Sierra

 

The motorcycle purred underneath me after he first cranked her up. I had never realized just how open the ride was on the back of one. I had always known that it was very different from riding in a car, but there was nothing between my body and the outside world, or the road.

 

I held onto Gunner for dear life as he pulled out of his driveway and onto the road. The bike roared between my legs, sending vibrations up through my whole body. The tender, delicate places between my legs trembled with ecstasy to have Gunner pressed against me while experiencing such strong vibrations.

 

That wasn’t the exciting part, though.

 

He steered us away from town. He took me into the suburbs, the smaller communities spaced out around our big city. There were stretches of nothing for miles, and we would suddenly drive past or through a small neighborhood, or something that looked like a downtown area as we rolled through another of the smaller towns surrounding us.

 

My work took me to so many different places, but it was always by plane or in the backseat of a cab or hired car. Travelling by motorcycle was something completely different. I didn’t just see the small, old buildings and the tall, wide houses; it was like I was right there in front of them. In a way, I was, but I felt more like I was standing in front of them instead of sitting in a car and missing half of what passed me by.

 

Once we were out of the big city and into the smaller towns, everything looked very different. Whereas in the city, the buildings and houses would push nature aside, the opposite seemed to be true once we pulled into a smaller town on the outskirts. We would pass newer subdivisions where everything was in its proper place and every lot looked exactly the same. Then, we would pull through an older neighborhood, and it seemed the houses were built so that they didn’t get in the way of the trees or rows of hedges.

 

After riding on the back of the bike for a while, I couldn’t feel my body. I was numb from the vibrations, but it felt great. I felt free. I understood why so many people loved motorcycles. I understood the culture of rebellion that surrounded them.

 

I had to stay focused, though. This trip wasn’t about me. It wasn’t about connecting with Gunner on any sort of meaningful level. This trip was about merely convincing him that I was trying to do that.

 

We pulled up to an old store with a porch out front. Several men stood around talking on the porch when we stopped. Gunner pulled up to the building and cut the engine. The men looked over at us and nodded their heads in greeting.

 

I pulled my helmet off and shook out my hair. I stretched out my jaw. My head felt cramped from being confined in the helmet for so long. Meanwhile, my skin felt as windblown as my hair would have been if I hadn’t worn the helmet.

 

“Why are we stopping here?” I asked Gunner as he took off his helmet and climbed off the bike.

 

“I just want to get up and stretch my legs, grab a drink, and maybe hang out for a few minutes before we get back on the road and head home,” he answered.

 

“Sounds like a plan. What are we getting?” I climbed off the bike behind him and followed him up the steps of the porch.

 

“I’m just going to grab a bottle of root beer. You can get whatever you want,” he told me.

 

“Root beer? Okay,” I said under my breath as we walked into the store.

 

Gunner nodded at the clerk behind the counter, and from the look they shared, I wondered if he knew the guy. And if he knew the guy, I wondered if I hadn’t just found myself in trouble for planning on screwing him over with the diamond.

 

As we walked down separate aisles of the store, I noticed a couple of people giving Gunner nasty looks. They knew what he was and obviously didn’t approve. I wondered if that was why he opted for the businessman and playboy look he normally sported over the biker look.

 

I watched as he went straight for the glass root beer bottles in the cooler. I grabbed a bottle of water. When we got back up to the counter, he had two bottles in his hand. The clerk punched the prices in instead of ringing us up with a scanner like so many other places did back in town.

 

“Here.” Gunner handed me one of the bottles on the way out of the store.

 

“What’s this for?” I asked.

 

“You’re drinking one with me,” he said.

 

“Okay.” I wasn’t sure what he was getting at, but root beer? Were we ten again?

 

Once outside the store, he walked over to one of the picnic tables on the wide porch. The men hanging out by the door didn’t even glance at us as we passed. The whole scene just seemed surreal. We were in a town that looked like it had missed the last thirty years or more, sitting down on the porch at an old convenience store, and drinking root beer like we were kids again.

 

“What’s all this about?” I asked him after we both took sips from our bottles.

 

“I just like to come out here from time to time.” He looked around like he was really taking in the scenery. “You know, if I ever take the time to just get on the back of my bike and ride, I like to come out here, sit on this porch, and have a root beer, just like when I was a kid.”

 

“Wait,” I stopped him. “You mean, you used to come out here when you were a kid?” Oh, it was getting thick out here. By trying to make him think I was trying to connect with him on a deeper level, I had opened the door to something I did not need to know. I didn’t need to know where he was from or what his childhood was like. Those things would just make what I had to do that much harder.

 

“This is where I grew up, Sierra,” he told me.

