It’s for the best, right?
At least I tell myself that the entire way to LAX. Only I can’t stop my mind from racing. What if I pushed her too far? Can I handle not having her in my life in some way? Can she handle me not being in hers?
I don’t know the answers to any of those questions.
Remember when I said I’d be twenty minutes?
I lied.
Nowhere in LA takes twenty minutes. It’s more like two hours. If you’re lucky.
I meet Willa and Tiller, my brother, at the airport just as the plane is boarding to Seattle. I sneak past a handful of passengers when I spot Tiller’s tall yet lanky frame come into view and his mess of dark hair he’s wearing artfully sculpted into a Mohawk today.
Falling into line behind them, I act as if I’ve been there the entire time and smile.
Willa turns around to eye me, looking like she wants to murder me.
My smile widens. “Miss me?” I wink, trying to be cute. Unfortunately for me, my winks stopped working on Willa a long time ago. Probably after the first one.
Willa’s wide-set amber eyes narrow immediately. I’m mentally preparing myself for her to skin me for being late, but she says nothing and turns on her heel to face forward.
Okay, so now we’re on silent treatment.
Nothing new. Willa once didn’t talk to me for fourteen hours while we were on a plane. Believe me, I tried everything to get her to talk, but she wouldn’t crack. Did I mention I hate when people ignore me?
Only now, I’m actually looking forward to nobody talking to me for the flight to Seattle. I could use the quiet.
The captain greets us at the door to the airplane, exchanging handshakes with me, excited to know he has two celebrities flying in first class. Looking at us, you wouldn’t think we’re celebrities, but in the world of FMX racing, we’re pretty much a big deal.
“Thank you for flying with us today.” The captain shakes my hand and then pats my shoulder. “It’s always nice to have the Sawyer brothers on board.”
Clearly he’s talking about me and not Tiller. You got a quick glimpse of Tiller from behind but just wait until you actually meet him. It’s coming in just a minute.
I offer the captain a thank-you and a smile, I’m the polite one of the three Sawyer brothers. While the older, much scarier Tiller gives a mystified glance over his shoulder at me, probably wondering why the captain’s trying to shake his hand.
Take a look at Tiller Sawyer, aka, Wild Cat. Standing about six feet tall and intimidating as fuck. It’s best to keep your distance. He’s called Wild Cat more for his temper than his ability on a bike.
If you ever saw Tiller on a bike, he’s a man who’d do anything to put on a show. Off the bike, he’s completely different. You wouldn’t think he’s the same guy once the helmet’s off. Beneath the tough exterior he displays, Tiller is shy and quite private. I don’t know a goddamn thing about him, and he’s my brother.
When we take our seats, Willa glares at me, again. I look at her and then Tiller seated next to the window on the other side of us. He couldn’t care less what’s going on around him, just that people leave him alone.
Behind us in the second row, Carl takes his seat and immediately digs out his laptop from his bag. Carl’s the head of our security team. Anytime we travel, Carl and his boys come with us. Since it’s a short trip this time, it’s just Carl. He occupies the seat behind Tiller next to the window, his broad shoulders filling up the entire seat, a set scowl plastered on his dark face as he stares down at his laptop.
When my brothers and I are in Pasadena, Carl leaves us alone. It’s when we travel we run into trouble. Well, mostly because of my partying and Tiller’s temperament, but that can’t be proven to be a problem if you ask us.
I’m the youngest of the three Sawyer brothers. Tiller’s the middle one and Roan, he’s the oldest, but we’re all within three years of one another. Parents were busy for a few years.
We were raised by my Uncle Ricky, who took us in after the tragic death of our dad during a motocross race in Baha. He died of a brain aneurysm while racing a super moto. I was only four at the time, but I think in theory, I remember him. I have the image ingrained in me rather than Dawson Sawyer personally. He was a legend in motocross, so I’ve basically heard about his life through others and in countless magazine articles written about him since his death.
Our mom, she left when I was one. Haven’t heard from her since. Ricky thinks she’s dead but we really have no idea, and I don’t care what her reasoning was. Any woman who could leave her three kids under five years old is a bitch if you ask me.
“Nothing like getting here the last minute,” Willa mumbles, buckling her seatbelt, finally speaking to me.
My brow knits together. “I made it, didn’t I?” I shoot back in annoyance.
I know I shouldn’t be a jerk since she’s constantly covering for me, but I’m still on edge from the argument with Rhya. You didn’t think I forgot about Rhya that quickly, did you?
The look Willa offers me is as if I’ve slapped her across the face and I’ve lost my damn mind as she stares back at me. “Since when do you ever talk to me like that?”
