MARRIED TO MY MASTER

by Nicole Fox

  “Took you long enough,” she said, teasing me.

  I stuck my tongue out at her and shook my head. “Listen, when you gotta go, you gotta go.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I don’t need to hear about your man habits in the bathroom. Come on. I’m dying to get off my feet. I’ve been here for hours.”

  We made our way outside. It was a lot cooler and crisper out there. I breathed in the night air.

  “Feels good out here tonight,” Ana commented as we got to my bike.

  “Better than in there. Kevin keeps it toasty.”

  “It’s to encourage the girls to wear less.”

  “Of course it is.”

  We laughed a little together. Ana slid on my bike behind me and wrapped around me snugly. It felt right, even if we were still in this little interlude where she was claiming that she wasn’t going to stay. Even if I was still trying my damnedest to get her to stay.

  Anyway. That wasn’t the point of tonight, and I wasn’t going to dwell on it. I looked at her over my shoulder. “Hey, you want a little bit of a detour tonight? I got somewhere I wanna take you since I’m going to be a bit busy tomorrow.”

  “Oh?” I heard the curiosity in her voice and knew immediately that regardless of her answer, I had her hooked. “Where did you have in mind?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  “You’re not gonna take me to some remote location and hack me up into little pieces, are you?”

  “Remote location? Yes. Hacking you into little pieces? No.”

  Ana laughed. “Ah ... What the hell. I don’t have work tomorrow, so we might as well. Lead the way.”

  She rested her head on my shoulder and I grinned, peeling out of the bar driveway and heading toward the highway.

  Despite the fact that this was still relatively new, it was a wonderful feeling having Ana back on my bike again. There was a place that I wanted to take her—something that I had thought about when we were younger and, for obvious reasons, had never panned out. It took us about thirty minutes, pushed us a little out into the boonies.

  Ana spoke to me over the roar of my bike engine, and the sound of the wind whipping past us. “You weren’t wrong about the whole remote location thing, Griz.”

  “Just hang tight. We’re almost there.”

  ‘There’ was an open expanse of land, I thought a meadow, or something. That wasn’t the point, though. I pulled us to a stop in the middle of it, where there was nothing—not even a dirt road—just grass. Ana looked at me curiously as I pulled her from the bike.

  “What’s all this about?”

  “I used to come out here with my dad all the time as a kid,” I explained. “He was real big on like star gazing and shit. Now I couldn’t tell you the names or anything, I wasn’t that good at it—but they’re gorgeous out here without the city lights in the way. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  I took her hand and walked her a little ways away from the bike. I sat down on the ground and she followed suit. I laid back, putting my hands under my head, and nodded at her to do the same. When she did, she gasped beside me.

  “Wow.”

  “Right?”

  Above us were hundreds—no, millions—of glittering, shiny stars. They were up there in abundance. Without all the city lights, we could see them a hell of a lot more clearly than we would have if we were back at, say, Kevin’s. It was insane what a difference a little distance made.

  “I remember,” I said, just starting to talk, because it seemed like the right thing to do, “Coming out here with my dad. And we would just lie here and talk. For hours, it would just be me and him. He’d talk to me about Mom and I’d talk to him about dumb shit like, I dunno. Girls and school and whatever else a teen boy had to talk about.”

  “That sounds so nice,” she said softly.

  “Yeah ... yeah, it was. My dad, before he got sick, this was his favorite thing to do with me. Like other people I guess would go fishing or hunting or whatever with their fathers, but Dad was. Well. He liked simpler things. I appreciated that about him.”

  “What happened to him?” she asked curiously. “Your dad, I mean. And your mom. They were never around when you joined up with the Skinners. You never talked about them.”

  “Ah ... yeah. I guess I never did.”

  I was quiet for a moment. Was it too heavy? Or no? After all, I was the one that had decided to bring up the topic of my father. I was the one that had decided to bring her here. I smiled a little.

  “My mom died a little after I was born. Complications with the pregnancy, and then the labor. It was all a lot for her.”

  “Oh. Oh, god, Grizzly, I’m sorry.”

  I shook my head. “No. No, don’t be. It’s totally fine. It never bothered me. I had a cool dad and he always took care of me a hell of a lot better than could be said for a lot of other fathers, so I don’t really have anything to complain about I don’t feel deprived.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Yeah. Anyway. My dad. He got sick. Cancer. It was one of those super aggressive kinds and rather than dealing with feeling like shit because of chemo and other shit that probably wouldn’t help him in the first place, he decided to just roll with it until he couldn’t anymore. By that time, I was old enough to take care of myself. So that’s what I did.”

  “I never knew.”

  I rolled to my side, facing her. She was still on her back, looking up at the stars. There were little lines of tears running down the side of her face.

