Zane
Ah, New Orleans. The Big Easy. Easy to lose yourself in. Easy to find yourself in. You never knew what was waiting behind the next corner. Like a beautiful woman in a small, hole-in-the-wall flower shop, for example. It wasn’t by chance I’d stumbled into her shop. The infinite wisdom of Google had simply plotted my route and shown me which flower shops were along the way. Fancy Florals had given me an excuse to ride down my favorite part of the city, where the old met the new and collided in a bustle of sound and light.
I left that part in the rearview now, aiming my bike toward the next stop on the tour. As much as I loved New Orleans, I wished I could leave it today. What once was sweet had curdled into something foul tasting on my tongue. My father’s recent incarceration had hefted a responsibility too large on my shoulders, something I’d never asked for and never wanted: the Iron Reapers.
The club members were good guys, and I always enjoyed spending time with them, but now I was up to my neck in spreadsheets, balancing finances and overseeing the running of the business. It was fucking infuriating. My dad left me a god-awful mess too. Apparently, Stan had been too busy getting sloppy at his shady dealings to bother making sure everything was balanced in his business. And now I, the goddamn perfectionist, was forced to fix it.
Today was one of the few days in the past week I’d gotten out on my bike. I’d been stuck inside trying to form some plan as to how to save the business from tanking, half wondering if I should just let it. But I knew the guys; I knew that the Iron Reapers was their life as much as it was mine. It was something I could do to myself, but not anything I could do to them.
The longer I spent thinking about it, the more I wished I’d just let the business crash and gotten out of Dodge before the fallout could reach me. But that wasn’t really me. That was the part inside of me that I never listened to but always heard nonetheless. Most people would have thought the voice weak, but I knew it for what it really was—cruel. I wasn’t afraid of going to this funeral, I just didn’t care. I wanted to pursue my own life instead of running a motorcycle club, even though I knew I was the only one who could drag it out of the shitter. That cruel voice could leave them all wallowing in my dust as I rode off into the night, laughing as I went.
I battled that voice constantly. I had no doubt in my mind that my father had his own, and had battled it too. Only he’d lost.
I wasn’t going to lose. I wasn’t a goddamn sociopath.
Anxious for a bit of a run, I drove through the streets around the French Quarter, just losing myself in it for a while. I wasn’t sure what to do for the next few hours. I wasn’t going to Graham’s funeral, but I figured I should pass along my condolences to Asa in the same way I was sending flowers to Graham’s family. I parked my bike and pulled my phone out, texting her and asking her if she was free to meet. I made sure to mention that if she weren’t feeling up for seeing anyone, I would understand.
Asa texted me back right away. She was in the French Quarter, doing a little shopping. How long until I could be there? It seemed a bit strange to me that her boyfriend had died two days ago and she was out shopping already, but everyone dealt with grief differently. When my mother died, I’d shut down for two weeks, refusing to talk to anyone. I’d been only ten years old at the time. My dad, fond of fatherly knowledge as he was, had tried beating the blues out of me. That had only made me lock down harder, go deeper into myself where I couldn’t feel his blows.
He left me alone after that. He’d been leaving me alone ever since, until the day he got locked up and hoisted his life’s work on me. Typical.
I agreed to meet Asa at a coffee shop a few blocks down, and I climbed off my bike and stretched my legs as I walked. The day was just between the stages of warm and hot. I could tell it was going to be a sweltering summer, and I welcomed it. Sweating made me feel like I was seeping stress through my skin. Maybe that’s why I liked sex so much. Maybe that’s why I liked fighting so much.
Asa was already there when I approached. I spotted her a mile away, even through the crowd. Her long auburn hair was piled high on her head in one of those stupid buns she always wore. I never understood why the damn thing had to go on top of her head instead of behind it, but she had claimed it was the pinnacle of messy hair fashion. She smiled and waved at me. Odd.
The air was filled with the white noise of chatter and a nearby busker strumming a guitar, but her keening voice cut through it like a knife. “Zane!”
As if I didn’t see her. As if anybody could avoid seeing her. She was like a goddamn magnet for the eyes. Her hair, her smile, her laughing eyes—everything shouted: “Look at me!” Add to that a wave and a greeting and she may as well have had a neon sign above her head.
Asa was beautiful in the way that bears were cute, though. You could imagine yourself with her in all sorts of ways, but you knew that it would only ever end with getting your guts dragged out of your stomach while you slept. There was something not quite right about the graceful slope of her jaw and the freckles on her nose, something that you only noticed after near disembowelment. I was sure most people saw a gorgeous redhead with legs for days, but I saw a perpetual annoyance who was way too aware of her own attributes. Presumably, that hadn’t been a problem for Graham. Though maybe that’s what had driven him to drink so much the night he died.
