Eighteen
Five Years Ago
“You boned him? Or he boned you. Whichever.” Leah’s eyes bugged over the rim of her cappuccino mug. “I am so…proud-slash-freaked-out. If that’s even a thing.”
Ava felt a blush flooding her cheeks and sipped her latte to cover it. “I didn’t say ‘bone.’ ”
Leah rolled her eyes. “You said ‘slept with,’ like my grandmother would say. The point is – you did him. Like, for real, full-on penetration did him, right?”
Ava nodded.
They were at Stella’s, on the patio, with fresh-baked cookies and coffees, enjoying the lull just after the lunch crush. Leah’s father had suggested they hang out at his coffee shop, just down the street, but Leah had said, “Sorry, Daddy, but Stella makes better biscotti.” And flashed him a grin and shoved Ava out the door ahead of her.
Stella did make better biscotti, but they were after the privacy. Ava had texted Leah, asked if she was up for a snack, and walked around the corner from Mercy’s in the daylight, feeling bold and adult and more than a little wicked. He’d already been gone, off to work at the Dartmoor bike shop. “Don’t eat all my Pop-Tarts,” he’d admonished, and kissed her and smacked her on the ass and left her still half-asleep and dreamy in his bed.
Leah had barely been able to contain her questions until they’d been seated and served.
“Thank God,” she said now, reaching for a chocolate-dipped biscotti. “You’ve been pining after him your whole life!”
Ava didn’t protest; that was true.
“You know I want the details.”
Ava made a face. It felt wrong somehow, a betrayal, to gossip about Mercy, reduce him to some boy who’d smiled at her across the crowded cafeteria. Whatever they had, it wasn’t as cheap as that. “I don’t know…”
“Ugh. At least tell me if it was any good or not.”
“ ‘Good’ probably isn’t the best word for it.”
“Just tell me,” Leah said, verging toward whiny. “You had sex with possibly the scariest person I’ve ever met – I want to know how it was!”
Two fifty-something women having a late lunch glanced sharply in their direction, their eyebrows slanted at disapproving angles.
“Shh,” Ava whispered. “I don’t want anyone to know.”
“So it was bad.”
“It was amazing.” Because that was the only way she could think to describe it on short notice. “It’s just complicated.”
Leah sighed and slumped back in her chair, bummed not to have the gritty play-by-play. “It always is.” She broke off a chunk of cookie and rolled it across her plate with thumb and forefinger like a wheel. “People say women are complicated – no, it’s the men. They’re the ones that always make things difficult.”
An impromptu meeting broke out in the common room over a mix of afternoon coffee and beer. Mercy had showered, but wished he hadn’t pulled on last night’s shirt: he could smell Ava on it. He prayed no one else could.
“Okay, Ratchet,” James said as he lit what Mercy figured was his fourth smoke of the day. “Hit us with the recap.”
The secretary whipped open his zippered folder notepad and turned to the most recent sheet. He didn’t beat around the bush. “I talked to the agent – Doug Ambrose – listing the house for rent, and he said the last renter – Jonathan Smith–”
Several of them snorted.
“ – paid cash for three months’ rent and was cleared out by the time his lease was up. Very up-front with the money, he said, but he gave him a ‘bad feeling.’ Made him think something shady was going on.”
“Because it was,” Ghost said. “Did he run a credit check?”
“It was all above-board. Nothing off there.
“Three of our dealers,” he continued, “say they were offered the same deal as Fisher. They were selling outside the city, but the same thing happened. Another dead kid in Spring City.”
“Shit,” Ghost said. “Which dealers?”
“Huck, Junior, and Presley.”
“All of them ditched the stuff?”
“No. They’re bringing it to me. I figure we want as much of it rounded up as possible.”
“We do,” James said, a long drag on his smoke afterward.
“Assuming Jon Smith is an alias,” Walsh said, and was met by nods of agreement. “It’d have to be pretty decent to get past a credit check.”
“Means there was real money to put into fake accounts, to run up paid tabs on a fake credit card,” Hound added.
“Someone loaded,” Rottie said. “Or someone loaded funding someone else.”
“So we start knocking on rich dicks’ doors,” Aidan said with his usual bravado. “Sic Mercy on some of them and see who squeals.
Mercy grinned, but he was prepared for Ghost saying, “That’s assuming he’s even based in Knoxville. And if he isn’t, we’ve pried the fingernails off some very powerful people who’ll go running straight to the feds and we’re all doing nothing but yard-time pushups the next fifteen years.”
Aidan’s face colored; he glanced down at his hands, pretending they were fascinating.
“So we’ve got shit,” James said. He took out the last of his cigarette in one deep breath and relinquished it to the ash tray on the end table beside him. “Nothin’ for it, boys, sometimes that’s how it goes. We’ll keep our ears to the ground the next few weeks, see how it shakes out.” He was content to wait for further developments.
Ghost, though, Mercy could see from the man’s quick, harsh frown, wanted immediate action. Ghost, unlike his president, was all about the club being proactive when it came to protecting their reputation. James didn’t mind cleaning up the spill; Ghost never wanted the spoiled milk poured in the first place.
