He claps me on the back. “The Death Lords are good for fucking, fucking up and throwing down. You think you can come home after three years in the pen and not have a goddamn welcome home party?” He knocks his fist lightly against my head. “They screwed you up but good inside.”
I shove him away with a laugh. It’s good to be home. The huge barn doors of the granary are rolled open and inside I see most of the club standing there, drink in hand, ready to fold me into their hard bosom. A strange emotion overwhelms me and maybe if I had a vagina, I’d burst into tears. Instead, I throw my head back, fling my arms out wide and let out the loudest yell my lungs can muster. I roar and the club roars with me.
Dad pushes me forward and I take turns enduring slaps on my back, my skull and my arms. At the end of the men are the women—nubile, barely dressed, with big hair, high heels and smoky eyes. Some of the girls I knew from high school but many I don’t. No old ladies, I note. Tonight promises to be rowdy yet I’m itching to head straight back home.
“New blood?” I ask out of the side of my mouth to Dad.
He squeezes my shoulder. “Welcome home, son. You’ve been sorely missed.”
A beer is shoved into my hand and I’m led to a sofa by Sara Ellerby, a cheerleader I fucked underneath the bleachers for almost an entire football season. The rec room at the granary is in the back. There are a bunch of sofas arranged in a big square and in the center is a pole.
At halftime, while the dance team amused the crowd, Sara and I would make our own entertainment. She looks as good today as she did back then. Better, if I’m honest. Her hips are rounder, emphasizing her small waist, and her face is a little slimmer. She’s wearing torn jean shorts, the frayed portion showing her plump ass. A black tank with the words Death Lords and the flaming skull is stretched across her generous rack. But for all her charms, she does nothing for me.
In all the days I spent in the joint, only one face starred in my fantasies. And it wasn’t the one in front of me.
She pushes me down into the cushions and climbs onto my lap. I take a swig of my bottle and push her off. No doubt her perfume is already stuck to my clothes which is only going to give Chels a reason to turn me away. I spent six months lying to Dad about Chels and me. After three years of brooding about it, I’m ready to go public.
Life’s too goddamn short to worry about anything anyone else has to say, including Dad. I love the old man, but I’m not creeping in and out of my own house to fuck my girlfriend.
I’ll give her a couple of days but that’s it. For tonight, I’ll put on a good show for her.
In the meantime my dick is ready for action and it is excited by all the bare flesh. But the only pussy I want is at home. Down, boy.
“What’s the first thing you wanted to do when you got out?” Sara asks.
Chelsea.
“Go for a ride,” I lie.
“We’re going to have a big ass party for you. A lot of nearby clubs are coming.”
“That’ll be nice.” Lie again.
I have no interest in big parties, particularly here, because if things aren’t worked out between Chels and me by then, we’ll be standing on opposite ends of the room or I’ll be chasing her around as she runs from corner to corner.
A couple of the girls start twirling on the pole and 90s rock is cranked into the speakers. Sara tries to climb back onto my lap.
“Think I’ll go talk to the old man,” I say. She looks confused but Sara’s not my concern here.
I find him holding up the back wall next to our vice president, Flint. I nod to both. “I need some air.”
“You not into Sara anymore? She told me she’d be your one woman welcome home crew.” Dad looks amused.
“There are plenty of women here tonight if Sara ain’t what you’re looking for,” adds Flint.
I run a hand through my unruly hair that is in desperate need of a trim. One more thing I need to talk Chels into doing for me. After we fuck will you give me a haircut? “I need space,” I tell the two men.
Dad nods sagely. “I feel you. Go on then. Get your space.” He takes my half consumed beer bottle and chucks it in the trash. “Be careful out there. Don’t forget to wear a helmet.” His eyes are twinkling and he gives my shoulder a good squeeze as he shoves me out the door.
Another time I might examine his weird statement but I’m in too much of a hurry. I swing my leg over my bike and reach behind for my helmet and pause. No, not tonight. It’s reckless to ride without a helmet and doubly stupid to ride at night without one, but the lure of the wind through my hair is too great to resist.
