by Sybil Bartel
Then I took her arms and pulled her off. “We must go.” I picked our guns up.
She swiped at her face and spoke with honesty so raw it was sometimes painful to hear. “I think that’s the first time you’ve ever hugged me.” She looked up into my eyes, and her voice dropped to a vulnerable whisper. “It felt good.”
I took note of her words, her expression and her body language. “It is time to leave. Put your clothes on. I will take care of the bodies.”
Nodding, she held her hand out. “Okay, but give me your gun.”
I handed it to her.
She used her shirt to wipe the gun down.
I tucked the other gun in my back waistband. “What are you doing?”
“Getting rid of your fingerprints. Cops can track that sort of thing.” Still using her shirt, she did not touch the gun with her own hands as she rubbed it once more and set it down in the tall grass. “Besides, this was Rush’s gun. We’ll leave it here, and with any luck, when they find the bodies, they’ll think he was behind this.” Picking up her jeans and boots, she dressed. “And since we don’t have time to bury them, not to mention we got no shovel, this is the best we can do.”
“I will drag the bodies out of sight.” Stepping so as not to leave too much of a trail through the tall grass, I walked to the closest biker and grabbed his feet. His weight eclipsed mine, and I could feel the strain in the shoulder my woman had reset for me, but my stab wounds, my bruised ribs and body, those wounds now seemed like a lifetime ago.
Dragging the body a few paces off the road, I let go of him. Returning for the second biker, my woman joined me.
“I’ll help.” She reached for his wrists.
I was not completely ignorant to the laws outside the fenced perimeter of the compound. Same as on compound, murder was punishable by death. A man had a right to defend himself, this I knew, but proof would lie in the hands of the survivor, and I did not think for one single heartbeat the laws would favor me in this situation.
I did not regret pulling the trigger. I had never regretted pulling the trigger. But seeing my woman struggle to pick up the stone weight of a dead man that I had killed gave me pause.
“Step back,” I ordered. “Do not get the blood of my kills on you. Stay pure of this.”
Ignoring me, she nodded at his feet. “Grab his ankles and quit puffing your chest out. This ain’t nearly the first time I’ve had blood on my hands, and it sure won’t be the last. Besides, you didn’t have no reason to kill until you got tangled up with me. So might as well quit your bellyaching over that too, because I ain’t got no virtue left.”
My jaw ticked, but I picked up his ankles.
We carried the second body and dropped him next to the first.
My woman brushed her hands together then held them up to me. “See? No blood.”
I glanced at her, but I did not comment. I was looking at the motorcycles.
“You thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?” she asked.
Not knowing her thoughts, I said nothing.
“I’m thinkin’ we got a bike for each of us now.” She looked up at me. “You ready for this?”
I did not know how to turn. I did not know how to come to a complete stop without stalling out the engine, and I did not know if my shortcomings would endanger our advance to the cabin. But I did know one thing without doubt. Riding was faster than walking.
I nodded once. “I am ready.”
“You gonna be insulted if I suggest you take the smaller bike?”
One bike was white, one was black, but one did not look smaller than the other to my untrained eye. “No.”
“Okay, good.” She nodded toward the black motorcycle. “Because that Low Rider will be easier on you for turns than the Road King.” She grabbed her shotgun and shells out of the side bag on the previous motorcycle and walked toward the white motorcycle. “I’ll lead. You stay close, and don’t forget to pull the clutch in and put the gear in neutral if you’re comin’ to a complete stop. Then you won’t stall out. Okay?” She shoved the shotgun and ammo in the side bag on the white motorcycle.
I grabbed the backpacks from the old motorcycle and gave her the truth. “I promise nothing until I get more accustomed to the machine.” I put the backpacks into the saddle bags on the black motorcycle.
“Harley, baby, say Harley. Or Hog.” She swung her leg over the motorcycle. “You remember how to start the bike?”
“Yes.” I straddled the one she’d called a Low Rider. “I remember.”
Sexy and confident, he straddled the Low Rider and fired it up.
I started the Road King. It was too much bike for me, but I’d figure it out. We needed to get the hell out of Dodge.
I glanced at him. “Walk the bike through the turn if you need to.”
Dominant and all man, he nodded once with the serious intent that made him who he was and revved the engine.
Still feeling him between my legs, gooseflesh skated across my skin. Lord Jesus, help me. Tarquin Scott made me want to make a dozen babies with him. And that wasn’t something I needed to be thinking about right now. Getting us to the cabin was priority number one.
Toeing the kickstand, I put the Road King in gear and gave it gas. Swinging a wide arc, I briefly glanced behind me to make sure my man was coming.
Holding the Softail between his legs, he walked it through a turn around. Then, like he’d been riding for years, he kicked it into gear and hit the gas.
Despite everything, a smile spread across my face. The sun starting to set, a Harley humming under me, an open road—I suddenly wondered why I’d stayed at Mama’s as long as I did.
I’d been trapped there as sure as she was trapped in her diseased mind.
Money aside, I could’ve left. I could’ve been free….
And I could’ve never met the man behind me on a Softail.
I glanced behind me again.
Keeping pace, he tipped his chin.