The club would be a very different organization once James finally stepped down and Ghost took the throne. Mercy didn’t know if that was a good thing or not.
“Go make me some more money.” James shooed them off with a wide grin.
Ghost muttered something to himself as he stood, giving Aidan’s shoulder a squeeze beside him that was fast, but supportive. One of those silent father-son moments that didn’t need words.
Like Mercy used to have with his father. Back before…
No, not going there, not as Aidan crossed the rug to get to him.
“Some douchebag brought a BMW bike in to be worked on. I can’t do anything with the goddamn imports; can you?”
Mercy met Ava’s brother square in the eye as he stood, smiling. Only a little bit guilty inside. A tiny bit smug. “I’ll take a look.”
They let Sunday go; Mercy tacked the image of her naked and soft in his bed that morning to the forefront of his mind and let the Sabbath bypass them. It was a home day, a family day. He didn’t know how to make time with her and not get everyone suspicious. So he waited, and the waiting made it better, the anticipation. And then it was Monday.
Ava made her appearance in the full glory of afternoon, a tattoo against the golden horizon, a flicker of heat and energy that tripped sirens in his head before his eyes could find her, before he could digest her long legs and her black boots and her old Zeppelin t-shirt. There a moment and then gone, hair flouncing down her back, keys in her hand, truck starting and sliding into gear, an errand to see her mother at the main office, and then back home again, without a wink or a grin, her presence alone an invitation. A white rabbit: Follow me back. Come after me.
Mercy fed Aidan and Tango an excuse about needing to pick up a part, and then the wind was in his face and the Dyna was eating up road and he was at her door before he even thought about refusing himself this opportunity.
Her bed was unmade this time, and she was in icy blue lingerie that looked like she’d just cut the tags off it. Down into her sheets they went and the mattress creaked and groaned and squeaked.
After, replete in the slanted bars of sunlight, Ava whispered that she loved him.
He didn’t reply, but he folded her love up tight like a note and pressed it deep inside himself, where no one would ever find it.
**
It was educational, her first full week of suspension. After that Saturday night in his apartment, Mercy dropped the guilty-adult act; it was too fresh and too on-fire to pretend they could go without. So they worked out a routine, making use of his lunch breaks, Ava taking time off from Green Hills and using the mornings and late afternoons to complete her school work.
When she could concentrate.
She practiced with her makeup and she over-glossed her lips. One morning, she spent an hour trying to curl her hair just-so with her mom’s hot rollers. It made her feel childish and stupid, all of it…right up until the moment Mercy knocked on the back door each day.
He was patient with her.
One day he pulled her astride him, and guided her with his hands on her hips, showed her how to ride him. Another, he rolled her onto her side and fitted against her back, entered her from behind and took her with aching slowness, until she asked for more. And another, he showered with her afterward, until the shower became pointless and she was convinced she was sweating under the onslaught of pounding water.
Friday afternoon, Ava propped up on her elbows, on her stomach, and tossed her hair over her back, glancing over at Mercy beside her. He was on his back, staring up at the ceiling, smoking, the cigarette bringing a new depth to the familiarity of her room. Dad and Aidan smoked in the house, when Maggie let them, but never in her room. Mercy smoking in her bed, tapping ash into an empty Coke can on the nightstand, felt intimate in ways that sex wasn’t, a new layer of closeness, people cohabitating.
He felt her watching him. Without glancing over, he said, “I thought I wore you out.”
Ava grinned. “Oh, definitely.” She was floating in the languid fields of pre-sleep, exhausted in a melted, happy way. “But I’m wondering something.”
His brows twitched as his eyes slid over. “Has anything good ever happened after someone said that?”
She rolled her eyes and ignored him. “How–” The question was harder to say than she wanted it to be. She felt that note of fear, the worry that giving voice to her thoughts would shatter this illusion they’d built over the past week. But that’s what it was: an illusion. And she and Mercy, that was real. That deserved better than stolen moments. She took a deep breath. “How are we going to keep doing this?”
His face stayed blank. “This?”
She reached down and laid her hand against his chest, the smooth bare swell of one pectoral, rubbing soft circles with her thumb. “Merc,” she said, a plea for some understanding.
His face changed, lines pressing between his eyes and around his mouth as he dropped the clueless routine. “I don’t know,” he said. “Thirteen years is a big gap when I’m me and you’re you.”
She sighed. “I know. Everyone’s going to think…”
“Yeah.”
“But they don’t get it.”
He twitched a smile, his eyes soft and warm, his face full of that sweetness he only gave to her. “No, fillette, they don’t.”
A lump formed in her throat. “Okay, so…we’ll just have to keep things quiet, until I’m old enough. When will that be? Eighteen? Twenty?”
But Mercy was shaking his head.
Ava felt her stomach sink; he was right: they couldn’t put a number on it. For the club, her father, it wasn’t about the age as much as it was the circumstances. There were too many memories of Ava perched on Mercy’s knee. The coloring book pages and barrettes and all that growing up she’d done under his guidance. Relationships didn’t take on new dimensions like this, not according to the rest of the world. Ava would never be able to convince everyone that this thing with her and Mercy – it was destiny. It was unavoidable. It was right.
