleared his throat, holding a microphone feeding loud speakers spread across the acreage. “My friends and fellow citizens of Marlowe. What a true pleasure it is to see you all here tonight…”

  June elbowed Ram, who chuckled.

  “Come here,” he said, taking her to one side while her father droned on.

  He walked with her just a few feet away behind a heavy oak tree, half-dead from the sun. But it was wide enough to block the view of the two of them from the rest of the crowd.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Do you still feel uneasy? Because no one will do anything. In fact—”

  “You’re too gorgeous for me to think about what any cop is saying.”

  Hands, strong and large, roamed up her waist. One landed on her neck, cradling her face just so.

  “Oh,” she said. “Well. That’s—”

  “I told you to get used to acting like my old lady, didn’t I? My old lady would only dress like that to fuck me whenever I wanted.”

  She barely had time to react. God, he was quick. His lips came down on hers, a little sweetness and tang from the barbecue leftover on his tongue and hers. But the rest was all him—all of that heady road smell, that easy cool confidence as he pressed her back against the bark.

  The bark dug into her dress, her skin, but she didn’t care. Her hands scooped up underneath his shirt, fingertips skating across the surface of those rock-hard abs. Feeling more brave than she had in ages, she took his hand and slipped it up against her thigh, slowly moving it upward. He got the idea.

  Soon, his fingers dug in deep to the bare flesh of her behind, spreading her skin beneath the firmness of his grip. His fingers slipped underneath her panties and she felt her body wet and alive at his touch. Fingertips were mere inches away from being inside of her, and everything in her wanted him to close that distance.

  “Ram,” she tried to whisper. It was more like a moan.

  “Shut up. Don’t think about it.”

  That was probably his whole life, wasn’t it? Seeing some action and not thinking about it long enough to realize what a bad idea it was.

  It sounded so thrilling.

  He shifted closer, and she could feel the hardness of him once again—and she knew without a doubt that, no matter how bad of an idea it was, no matter how much it would never, ever work out—she needed to have that cock inside of her body.

  It pushed against her thigh, urging itself closer and closer to her entrance from behind its stupid fabric prison. Desperately she wanted to free it…and then enclose it again inside her.

  “June?”

  Kyle’s voice broke her reverie. She pulled away from Ram, struggling not to giggle at the sheer stupid girlish delight at being caught.

  He was just on the other side of the tree, looking off toward the party, as if he had not just caught his sister making out. He was dressed in a sky blue polo that fit snug on his form; broad chest but wide gut, strangely skinny legs sticking out like drum sticks inside his jeans.

  “Hey Kyle.”

  “Can we talk? Alone?”

  Chapter 14

  She moved with Kyle to another end of the party, sitting with him beside a small gazebo nested between a surprisingly fruitful set of pecan trees.

  The request to speak with her took her off-guard. She wasn’t used to talking to Kyle. When she had first left Marlowe, she didn’t ever try to contact her parents.

  But, she had tried to contact Kyle. She called him frequently, but then he started to not answer the phone. And then she stopped calling—and then stopped answering when he called. It was worse than a cold war; at least in a cold war, there was a clear cause that was being fought over. Instead with her brother, they were ignoring each other over past instances of ignoring that spiraled down from simple mistakes or misunderstandings.

  Kyle was a police officer like his father and cousins, but that was about all the sameness one could find among them. Theo and Sheriff Colt were great stadiums of men, heavily structured with dome-like chests and low centers of gravity.

  He was smaller in frame but flabbier in flesh, his hair downy soft and blond. His neck, face, and arms were heavily tanned but Ram could see flashes of pure white skin under his color that looked as though they had never seen the light of day.

  “How you been, Juney?”

  “Doing okay,” she said. “It’s pretty weird being back here all of a sudden.”

  He nodded. “I bet. All those years without seeing it. Not being around it at all, and now you’re here.”

  There was an undercurrent to his voice that didn’t quite match with the meek young man she had known four years ago—the man who she would defend from bullies at school, who she would have to stand up for in front of Mom and Dad.

  “How are you, Kyle? A cop now? Mom told me, but I tell you, I didn’t really believe it until I saw you in the uniform.”

  “I bet,” he said again. “Well, I am a cop now, June, believe it or not.” His tone was combative.

  She flinched a little. “It’s just different for me, Kyle. That’s all. I never thought—”

  “So you’re getting married, huh? To that guy?” He pointed back over to the trees where Ram still stood, leaning on the trunk with his arms crossed. He was sturdy as the oak. “That’s weird.”