Though I try all the time, I can’t be mean to Willa, and a smile cracks my lips. I nudge her arm, winking. “I’m kidding.” I don’t think I’m kidding. “Sorry I was late.”
Willa’s been my personal assistant and our PR rep for as long as I’ve been racing, so fifteen years. She’s like a pretend aunt to us all and keeps us in line. Or a big sister who doesn’t let us get away with shit.
Let’s face it, we fucking need it. Uncle Ricky can only do so much to control us and honestly, he’s just as bad. He’s a forty-year-old bachelor on the verge of a midlife crisis if that tells you anything.
“Where were you?” Tiller asks, stretching his long legs out in an attempt to get comfortable. It’s useless. He’s never comfortable. Anywhere. “Fucking around with her again?”
I glance at him, dark brown eyes finding mine and I shrug. I don’t need to answer him. He knows.
A flight attendant walks by and catches Tiller’s eye. She stops, her hand on the seat next to his and smiles tenderly at him. “Can I get you anything, sir?”
This could get ugly.
He doesn’t acknowledge her with his eyes and grunts out, “Vodka,” his focus remaining on the window as he flips the blind closed.
She nods but doesn’t leave and tucks her long stick-straight blonde hair behind her ear. I think she’s waiting for a please, but she’ll be waiting a long fucking time for it.
When she doesn’t move, Tiller’s eyes drift to hers. “Why are you still standing here?”
See what I mean? Not. Friendly.
If you didn’t know Tiller and you just met him, you wouldn’t talk to him. I guarantee it. Or at least I wouldn’t suggest talking to him because he’d probably pop you in the fucking mouth for even looking at him.
Tiller is a scary person. His mind is a terrifying place, but he also excites even the dullest. He’s also the most honest person I’ve ever met. He’ll never tell you a lie in hopes to make you feel better.
His dismissal steers her the other direction, toward the beverage cart. He certainly has a way with the ladies, doesn’t he?
Tiller rolls his eyes and shakes his head, picking up the in-flight menu and positioning his body to a slouched position. “People are fuckin’ weird.”
Adjusting his hoodie so it’s pulled down over his face and collapsing his Mohawk, Tiller groans and tosses the menu on the seat beside him that’s empty.
We usually book two seats for him that way no one sits next to him. Last time a man sat next to him on a flight to Vegas, Tiller threatened to cut the guy’s throat when he wouldn’t stop talking to him.
“I hate flying,” he barks out, mostly to me since I asked him to come with me. “I don’t know why you bastards make me do it.”
It’s true. Tiller has a phobia for flying and most of the time we have to get him drunk to get him on a plane. He doesn’t need to be going to Seattle this time, but he is for me. While he doesn’t like flying, I don’t like going without one of my brothers with me.
On the other side of me, Willa reaches over me and hands Tiller two pills. “Here, take these and stop complaining.”
The pills are probably a sedative. And for good reason. He once hallucinated on a plane to Spain and got kicked off for convincing a good amount of the passengers he was Superman. Now we drug him to keep him calm.
“Drug the crazy guy,” he mumbles, taking the pills back dry. “Where’s that fuckin’ vodka I ordered? Am I going to have to get it myself?”
Tiller truly is the craziest motherfucker out there. Both he and Roan race motocross with me. Right now we’re all competing with the Red Bull X-Fighters and Nitro Circus, but out of all of us, Tiller is the biggest daredevil. I’ve seen him do things on a motorcycle that shouldn’t be done, but he does them and lives to tell about it.
I can’t say Roan and I are any better. We all seem to have a death wish on a motorcycle, so they tell us. People see us and think, those dudes are insane. Mentally deranged motherfuckers who act foolishly.
It’s not like that for us. Sure, we know what we do for a living is insane. We’re not dumb. But people judge us without taking the opportunity to know anything about us or why we like doing tricks on a dirt bike.
Here’s a fun fact for you. Believe it or not, every trick I’ve ever done I’ve analyzed more than anything you’ve probably done in your entire life. I say that with complete confidence and I don’t know anything about you. I think about it intently before I decide I’m going to hurl myself through the air on a bike and let go of it midair in hopes I’ll be able to find it again, and land the bike without killing myself.
I analyze every aspect. What’s the risk? What will I get out of it? What are the chances I’m not going to make it? If I don’t make it, what are the chances I’ll walk away?
After I’ve thought about all that, I make my decision to do the trick.
Life or death, that’s not a metaphor for guys like us. It’s a situation we put ourselves in constantly, and we do it because we want to. That’s the crazy part about it. And when I do, it’s unlike anything I can accurately describe. It’s, I don’t know, euphoric in a sense.