 

I sat back and looked around. The area was obviously poor. The men standing by the door wore old, worn clothes that looked stained from years of hard work. I took a deep breath and looked around at the worn out buildings around us. If he had grown up in a place like this, it certainly explained why he didn’t have any personal pictures out in his office. Instead, it seemed he wanted to focus on his successes in life. I could definitely understand that.

 

“Did it always look like this?” I asked him quietly as I took a sip from my root beer. Root beer just always tasted like childhood to me. I figured if someone wanted to reminisce, it was the perfect drink.

 

“No, actually. You see that building on the corner over there?” He pointed across the street to where we had just crossed the railroad tracks before pulling up to the store.

 

“The tall white one with the boarded up windows?” I asked. It also didn’t have a lot. It stood right on the curb. The door opened onto the sidewalk. Or, it would have, if the place still had a door. Instead, it had a couple of sheets of plywood where the door should have been.

 

“When I was little, that was the local grocery store. Unless they built one further out, everyone has to drive into the city now to get groceries if they can’t find what they need in the store here.”

 

“You’re kidding!” I couldn’t fathom that someone of his stature, both physically and financially, had ever lived in a place like this. All the houses were old and run down. I turned and looked down the porch at the other end of the store’s lot. Behind the store were boarded up houses.

 

“Not at all. Sometimes I wish I was, but after living here, I definitely appreciate everything I have and everything I had to do to get it.” He nodded and took a long drink from his bottle.

 

If there had been any one point during the whole situation with Gunner when I truly regretted what I had been planning on doing the whole time, that was it. It wasn’t that I felt sorry for him for having grown up in a poor little town. He had obviously done well for himself since leaving. What got me was that he had opened up to me the way he did, and I was still planning on screwing him over.

 

I wished I had never met him. I wished I could have turned off everything I felt. I wished I could have forgotten everything that had happened between us. In that moment, I wished I could get up from the table and leave him sitting there alone. I didn’t even know where we were, but my phone was in my pocket. I could have had Coyote call a car for me.

 

The temptation was strong.

 

“What are you thinking about?” he asked. “You’re having a hard time believing I came from a place like this, aren’t you?”

 

“It is a little hard to believe,” I admitted.

 

“Would you like to see where I grew up?” he asked, tossing his empty glass bottle into the large trash can at the corner of the porch.

 

“You don’t have to show me.” I really felt guilty for how he was putting himself out there for me. I didn’t need to know everything about him. I just needed to know where that damn diamond was so I could disappear from his life.

 

We were getting into things I couldn’t relate to. I couldn’t imagine what it would have been like, growing up around here, in a town that didn’t seem to have a name.

 

“No, come on. I know it’s more than you bargained for, but come on. We’ve spent enough time together now that I think it’s high time we start really getting to know each other.” He stood up and grabbed my hand as he started walking past the table. He didn’t give me a chance to finish my root beer, but he grabbed my water for me.

 

He threw on his helmet and straddled the bike. I climbed on behind him and put on my helmet. When I wrapped my arms around his waist, he handed me the water. He fired the bike back up drove onto the road, taking the first right and going down behind the store to where the vacant houses were that I was looking at from our seat on the porch.

 

I didn’t know what to expect from him next. I had no idea what he was planning or why he was even showing me all of this. For all I knew, he could have had the rest of the MC waiting for me in one of the old houses and they were going to try to get information out of me.

 

When we pulled up in front of one of the houses, I figured that was exactly what was going to happen.

 

“This is it,” he said after he killed the engine again and took off his helmet.

 

It was a square, one-story home with a small sagging porch in front. The windows had been boarded up at one point, as had the door, but the sheets of plywood were hanging off, leaving the openings exposed.

 

“Come on,” he said, grabbing my hand again and pulling me off the bike with him.

 

I looked around cautiously as we approached the house, stepping over uneven chunks of cracked sidewalk where grass was growing through. I felt like I had stepped into the twilight zone. This was not the same person whose house I’d been living in for the last several days. I didn’t know this version of Gunner.

 

“Watch where you step.” He helped me up onto the porch and helped me step over the fallen board that had been in front of the door.

 

I looked around the inside of the house. The floor seemed pretty solid, but the paint was peeling off the walls in large patches. Light spilled in through glassless windows and holes in the ceiling and roof. It gave the interior a mottled look.

 

We were alone, and the grip Gunner had on my hand tightened. It became clear what was on his mind. He wasn’t bringing me here to guilt me into giving up my mission. He wasn’t bringing me here to ambush me with the rest of The Immortal Devils.

 

He wanted to take me in this old abandoned house.

 

As strange as it was, I was down for anything he had in mind.