  It was a charade. It was fake. And yet that was information only privy to her and Ram. For other people to question it felt very much impudent on their part, and June was already tired of it.

  “It’s not weird for people to fall in love, Kyle. They do it every day.”

  “It is when people fall in love with criminals. You know he’s a criminal, right? You know he’s going to drag you down into his shit with him? That’s what those people do. I see it every day.”

  “God, listen to you. You sound like Dad.”

  “Who else would I sound like, June? Who els
e has been around? Not you, that’s for damn sure.”

  He had stood up, raising his voice.

  The Colts were experts at communicating loudly and always had been. In her time at college, June had found that a great many people didn’t deal with anger and confrontation as directly as they did. For each Colt family member, there was a very distinct line between raising their voice, yelling, and screaming. Anyone overhearing right now who wasn’t as schooled in the fine vintages of repressed rage might have thought Kyle was having a shouting fit.

  “Sit down,” said June, her own voice rising up. “You sound like an ass. Let’s talk about this.”

  “Now you want to talk? Four years go by and now’s a convenient time to talk for June. Sure, that’s great. Let’s talk. You want to hear me talk?”

  Very suddenly, she didn’t. But she nodded anyway.

  “Good. Here’s what I think. I think you’re so desperate to piss Dad off that you’d marry any bum that came in off the street who wasn’t someone he liked. I think deciding on the rest of your life for that reason is stupid and immature. I think you’ve got a history of making big, big decisions based on resentment for him and Mom, and if you keep going with that guy, you’re going to have hardcore regrets in your life.”

  He shook his head. Now he was yelling. “Do you know what the worst part is? The worst part is that you don’t think you’re stubborn. You think you’re just open as shit to anything that comes along. You think that just because Dad’s kind of a shit that it gives you a pass to railroad your way past anything else this family thinks. But no, you’re stubborn. I’m telling you, straight up, that this is a bad idea and it’ll end in heartbreak, and you won’t even give that thought the time of day because nobody but you could ever be in the right.”

  People were staring without staring, stepping away and nodding their heads over minutely. Kyle’s voice had for several moments pushed past the music.

  He looked deflated, the anger in his face quickly melting into something else entirely: a mixture of relief, confusion, and embarrassment that June somehow found herself matching with her own expression.

  “Kyle,” she said. “I’m sorry if—”

  “Shut up.” He said this not harshly, but preemptively, like you might tell someone in the grocery store to skip ahead in line when they only had a couple of items. He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Let’s not talk anymore. Goddammit. I’ll talk to you later on.”

  Chapter 15

  Ram did not overhear everything that happened between June and Kyle, but he caught the general drift of it. Nobody could be away from home for very long without building up problems of one sort or another.

  After Kyle left her, June was waylaid by relatives and old neighbors, and Ram was caught adrift in the flow of the party with a beer in hand. Dirty looks followed him everywhere.

  That was the problem with making sure everyone knew to be afraid of you, Ram realized. It meant everyone knew who to target when they got tired of being scared.

  It wasn’t the Wrecking Crew’s policy to terrorize Marlowe. Total opposite, in fact. Howitzer believed that as long as they kept Marlowe free of their brand of crime, they’d have a lot more free reign to do whatever it was they wanted. And for the most part, Howitzer was right—except that Sheriff Colt had a stick the size of a rattlesnake up his ass about the club. For everything that went wrong in Marlowe, Sheriff Colt made sure the populace knew that the Wrecking Crew was who to blame.

  It was getting into the evening now, and night had fallen. Tiki torches lit up all across the property and small electric lamps turned on alongside them, hanging from the trees and posted on tall poles. Ram saw Sheriff Colt approaching him from across the field and braced himself.

  Be nice. Be calm. No fights. No problems.

  This, despite the fact that all he’d really like to do was shove the man’s teeth down his throat. He contented himself with the knowledge that he was almost certainly going to bang his daughter. June wanted him, and by god, Ram wanted her too.

  It would be a double-win—it’d piss off Sheriff Colt to no end, and June was fine as hell.

  “I don’t know who the hell you think you are,” said Colt, “being with my daughter, but I’m not going to let it continue.”

  Ram had to give it to the man for not mincing words. There was a heavy scent of beer on his breath. It had taken him a while to work up the nerve to come talk to him. Good.

  Ram felt anger at his words even though he knew the relationship was a big sham.

  “I don’t think that’s a decision of yours,” he said. “And I sure as hell don’t think it’s any of your business.”