When I’m soaring through the air, time seems irrelevant. A jump that could take two seconds feels like thirty to me and everything around me is magnified. In those moments, I’m free from everything else around me, and that’s why I do it.
Nothing ever made me feel the way I do on a bike, well, expect Rhya.
I used to feel that way around Rhya, but that was a long time ago. Before the abuse, before the drugs, all of it, she made me feel alive. Probably because most of the time I was with her I was doing something illegal that could land my ass in jail or like dirt bikes, dead.
Not anymore.
Now there’s only sadness and her using me. With the change in my thoughts, I think about her and remember in detail me telling her I was done. Was I? Could I be?
Before the plane takes off, I send Auden and text message to check on Rhya for me.
Me: Can you check on Rhya for me later.
Auden: Yeah, I’ll swing by later and check on her. Safe flight.
I turn my phone off and tuck it in my bag before takeoff.
I want to get some sleep before we arrive in Seattle in a few hours, but my mind keeps drifting back to Rhya and the things I said to her.
Like it or not, I’ve always been a Band-Aid for Rhya. She uses me to erase the bad. She lived a life of sex, drugs, and bad decisions. From an early age, she chain-smoked and fucked. She was deep into the lifestyle of fucking people over at the time, and I wasn’t just innocent to the ways of the world she was in, I was oblivious.
After that night at Glen Helen when she was raped by her brother’s best friend, she begged me to have sex with her. I don’t know why either. We were just friends, or I thought we were. Naturally I was attracted to her, but at fourteen I think I was attracted to anything with tits.
Every chance she had, she was kissing me and attempting to get me to fuck her. I was fourteen and she was thirteen. I wasn’t even thinking about sex like that, but she was for some reason. She grew up faster than she needed to and it wasn’t by choice. Unfortunately for me, because of that, she forced me to as well.
I understood it, in part, but then again, I had no idea what happened that night in Glen Helen would pave the way for what was to come. I really didn’t. At the time, I didn’t know about what her father and uncle did to her either. Jaime was just the dam breaking to the point of no repair.
When she was fourteen and I was fifteen, we began messing around physically. Innocent touching at first, but there is nothing innocent about Rhya Morgan. She was trouble from the beginning, and to this day I don’t know if anything she ever told me was the truth. I don’t know if any of it was.
After a few blow jobs and me fingering her a time or two, I finally had sex with her, my first time, her. . . I have no idea. It was when I was sixteen and she was fifteen. It was after a race at Glen Helen again, and she ended up sleeping in our trailer, and she got into my sleeping bag with me in the bunk. Luckily for me, my brothers were out causing trouble and didn’t catch us. Rhya cried the entire time. I hated myself after that night.
I turned my head because while she was crying, she wouldn’t let me go and kept begging me to continue. I didn’t want to stop, but I also didn’t know what to do. I wanted to erase the memories for her. It never worked.
And that was my first mistake and has continued ever since for the last five years. Whenever something bad happened to Rhya, she used me to forget about it.
Rhya and I have never had an actual defined relationship. Two weeks after she had sex with me, she was back to messing around with other motocross racers, and then back to me again.
It’s a fucked up situation. I stayed loyal to her for over two years and then lost interest and moved onto other girls. The closest I’ve ever come to a relationship is Rhya though, and that should tell you a lot about my current love life. Non-fucking-existent and usually consists of whatever girl manages to have the balls to come up to me. I’ve never even been on an actual date with a girl. Unless buying them drinks at a bar all night and then fucking them in a bathroom counts.
Probably not though, huh?
About the time the plane takes off, Willa looks over at me from her phone. “What happened with Rhya? Anything I need to know about?”
Willa’s in the business of protecting me publicly, and there have been a few times where she’s had to defend my actions with Rhya to the media and their ever-present curiosity into Shade Sawyer’s love life. They know about Rhya, her drug use and my inability to cut her out of my life. I hate that they know, too. Mostly because it paints the picture of me being weak and I don’t want to be known as that guy. I don’t know anyone who would.
I’m not entirely sure how to answer Willa’s question.
I don’t know what happened with Rhya. Now that I’m away from those lying eyes, I think I want to call her and apologize, and I know it’s wrong.
If I tell Willa any of that, she’ll slap me upside the head. For years Willa’s been my only voice of reason when it comes to the shit I put myself through with Rhya. If it wasn’t for Willa, I’d probably be dead myself trying to protect Rhya from her own life.
But I’m not, and I’m thankful someone is looking out for me because it’s sure as shit never been Rhya.
