****
After the hot episode that they shared in the garage, Mona wasn’t quite ready to hop on the back of a motorcycle. She was feeling giddy and slightly embarrassed, which wouldn’t help her focus on the road. “Do you want to come back inside and have a coffee or a beer or something?”
When the going got awkward, she could always rely on her barmaid and hostess skills.
Ryan nodded, giving her a shy sort of smile. “Yeah, that sounds good.” He gave The Duke one last, lingering look before following her back into the house. They went into the kitchen and he sat backwards in one of the chairs at the small, white table while she got out some mugs and prepared the coffee maker.
“So, what’ll it be, coffee or beer?”
He chuckled, gazing at her. “Whatever you’re having is fine with me.”
She could see, from the corner of her eye, that he was checking her out. His eyes were focused on her butt. She smirked at him. “Do you like hazelnut coffee? I could make you another kind.”
“Aw, no, hazelnut’s fine.”
She put enough spoons of coffee grounds into the filter for two, then turned the maker on. While it brewed, she leaned against the counter, looking at him and scratching at the back of her neck. Her pixie cut sometimes itched her there, but never enough to make her regret the hairstyle. It made her appear more like one of the club members, someone who belonged with them. At least, to her. “What do we do now?” she asked him.
“Would you like to go out with me?” he asked her without hesitating. “We could go see a movie, get dinner somewhere…?”
Mona laughed. “I meant about the motorcycle club.”
Ryan looked down, smiling embarrassedly at the tabletop. “Oh. That. Well, if you want, after we’re caffeinated up, I can take you out for a ride. You probably don’t want to start just driving The Duke. You want to ease into it.”
She nodded. “That’s what I was thinking. Get a feel for it before taking control. I still am not sure if I’d be able to race with you guys, but…”
He looked up at her and smiled. “No one expects or wants you to race. You’re the group’s lovely owner. If you got hurt or something, it’d be all over.”
That made Mona scoff. She didn’t want to be thought of as a precious flower or anything, even if she was hesitant to ride a bike and risk injury. “I can handle myself.”
Ryan raised his hands up defensively. “No one doubts that you can. We’d just rather keep you as our Supreme leader.”
She smiled, nodding a little. “Supreme leader,” she repeated. “I could get used to that.”
The coffee pot let out a beep to alert Mona that it was done. She went to it and carefully poured them each a cup of coffee. “Milk and sugar?” she asked him. “I only have artificial sugar. I hope that’s okay?”
He smirked at her. “That’s fine. Thanks. Are you watching your calories or something?”
“I’m not,” she said, pretending to glare at him. “My dad was. He was a big guy, as you well remember I’m sure. He was afraid of getting diabetes. But you can see how that worked out in the end anyway…” She frowned slightly, stirring the fake sugar into the coffee cups.
Ryan gave her a sad look. “I’m sorry. I was just teasing… I didn’t realize he’d been such a health nut.”
Mona guffawed at that. “He wasn’t a health nut. He loved packing away the burgers and ribs at Hog’s Grogs. He just—I don’t know, I guess he felt some kind of a sign that he needed to be careful.”
She added a few drops of milk straight from the carton and then placed Ryan’s mug in front of him before sitting beside him at the table with her own.
The mug she’d given him said ‘World’s Greatest Dad.’ He looked over at her curiously before taking a sip. The hazelnut coffee was heavenly. It tasted kind of like Nutella, but liquefied.
Setting down his mug, he continued to look at her in a concerned, thoughtful sort of way. “Mona… How have you been holding up?” He placed his hand on hers. “I get the feeling that no one’s really asked you that. Everyone was so in shock and sad about what happened to Benny.”
She looked into his eyes, surprised that he was asking about how she was doing. It seemed as though everyone assumed that their grief was her grief and that she didn’t need anyone to confide in about it. After all, she was Benny’s tough girl. She was taking care of herself. But sometimes taking care of oneself did not mean that one was feeling ‘okay.’
“Thank you for asking,” she said, looking at him and giving a vague, little smile. She wished that she could reassure him that she was fine and everything was taken care of, but honestly, she felt like she was broken up inside and had no way of letting that out. She had cried, of course. She cried a lot, these days. But she also tried to keep most of her feelings inside. She was Benny’s strong little girl. She couldn’t reveal how weak she actually felt now.
He gave her hand a soft pat; almost as if he knew how she was feeling and understood that it was difficult for her to just let go.
They finished their coffee in a comfortable silence. She was glad that he was there with her. She was glad that she could depend on him. “As to your other question,” she said. “Yes, I’d love to go out with you.” She stood up and took away their empty mugs. Leaning towards him as she scooped his up, she winked and added, “Normally guys ask that before fucking the girl, but I love you so I’ll let it slide this time.”
He watched as she went to the dishwasher to store the mugs away, admiring her ass again and the way her hips swayed when she walked. She was a bit like a runway model, except she wasn’t quite so thin and she had muscles. She could probably beat the shit out of a runway model. She put girls like that to shame.
“So,” she said, clapping her hands together and grinning at him. “Are you ready to take me for a ride, Mr. Kirby?”
Ryan grinned back at her. “It would be a delight, Miss Myers.”
She led the way back down the steps into the garage. Aside from The Duke, the other bikes had been cleared out, but there was a row of helmets on the shelves around them. “I sold the rest of the motorcycles and put the money into the kitty for our club,” she explained.
Ryan wasn’t surprised that she’d done something like that. “It must’ve been hard to give away those bikes,” he said.
Mona nodded. “Yeah… That’s part of why I kept the helmets. They’re sort of a memorial to them,” she explained. Going over to the shelf, she lifted up a blue and black helmet, then eyed The Duke to see if the colors would work well enough together. She didn’t want to clash, even though it didn’t matter. Case in point, her black outfit and brown jacket.
She put the helmet on, unfastened, and looked at him. “How do I look?” she asked.
He tried not to laugh, but it was clear from the expression on his face that he was holding back.
She felt frustrated and started to remove it, but he stopped her with a gentle hand on her arm, chuckling a little. “No, don’t take it off. You look good. It looks like it’s supposed to. You just… It looks so cute on you.”
Mona balled her hand into a fist and moved like she was going to punch him in the stomach, but then she didn’t. She smiled, chuckling slightly herself. “It’s not supposed to look cute; it’s supposed to make me look like a serious biker.”
He nodded. “You look like a serious biker,” he said. “Although, you don’t have to actually be serious.” He winked at her.
Once he’d grabbed a helmet from the shelf as well – a simple, black one that had been paired with one of Benny’s more standard, less impressive bikes – they went over to The Duke.
Mona took her leather jacket off of its handlebars, tossing it over onto the shelf. She eyed the bike as though it were a priceless artifact. In a way, it was. “So, what do you think we should do now? Start your lesson, mister.”
First, he demonstrated the proper way to mount a motorcycle. Once she seemed to have mastered that, he got on and patted the seat behind him. “I think the best thing to do is just go out on the road. I’ll show you the tricks of the trade. Watch everything I do carefully.”
Mona nodded briskly. “Got it.” Gingerly, she got onto the bike behind him. She wrapped her arms around his middle and he started revving the engine. Pulling out the garage’s remote control from her pocket, she opened up the door and they were off.