Camden (The Henchmen MC 18)

I couldn't, of course, ask him his favorite music. Which had always been my favorite of all the questions, whole-heartedly believing that you could know so much about someone based on their tastes in music, the songs that made them cry, the songs that they considered all-time-favorites.

But I knew what he liked to eat. Sweets of any sort. But more specifically, cupcakes with vanilla with white frosting, apple pies, and oatmeal cookies. But only if it was the squishy kind of oatmeal, not the hard as bricks kind. He thought it was practically sacrilegious that I tended to swipe half - or sometimes all - the frosting off my cupcakes and cakes because I thought they were a little overwhelmingly sweet.

When it came to movies, he was a fan of whodunits. From the black-and-white noirs all the way to the more action-packed mysteries of today. He just liked trying to figure it out, trying to pick up on clues, knowing what was a red herring or not. He got off on solving the case.

I wondered if, in another life, maybe he would have pursued a life on that side of the law instead. He would have made a great detective. Maybe that was even what he used to dream of being when he was a little boy. Because no little boys dreamed of growing up to be outlaw bikers. No one really wanted to be considered the 'bad guy'. They always wanted to be the superheroes, the cops, the ones who saved the day.

I couldn't help but be curious as to what had led him down the path he was on. I was old enough now that I knew that life was nowhere near as clear as I had thought it was when the naivety and the ignorant certainty of youth made me think the whole world was black and white. Older, wiser, a little more hardened by said world, I understood that very little, in fact, was black and white. Most things existed in varied shades of grey.

Including the motivators that led many down paths others saw as seedy or unsavory. Criminals, addicts, prostitutes. It was never as simple as people wanting to sell drugs or liking being high or enjoying sex. It was crippling poverty, horrid childhoods, abuse, systematic racism, a system stacked against the poor and needy. People did whatever they needed to do to get themselves out of certain situations. Or to escape into the chemical euphoria when they could get away.

So whatever it was that happened in the life of a little boy who probably wanted to be a good guy, that eventually led him into a life of crime, was likely not pretty, not as simple as wanting to be a biker, wanting to sell guns.

I didn't like calling him a 'bad guy'. Not even in my head. Because, quite frankly, I didn't necessarily think that being a criminal made you a bad person. There were plenty of moral people in prison. Ones who supplied drugs because there was a demand for them, but abhorred wife beaters or child molesters. Everyone - even criminals - had their own moral codes. What they did to get by didn't necessarily negate that.

It seemed to me that Cam had a pretty decent moral code. No, there was no denying he was a criminal, that he had likely done things I would never even think of doing. That there was a darkness in him.

It didn't mean he was a bad person.

It was funny to me, at times, how we somehow managed to live in the same apartment building. How people from such different worlds could live across the hall from one another.

You didn't move into a place like this one and expect to be neighbors with a member of a local notorious outlaw biker club.

You expected single moms. You expected college kids. Young adults. Those on a fixed income.

It maybe sounded a little crazy but I much preferred Cam over the potential of a colicky baby crying all day and night to his poor, zombie-like mama. Or the college kids and young adults, perhaps too keen on parties and loud music; the kind I couldn't stand - all manmade noises and heavily auto-tuned voices - or even the elderly with their TVs set loud enough to hear every word of their soaps from across the hall. Maybe I went through a bit of a soap phase in high school, but I was beyond caring what Sonny and Carly were up to these days. The show was never the same after Lorenzo Alcazar was killed anyway. Though that opinion might have been based solely on my wildly intense girlhood crush on him.

Apparently, liking 'bad guys' wasn't a new phenomena for me after all.

Maybe a part of liking having him nearby was simply that I knew he was a decent man and it was sometimes a bit scary living all alone. Especially in the kinds of areas I typically lived in, the only places I could afford. At least I knew he was right there across the hall should I need someone. If I was choking to death on a piece of bread. Or needed a spider relocated. Or was being chased around by a madman.