Rust

 

I turn around at the end of the street and watch as she climbs into the cab, still finding this experience a mixture of funny and blue-ball-inducing. There’s nothing quite like getting hot and heavy with a woman and then having her end it before it really gets going. Sure, that hasn’t happened to me since I was about fourteen, but I remember the feeling. The feeling like your balls are about to burst like overripe grapes. She climbs into the cab quickly, not glancing down the street, and so I turn away and head back toward my bike.

 

The walk does me good, cooling me off a little, and by the time I reach my bike, I’m able to view the afternoon as more funny than anything else. I climb onto the bike and start the engine, revving it loud, and then head toward the clubhouse. It was damn fun, I’ve got to admit, even if it didn’t go further. She felt incredible in my arms, her lips were soft, her body was tight and bouncy. Best of all was the way she moaned as we kissed, almost as though she didn’t want to be moaning but couldn’t help herself. I’m sure I’ll be hearing those moans for a long time to come.

 

Yeah, it was fun, but truth be told if she’s going to get my blood hot like that and then just take off, it’s probably for the best that we’re not going to see each other again. I like women, fuckin’ love them in fact, but I don’t like women who string men along. Malicious women. Women who try and do to men what my mother did to Dad, cheating on him, playing him, twisting him: killing him. Dammit. I push the thought far down, where it belongs. It’s odd, because I never normally think about it these days, having squashed it a long time ago. Maybe something about Allison …no, I kill that thought, too. Saving, talking, even getting close to a woman isn’t about to crack open my chest and spill all that shit out. No fuckin’ way.

 

I get to the clubhouse, which sits on the outskirts of the city, a squat wide one-story building split into two parts: the dormitory wing and the bar wing. I head into the bar, past the pinned-up leather of the first Damned member, long before my time, and past dozens of framed photographs of other Damned members, the latest including me and the others, kneeling in the sun smiling like fools. The place is empty apart from a pledge standing behind the bar, rag in one hand and glass in the other, and Zeke, who sits in the corner, sipping whisky. I take a glass from the pledge and go and join him.

 

Zeke is tall at six one, a couple of inches shorter than me, and he’s leaner. His face is open, welcoming, but it’s a chameleon face because it can change to vicious and terrifying or sincere and kind depending on his mood. His dusty blonde hair is tied in a ponytail, and his hands are covered in tribal tattoos. When I sit down next to him, he slides the bottle of whisky across the table.

 

“Where is everyone?” I ask, pouring myself a glass.

 

We sit in the corner, overlooking the bar, the pool table, the door which leads to Shackle’ office: the President’s office. And the long council table where we hold our meetings.

 

“Business,” Zeke says. “Or at home, or out drinking. You and me have been put on the unpatched, so we’re holding off on the regular running for a while.”

 

“Alright.”

 

I think back to the days when Mouse was in charge. Mouse—who was six seven, a giant compared even with me—became my father when my own father went to the grave. He was a cheerful, life-loving man, a man who didn’t take the business side as serious as the fun side. But then Mouse stepped down and Shackle took over, and Shackle definitely sees the business as just that—business.

 

“So our job is to fuck up the unpatched when we see them?”

 

“Yeah,” Zeke replies. “And to investigate, all that shit.” He glances at me, and then offers a small smile. I like Zeke, probably like Zeke more than any other man in The Damned; he’s my friend, my partner, and ’cause he’s smaller and younger than me, I sometimes see him as a little brother. “Something happened while you were out, man.”

 

“You a fuckin’ mind reader now?” I pour myself another whisky, and then drain it.

 

“Nah, but I’ve been around you enough to know when something’s up.”

 

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ, man,” I reply. “Are you Oprah now or something?”

 

Zeke grins again, scratching the scar under his left eye: a triangular scar left by the heel of a mark’s boot a few years back. “I don’t give a shit one way or the other. I’m just saying.”

 

We sit in silence for a while, drinking the whisky until both of us are tipsy, which takes a whole lot of whisky; the bottle is almost empty. I turn to Zeke and mutter: “I met a girl whilst I was out, on my way back from the protection job.”

 

“No shit? Where’d you meet her? I thought that job was an old man and his wife …wait, you didn’t fuck the wife, did you?”

 

“Why don’t you listen when I talk if you want to learn so goddamn much?” I laugh. “I said I met her on the way back. I was cruising and saw the unpatched, Trent and those pricks, looking like they were ready to tool up this girl. So I stopped them.”

