Slick
When you come home after a long time away, you expect everything to be the same. Two years I was away, a prisoner, and all that time I would picture the Road Rage clubhouse in my mind. But not just that; I would picture it in my mind how it was when I last saw it. I’d left for the job in the afternoon. It was supposed to take a couple of weeks and ended up taking years; now, in the early morning, the place seems changed. An extra wing has been built onto the side, a dormitory for the growing membership. There’s still the red, neon letters above the garage area, spelling out the MC’s name. But the motorcycles are no longer kick-standing outside on the dirt like before. A car park has been built, smooth grey granite, and the bikes are there instead. Small changes, and yet it just tells me that life has moved on without me.
I bring the bike to a stop in the garage area. My body is aching from the long ride, Seattle to Denver in one twenty-hour slog. The garage is about the same, even if there are a few more fancy toys now; the calendar with pictures of naked women is the same, though now it reads 2017 and not 2015, and the smell of oil and metal hasn’t changed. The office off to the side is closed—it’s still early—so I leave my bike in the middle and go and take a seat at the back of the room, watching my bike and, beyond it, the road. Then I look down at my hands, knuckles scarred, and will them not to shake. I’m not there anymore, I remind myself. I’m not under the thumb of the Masked Man, who really wasn’t one man but many, those psycho fucks at the Flaming Skull taking turns to torture the prisoners. I remember once when—
I close my eyes, take a deep breath. Old and new scars clash all over my body: my arms, my legs, my back. Most of them are not deep, just surface, harmless fightin’ marks. Most of them are products of beatings and fights. But a couple of them are deep brutal scars left over from when the Masked Man would go into a rage, grab a whip or a machete or a pistol. I squeeze one hand with the other, trying to squeeze hard enough so the pain distracts me from the memories. Two years I was kept fuckin’ prisoner up there in Seattle, all ’cause a gun deal for one of my courier missions went south, and they decided the best response was to take a patched man hostage. Word was Grizzly thought I was dead, but when he found out he sent for me, and spent a damn long year negotiating for my release. Him and Clint.
Clint, the new VP, though new isn’t exactly the word considering my dad has been dead for a long time now. Still, I don’t trust Clint much, don’t like the way he looked when he and Grizzly and a few others came up to Seattle once for a talk with the Flaming Skulls. I was there, locked in back with the other prisoners, watching. And Clint looked like he couldn’t give a shit whether I was set free. I even saw the bastard laugh and clap one of the Flaming Skulls on the back like they were pals.
Sitting against the garage’s back wall, my eyelids are drooping, my head sagging. I yawn, stand up, begin to walk around the garage. Somebody should be here pretty soon. I think about going into the clubhouse, but after two years of being locked up with nowhere to go, I want to make sure my bike is tuned up . . . I’ll always have an escape route, now. I’ll never be left stranded like that again. That’s the only reason those pricks got me in the first place, a goddamn malfunction with my bike. Dumb luck.
I was wrong about the garage being the same. There are new pictures on the wall. There are pictures of me with the men, standing there with a dumb smile on my face. This was before I really got the fire in my belly. This was before I realized that a man needs real power if he is ever going to feel content with his life. This was before I realized that being a courier is fine but I need more; I need to be VP. I need to follow in my dad’s footsteps and I need to oust that Clint fucker and show the club what I’m made of. I study the picture, all of us from two years ago, me with that smile on my face, hating it. The past me, the me before I was put through the gauntlet with the Masked Man and the torturers and the fights and the spit. The me before the world took its pound of flesh.
Perhaps I shouldn’t care, but it pisses me off when I see the following pictures, the ones taken when I was a captive. All smiling, just the same . . . but I’m sure Clint is smiling a little more. Grizzly just looks the same, but then Grizzly has been like a dad to me since my real dad died, all those years ago. What’s it been? Two decades? Goddamn.
I return to my chair, getting impatient now. I need sleep, but I won’t leave my bike before she’s been seen to. If that makes me paranoid, then I’m paranoid, but I reckon that’s understandable considering even now when I catch a shadow the wrong way I see the Masked Man, watching, sometimes giggling as me and another prisoner take chunks out of each other.
“I’m just the messenger,” I’d told the Masked Man, dozens of times, always telling him no matter which him I was dealing with. At first, anyway, I told him a lot. But then I came to understand that in this life, the messenger is in just as much danger as the gunner, or the VP . . . and if you’re going to have as much danger as the VP, I reckon you should have the same power, too. I remember Dad, efficient, cold, powerful, and whisper to myself, “It’s time to prove myself to Grizzly. It’s time to prove myself VP material.”
I’m rambling; sleep hovers at the periphery of my consciousness. I lean forward and massage my eyelids, trying to work some life into them.
“Long night?” Her voice comes to me across the length of the garage, from the entrance. I open my eyes, lean up. She’s young, maybe around twenty, with tan skin and coppery hair which curls around her chin. She smiles, and I see that her teeth are dazzling and perfectly white. As she approaches me, she takes a hairband from her pocket and begins securing her hair in a little, flaring ponytail.