“But what do we do?” she whispered, feeling a retreat into the childhood part of her, wanting to cry.
Mercy slid an arm beneath her belly and around her waist, pulled her over onto his chest like she was a little doll and tucked her head in under his chin. “We don’t worry about it, okay?” He stroked her hair. “I’ll do whatever you want me to, sweetheart, to make it better, but just don’t get ahead of yourself.”
Her hand was against his throat; she brushed her fingertips across the strong, stubbly underside of his jaw, found a little scar that she traced with a nail. “Will you just lay here with me for a minute?” she whispered.
“Always, petite amie. Always.”
Sunday came, and with it, one of Bonita’s big biker family dinners.
The old ladies had a tradition of hosting meals in turns, first one, then the next, and so on, everyone taking a hand at hostess duty. Everyone was invited, wives and girlfriends only, no Lean Bitches, thank you very much. A family dinner, as was always stressed, babies-in-diapers included.
It was being held at Bonita’s this time, at the James’ spacious ranch done up in bright Mexican colors, and the fare was authentic, as was always the case with Bonita. She’d made mole sauce for the chicken, and its rich scent filled the orange-painted room.
Ava stood at the island, chopping veggies for the salad, smack dab in the middle of the action, feeling like everyone could see the hand-shaped bruises on her hips through her clothes, half-terrified someone would ask her what she’d been up to. She wasn’t naïve enough to think anyone would be supportive of her afternoons with Mercy. She wasn’t just some mistake one of the boys had made; she was family, had grown up in this club, and still very much a child in all their eyes. They’d all hit the roof if they found out what she’d been doing. She felt no shame herself, but she wasn’t ready for the shame they’d rain down on her.
“I told Charity,” Nell was saying as Ava forced herself to sync up with the conversation, “that she could move back in with us. Just till she gets back on her feet. But would she have any of that? ‘Course not. God forbid the lawyers find out she’s living with her father again; Dustin would have the kids taken away like that.” Snap of her fingers.
Hound and Nell had three daughters, all named after virtues: Hope the oldest, Charity in the middle, and Patience the youngest. At home, when it was just them, Maggie rolled her eyes and told Ava those were the worst names she could think of for bikers’ children. And, true to their names, none of the girls wanted to claim relation to their aging outlaw father. Charity was going through a bitter divorce, though, and had no place else to stay.
“Oh, but he wasn’t too proud to take Hound’s money last year, was he?” Jackie asked. She snorted and tossed her bobbed red hair. “Bastard.”
“We have extra space,” Bonita said as she cranked up the heat on her Dutch oven full of bubbling vegetable oil on the stovetop. “That spare bedroom. Big closet, room for her kids. She can stay with us if she wants.”
Nell smiled the best she could given her haggard, deflated expression. “That’s sweet, hon, but you’re still Lean Dogs people. That’s the issue with The Bastard.”
Bonita said, “Ah.”
“Not to pry,” Maggie said, “but doesn’t Hope have a place for her?”
“Well her bastard’s going through his emotional crisis.” Nell threw up her hands. “These girls, I swear. None of them wanted to marry a man like their daddy, and look at the fucking pond scum they ended up with instead.”
Ava slid the knife through the head of romaine, cutting tiny crinkled ribbons of lettuce. Forward and back. Forward and back.
“I shoulda had boys,” Nell said. “Then I wouldn’t be having this problem. They could ride bikes with Aidan and not have their damn panties in a bunch about everything.”
Yes, Ava thought, it was easier for boys. Boys could join the club. Boys knew their place.
“Speaking of boys,” Mina spoke up shyly, and passed a hand over her belly. “I went to the doctor today–”
The rest of her sentence was cut off by a collective whoop from the other women.
And Ava jerked the knife too fast and sliced into her thumb.
The congratulations were shushed as she hissed in pain.
“Shit, baby.” Maggie spun to her and was around the island and at her side in a flash. “Lemme see.”
Ava pulled her fingers away and a bright slash of blood welled and overflowed. Her head gave a little spin.
“Ava,” Maggie crooned, her mother-voice on. “You’ve gotta be more careful. Here, come here. Put it under the water and see what we’re dealing with.”
She towed her over to the sink, a supportive arm around her shoulders, and Bonita pulled dishes out of the way so she could stick her hand under the tap.
The blood had traveled over across her knuckles, down into the creases of her palm. The wound was too new for there to be any pain: that sharp killing of sensation right after the knife slices through.
The water was warm, and it stung. Ava winced as the blood was washed away; it bubbled again and the process repeated, until the sink basin ran red.
“That’s deep,” Bonita said with a clucking sound. “You have to be more careful, bambina. You could have chopped your thumb off!”
“Well that’s a little dramatic,” Nell said.
Ava’s eyes began to lose focus as she stared at the blood and water swirling around the drain in the bottom of the porcelain farm sink. Without her permission, her mind detached, floating away from the moment, until the voices of the women around her were just dim murmurings of indistinct sound.
