He reeled back slightly, his mouth slack, big body loose then suddenly tight with tension. I watched as he closed his eyes for a moment, as he dragged in a fortifying breath. When he opened them again I was surprised by the guardedness of his expression.
“What changed in the last three minutes?”
I fidgeted because I didn’t want to seem like the stick in the mud, snobby asshole that apparently I was to my core. “Nothing, I just had a minute to see the error of my ways. I don’t even know you, and this,” I gestured vaguely, “isn’t me.”
His eyes narrowed on me. “I thought we agreed the best way to get to know each other was with you on the back of my bike? I don’t take that shit lightly. In fact, I haven’t asked a chick to ride with me like that in my whole fuckin’ life. So, I’m going to ask you again, what the fuck changed in the last three minutes?”
My eyes flittered nervously over the bikers congregated over his shoulder. They were still chilling, some of them smoking cigarettes and what smelled like pot, two of them were arguing almost violently but then they burst out laughing.
When I brought my eyes back to King, his were sparking with fury.
“It’s the MC.”
It wasn’t a question, but I nodded hesitantly. “I’m trying not to judge you, King, honestly. It’s just, I’m not that kind of woman. Trust me, I wish I were. I’ve always wanted to be the kind of woman that lets her hair down, dances on tables in bars and goes skinny-dipping on the beach. I’m just not. I’m the kind of woman who curls up with a book in front of the fire, who doesn’t drive at night in the rain because it isn’t safe, who has never even left the country.”
Shame burned through me like brush fire, a sudden evisceration of my confidence and will. I felt hollow and worthless as I looked up into his eyes again, unafraid of the condemnation I found there because no one felt that more deeply than I did.
“It’s not that I don’t want to do this with you,” I breathed through the sting of tears in my throat. “I just know that I can’t.”
“You don’t know anything about me. You don’t even know if I’m part of that life you’re so fuckin’ afraid of.”
“Are you?” I asked softly.
His jaw flexed. “Yes, but not in the way that you think.”
I waited but he only stared at me, the muscles in his corded throat starkly defined in his anger.
“You’re not gonna give me a chance, no matter what the fuck I say, eh?”
I swallowed noisily but didn’t say anything. Truthfully, I wanted him to push me. I wanted him to be the first person in my life to throw me into the deep end, to drag me from the light into the darkness and the shadows to show me what lurked there, to teach me how to play with the monsters instead of fear them.
Instead, my stupid lower lip trembled and I rolled it into my mouth to stop the shakes.
King stared at me hard for a moment before he cursed violently and ran his fingers roughly through his unruly hair. “Fuck me for fuckin’ digging some chick without the balls to see it through.”
I flinched but he was right.
“I’ll take you home.”
He was quiet on the ride back into town. The spark between us was still there, and I had a feeling it would always be there like an electrical hum at the super market, but it was blanketed. His frustration rolled off him, made his body tense in my hold.
I pressed my forehead to the back of his leather jacket, noticing for the first time that it didn’t have The Fallen MC patch on it. As the wind rushed past us, leaving this biker and me in a strange bubble of isolation amid the dark Canadian wilderness, it was easy to analyze my fears.
When the only time you’ve ever let go and really lived resulted in your brother going to prison for five years, you learn to keep a tight leash on your impulses. The only time I’d let my inner wild child out in the intervening years was in random, unsuccessful attempts to seduce William to the darker side of my lust. Now, here was King, trying to blow open the lid on my conservative values and lifelong propriety. Recklessness had never got anyone or me anywhere. Being a teacher, my favorite historical examples included Napoleon’s rash march on Prussia and Picasso’s depressive suicide over his lack of artistic skill mere days before his first critical acclaim. Literary cautionary tales also abounded, Romeo and Juliet being the most infamous, but more, Abelard and Heloise, and my ultimate favorite, Satan’s crusade against the all-powerful God. My life and my studies had taught me that nothing good came from the unpredictable and I truly believed that even though I’d left William for a more exciting existence, dating someone like King would only destroy me.