“You could say that,” I respond.
She’s looking at me strangely, but I don’t know why. She’s hot stuff, I’ve gotta say. Tall, thin, but with a womanly curve to her breasts and her hips. It’s been a damn long time since I saw a woman like that. A damn long time since I was able to just sit in the morning sun and watch as a woman moved gracefully toward me. I feel my cock getting hard, and stand up as she reaches me. She wears overalls, and her sleeves are rolled up to the elbows. I’m consumed with just watching her, the bright flush on her skin, her bright green eyes, her long night-black eyelashes.
She looks up at me. “So, what’s the problem?” She still has that same look, as though waiting for something to happen.
“No problem exactly,” I say. “Just need to make sure she’ll be ready if I need her. Plus I don’t trust the cowboys at the last shop, so I reckon she needs a once over.”
“Okay, we’ll take a look.”
Still smiling at me, that same look, green eyes probing. Damn, but this woman is the hottest thing I’ve ever fuckin’ laid eyes on, and the way she keeps glancing around, like a deer, like a nervous deer . . . I look closer, as she walks away from me, wiggling that ass, and that’s when it hits me. I sit down, watching her as she takes her tools and starts in on the bike. The last time I saw Brianna Shields, Grizzly’s daughter, she was a nineteen-year-old tomboy with a smokin’ body just waiting to come out, but still hidden. Now, she’s flowered, her body tight even in the overalls.
That explains that cute smile. She recognizes me, of course she does, and she’s shocked that I don’t recognize her. Well, I’m shocked, too. Especially when you consider that shortly before I became the plaything of some sick fucks in Seattle she and I had a one night stand. Especially when you consider that the Brat was hot on me when she was fourteen and I was twenty-one; I never did anything then, but I couldn’t avoid how beautiful she was becoming. Especially when you consider that hot, steamy night, the night that changed everything, the night I lost myself in a nineteen-year-old with a wicked tongue and playful nature I could never have guessed at. Her hair, though only chin-length, is much longer than when I knew her. She was a tomboy, a coltish, lanky tomboy, splotched with oil and reeking of the garage.
“It’s good to see you, Brat,” I call to her, as she works the wrench.
I see the corner of her mouth twitch in a smile, and then she shoots back: “Don’t call me Brat, Sky.”
I bristle. Sky is short for Skylar, which is a name I haven’t used since I was a little kid. It’s also what Brat called me time and time again that night, whilst I was on top of her and she was writhing beneath me. Sky, Sky, Sky, she moaned, and back then, sweating and consumed with the pleasure of her body, I didn’t mind it. When I asked her why she kept calling me that, she said that my eyes were sky-blue, and as we fucked she could not take her gaze from them.
But I can’t let her know how fond of it I am. Then the fellas might find out, and for the rest of my damn life I’d be Sky. “Don’t call me that, Brat.”
Bri giggles, but it’s a grown-up giggle. In two years, she’s become a woman. “How are you, Slick?” Her voice is strained as she works the wrench, my bike making a loud squeaking noise.
“Better, now,” I say, unable to help myself. When you’ve been locked up for two years and the first thing you see when you get home is a tight, sexy, vivacious woman, a woman you fucked a couple of years back, how the hell are you meant to restrain yourself? She’s bent over, ass pushed out, as she struggles with the wrench. I go rock-hard for her, watching the way the fabric of the overalls hugs her perfect ass. That ass was skinny once upon a time; now it’s round, full, ripe for spanking, more . . .
I swallow, but I can’t ignore how sexy she is. Her hair was more gingery when I last saw her, and I’m sure there were more freckles on her face. Maybe they’re still there and she’s wearing more makeup, but that, too, is a change. She was a tomboy who hated makeup.
“You were a kid the last time I saw you, Brat.”
“I was nineteen,” Bri replies. “Hardly a kid.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I decided to grow my hair out,” she says, voice jerky as the bike goes squeak-squeak-squeak, the only backing music to this reunion. She sounds nervous when she asks, “Do you like it?”
“Ever since you were old enough to say no, you’ve said no to growing your hair out,” I say, remembering when I was ten and she was three, and she screamed and cut her own hair whenever it got longer than a few inches. Even when she was she was a teenager, she never grew it longer than her chin. When I had thought of Bri while I was in my cage in Seattle, I saw a coltish long-legged teen skipping between bikes with oil on her face. Now . . . “It looks incredible,” I tell her. “Damn incredible.”
“I see you haven’t lost your charm,” Bri mutters, smiling, but not looking at me. I get the sense she doesn’t want to look at me, though I have no clue why.
I stand up, join her at the bike, standing over her. It’s been twenty-four hours, maybe more, since I last slept. But now I’m wide awake. I remember that night we shared, how shy and then, toward the end, wild she was.
“So,” I say, “did you miss me?”