Lord have mercy, the boy was gorgeous. But he wasn’t a boy. Tarquin Scott was all man, and God willing he was going to be all mine for a very long time.
Focusing on the road in front of me, I used the rearview mirrors to keep an eye on Tarquin, but I was also looking for more company. As soon as Rush’s club brothers figured out the two bikers were missing, they’d come looking. And shoot, I’d forgotten to take their cell phones.
Slowing down, I pulled to a stop.
Wobbling somewhat as he slowed, but not stalling the Softail out, Tarquin pulled up beside me. “What is wrong?”
“We need to go back. I forgot their cell phones. If they’re turned on, someone will be able to track them that way.”
“We are not going back.” Tarquin glanced behind us before looking at me. “The bodies are not buried. They will be easy to find regardless. Flies will have already found them. Turkey vultures are next. They will scent them before sunset. Wildlife will give away the bodies’ location as much as any device to track them.”
I stared at him a moment. “How do you know all this?”
He paused. Then he did something he never did when he was speaking to me. He looked away. “I know dead bodies.”
Unease crawled up my spine. He wasn’t talking about what happened back at Daddy’s place. “You care to explain that?”
“We must go. I will explain later.”
“Uh-uh.” No way. “Explain now.” If he was some kind of serial killer or had some sick fetish for dead bodies, I needed to know. I wasn’t so far gone that I had to hang on to him. I didn’t give the exact location of the cabin. I had my own getaway Harley. If I had to, I could ditch him. I knew I was being somewhat hypocritical after the day’s events, but there was killing to protect your own life and there was killing for sport, and there was a huge difference between them.
His clear blue eyes met mine. “I was the digger at River Ranch.”
My mind stretched. It knew the word, but for some reason, my brain was misfiring and I wasn’t making the connect
ion. “Digger of what?”
“Graves.”
And there it was.
His flaw.
The chink in his armor.
The truth of his upbringing.
I knew he wasn’t normal. Heck, there wasn’t even a normal in my life. And if you looked at this whole thing from a practical perspective, society needed gravediggers. Fact of life, people died, and you couldn’t leave bodies lying around just anywhere. You had to bury them.
But Tarquin Scott wasn’t no normal gravedigger.
He was a River Ranch gravedigger.
I was sure that didn’t involve the sanitized version of regular folk’s burials with closed caskets and preserved bodies. And God help me, I was starting to imagine all sorts of places his hands had been before they’d been on my body, and I couldn’t go there. That wasn’t normal. Thinking that wasn’t normal, him being a gravedigger wasn’t normal, and not a single damn thing about River Ranch was normal.
“I know what you are thinking,” he stated without emotion.
His intense gaze unwavering, his muscles strong, so very strong, probably from digging and lifting dead bodies, and oh God. Lord have mercy, he didn’t know what I was thinking. No, he surely didn’t.
“I bury bodies,” he continued. “I do not have a fixation with death.”
Okay, maybe he knew what I was thinking.
“Your expression right now is nothing new to me.”
Oh sweet Jesus. “Tarquin—”
“River Ranch was not a close community, not like what is spoken of in scripture. It is a closed community. Everything was controlled by oppression, fear, and manipulation. I realized that when I was five turns around the sun. I realize it more now. Socializing was not encouraged but not nonexistent. That said, no one befriended the digger.”
My hand went to my chest. “I’m sorry.” And I was—for him, for my thoughts, for the whole situation we were in now.
Stoic, his expression didn’t change. “I do not seek nor want your sympathy.”
I nodded once. “I understand.”
“You cannot possibly understand, not unless you lived it, because not one single thing outside compound gates is the same as inside them. People speak differently, eat differently, behave differently. The landscape is different. The structures are different. Even the air is different. It does not smell of lingering rot, molding wood and decrepit septic systems. Your air is scented with freedom so vast, it is difficult for me to comprehend. Compound life was structured and small. Your life is vast and wild. I had a purpose on compound because everyone was assigned a duty. I did not get to pick. I did not get to protest. And I did not have the luxury of being sensitive to the subject matter. I had a job to do, and I did it. The alternative was to dig my own grave.”
I felt ashamed for my earlier thoughts.
“Do not pity me,” he clipped, reading my expression as easily as if I had spoken it. “I said I will not leave you, but the moment you pity me is the moment I turn my back on you.”
Offended, upset, my mouth opened. “I wasn’t sayin’—”
“No, you were not speaking. You were first thinking thoughts of regret for giving yourself to me, then you were pitying my upbringing as if it were not the past.”
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered.
His jaw ticked, and his knuckles turned white. “Do not be sorry. This conversation needed to occur, and I prefer it to be now than later. We have had it, and if you wish to be my wife, we can move on from it. Decide.”
“I… okay.” Wow. I took a deep breath. “That’s a lot to digest.”
“Every word you speak to me is a lot to digest.”
Double wow. And I was a terrible person. “Fair enough. I’m sorry.”
His jaw tight, his muscles tensed, he held the Softail’s handlebars in a punishing grip. “Make a decision. The vultures are here.”