Just like that, as easy as breathing, pain had slid across her. One wrong pass of the knife, and there was blood all over. Tiny droplets on the tile at her feet. There had to be more of them on the curly green lettuce leaves. Injury was this thing that lay dormant, she reflected in this strange cartwheeling bubble of detachment, ready to shred you if you made one little slip. One miscalculation, and there was the blood.
She thought of the blood on her comforter, on her thighs.
Thought of Mercy’s hands on her.
For a moment, standing at the sink with her mother’s arm around her, she believed in premonitions, because she thought she was having one.
“Let’s see,” Jackie said, materializing at her elbow with a first aid kit.
Someone shut the water off and Maggie patted her hand dry with a paper towel, little bits of it getting stuck in the gaping slice in her thumb.
Pliant, doll-like, she watched Jackie dress the wound and pronounce it just fine.
Maggie flicked Ava’s hair back off her shoulder, pressed the back of her hand to Ava’s cheek. “You alright?”
“Fine,” Ava said. “Just a little faint.”
In autumn, Bonita and James spent most of their downtime on the three-season porch on the back of the house. Floored with wide tiles and covered with a half-dozen cozy rugs, the room was lined on three sides by picture windows that could be opened to screens in the summer and spring. A wood stove in one corner heated the space, along with half the house, and the furniture was deep, casual, comfortable. James had wired a flat screen TV to the wall that attached to the main house, so there was always a game of some sort on, year-round.
They ate mole chicken, rice, salad, and chilaquiles off plates balanced on their laps, the whole crowd of them scattered throughout the house. Mercy ate with RJ and Dublin, and drank Coronas like water as he stole glimpses of his girl.
His girl. That’s what she’d always been. How stupid of him to think that sleeping with her would change that somehow, wreck it, make it less important. How truly foolish to underestimate just how much stronger the connection would be after they’d been together.
She sat in the dining room, beside her mother, picking at her food, a long curtain of hair shielding her from some female conversation she didn’t want to be a part of. The bandage on her thumb snared his glance, spiked his worry. That hadn’t been there before. She must have done something to herself in the kitchen, while she was pretending to cook. Bless her heart, she was a klutz in the kitchen. Someone should have been watching her better. Someone shouldn’t have given her a job that involved sharp objects.
Her safety had been his responsibility for too long; he couldn’t stop the spin of accusatory, protective sentiment. He wanted to shake one of those women, ask who had let his girl get hurt.
That separation, in his mind – She wasn’t one of the women to him. Not a part of that mysterious cluster of chatting females he’d never understand. He didn’t categorize Ava that way – as a woman. She was…she was just this person. His person, that he’d always understood and loved. She was just Ava, and the three letters of her name held an essential meaning for him, one that he didn’t have to justify or explain to himself. There was not, nor had there even been, any confusion when it came to her. Guilt, yes – plenty of guilt these days. But his complete comprehension of her as a living thing couldn’t he shaken by something as simple as sex.
After dinner, his brothers piled onto the porch, quiet and full of food. Mercy saw a flash of dark shiny hair, a wedge of leather jacket, and knew Ava had slipped outside.
He waited a moment, said, “I need a smoke,” in case anyone cared, and let himself out the storm door, into the crisp, dark evening.
The moon was a high white wedge, wisps of cloud scudding across it, the stars bright as tiny torches. Someone on the block had a wood fire going, the sweet-and-smoke tang shifting through the air, tickling the inside of his nose. And somewhere under the smoke and fermenting crunch of fallen leaves, he imagined he smelled Ava.
She was tucked around the corner, out of sight of the porch, against a patch of house with no windows. Her arms were folded against the chill, one boot propped on the siding of the house, head tipped back as she stared up at the sky, the half-moon reflected in her wide dark eyes.
She noticed him, but she didn’t react right away. He saw the fast twitch of her lashes, the anxious flick to her fingers as she pulled a strand of hair out of her lip gloss. She was pleased; she had that excitement, deep in the pit of her stomach, at the sight of him with her alone like this. But she wasn’t going to leap on him. Seventeen, and she was learning how to contain herself already, grown up in a way that most of the thirty-something women he knew weren’t.
He was content to prop a shoulder against the house and watch her fight down her exuberance.
Ava lifted a hand and pointed to the sky. “Orion.”
“What?” He followed the aim of her finger, up at the aimless dotting of stars.
“The constellation.” There was a breathless catch to her voice that might have been about him and might have been about the stars. He didn’t know, and for some reason, that made him smile. “Orion. The hunter. See, there’s his belt, and his arm, his bow, his legs.” She traced the shape with her fingertip.
“Bad enough you grill me on Shakespeare. Have I gotta learn astronomy too?”
Her eyes cut to him, bright and moon-shaped as she grinned. “Actually, Orion’s the only one I know. Just don’t tell Aidan. I may have told him I could navigate a ship by starlight when I was eleven, and this would kill my reputation.”
Mercy turned and put the flat of his back to the wall, digging a smoke out of his cut pocket. “Good way to get yourself dumped outside of town and told to ‘navigate’ your way back, knowing your brother.” He found his lighter and stuck a cigarette between his teeth.
