I still remembered my first biker party down to every detail. It was the moment I embraced the woman I wanted to be and the man I wanted to be with for the rest of my life. The club’s Old Ladies and Harleigh Rose with her best friend, Lila, had taken me to the mecca of biker stores, Revved & Ready, to pick out new wicked cool clothes. Now, those clothes were a staple of my closet, one side filled with the feminine, almost old-fashioned clothes I loved to wear to work, and the other side a mix of denim, leather, and graphic tees. That was who I was, I’d found out, leather and lace, badass and romantic.
It was a duality that worked for me and worked for King because that paradox was echoed in his own soul.
Now, four years later, I was an old hat at being an Old Lady, and the party that raged around me felt right and normal. Heckler was making out with two women in the corner near the dart board while Boner hustled people for cash over pool. Lou was there, so massively pregnant even three weeks out from her due date that I worried she would pop them out given the slightest provocation. Her mother was there too, a not infrequent visitor to the club, wearing pearls and leather jacket like a lady gone bad, and she was laughing at Smoke as he mimicked shooting a shotgun for some story he was telling.
Old Sam, the owner of the record shop King and Harleigh Rose loved, was there with his wife, Rainbow, and Tayline were there arguing with Benny, Carson, and Wiseguy over darts, and even Susan Hobbs, Danner’s estranged wife and the woman who had taken in the Garro siblings when Zeus was in prison, sat at the bar talking to the Fallen cop, Officer Hutchinson.
Riley Gibson was there too, looking faintly awkward and out of place, but smiling as he drank with Axe-Man and the biker showed him the hatchet he kept dangling from his belt. King had insisted on inviting him as a show of faith and gratitude for a supposed tip-off he’d given the club. I was surprised by that because Gibson was the kind of clean-cut man who seemed hard-nosed about the law and abiding it, but I knew how the club had a way of flipping our perceptions on their head.
Lila was there too with Cleo, looking absolutely gorgeous as she always did these days, caramel skin exposed at her taut belly, tattooed flowers blooming all over her hips and up under the bared skin under her breasts. She wasn’t smiling, and I knew it was because her fiancé refused to be there, hating the club has he did, and more, because Nova was sitting at the bar with a biker bunny on the counter, doing shots out of her belly button with Ransom.
It was funny to sit on King’s lap, idly listening to him shoot the shit with Curtains, Lab-Rat, and Bat, happier than anyone had a right to be living their happily ever after, and watch the women I loved struggle after their own Prince Charming in leather.
I didn’t think Nova and Lila would end up together even though they were thick as thieves and so perfectly suited it seemed almost ignominious that they wouldn’t. Lila was engaged to a civilian, someone outside of the club, who hated the club, and Nova was Nova. The most beautiful man any of us had met in real life and also the most afraid of real commitment.
The pair who seemed more likely to engage in some kind of relationship was, of all people, Bea and Priest.
She followed him. It was something she did. Something she’d done since she was fourteen and introduced to the dark side of life through her sister’s love for the ex-con president of an outlaw motorcycle club. It was an odd sight, a pretty little slip of a blonde who looked more angel than human shadowing a stone-cold killer as if he was the god she was born to revere.
Priest pretended not to notice, and he was good at it. He was good at everything I’d ever seen him do, including endeavouring to be the least human man on the planet. But there were these glimpses, like sunlight through storm clouds, that broke apart his stoic features and turned him into something still not quite human, but otherworldly, demonic perhaps while Bea was angelic. There were an odd sort of yin and yang, and to me, at least, now well versed in the areas between black and white, they seemed well suited.
Not that Priest would ever give into those flashes of desire I saw like lightning streaks across his face. Not that Loulou or Zeus would allow the overly protected Bea to engage in anything whatsoever with their barely leashed beast.