 

Zeke sits up. “You saw the unpatched?”

 

I nod.

 

“Well, fuck …how are they doing? They tough?”

 

I shake my head. “I chased them off, no problem, and there were six of them. They’re green.”

 

Zeke sits back. “I thought as much. So this girl, I guess you did the normal Rust routine.”

 

“The fuck is the ‘Rust routine’?”

 

“You know what I’m saying. You did your fuck and chuck routine.”

 

Classic Zeke…he goes in for relationships, whereas I go in for quicker, hotter encounters. Zeke isn’t soft or anything like that. He just likes the longer experience of getting to know a woman and all that shit, something which has never appealed to me much.

 

“No,” I say, after a moment of reflection, ’cause I know exactly what he’s thinking: why am I still talking about her if we didn’t have sex, when I would never talk about another woman I didn’t have sex with?

 

Sure enough, he points that out. “I’ve never know you to talk about women much at all, really,” he adds. “There must be something special about this one.”

 

“Special.” We look at each other for a few seconds, and then burst out laughing.

 

“I’m serious, man,” Zeke says, holding his hand up for the pledge to bring another bottle of whisky over. He places it down, takes the empty bottle, and leaves us. As Zeke pours a drink, he says, “You have never, in all the too-long fuckin’ years I’ve known you, talked to me about a woman beyond nodding at her and saying you think she’s sexy. What the fuck?”

 

“You asked,” I snapped, taking the bottle and pouring myself a drink.

 

Zeke holds his hands up. “Calm down,” he says. “I don’t want to have to tool you up.”

 

“Ha, fucking, ha,” I reply. “I’d love to see that.”

 

We both drink in silence for another few minutes, and then Zeke says, “Are you still thinking about this girl, then?”

 

“I wish I’d never mentioned this,” I murmur.

 

“But you’ve mentioned it now,” Zeke says, and I can tell he’s just going on about it to twist the knife. “I really can’t believe that Rust Springfield, of all people, has fallen head over heels for a woman. I never thought I’d see the day when you got all doughy-eyed over a woman, and yet here you are. I guess you do have a soul after all. So, when’s the wedding, eh? When’s the big day? Look, I understand if you don’t want me as your best man; I guess I could give a speech which wouldn’t be too flattering in front of your blushing bride.”

 

“Such a prick,” I say, but I’m smiling at how stupid he’s being. The image is funny, I have to admit: sitting in my leather at a white table, this strange woman beside me, Zeke half-drunk blabbering about all the jobs we’ve been on together.

 

“The club is all the family I need,” I say. “I’ve got my brothers, I’ve got my work, I’ve got some sexy women now and then. That’s all I need. You’re the one who’s got a new girlfriend every New Year, like it’s your goddamned resolution or something.”

 

“Maybe I don’t see the club as the be all and end all of family and closeness and all that bullshit.”

 

“What do you mean?” I ask.

 

Zeke shrugs. “Maybe there’s more, like a proper family, like a wife and kids and all that stuff.”

 

I grunt out a laugh. “For us? For Damned enforcers? I don’t reckon I see that, truth be told.”

 

“Yeah, maybe I don’t, either,” Zeke says quietly, and then knocks back a slug of whisky straight from the bottle.

 

That adds an aspect of darkness into this otherwise cheery drinking session. We sit and drink for another hour or so before we’re called out on a job, but neither of us talk, just sit here listening to the pledge cleaning the bar, scrubbing the pipes, dusting the counter, vacuuming the offices. I sink into my thoughts, thinking first of my mother, the way she stared at me matter-of-factly, as though it was to be expected that she would move in and start a new family with the man she cheated on my father with; as though it was expected that I should just leave, find a new family. And then I find myself thinking of Allison, which Zeke is right about. I never do this. I never think about women like this. It never even occurs to me that I might. Is it because I didn’t fuck her? Is it because I want to feel those pert peach-like breasts, those long legs, that pussy, which I bet was wet for me earlier?

 

Or is it something else, something less plain than that? I tell myself that that’s ridiculous. I am not a man who thinks about women like this. I am not a man who sits around pining over women. I don’t give a shit, ever, when it comes to women. I like their bodies, their moans, but that’s about it.

 

But Allison …

 

Shit, man, I just don’t know.