“Nah. There’s a line between torturing me and running scared from my mom. He wouldn’t be that stupid.” She watched him light up, gaze trained on the movements of his hands. When she reached absently to tuck her hair behind her ear, he saw the white flash of the bandage on her thumb.
“What’d you do to yourself?” It came out sharper than he’d meant.
Her eyes widened a fraction and she pulled her hand down, glancing at the injury. “I cut my thumb slicing lettuce.” She shoved her hands in her pockets – tried to anyway. He grabbed her left hand before it could disappear. “It’s nothing.”
Mercy turned her palm up to the moonlight, her skin pale and almost translucent; he could see the faint tracks of veins beneath the surface. Someone had wrapped her thumb up tight, but he saw the shadow of blood seeping through the gauze.
“This was deep.” It was a reprimand, one he couldn’t seem to twist into a simple comment.
Ava’s fingers closed around one of his, the index that probed the edge of the bandage. She said, soothingly, “It’s no big deal. Just clumsy me and a sharp knife.”
He glanced up at her face, at her soft expression, the little notch of concern between her brows.
“What’s that about?”
“You’re worried,” Ava said, straight-faced. “And that’s sweet, but I’m okay.”
Anger shot through him before he recognized what was happening. “Yeah? When in your little life have you ever been okay?”
A moment – a shared memory – burst to life between them, full-color, each detail laser-etched.
The two men coming through the bedroom window. Ava’s scream. Flash of the knife. The blood all over Maggie’s carpet. Ava eight and trembling, staring in open-mouthed shock at the gutted corpses.
As he shoved the memory back in its mental filing cabinet, Ava stepped in close, through the fuzzy projection of the past, and slipped her arms around his waist, inside his cut, laying her face against his chest.
“My hand’s okay,” she whispered against the running black dog silk-screened onto his shirt. “You know it is. Don’t be mad.”
It wasn’t just about her thumb, he acknowledged with an inward sigh. It was boys giving her hassle at school; it was her future jeopardized by this suspension bullshit; it was the idea of her going to college, a place he could never go, that would never accept the presence of someone like him; it was football douchebags smiling at her; and it was his own taint, his regrettable influence on a life that would have been better off if she’d never been associated with this club, or him.
“Mad,” he echoed, smoothing a hand down the back of her head, through her silky hair. “Fillette, you haven’t seen mad. This is overjoyed.”
She chuckled and he felt the small reverberations through his chest.
The faint swell of voices filtered through the walls from inside.
Mercy had never, not in his memory, been content to exist alongside a woman like this, the way he was with Ava. Women were treacherous, slippery creatures; he didn’t trust them. He didn’t dislike them, didn’t fear them or resent them – not most of them, anyway – but he was too smart to let them get to him. He knew their games, their favorite lies, the way their lashes batted when they were trying to flatter him. Ava, somehow, miraculously, was still the child he’d half-reared, underneath the woman she was growing into.
Her hands shifted at his back, slid under his shirt so she was touching skin. She had narrow palms, skinny fingers; he still wasn’t quite used to the familiar feel of them in this new unfamiliar capacity. He loved it.
“What are you doing?”
Her hands shifted up, moved forward, as she traced his lowest rib, nails scratching lightly, teasing. “No one can see us out here,” she said, mischief curling in her voice. Up, her hands climbed, up the ridges of his abdomen, pushing up his shirt under his cut, going for his chest. The fast glimmer of moonglow in her eyes told him she knew he liked it.
Little brat.
“Isn’t is supposed to be me putting a hand up your shirt?” he asked.
“Probably–”
He spun her around, so her back was against the wall, his shadow closing over her and sealing them in.
Ava could see the moon-silvered yard, swaying shadows of trees, and the outline of Mercy’s broad shoulders. But right in front of her was all darkness, this pocket of space that was just theirs. And when he made good on his word, and put his hand up her shirt, it was all the more stirring because she couldn’t see what he was doing.
They didn’t kiss. She could sense his face hovering above hers as she tilted her head back and let the wall support its weight. She wasn’t distracted, that way; she was attuned to every pass of his fingertips as he pushed her bra straps half-off her shoulders and tugged down the cups, stroked her breasts until they were heavy and tight.
“Can we?” She reached through the dark and found the waistband of his jeans. “Out here. Just…quickly. Merc.”
“You’re trying to get me in trouble.” But his voice was that low French-flavored purr that meant she was going to get her way. “You just want your old man to try and beat my ass, dontcha?” He flicked one hardened nipple with the pad of his thumb, back and forth again and again, rasping it until the sensation was so acute, she bit down hard on her lip and thrust her chest against him.
Her voice was a high, thin tremble, but she said, “You afraid?”
“I said he’d try to beat my ass.” Her other nipple got the same treatment – she was squirming now, as she unbuttoned his jeans, daring him. “That’s how you want it?” he taunted as she worked the zipper down. “Up against the wall in the dark like some groupie?”
