She turned her head to me, eyes heavy but clearing before I could move away.
“He kissed me,” she whispered, mouth twisted with disgust. “He put his lips on me.”
“Hush, I’m with you,” I told her, stroking back her hair again.
“Lion,” she said in the voice soft and silky as rose petals. “Make it go away.”
“What, Rosie?”
“His kiss. I can’t sleep with it on my mouth,” she told me, her eyes blue as melted gemstones.
I shouldn’t.
I’d been careful to draw distance between us again after the spanking incident and I didn’t want to confuse her. But looking to her eyes, seeing the fragility of her soul shining out from them, I knew I couldn’t deny her.
“Okay, rebel,” I said softly. “Close your eyes.”
She immediately obeyed.
Gently, I leaned over to press whisper light kisses against each of her fluttering lids, then when she opened her eyes, her mouth parted to protest where I’d kissed her, I pressed my open lips to hers.
She sighed into my mouth and melted into the bed.
It was a short kiss, as sweet a one as I knew how to give.
And it rocked my simple world temporarily on its axis.
In the span of that minute with her plush lips on mine, her silky tongue in my mouth, and the scent of her floral skin and bonfire imprinted hair in my nose, there was no future for me but her.
An MC princess from the same biker gang my family was determined to see ruined.
A girl ten years younger than me that pretended to be seasoned, but who was as fresh and beautifully untouched as morning dew. I wanted to smear that innocence with my rough hands and taint it with my cock at the same time I wanted to preserve it, fight to defend it.
It was an impossible contrast, but in those seconds we kissed, it seemed wildly possible.
Natural, even destined.
I pulled away abruptly, my heart thumping hard, my deviant cock pulsing.
Her eyes remained closed, but she smiled and mumbled, “Love you, Lion.”
And then she was out. I could see it in the way her head drooped, and her breath deepened.
My rebel Rose looked so peaceful in her sleep, so at odds with her waking hours when she seemed provoked to take on the world. That was the beauty of Harleigh Rose, she was a walking contradiction, the rebel and the saint, the good girl and the sinner.
I sat in a chair beside her bed and watched her for hours.
I thought sitting sentry and seeing with my own eyes that she was going to be okay would be enough to quell the nuclear rage that blasted through me on repeat, but it wasn’t.
It only grew stronger.
There wouldn’t be justice for Harleigh Rose because sometimes, too many times, there was nothing the police could do.
I was faced for the millionth time with my own impotency in the face of unjustness and the feeling burned cleaned through my rational brain until all that was left in me was pure, bestial instinct.
I left her.
The alarm armed, my dog at her feet.
But I left her.
I got in my ‘Stang, Hozier’s “It Will Come Back” pumping through the speakers because the singer reminded me of Rosie, and I drove to Evergreen Gas where teenagers from Entrance Public like to hang after parties.
The stupid fuck was there, laughing with his buddies as if he hadn’t just tried to rape an innocent girl.
I parked my car in a darkened lot across the street and waited.
I didn’t have to do it long, it was late, and they were still children even though they pretended not to be.
Rick Evans said goodbye to his friends and went into the gas station to buy a snack before heading home himself.
Fate was smiling on me.
I was waiting in the shadow by his car when he finally ventured to it and I had him pressed to the metal with his arm wrenched behind his back, one hand over his mouth before he could even call out.
His open packet of Skittles fell to the ground and tumbled out like a broken rainbow.
I leaned into him, my voice hard in his ear. “Next time you think to mess with any woman, let alone Harleigh Rose Garro, you’ll fuckin’ think again.”
“Fuck off man,” he said when I released his mouth slightly. “That bitch deserves everything she gets.”
“Wrong,” I growled, “That bitch deserves all the good she can get, not shit the likes of which you tried to give her tonight. You don’t get that, boy, I’m happy to teach you.”
“Fuck you,” he tried to shout behind my hand.
So, I taught him a lesson.
One I wrote on his body in bruise blue ink, with punches I wove like calligraphy around his torso and face, the flourish of my signature in his matching black eyes.
He was contrite when I left him there, crying on the ground like the pathetic boy-man he was.