Tiffany…

I bit my bottom lip when he pulled into the lot at the motorcycle club. I didn’t want to be around a whole lot of people. It just wasn’t what I needed right now. I felt some of my apprehension ease off when he pulled back, behind the main building, and followed a shoveled asphalt track around to a low, cinder-block outbuilding, beside a much larger, corrugated-steel one.

“Come on, get your stuff and Mad Max together, I have a room back here, no one will bother us.”

“Thank you. I just don’t think I can handle being around people right now,” I said, hitching my purse strap back up on my shoulder and across my chest. I reached for the loop on top of my backpack and wrapped the top of the knotted pillowcase holding Max around my other hand.

“Don’t worry about the rest,” he said gently. “I’ll bring it in, once I get you in there.”

“Okay,” I said and he got out of the truck, cold air rushing into the cab in his wake, the cat not pleased by any of it and growling menacingly, hissing and struggling in the bag. It was the safest way I had to transport her though, and I really really hoped she would forgive me for the rough and just generally shitty and stressful handling. Of course, she didn’t know that I thought I had come home to her furry little ass nailed to my door. Just thinking about that made me want to fall apart. The fact she was alive and hissing, god, I was so grateful. So, so, grateful.

She could be mad at me all she wanted. She was alive. We were both alive and someplace safe… but Delia?

Poor Delia…

My door opened and I jumped, a little yelp making it out of my mouth, which Max answered with a hiss and another low, angry growl. She was pissed and I needed to get her out of this damn pillowcase. I was lucky she hadn’t pissed everywhere, which is what she had done last time, when she’d come home bitten by something, and Delia and I had raced her to the vet.

A five-hundred-dollar vet bill I couldn’t really afford later, she’d been cleaned up, stitched up, and was in one of those cones of shame so she didn’t try to lick her wounds. Pilling her had been an absolute joy and it had taken both me and Lia to do it.

What was I going to do without her?

“Hey, come here, hey, hey, hey…” Nik pulled me out of the truck into the snow at the side of the track thing we were on and held me tight, letting me cry into the cool leather encasing his chest.

“Just a little bit longer,” he begged. “Just hold it together for Mad Max in there, and then you can scream and cry and do whatever it is you need to do to feel better, eh?”

I nodded. I could do that. I really could. Just a few more feet and we could be inside and Max could be warm. I followed him into one end of the building into a hallway that ran the length to another door at the opposite end like the one we’d just entered. The hall was lined on both sides with doors, and Nik touched the first one on the right.

“Bathroom and toilet here, same at the other end, opposite side of the hall. My room is down here.”

I nodded my understanding and followed him almost to the other end of the hall, the last door before the exit on the left-hand side. He hung his head and sighed.

“Bugger all, I gave Dragon my keys.” I felt my shoulders drop and he brought out his phone, dialing someone up.

“Yeah, Bro, its Zeb. I’m here and I have a guest, but I gave Dragon my keys, have ya got a spare?” He paused while someone said something on the other end of the line. “That’d be great, thanks. He ended the call and said, “Mali’ll be right out with the key. In the meantime, I’ll bring more of your stuff in, yeah?”

“Okay,” I agreed.

He gave me a nod and went to turn but stopped, took a half-step closer to me and leaned over, pressing his lips to my forehead. I closed my eyes and let the comfort the small gesture was meant to give me wash over me. Too soon, he was gone, striding up the hallway, the logo on the back of his vest over his leather jacket larger than life. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, closing my eyes and counting the seconds. All the way to sixty and then over again. Just something to do, something small to focus on while I held onto the pillowcase with Maxine in it. She’d gone still and had stopped fighting but her frightened and confused cries had taken over now, and they were a knife to my heart, every single one of them.

The door at the end opened, and my eyes flew open. Nik strode up the hall laden with trash bags full of my shit. He was alone, a set of keys dangling from one hand. He set bags down at my feet and went through three keys before he got the right one.

The door swung in on a dark room. He reached past it and flicked on a light switch on the wall; golden lamplight flooded the space and spilled across the low, industrial-business carpet in the hall.

“After you,” he said gently and I went in, blinking in surprise.

It was furnished in here. Furnished far more than his apartment over the bar and gym was.