  “My business? My business? You come on my land with your War and Peace record and talk to me about my business? You know my business. It’s to add more chapters to your little book of offenses against the law.”

  “War and Peace was a big book, Sheriff. I think you’re mixing your metaphors.”

  Colt shoved him in the shoulder. Hard.

  “You shut your fool mouth,” he said. He shoved him again, more like an open palm strike this time. “You get the hell off my lawn. Outta my house.”

  “You need to stop hitting me, old man.”

  “Or what?” Colt shoved him again, harder.

  Ram saw what he was doing. If Ram hit him back, no one in this crowd would say that they saw the Sheriff hitting Ram first. It would be an assault from an untrustworthy, wild biker on a respectable lawman.

  And all the same, Ram’s pride flared. He was ready to murder this old fool.

  His glare was murderous. “Stop hitting me, or you’ll find out.”

  “What if I didn’t?” Colt slapped him, right across the face. “What if I just kept—”

  “Daddy!”

  June arrive just in time to save her father’s life. Ram was a steel coil, ready to unload. His cheek stung—Colt’s hands were plenty big enough to leave a mark. On the next strike he would have grabbed Colt’s arm and broken it over his knee.

  And that was just to start. The other nearest cop was more than thirty feet away, though he was watching close. Ram was confident he could have snapped Colt’s neck in the time it took for that cop to get close.

  Colt looked at her, the fight leaving him just a bit. June stood between them, taking Ram’s arm in hers.

  “You’re being an asshole, Dad,” she said. “Try and fix that before you see us again, okay?”

  Chapter 16

  June didn’t want to go back inside just yet and let the night end, to send Ram on his way. She wandered with him further out into the wilderness, finding a small clearing in the trees under the moonlight.

  It was romantic, she realized, just after pulling him there. Inadvertently so, but romantic all the same.

  “I’m sorry about him,” said June. “Are you okay?”

  “From what, an old man trying to prove he’s tough?” Ram laughed, stroking his jaw. “I’ve been dealing with that kinda shit since I was a little boy. Cops don’t even like the sons of outlaws, did you know that?”

  June let out a breath. “Yes. I knew about that.”

  She heard all kinds of stories. Her father and his compatriots would get together at the Colt house every Saturday and play poker, smoking cigars and drinking whiskey. June could sit at the top of the stairs and hear them trade cop stories.

  Some of them were really exciting—chasing down bank robbers and driving them off the road. Some were funny—arresting men dressed up in banana suits who tried to snatch purses.

  And some of them were sad, even though the men downstairs would laugh and chortle—giving drug addicts and suspects “rough rides” in the paddy wagon when they didn’t want to be taken in. A rough ride was exactly what it sounded like—the police unloading their frustrations with capturing someone, punching and kicking and shoving him, on the way into the station.

  Her father’s suspicion didn’t extend solely to criminals. Even June had been the subject of it—and on mor
e than one occasion. The final straw, the reason she had decided she definitely would never move back to Marlowe was in her senior year when she discovered that her father had been tapping her phone.

  It wasn’t difficult for him to do, or even necessarily illegal. He hid his guilt behind both these defenses, telling her that she shouldn’t be talking about things he didn’t want to know about if she couldn’t handle him knowing about them.

  But she had talked on her phone to her friends about everything—her hopes, her wishes, her fears; deeply personal stuff happening on her body with everything from zits to her period. He hadn’t been allowed to hear that from her. She wasn’t doing anything wrong when she used a toilet, either, but that didn’t mean she wanted it in the living room.

  That incident was the end of their friendly conversation. Up until that point, she had been willing to imagine him as overprotective but loving. After that, she realized how deep his paranoia really went.

  “I don’t know anything about you,” she said, looking away. “Not really. But I can’t imagine your life has been easy.”

  “It’s not so bad,” Ram smiled. “Hey, don’t feel sorry for me, okay? I like my choices. I’m happy with who I am.”

  June shook her head. “The way you live. Outside of society. It seems…terrifying. Especially for a little boy. Did he raise you to be someone just like him, your dad? Did he ever want anything better for you?”

  “There’s nothing better than being free on the road.” Ram clenched his jaw. “Nothing.”

  “It just seems like, being told you can’t trust anyone but your family, that you always have to be suspicious, that as a child, you must have—”

  Ram took her by the shoulders and turned her back to face him. “Stop. That. Don’t try to piece me together, June. You won’t like what you find.”

  June looked up at him, defiant, not ready to stop saying her piece.