I looked up at the quickly fading daylight as the sky turned to dusk. Three large, black birds, majestic but unsteady, teetered across the flaming sunset as their wingspan left brief black smudges in the otherwise picture-perfect sky.
My thoughts jumbled, and my head spun.
But then I did what I always did when I needed to process.
I thought out loud.
I saw it the moment I told her I was a digger.
Regret.
Her expression took on the mask of wariness I was accustomed to on compound. I was avoided by the brothers, and I was not looked at by the females. Except in the men’s quarters after nightly prayer, I was ignored. Then I was the brother who had a reputation for being skilled at mating.
I had no such reputation now.
I had nothing now except the woman next to me who rode a motorcycle with more skill than any brother on compound would be able to do. A woman who used words no female would dare whisper on River Ranch.
But I did not have her if she was going to regret my past and where I came from.
“Make a decision,” I demanded. “The vultures are here.”
She glanced up at the sky. Then she looked back at me. With the hues from the setting sun coloring her face, she began to speak.
“I didn’t have a normal upbringin’ either. I don’t even know what normal is, and I’m not sure anyone gets that kinda life outside fairy tales and kiddie books meant to make you feel good about the world we live in. So I got no right to hold it against you where you come from or what you went through comin’ up. But I can’t sit here and look you in the eye and deny I don’t worry about what that kinda background means for you and me.”
She paused.
I said nothing.
I would not sway her decision. Neither would I give her words of reassurance. I was not River Ranch anymore. I did not have to prove my self-worth to her. She had witnessed my actions today. She knew what I was capable of.
She nodded as if I had spoken. “And I get that me even sayin’ those words is hypocritical. I wasn’t exactly raised right neither. Seeing my mama OD, knowin’ my daddy uses his land as his own personal dumpin’ ground for club members he’s had enough of, I’m not ignorant. There ain’t an untainted single year between us.” She glanced at the darkening sky as if seeing the past.
Then she looked back at me. “So I guess it all boils down to one question I got for you.”
My muscles coiled, my jaw tight, I tipped my chin.
Her gaze held mine. “Do you believe in love?”
I knew the color of what she was asking. I knew the question she wanted answered without using the direct words to ask if I loved her, but I could not give her the answer she wanted. I could only give her honesty. “I do not know what I believe in.” I only knew what I did not believe in—the God she often spoke to, the man who created a compound in the middle of the Everglades, the mercy of humankind. I had no faith in any of those things.
She nodded slowly. Then the female who had given me her virginity, not the woman with a motorcycle between her legs, surfaced. Quiet, hesitant, she asked the question another way. “Do you think you could ever fall in love?”
Seeing her vulnerability made both anger and remorse surface inside me, and I did not have words for the constricting feeling in my chest. I did not like it. Nor did I like the next thought that occurred to me.
It would be easy to tell her what she wanted to hear.
It would be simple to put forth words of untruth and give her affirmation.
It would be effortless to lose all sense of being just and true.
It would be undemanding.
But it would be dishonorable.
I did not tell her what she wanted to hear. “There are no guarantees while we walk this earth. I will not make promises of falsehoods to reassure you. I do not know what the future holds any more than I know the location of your cabin.”
She opened her mouth to speak.
I held my hand up. “I am not ignorant. I know what you are asking without using the words directly, but I do not have an answer that will
satisfy you. I only have the truth. I have nothing. I have no means. I have no money. I have no shelter with which to house you. I am half a man without those means. But I am no man without my word. I said I would take you as my wife. I gave you that promise with the full knowledge of what that means. I will take care of you. I will tend to you. I will make sure you never go without the necessities of food, water and shelter. But until I get a footing in life outside the perimeter of River Ranch, I cannot guarantee the quality of those necessities.”
“I don’t need a guarantee on those things. That’s not what I’m askin’.”
“You are asking if I love you.”
Her throat moved with a swallow. “Is that so wrong that I want to know?”
My seed inside her, gunpowder on my hands, I did not know if I resented the question or the circumstances more. “You did not ask this question before.”
She glanced behind us as the vultures made their war cry. “Yeah, well, I guess now I asked, but never mind. Forget I said anythin’.” She put her motorcycle into gear. “We gotta go.”
Without another word, she took off.
I shifted the stolen Harley into first, gave the engine gas and lifted my feet. It was not a smooth start. Unsteady at first, I gave more gas, and just as she had said, the machine was easier to drive at a faster speed.
Quickly shifting into the next gear, giving it more gas, then shifting two more times, I finally matched her speed over the uneven dirt lane.
Wind on my face, the scent of orange blossoms, earth and grass speeding by, I had not known a freedom like this existed. I wanted to keep riding, but we would have to leave the motorcycles once we got deeper into the Glades. As the dirt lane ahead came to a crossroads, I made myself a promise.
One day I would have a machine like this of my own.
We rode for miles until the dirt lane through the groves ended. Despite the heavy bike purring under me, I was still mad as a hornet’s nest. I’d given that infuriating man behind me everything I had to give. I had a right to ask any darn question I wanted.
If I wanted to know how he felt about love, then I should be given a straight answer. Not some runaround about no guarantees in life.