  “Hey ...” I reached out, thumbing at one of the lines of tears. “Why are you crying? It’s totally fine. Like I said, it doesn’t fuck me up or anything it’s just. You know. One of those things.”

  “Don’t you miss him, though?” She turned her head, looking at me. “Your father?”

  I shrugged. “Of course I do. He was the man that raised and took care of me and was the one who helped make me who I am today. But I can’t sit here and pity myself, because sometimes cancer is a thing that happens in people’s lives. It just. You know. It happens. My father made his choices about it, and I made my own after he passed.”

  “Yeah.”

  Her voice sounded choked. I honestly didn’t know why it affected her so much. I kept my hand on her face.

  “Hey ... why does it upset you? About my father? I’m sorry for talking about all this; this was obviously super heavy and kinda not why I came out here with you—”

  “No, no!” She shook her head. “It’s not that it’s just ... Damn. I wish ... it was something that I had known.”

  I tilted my head, a little confused.

  “Why?”

  I sighed out a laugh.

  “Because back then, you always helped me so much. There was always something going on. You were always just—you were always just there!” she said. “And I never knew ... such a thing that a friend should about you. I feel like you did all the work and I did nothing. I don’t even know why you bothered when you were dealing with that.”

  I laughed aloud, loudly, I might add. She looked at me with a confused expression.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  “I’m laughing because I did all that because we were friends. I liked you. You made things fun and interesting and it was always nice seeing how you handled the other boys, and it was nice seeing you interacting with the other club girls. I just. I didn’t need you to listen to my sob stories. You just existing in the same place and time that I was in was enough for me, Ana. It always has been.”

  I could see her face redden a little under the starlight, and she turned away from me to look back up at the sky. She wiped away her tears, and I was happy to see that she was still smiling.

  “That’s ... so fucking sappy, Grizzly, oh my God,” she said finally with a laugh.

  I grinned and settled back against the ground, my arms under my head again.

  “What can I say? I picked up a few things over the years. Like how to woo the ladies.”

  “You were always wooing the l
adies, Grizzly,” she said. “Literally every club girl wanted to be with you. Or at least under you.”

  “I never would have guessed.”

  She scoffed. “They all practically threw themselves at you!”

  “Wasn’t nothing that I noticed.”

  That, maybe, was a small white lie. I noticed, all right. I just wasn’t interested in the club girls back then, only one club girl. Of course, Ana caught my bullshit. She let out another scoff.

  “You mean to tell me, with all those girls trying to hop on your dick, you didn’t notice. Not. A. Single. One.”

  I grinned.

  “Nope. Not even one.”

  “I’m calling your bluff.”

  “Call it all you want, Ana. I’m not budging.”

  She nudged at me, and I nudged her back. This led to a little nudging match that escalated until I quite literally rolled her over.

  “Ha. I win.”

  “How the hell do you figure that? According to what rules?”

  “The rules of the universe that say that the person who gets rolled over first in a rolly match is the loser. A big, big loser. Apparently you’re the sore kind of loser.”

  Ana rolled back my way, and smacked my arm playfully. I held it, as if really hurt.

  “Who’s the sore loser now?”

  “You still are. You’re just mean. A bully. I can’t believe this injustice,” I said, being as overly dramatic as humanly possible.

  “Uh huh. Sure. Just hush. You brought me out here to watch the stars. Let’s watch the stars.”

  We laid there for, fuck, I didn’t know how long. Long enough that eventually Ana ended up falling asleep on me, snoring softly. I let her lie there asleep for a while; I didn’t want to disturb her too much, and I just watched her. She was goddamn gorgeous in the moonlight. It reminded me more than ever why I needed to do what I was doing. I wanted to settle all of this once and for all, so I could come back to her—so I could maybe have her for more than these fleeting moments where she let me hold her, or the times that I had her in my bed and we both managed to forget for a little that she would be gone as soon as it was over.

  When it got a little too cold to continue justifying lying on the ground any longer, I nudged her a little so that I could wake her up.

  “Ana ... Ana, it’s time to wake up.”

  “Hm?” she muttered groggily.

  “Time to wake up. I’m gonna ride us back home.”

  “Mkay, Griz.”

  I chuckled a little and helped her up, leading her to the bike. I rode us slowly and carefully home, in case she decided that she wanted to doze off on me while she was back there. It made us get home a little later, and admittedly, I was getting real damn tired myself. It was okay, though. I was calm from the night out with Ana, and I didn’t regret her taking my time up like that, either. Most were either asleep or gone to their own homes by now. We went undisturbed as I led her up the stairs to her room.

  I was surprised when we got to her door and she wrapped her arms around me in a tight hug. She was shaking a little, clinging to me.

  “Ana?” I didn’t know if something was wrong, but if there was, I needed—wanted—her to tell me.