If there’d been anything but desire in his voice, she might have stepped back and slapped him for that comment. But he was all Cajun loverboy at this point, and he was hard for her; she felt his cock against her knuckles, heard the little catch in his breathing.
“Up against the wall in the dark,” she said, “like you want me too bad and you can’t help yourself.”
That did it.
She barely had time to toe off her boots before he had her jeans undone and was skimming them down her legs, pulling them off her feet. He lifted her, and she wrapped her legs around his waist, felt the gooseflesh as the cool air chased across her bare skin.
Rustling of his clothes, some arranging, his warm finger sweeping her panties to the side, gliding against her wet sex.
And then he entered her on one hard thrust, drawing her down the length of his cock until it hit deep and she gasped.
His hands latched onto her ass and he pressed her hard into the wall.
“Brat,” he said, breathless, and nipped at her throat. “You manipulative brat.”
The power of him. He was strong beyond comprehension. Each time, each new position, left her stunned and marveling. Left her melting and reeling.
It was raw and savage, the way he took her up against the wall. He pounded into her, boiling with the primal lust her egging-on had brought up in his blood.
Ava pressed her head back and dug her fingers into his shoulders, her breath a high whining sound she didn’t recognize, the pleasure just as desperate as the act itself.
He cursed as he came, his hands locking onto her ass, body bowing with the force of climax.
Ava almost swooned as her own orgasm tackled her.
For a long moment, they panted and spasmed and waited for their breath to stop pluming like smoke.
When Mercy finally withdrew, he lowered her slowly to her feet, kept an arm around her as she swayed.
“Baby,” he said, and he sounded drunk. “C’mere.”
She squinted, in the dark, and finally realized what she was looking at. He’d pulled his shirt all the way up, his golden skin silver beneath the moon, the shadows carved deep between the pads of muscle.
“What?” Her brain wasn’t working right; it was on a delicious post-coital vacation.
“Bite me.”
She shook her head, trying to clear it. “What?”
One hand held his shirt up out of the way, and the other cupped the back of her head, brought her face in close to his chest, until she drew up on her tiptoes and was eye-to-eye with the smooth skin covering his heart. “I want you to bite me. Right here.”
“Are you serious?”
“Very.”
Ava tried to take a step back, but he held her fast. “Mercy–”
“Just do it.” His voice was ragged now. “Please, Ava, just because I asked.”
Like she’d asked to be done up against the wall.
Fair enough.
She leaned in – salty smell of his skin, faint whiff of the soap in his shower, salt on her tongue – parted her lips, and set her teeth against his pec.
“Hard,” he instructed. “Leave a mark.”
She glanced up at him from beneath her lashes, saw the harsh line of his jaw tensed, the intensity of his black eyes fixed to her mouth, and her stomach turned over, heat filling her again.
She put pressure, felt his skin dent beneath her teeth.
His hand pressed the back of her head. “Harder.”
She hesitated.
“You won’t hurt me.” In a low, dark voice: “I want you to draw blood.”
She clamped down, hard. The copper tang of blood hit her tongue and she drew back, licking her lips, the blood-taste moving deeper into her mouth, down her throat.
Mercy didn’t even flinch. He leaned down and kissed her, and she wondered if it tasted the same to him, like the realest thing in the world.
**
Suspicion was acidic, eating one drop at a time at a person’s sanity and confidence. But suspicion only got you so far. Maggie had suspected for days now that there had been a tidal shift between Mercy and Ava, some line crossed that had changed everything; shoved all the old affection and trust into boiling, deeper waters that would drown them or burn them. She wasn’t a tenth as oblivious as Ghost – she’d seen that propensity in Mercy from the get go, years ago, the way he wanted something shiny and special to keep in his pocket.
Had it been any other Dog, Maggie could have counted the days before the thrill wore off and the guy dumped Ava on her ass. No muss, no fuss, just a few bitter exchanges and he wouldn’t take one backward glance toward his flavor of the week. With any other Dog, Ava would have been a notch in the belt; bragging rights: I fucked the boss’s daughter.
But that wasn’t Mercy. Mercy and Ava together – too hot, too close, too beloved, too much of a no-brainer…wrapped up in a scandalous package. Ghost would flip. Aidan would flip. Maggie could imagine the gossip, same as when she’d been Ava’s age: Jailbait, pedophile, sick as fuck.
But all that was suspicion, until dessert time rolled around.
Maggie had made white chocolate, dark chocolate, and marble cheesecakes for the dinner, and everyone waited to be served…everyone but Mercy. Where had he been? Maggie wondered. She hadn’t seen him for at least a half hour. Ava neither, now that she thought about it. It was a big house, a big party; easy to get lost.
But Mercy and Ava stood together over the marble cheesecake at the kitchen counter, Mercy’s tall frame almost curled around her as he looked over her shoulder, smiled at whatever she’d said. His hand, for just a second, was at her hip, too low for casual.
He pulled it away and turned as Maggie stopped in the threshold, his eyes coming straight to her face, the mask not fast enough in coming down. Naked fear strobed in their black depths before he could catch hold of it.
