“There’s no one but you, Chels. No one but you.”
Present day
That husky promise replays every time I bring myself. He kept his promise. After that night that he took my virginity, Grant never looked at another girl. He applied himself to pleasuring me every spare and secret moment. He’d wanted to come clean to Judge and I told him not until I graduated. I was thinking of another promise to extract from him when he got into a fight outside Rowdy’s with another motorcycle club—the Eighty-Eight Henchmen were motoring through town and wet their white supremacist whistle in our bar.
Fortune is home to a number of Native Americans and they didn’t take too kindly to the swastikas and other symbols of hate adorning the 88’s colors and skin. Grant stood up for his friend, Mato, and ended up killing one of the supremacists. If it wasn’t for the fact that the chief of police had it in for the Death Lords, Grant would’ve gotten off on self-defense. Instead he ended up serving three years of a ten-year manslaughter sentence.
I waited for him to come home and dreaded it too because when he got out, I’d want him even more and if those feelings were returned, then our secret wouldn’t last.
I couldn’t live with myself if Judge turned his back on us. Coming clean seems to be the least positive outcome but I don’t want to leave Judge and Grant either. I have no good answers.
I rise, wash my hands off and climb back into bed feeling frustrated, unsatisfied and worried.
Grant is over at the club where there is a shit ton of available pussy. I’d turned him away and after three years of going without, would I still be the only one for Grant? I knocked myself on the head. If I wanted to stay here with my family it meant that Grant needed to move on. Maybe if he found a new girl, I can finally break free. But deep down I know that is a lie.
I only had one lover and I only want one lover.
I am in such deep shit.
2
WRECKER
The clubhouse looks no different. It’s an old granary. Chelsea once pointed out that the middle section is shaped like a tall thin milk carton. After that Dad and I couldn’t unsee it. There are two sloped roofs on either side and a belt conveyor attached from the third floor into a nearby silo. The silo is empty and serves as the porthole for Bang Bang’s prepper tendencies. He’s the club’s Warlord, in charge of tactical strategy. His focus is on stockpiling weaponry, food, water tablets and who knows what else for the impending apocalypse. No one mocks this because he may be right and we’ll all have to live in an underground concrete box eating jerky and drinking reconstituted piss, but at least we’ll have food and water.
Kind of like prison.
Maybe I can convince Bang Bang to build us an underground basketball hoop because without the yard exercise daily, I would’ve shanked myself inside. Three years is a long fucking time.
At least I didn’t serve five like Saxon Gray, the president of Hellfire Riders, over in Oregon. He’d turned a Henchman into a vegetable with one swift kick to the head. Rumor has it Gray had been protecting Little Red, the daughter of a rival MC president, from rape but nothing came of that defense.
Everyone saw my attacker come at me with a motorcycle chain. When he ended up dead because I was quicker, stronger and less drunk, the Henchmen wanted someone to pay. Fortunately for them, Chief of Police Eric Schmidt is in their back pocket, turning a blind eye to the meth and guns that are trafficked along the Chippewa River. He pushed through my manslaughter conviction by riding the county attorney hard.
It is what it is and that part of my life is over. I don’t regret killing the Henchman, only that I got caught. I’ll be more careful next time.
Outside the clubhouse almost twenty bikes are already leaning on their stands. I cut the throttle, turn off the bike and climb off. Unbuckling my helmet, I wait for Dad. “Call in the troops, did you?”
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.