Trying to shuck off the feelings of ire that were already bubbling up in Asa’s presence, I slung myself into the chair across the table from her and forced a gentle smile on my face.
“My condolences, Asa,” I said. “Graham was a great guy.” I didn't know that. I’d met him only once. It was a damn big club, and I kept with my own guys. But it’s what I was supposed to say, right?
Her hand shot over the table and landed on mine, curling her delicate fingers around it. If she expected me to take her hand, she expected too much. I was doing what my father would have done—showing respect. I wasn’t there to comfort a woman I wouldn’t normally have spent any more time with than absolutely necessary.
“What have you been up to, stranger?” she asked. Her tone was a sharp contrast from the intended gesture of the hand still laying on mine. She sounded cheerful and mischievous. Happy.
I showed nothing on my face but studied her in detail. Was this her coping mechanism? Why?
“I’ve been running a club,” I replied steadily. “It’s been keeping me busy most of the time.”
She nodded in understanding. “I heard. Look at you!” She winked. “Big boss man. That’s totally hot.”
And like that, she had reached the finite limit of her vocabulary. She wasn’t a dumb girl. She was too scheming to be dumb. But she wasted her energy on endless mental posturing, fluffing her feathers and constantly searching for a way to get an edge on all the other hens. If she spent as much time reading as she did making other people miserable, she’d be a goddamn genius.
I pulled my hand back. “I’m glad to see you haven’t been consumed by the tragedy.”
In a way that only she could, she picked up my sarcasm without actually understanding it. “Oh, Zaney. I’m just living day to day, you know?” She shrugged theatrically. “I’m beginning to realize what’s really important in life. Trying to get the bigger picture.”
She was getting philosophical now? Good for her.
“And what’s important?” I was a glutton for punishment. I shouldn’t have asked.
“I can think of a few things off the top of my head. It’s just that most of them aren’t really public places kind of things.”
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. It was time to go. I rose from my chair and forced a tight-lipped smile, inclining my head toward her. “I truly am sorry for your loss, Asa.” Mostly because it meant I was apparently back on her radar. “Give my regards to your family.”
I was back out on the street before Asa even had a chance to pick her jaw up off the ground from me rejecting her. She always failed to factor into her little plans that the object of her affection might not hold her in such high esteem. It was her fatal flaw. One of them, anyway.
I thought back to the girl in the flower shop, the intelligent gleam in her eye as she assessed my appearance. The only thing Asa had ever had in her eyes when she looked at me was lust and pride. I wondered what kinds of things flower girl had decided about me in the time I’d been there.
I’d decided one thing about her—I wanted her. Her cornsilk hair and emerald green eyes called to me; had done since the moment I stepped into that shop. Being called to by a woman wasn’t something I was used to. Attraction was everywhere, and I practically felt lust in my sleep. But a call like that? The urge to know more about a person? That was rare. I didn’t like it, but I was also enraptured by it.
Asa had never called to me like that. We’d had something, something enough that I’d nearly married the lunatic, but she had been too unstable and riddled with every drug she could get up that tiny nose of hers. I’d tried to be supportive of her violent temper, I tried to help ease her away from the scars of her traumatic childhood, but none of it had done any good.
And she still pursued me. I would have puffed with ego if it weren’t so goddamn annoying. Half the guys in my club lusted over Asa on a regular basis, the other half part-time. But those who were smart enough to see the storm in her eyes steered clear. And I was the clearest steerer there was.
I grabbed my bike and headed back out onto the streets, angling toward the bayou. It was my favorite place to get lost. Being on the back of my bike, careening through the woods, was the closest I ever came to God. Not that I’d ever been a believer, but I liked to think if there were an almighty deity, he or she would be out sprinting with the wind through the forest and skipping over the water’s edge.
It didn’t matter how fast I went, though, the thought of Asa throwing herself at me kept niggling at the back of my head. It was times like that I would nearly forget just how deep of a hole into hell being with her would fling me into. All pretty and keen, batting her eyelashes at me and rolling her hips, it was impossible not to remember the ferocious physical passion we’d once shared. There was no doubt in my mind that she and I could have stayed in bed forever if our weak human bodies hadn’t needed food and water.
I wanted to find someone who gave me the same erotic thrill that Asa did, but who was compatible with me on more levels than just that. Asa had challenged my will to live at times, but I wanted someone to challenge my perceptions of life.
No use going down that rabbit hole now, though. And it wasn’t the bloody time for it either.
I had the running of a club to think about. It followed me around like a goddamn disease. When I wasn’t thinking about the club, I was thinking about ways to get away from the club. I was so goddamn tired. At twenty-eight, I knew I was too young to be this tired.
Before I even knew it, the sky turned pink at the edges. Fuck. I was going to be late.