I breathe in, deeply, then exhale slowly and stare at the screen displaying a movie I have no interest in before me. “I told her I’m done.”
Willa’s voice is tender when she asks, “Do you mean it?”
“I’m not sure,” I answer honestly. “I want to be sure. I want to be done with her and her problems, but I also know she has nobody else. How can I just abandon her like that?”
Tilting my head in her direction, I look to Willa for advice. Something she usually gives me free of judgment. “She has Reece, Shade. He’s always there for her and doesn’t put up with her shit either.”
I nod. “You’re right.”
I wish she was. I wish I knew for sure Reece would be there for Rhya, but I know he won’t in the same sense I have been.
It’s Tiller’s voice of reasoning when we land that gets me thinking less about Rhya for the moment and more about the next couple days in Seattle. More importantly, our New Year’s Eve party we have planned for the penthouse suite.
“All my plans for the next few days involve eating, drinking, and pussy,” Tiller notes, right in front of the flight attendant as we’re exiting the plane. And then he winks at her, even though he was a complete ass to her the entire flight. “Maybe all of them at the same time.”
Willa slaps my chest. “You have a meeting at 9:00 a.m. Don’t stay out too late. I don’t care what you guys do on New Year’s, but you have to be at that meeting.”
I don’t pay any attention to anything she’s saying because in the car on the way to the hotel, she’ll remind me a half a dozen times and even set the alarm on my phone.
I’m more entertained by my brother who’s pulled off the hood of his sweatshirt for the first time and acknowledges the timid girl in front of him. The one who’s probably never been treated so badly by a passenger as she was by him. You’d think he’d offer an apology but sadly he won’t.
Want to know the worst part about this particular interaction between these two?
She’d still fuck him. If he even so much as indicated he’d fuck her, she’d have her legs up around her ears to get him inside her. I know this because I’m experienced in this department, as are my brothers. It’s not even a game anymore. There’s absolutely no chase involved. All we have to do is glance in a girl’s direction, nod, or whatever and they’ll come over ready and willing.
But for this particular flight attendant, it’s not happening as Tiller moves past her without another glance as we exit the plane.
“Screw New Year’s Eve, there better be pussy lined up for tonight.” And then he looks back over his shoulder and turns to walk backward, his eyes on the ass of the flight attendant. “I bet she’s never took it up the ass before.”
Willa shakes her head, unfazed by our crudeness. Believe me, she’s heard it all. She could walk in on us fucking a girl and keep a straight face. It’s happened a few times.
I glance over my shoulder, too, at the girl and notice she’s actually pretty fucking hot. Tight ass, perky tits, probably just barely eighteen. For a moment, I fantasize about fucking her in the ass. Blame Tiller. He put the idea in my head, and his. My dick stirs in my jeans, but that’s all.
“Yeah, highly doubt she’s taken it up the ass.” I turn back around, turning my phone back on to see if I’ve missed any messages.
Tiller watches the girl for another few seconds, seeming interested, but not enough to go ask for her number. Losing interest, he bumps his shoulder into mine. “How’s Rhya?”
He cares about Rhya. We all do even when we say we don’t. Again, I shrug, because it’s my body’s natural reaction to the question.
“Fucked up as usual,” I mumble, noticing I have a dozen messages from the guys I know up here in Seattle, all waiting to hear where the party’s at tonight or any other night during our week-long stay in the northwest. “She got out of rehab this morning and was already fuckin’ high.” We stop at the gate after exiting the plane, Carl moving around me to walk in front of the three of us. “I’m done. I told her I couldn’t help her anymore.”
Tiller’s eyes move to mine, squinting. Adjusting the backpack on his shoulders, he pulls his hood back over his head covering his eyes in shadows. “And you mean it this time?”
“I do.” Deep down, I’m not sure, but I know I need to mean it, for Rhya’s sake. Not just mine. Pay attention to this next part. The part where I walk away. Do you think I can?
No. I can’t. I can’t because she’s someone who begs me from her knees to make me think she means it.
But you know what, she’s silent now. There’s no more begging.
I’m someone who keeps my word. It may take me a while to make a decision, but once I do, I stick to it. Don’t believe me? Here’s proof. In the world of freestyle motocross, I’m known for my double backflip. I made my mark in history with it but I wasn’t always good at it. I crashed and landed on my head more times than I care to admit while I practiced that particular move. One thing remained the same. I said I was going to do it at the X-Games and fuck, I was going to do it. Anytime I say I’m going to do something, I keep my word.
Now won’t be any different.
As I scroll through my messages on my phone and I don’t see any from Rhya, I know she knows the same thing. I’m keeping my word. I’m done.