  “It’s—nothing,” she said. She looked up at me, and despite her demeanor, she was smiling at me. “Thank you for tonight, Grizzly.”

  “Of—of course.”

  She leaned up and planted a kiss on my jaw, and turned to go to her room. I touched the place where she had kissed me, like I couldn’t believe that she had done that, but she had. I had ... no idea what had just happened here, but I had more motivation than ever to make tomorrow go down without a goddamn hitch.

  Ana meant too damn much to me.

  Chapter Fourteen Grizzly

  I was out early the next morning, hitting the road with my purpose clear in my head. From what I had learned, the MC under Road Rage partied hard on the weekends, meaning this was my prime time to get out and take a look at what was going on with them. If they were hammered out of their minds, what kind of threats could they be? If I needed to, I would leave before anything got out of hand while I was there. If that wasn’t the case, then I would handle it the way that I wanted to then and there.

  It wasn’t all that hard to find the ‘clubhouse’ that these people operated under, after I had done some poking around. It was just way out in the cut, and a long ride down a dirt road that left my pants and skin grimy; I’d definitely need to shower a whole damn lot after all this shit. When I came closer to the house, I killed the engine of my bike, moved it off to the side of the road, and walked. There was a small wood at the edge of it, and I moved into the trees there, watching the house. I could see that it had no curtains on the windows, which gave me a good look into the house. There were a few people in it, but then they disappeared.

  There were only three bikes out front. I knew there were probably more than three people in the house, but at least there wouldn’t be a whole big company of them. I weighed my options.

  I could just walk up. Say I was asking for Road Rage, and see what answer I would get. I could wait until night fell, and get closer.

  My choice was made for me when I heard the crack of a twig behind me, and not seconds later, the click of a gun.

  “You make a m-move and I’ll f-fucking shot you.”

  Shit.

  I put my hands up, slow, to show that I wasn’t going to try anything funny. I knew better than that; I wasn’t Superman and bullets wouldn’t just bounce off of me, no matter how cool and useful that would be at the moment. I should have thought about the fact that they had lookouts. I hadn’t even considered the possibility; dope fiends didn’t prepare like that, did they?

  My miscalculation had me forced on my knees, my hands held behind my head. I didn’t move to look to see who had captured me. I didn’t figure that it mattered.

  “Hey, man, I’m not here to cause no trouble,” I said calmly. The man behind me gave a nasty, sick cough. Like there was snot caught in his throat. I grimaced.

  “Yeah, sure, you ain’t, asshole; that’s why you’re out here hiding in the woods, huh?”

  “I got lost.”

  “There a road right over there.”

  “I got really lost.”

  The man coughed again and my face scrunched up at the noise but I didn’t comment on it. I heard him fiddling around behind me and the sound of a dial tone before a faraway voice sounded. He must have been talking on a cellphone. I strained to hear.

  “Boss? ...Yeah, there’s some guy ... Spyin’ and s-shit out here ... No—I don’t think. H-hold on.” He jerked my head back, and I got a look at the man that was holding me hostage, albeit at an upside-down angle. The fucker looked terrible, all spazzed out. He was clearly hyped up on something but with that gun in his hand, I wasn’t going to try my luck.

  “You the d-dealer?”

  My brows furrowed.

  “What?”

  “Y-you the fucking dealer, a-asshole?”

  “No, I’m not the fucking dealer.”

  The man went back to the phone.

  “He’s says h-he’s not the dealer, boss ... Uh huh ... Right.”

  The man got off the phone and jerked me off my feet.

  “Boss wanna s-see who you are. Y-you damn stupid, coming up on us like this.” The man laughed through a cough, but I let him push me along the way, regardless. He had me by my hands, still up at the back of my head. It wasn’t ideal, but it was getting me into the house, and it was getting me an audience with this Road Rage fucker. That was a start, and I was going to take it with a grain of salt that it had to be done like this. Whatever. I could deal. I was a big boy.

  I was pushed into the house, which smelled like shit and sex and had a thick layer of cigarette smoke in the air. There were people all around, shooting up their veins or snorting or smoking. It hadn’t been a lie—this place was a cluster fuck of junkies and dope fiends. How anyone around there got anything organized enough to be called
an MC was beyond me—but perhaps with the lack of bikes out front, there was a reason for that when it was obvious that this wasn’t an MC, this was a group of fucked-up people doing fucked up-shit.

  I was pushed into the back, stumbling through a door into a room. It was a shabby looking shit pile, and though I knew my own office could become a bit of a mess, this was a different story.

  There was an old table in the middle of the room, surrounded by shitty folding chairs. It was covered in film and powder, a couple of lines here and there. Strewn across were baggies and needles of all sorts and green bits of bud. It was a clusterfuck. A couple of people sat at this table, but the person that caught my eyes was the one at the head.