Don’t say anything. Don’t take her from me. Don’t you dare. I will fight all of them. Oh, God, it’s all going to blow up, isn’t it?
Then his face blanked over and he looked away from her, hand going in his pocket, attention going back to whatever Ava was saying to him over her shoulder.
Maggie saw the little things: the clothes not quite straight, the high color in their faces, the windswept look to Ava’s hair.
The air shimmered around them, neon with possibility, the chemistry of them this hot, sticky amalgam of complementary metals.
Mercy had crossed the line.
Ava had either followed him, or invited him to come across it to her.
Maggie felt the lump well up in her throat, the sting of tears at the backs of her eyes.
It was so perfect, and it was so disastrous.
And they’d be sliced to bits before it was all over.
Nineteen
Five Years Ago
The next morning, Ghost sent Mercy, RJ, Walsh and Rottie off on a run. He announced at the breakfast table that they’d left before the sun was up; he’d called them all and seen to it.
Ava felt the bottoms drop out of her feet. A swift, painful sense of having been cheated. She had almost a week left of suspension! Already she’d been planning her afternoons, thinking about her stolen time with Mercy.
“How long will they be gone?” she asked, and hoped it sounded casual.
Maggie glanced at her from her spot by the stove, her poker face evidencing nothing.
Ava wanted to squirm in her chair, and not just because she was sore from last night.
“At least a week,” Ghost said from behind the morning paper. “Maybe longer.”
She bit her lip and tried to keep her disappointment from showing. Her first instinct was to call Mercy. Fire off a text. She wanted to set the clock back, to at least have a chance to tell him goodbye.
She stared glumly at her Rice Krispies and told herself a week wasn’t that bad of a wait.
Maggie watched a moment too long before she turned back to the eggs.
Ava had been raised a club daughter. She didn’t bother Mercy while he was away; instead, she threw herself into work at Green Hills, into her school work, into her tutoring sessions with Carter. Whatever his intentions had been the night he’d invited her to Hamilton House, he seemed firmly rooted in the friendzone now and didn’t give the impression he wanted out of it. Leah was unsure, at first – “No one that cute is worth a shit,” she said to Ava – but by the end of the week, the three of them were sharing Stella’s takeout over English notes at one of the clubhouse picnic tables.
One afternoon, Carter chewed dill pickle slices and eyed the two of them across the table, his face coloring self-consciously. “Don’t you guys” – he cleared his throat – “I dunno, doesn’t it bother you the way Ainsley and her friends talk about you?”
Ava shrugged. “I care that everyone else cares. That they give her that much credit. But people have talked shit about me and my whole family forever. It’s just…I think they must be really bored and unhappy with their own lives.”
He blinked. He’d never thought of it that way.
“Ainsley hates me because I won’t be one of her bitches,” Leah said. “And because I have better hair than her.” She gave her pink-streaked ponytail a twirl.
Carter laughed.
Ava missed Mercy that week. She always did, whenever he was away, but it was different now, more urgent and painful. She felt like she was trying too hard to be normal, to be chipper. It was easy with Carter and Leah, distracting. She felt almost guilty that she was enjoying being seventeen and stupid with them, but they took her mind away from Mercy’s absence.
At home, though: helping with laundry, vacuuming, dusting, getting her great-grandmother’s china out and hand-washing it so it sparkled in the cabinet. Maggie kept giving her the side-eye about that. Maggie never breathed a word, but sometimes she would respond to an over-enthusiastic question about her work at the Dartmoor main offices with a slow “sure, yeah.” Ava lay awake long into the deep of night, staring at her ceiling, a strange sense of doom creeping up the back of her neck. Her mother suspected. And Mercy was gone, and she just wanted him to kiss her on the forehead and tell her it would be okay.
She held out contacting him until the Thursday before she returned to school. At eleven-fifty-two, in the shadowed dark of her room, she rolled toward the window and cradled her phone in the covers in front of her face, bit her lip and overanalyzed her text message before she hit SEND.
Wish you could see the moon with me tonight. I go back to school tomorrow.
Afterward, her phone screen blacked over and she stared through the slatted blinds, at the almost-full moon bobbing over the hill at the top of the street.
She didn’t expect a response. She just liked the idea of putting words from her head into his hand, dreaming foolishly that it might make him smile.
Then her phone dinged.
She sucked in a breath as she opened the message.
Still can’t see this Orion you talk about. He only comes out for pretty girls. Hit lots of bitches in the face for me tomorrow.
Ava grinned until her face hurt. She envisioned him on a blanket roll under the stars, cowboy-style, his great hands folded behind his head, the murmur of RJ and Rottie’s voices in the background as they rehashed their usual Bike Part Debate.
I love you, she thought, and snuggled down into her pillows.
“You’re crazy if you think those pipes sound better,” RJ was saying over by the cooler.
“Bro, have you heard yours?” Rottie said. “Like a damn Fast & Furious Honda piece of shit…”
A lead they now knew to be false had taken them to North Carolina. Tonight, a campground cleared out for the fall served as a place to crash. Mercy had found enough wood for a fire and they’d built it in a blackened rock pit a camper had left behind. Walsh had bought a Styrofoam cooler at a gas station and stocked it with beer. Dinner had been burgers and fries. They were bedrolling it tonight, old school 70-something MC style.