In the dark, the road seems endless as if you could ride forever until the flat land drops into an abyss. Death is at the end of the road. I just want to keep riding. I can bike this road out of town in total darkness because I grew up here, first riding bitch on the back of my dad’s Harley and then on my first motorcycle—a Triumph that I bought for five hundred dollars. Two skinny wheels and a frame made up that bike. I wrecked it not six months after I’d purchased it, leading Dad to send me, secretly, to motorcycle classes in the Twin Cities. We drove up there on the weekends and I learned how to corner, stop short and never, ever lay down my bike.
I know this road because I drove it a million times with my eyes closed when I was in the pen. At night, during the day, whenever I wasn’t thinking of Chels, I’d be on my bike whipping down the long flat straightaway past the Hoover farm and then around the curve near the Academy stables. Up the hill, then to the Hilltop Cafe and then down again. When I’m twenty miles out of Fortune, I pull off onto the shoulder, breathe the clean night air. Those tears I’d fought down earlier tonight welled up and I let them flow. In the dark, in the silence, out here where there is nothing but fields, corn and cows, my pain and relief and grief do not exist. As quickly as the storm overtook me, the cloud passes. I shake my head and run my fingers through the snarls the wind wove into my hair.
There’s a pulsing in my blood—a pounding, really. A desperate need clutches me and I nose my bike back onto the highway.
Chelsea.
Chelsea.
I hear her name on the wind, in the rustle of the long grasses. It’s the painted lines on the road. It’s home.
I gun the throttle and speed through the night like an arrow.
When I pull up to the house it is completely dark.
I smirk. The total blackout is a telltale sign Chels is feeling herself up. She believes that if it’s dark then she’s not really masturbating or some shit like that.
As if I cared. As if I didn’t watch her a hundred times when we were teenagers because she oh so conveniently left the door ajar. I watched her feverishly work her fingers beneath the cotton, her knuckles making weird humps as she tried hard to get herself off. She’d reach a small plateau, give herself a break and then go at it again because her tiny little orgasms wrought from her fingers weren’t much more satisfying than eating bacon for breakfast when you wanted a big goddamned steak. A temporary reprieve.
I wonder if she’s heard the bike or if she’s too lost in her own world. I hope it’s the latter. I want to watch her again. After, I want to pluck her hand from her panties and suck her fingers clean.
Shit, I laugh softly to myself as I roll the bike to the side of the house. I have so many things I want to do to Chelsea, I wonder if we’ll both live long enough to do even half of them.
Inside the house, it is mouse quiet and I can’t help but creep down the hall, skipping over the board by the bathroom that is squeaky as all hell. My night vision is pretty good so I can make out her form on the bed. There’s a bit of moonlight shining in, and in the blue-black, I see she’s lying on her bed, her face turned into the crook of her right arm while her left hand is busy in her panties. She’s rubbing herself pretty fast, as if I’ve come in on the tail end of her action. I wait, then, to see if she’s gotten any better since I’ve been gone.
Her hand makes jerky movements and she moans into the flesh of her
upper arm, but it’s a moan of frustration and not satisfaction. Poor baby. I push the door open and the sound startles her. She whips her hand from her panties and sits up.
“Who’s there?”
Who? That makes me unaccountably angry. I stomp forward. “Who in the hell would it be?”
“I don’t know, Grant.” She jerks a blanket over her body. “That’s why I fucking asked.”
“You expecting someone?”
“What business is it of yours?”
Shit, this girl wants me to blister her ass.
“You’ve been my business since your sweet ass waltzed through the front door.”
“I was fourteen, you prick,” she gasps in false outrage.
“You couldn’t stop staring at my package,” I counter. I remove my belt and toss it on the end of the bed. I might need that later if she’s too much of a wildcat. It’ll be a good restraint around her wrists. Good thing she can’t see me smile in the dark.
“You walked around with nothing on,” she protests.
“You still looked.” I pull off my shirt and then my boots, jeans and boxers. Grabbing myself and giving my aching cock a rough caress, I say, “If you aren’t interested there are plenty of girls back at the club who’ll take care of this.”
She bites her lip and then sits up, the blanket falling to her waist. I notice then she’s wearing an old tank of mine. The neckline hangs so low, the tops of her breasts are showing and the arm holes gape open showing the side of her fat tits. My mouth waters. I give myself another stroke but I’m in no danger of coming. My dick has had my hand wrapped around it plenty. It wants Chels. Her mouth. Her cunt. Her tits. Her ass. Chels and no one else. “You never answered me.”