Chapter One
Jacket
The road comes to an abrupt end at a line of scrubby windswept bushes. I pull the bike over to one side, always mindful of protecting my baby. She’s always good to me. I unsaddle, stretching out my limbs after many hours pointing straight on the highway without a stop.
I shake myself out and wander back a block to the motel sitting on the side of the road like a tombstone.
‘End of the Road’, it’s called, although the yellow neon ‘R’ is blown out and no longer flashes.
After the freedom of the endless vista I need something to anchor me back on this planet, in what is strangely known as the ‘real world’. Is this what people call real? After checking in at the motel stuck somewhere back in the 1960s I’d say, with a proprietress from that decade too, I head down the town’s only street to a saloon. Yeah it’s a saloon, not a bar, and I feel like I just returned from the Okay Corral when I walk through the swing doors in my cowboy boots and everyone turns to look at the stranger.
I’m sure I’m imagining things, the hostility, the questioning. I can do that at times. Imagine attitudes that aren’t there. It’s one of the reasons I keep life simple by going solo.
“Where you coming from?” the bartender asks, just passing the time.
“Nowhere really,” I mutter.
With a second cold one in front of me, I pull out my phone and scroll mindlessly through my notices.
The bartender, a squirely old guy with a mustache that looks like a slug has settled on his upper lip, gives me a strange look. I’m no teenager, not by a long ways.
“My mom’s birthday,” I say by way of explanation, embarrassed to be checking my social media. It’s okay to lie in a bar, even expected.
“Humph,” he shrugs like it’s all the same to him. Still he looks at me oddly and I realize the other patrons are staring at their glasses, not their screens. I truly am stuck back in another century in this town.
‘No credit’, a large old sign over the bar informs me. And someone has added in black pen, in bigger letters, ‘No wi-fi’.
Shit.
I can’t imagine anyone in here owning something as high tech as a cellphone. A song comes on the juke, a country song that inspires some guy down the bar to leap up off his stool. He bursts into a jig on the spot while the song plays. As soon as it ends, he sits back down and returns to his pose staring at this beer, as though he’d never moved.
“Where am I?” I ask the barback as he wipes his clean glasses morosely. “What’s the closest big city around here?”
“Don’t that thing tell you that?” he grumbles, eyeing the phone like the feds might be watching.
“Probably would if I knew how to work it.”
“That was a good model,” some dude who sat down on a stool two over says, staring straight ahead. “In 2002.”
“I don’t care about that latest model trendy shit,” I growl, taking out my irritation on the guy whose entire face is buried behind a red bush that hangs almost to his belly. I guess grooming is out of style here too. Although who am I to talk?
I never do much of that at the best of times. Talking.
“I only got the stupid thing for one reason.”
To be a stalker.
I just wanna see my girl. What the hell am I saying – she’s not mine.
“Shit.”
I slam the thing down on the bar top in frustration. All the credit I applied last time I was in a real town is already used up. I need to see her. It’s like the tug of addiction curling at my insides.
“Mind if I take a look?”
“I ran out of credit is all.”
“Seemed important, whatever you were looking at.”
The guy has already picked up my phone and is tapping out a bunch of commands with his surprisingly swift stubby fingers.
“Yep, there you go,” he says as the screen comes back live.
“How the hell did you get online when there’s no internet for miles?”
“Kind of a hobby of mine,” he grins and taps the side of his nose like we’re sharing a secret.
Maybe he’s one of those hackers living off-grid. Anonymous.
“I can see why you were pissed at losing her,” he smirks.
I snatch my phone out of his hand. I’m grateful but that doesn’t mean he gets to ogle my girl.
I scroll up and there she is. My heart does a leaping kind of thing and my jeans tighten when I see the smiling girl on the little screen. She’s on the ground, hugging a white dog and looking up at the camera shyly. I can’t quite see her mouth. The mouth I had thoughts of covering over with mine last time I saw her. The woman I met in a bar not that much different from this one gave me the strangest notion of security.
Like meeting her was like coming home, like I’d known her for a very long time.
It was ridiculous but I couldn't shake it off. The more she talked and looked up at me from beneath a fringe of lashes, with those huge eyes, the more I wanted to crush her to me. I couldn't take my gaze off her soft lips, at least I was sure they’d be soft if I could suck them between my own, bite down on that full flesh and make her clutch at my waist. I can’t get another look at those lips while the triangle dart is covering them. I touch the screen to make it go away and the girl starts moving.
“Fuck,” I breathe, in amazement that she’s right there.
The bartenders harsh stare shifts back to me.
“Video,” I say. “Right here in my hand.”
Again he shrugs like he doesn’t care to keep up with the modern world.
I return to the image on screen. Of the girl dancing around with the white dog, laughing in delight as the pup licks her cheek and she clasps it to her.
There she is, in another post – she’s holding up a gift, wrapped with a huge bow in silver and white. ‘Someone’s getting married’ the post reads mysteriously.
My stomach lurches soon as I see that. She can’t possibly be, can she? I scroll back up through older posts, wondering whether I’ve been out of the loop long enough to have missed something.
“If I had a girl like that, I wouldn't be sitting alone in a dump like this. Where is she?”
“I wish I knew,” I half snarl, half groan.
What the fuck is wrong with me? Mooning over a girl who in fact is not mine. Not even close. And now she’s about to get married. Taking her further away from me, permanently.
Red Beard holds out his palm with a grin and I reluctantly drop the device into it. I have no clue what he’s up to but it takes less than a minute of ferocious stabbing at the keyboard.
“Dragoon,” he announces, triumph filling his bearish voice. “Oh, Arizona, that’s a ways off.”
“Dragoon?” I bark. “You’re sure?”
“Yeah, you from out West too?”
“No, are you?” I growl and he stops with the questions.
I finish up the beer and walk out with the merest grump of a goodbye. I grab my stuff from the motel room and head out without even resting. Then I decide I ought to shower at least because who knows how long it will be before I get another chance.
One more check on her timeline. Another post. A huge pink gift. “Three days and counting ‘til the big W.”
I slam the phone down on the bureau and head to shower off the dust that’s ingrained in my pores. The woman’s face will never allow me to push her delectable features from my mind and I end up with my back lining the tile, my solid bolt of steel in my palm, as I think of her in the way I’ve thought of her every day since I met her. Here with me, her thighs wrapping me as I lift her up to lower down my length.
A minor panic sets in and my heart starts to race, realizing I may have missed out on her gradual announcements regarding her engagement. It would be my own fault for disappearing for such a stretch, addicted to the untethered life on the open road.
It’s been six months since I saw her and she hasn’t posted anything about a guy she’s seeing. She’s hardly posted about a date, let alone a man she’s agreed to spend her life with.
I yank my hand away from my rigid shaft and flip off the faucet. Three days.
I just have time to get to Dragoon if I leave now.
I don't know what the fuck I’m doing – I just know I need to speak to her before she gives her life to someone else.