Mercy had his head propped on a low fireside bench made out of a split log, the glow from his phone fading the stars above to dull pinpricks.
He waited a moment, wondering, half-expecting Ava to keep texting him. It was in her nature to talk, not because she needed him to listen, but because she was a writer, and that was how she showed love to the world: writing about it.
When the phone went blank, he stuck it in his pocket and resumed staring at the sky, not sure of his expression, hoping he didn’t look like some kind of smiling, drooling sap. He’d needed that: her two lines of type. This was a shit run that was getting them nowhere, and her voice in the dark was like a hand going down a cat’s back: soothing and stirring all at once.
Walsh, sitting up and propped against the neighboring bench, just another shadow in the night, was impossible to notice. Mercy had forgotten he was there. His voice, that low English monotone, came out of the dark, direct and sharp-edged, like a knife. Quiet enough the other two couldn’t hear. “Something’s up with you.”
Mercy glanced over without turning his head. The fire didn’t quite reach Walsh’s face, just a red flicker against his pale eyes. “I’m lying on a big-ass rock and I haven’t showered in days. Yeah. Something’s up.”
One slow shake of Walsh’s head: not buying it. “You slipped out of dinner the other night.”
“For a smoke.”
His brows went up. “You need to be very careful, brother. If you like young ones, that’s your business–”
Mercy put a bite into his voice, one Walsh would know wasn’t bullshit. “Yeah, it is.”
“ – but Ava, that’s a whole other issue.”
Mercy glared at him.
Anyone else would have caved and looked away, but not Walsh. “I’m just saying, is all. I’m the first one to notice. But I won’t be the last.”
Mercy rolled his head back, swallowed hard and searched for Ava’s Orion among the firefly specks above him.
Her first day back. The principal – Mrs. Mullins – had a windowless office crammed full of inspirational kitten posters, live ferns, and a thermostat that must have snapped off at fifty-five degrees. She was a bulky woman – not fat, just wide and solid and substantial – and Ava would have been disappointed had she been anything other, given her profession.
Ava sat beside her mother in the two visitor chairs facing the desk; the guidance counselor, a milquetoast librarian-type named Mr. Freeman, sat on Maggie’s other side, sideways so he could see all involved parties, sipping coffee in noisy slurps.
Maggie had dressed the part: black skinny jeans, spike-heeled boots, white button-up blouse, very fitted, and a black blazer; her hair was messy, honey-colored perfection, her lipstick and fingernails bright red, her gaze narrow and her jaw tight. She was this wild, vital creature, cooped up in this dead room; she looked dangerous and ready to strike.
Ava had gone for demure – as demure as her closet would allow. Bootcut jeans, low ankle boots, black hoodie, sparse makeup. She sat on her hands to keep them warm and shivered inside her sweatshirt, anxious to get this over with, anxious about going out into the school.
“The Millcotts,” Mrs. Mullins began in a voice too large for the room, “took quite a lot of convincing not to press charges against your daughter, Ms. Lowe.”
One corner of Maggie’s mouth twisted at the slip. Mullins had been the principal when she was in school. The lingering disapproval was a palpable thing. “Mrs. Teague,” she corrected. “And yeah, I guess we have you to thank for that?”
Mullins tucked her chin a self-congratulatory way. “I persuaded them that this was a childish skirmish gone wrong, and that it wouldn’t help their daughter to have yours arrested. I also assured them” – sharp glance toward Ava – “that there would be no more incidents, of any kind between the girls. The zero tolerance policy is firmly in effect. One more act of aggression, and Ava will be expelled.”
Tight smile from Maggie. “Don’t worry, ma’am. I’ve instructed her to just let the bitch beat her up next time, and then we’ll sue the Millcotts for the medical bills.”
Mr. Freeman choked on his coffee.
Mullins aimed a wagging finger at Maggie. “That attitude right there is why Ava’s having trouble getting along with her classmates.”
Maggie fired back. “That attitude is the only thing that gives my baby hope that she isn’t alone when it comes to dealing with the spoiled Mean Girls who run schools all across this damn country. You can run this place, Mullins” – she gestured to the room around them, the school – “but you can’t run my family. You keep Ainsley Millcott away from my Ava, and you and me won’t have a problem.”
She hid it well, but that got under Mullins’s skin, intimidated her a little. She’d never approved of Maggie – smoking in the bathroom, condoms spilling out of her pockets in the middle of Biology – but Maggie’s connection with the Dogs gave her pause. It gave everyone pause.
After promising not to make more trouble – it was all she could do not to roll her eyes – Ava was released back into the jungles of the school.
Maggie kissed her on the forehead just outside the main office. “Be brave, baby, you can do this.”
And when she turned around, just as first bell was ringing, there were Leah and Carter, her bodyguards and support system.
“You’ve gotta see the bandage on Ainsley’s nose,” Leah said, grinning. “So not in vogue.”
Ava took a deep breath and plunged in.