Bookshelves lined one wall completely, floor to ceiling, all handmade and beautiful. The foot of the bed, beside the closet door, held a dresser of the same wood but the bed is what caught my attention.

It was an actual bed, not just a mattress on the floor. With a hand-carved headboard and footboard that begged to be touched. I wanted to inspect it more thoroughly but I had Max to attend to.

“Is that everything?” I asked about the bags he was picking up, bringing across the threshold, and dropping inside the room.

“Yeah,” he said gently.

I nodded and said, “Thank you. I’m going to let her out now if that’s okay?”

He closed his bedroom door and said, “No worries, have at it.”

I dropped onto the edge of the bed and picked the loose knot out of the top of the pillowcase with my fingers. Max shot out, slinking low to the ground. She sniffed the air, looked left, then right, and immediately did an about-face and shot under the bed. I hung my head and sighed.

“She’s going to be under there a while.”

“Gives us time to set up her things and put yours away, eh?”

“I guess I’m going to be staying a while?”

“We,” he corrected. “We are going to be staying a while, yeah. I wouldn’t leave you here alone.”

“Thank you,” I said again, softly, and he shrugged out of his jacket and vest, hanging it on a hook on the back of the door. He held out his hands to me and I pulled my purse over my head. He took that, and hung it beside his jacket and reached back just in time for me to hand him my jacket. I smoothed my suddenly-damp palms over the denim encasing my hips and ass and asked, “What now?”

“Now we put this stuff away, get Mad Max set up, and then it’s whatever you want to do.”

“Trying to keep me busy?” I asked.

“The only idea I’ve got right now and it needs to get done. I know I always seem to think better when things are in order.”

I nodded. “Yeah, me too.”

He smiled at me and said, “Not trying to be a cheeky bastard, but I know.”

I felt like I suddenly had a liquid center. That was so incredibly sweet of him, taking care of me like that, especially at a time like this. I moved around the room, setting up Max’s food and water dishes, using a bottle of water he handed me out of the mini-fridge he used as a nightstand. The only things in it seemed to be bottled water and some beers. I didn’t want either, even though he offered.

I stood up from filling the little water bowl and he took the empty bottle from me and threw it in the bag of trash he’d collected.

“I’m going to run this out, make yourself at home.”

I nodded and hugged myself, going to the bookcases and letting my eyes rove across the spines as he ducked out, shutting the door behind him. I wanted to check on Max, but I resisted the urge. She was stressed out and pissed off and just needed the time to chill.

I didn’t read a single spine, nothing that went in through my eyes and into my brain really wanted to compute. I didn’t know what to do with any of this. I didn’t want to feel anything anymore. Everything was just open, raw and aching. It was wholly awful and I just wanted it to all go away. I wanted to drown myself in something, anything to make it all just go away for a little while.

Nik came back in and I went to him. He didn’t even ask, he just put his arms around me and I kissed him, pouring my absolute desperation to concentrate on something, anything but how I should be feeling.

He kissed me back and I bit his lower lip, he jerked at the unexpected and exclaimed “Ow! What was that for, eh?”

“I’m sorry, just… I don’t want to feel any of this, you know? All I want right now is to feel you and I really don’t want you to be all that nice about it… if you know what I mean?”

He lowered his hand from his bottom lip and gave me a half charmed little smile.

“You want some rough sex, eh?”

I nodded. I liked it rough sometimes and this was definitely one of those times. When everything was all screwed up and turned inside out, that was the perfect time. Just something about being pounded into the damn sheets grounded me, but I’d never really had to ask for it before. I figured the love bite would have been enough but if it was one thing I was learning from a lot of my psych classes, it was the importance of communication and asking for what you needed.

I couldn’t tell you how grateful I was that Nik made it easy; to ask, I mean. He didn’t judge me. I mean, he had at first, but he’d apologized, we’d talked and things were actually better. It was how I’d always thought a relationship was supposed to work, but up until this point, mine never had.

“You don’t have to ask for that,” he said softly, hands alighting on my hips, pulling me in.

I put my hands on his shoulders and whispered back, “Clearly, I did,” boldly adding, “Now, shut up and fuck me.”

He grinned, and it was a happy but savage thing, his mouth crashing down on mine. I wrapped my arms around his neck and bowed my body into the shelter of his and just tried like hell to let all of it, everything around me, just fall away.