Affliction: An Age Gap, Insta-Love Romance

Chapter 1

Cilla choked on a sob.Blinking back burning tears, she curled into herself as much as possible, pulling her legs up to her chest as best as she could while sitting on a toilet. She wanted to make herself smaller…completely invisible. In truth, she wanted to get sucked down into the toilet she was trapped on, and never come out alive.

No matter how much she wished to disappear, it didn’t happen, and she was stuck in the bathroom stall…listening.

It was her fourth clubhouse party, and the first she’d attended alone, because the friend she usually attended with had come earlier and had left early. But Cilla hadn’t minded, because he was going to be there, and she’d planned to spend the whole night with him. She’d been happy, grinning, confident about herself for the first time in her life, excited about how the night was going…and how it could go, when she’d excused herself from the small group of partiers, and headed down the hallway and into the bathroom. She’d had to pee like crazy. And, almost like right out of a romantic comedy movie, the mean girls showed up the moment her proverbial pants were down.

And they just kept talking.

Laughing.

Eviscerating.

“…oh my God, have you seen her? She looks like a fucking clown dressed up like an even uglier clown.”

“Yes! Oh my God. And did you see the way she practically threw herself at Patriot when he got here? It was so fucking embarrassing?—”

“For her. But I felt sorry for him, too! Can you imagine having to fake a smile in front of everyone when he really wanted to push her away and tell her to fuck off?”

Laughter filled the small bathroom, bouncing off the subway tile walls and the porcelain toilets in the stalls. For a bathroom in an MC clubhouse, it was surprisingly clean and well-maintained, then again, her friend Stephie explained that the clubwhores were required to make sure everything stayed clean.

So, most of the clubhouse was clean.

Like the stall she was trapped in…listening to them tear her to shreds, piece by piece.

“You know who I feel sorry for?” Kiki purred, the sound like a hyena licking its jaws.

“Jaime.” The other three women answered in unison, like a chorus of bitches. A Slut Trio—plus one. Like the Three Musketeers. Three Slutketeers? Sasha, Tasha, Marci, and Kiki. All bitches, all proud sluts—their words not hers, and all close friends with Jaime, who seemed to be a ringleader among all the women in the club.

Jaime? She was one of the club princesses. Her brother, Stallion, was a nomad who popped in every few months to check on her and the club. Jaime, as the sister of a patched member, was given protection and special privileges within the club. Like the other women who belonged to club members, Jaime came around a lot, but she wasn’t officially “attached” to a club brother. However, Cilla wasn’t blind, she knew Jaime and Patriot were close because Patriot was best friends with her brother, and Jaime took every opportunity to snag and hold Patriot’s attention. And from the times she’d seen them stumble upstairs together, she assumed they had hooked up at a few of the club parties in the last six months Cilla had been coming around, and Cilla was sure they hooked up long before she’d met him.

Patriot.

And those nights where Cilla watched Patriot and Jaime go upstairs together, she went home and fell into bed alone…and aching.

She ached for a man…who she once dreamed could be hers.

Kiki added, “Yeah, Jaime’s a bitch at the best of times, but at least she isn’t a dog in heat like Cilla—that ugly bitch has no fucking class?—”

God…she was such a stupid idiot.

“Yeah, Jaime’s a bitch sometimes, but she has the right to be, yeah know. She and Patriot have been on and off again so many times, she’s getting tired of it. She wants him to claim her, but he’s not ready. Some sort of promise he made to Stallion years back,” Marci supplied.

Tasha, Sasha’s twin sister and constant shadow, supplied, “I heard that Patriot is ready but he’s waiting for Stallion to come back in a few weeks before he can claim her. Wants her brother here for the claiming party.”

Patriot and Jaime? Apparently, there was more between them than Cilla knew…and if Tasha was right, he was going to claim Jaime. She’d be his ol’ lady, and Cilla would just be the chubby dumbass who thought she was even in his league.

She swiped at the tears burning down her cheeks.

Another voice sounded, this one she recognized as Sasha, the girlfriend to club brother Tornado—who spent a lot of time with the club whores…because she’d been one five years ago. She’d targeted Tornado, wore him down, and eventually got him to offer her exclusivity. There was talk of Sasha becoming his ol’ lady, but Tornado didn’t seem in that much of a hurry to claim her.

Not that Cilla blamed him.

Marci, a hanger-on and not officially a club woman, added, “Yeah, and Cilla is so fucking blind, too.”

Blind? About what?

“Did you see the way Patriot looked at her as she was walking toward him?”

“It was like a pig jumping on the slop the way she pounced the moment he came in the door. God, have some fucking class! The man just got back from being on the road for three days, he doesn’t want to deal with your needy, clingy, desperate ass the minute he gets back.” That voice was Kiki, a clubwhore who was a regular of several of the brothers, and was aiming to be ol’ lady to one of them, but Locust, the brother she was trying to get with, had been absent from the club for a while, doing whatever the prez had ordered him to do. He was there tonight, though, so it was no wonder Kiki was boozed up and tits out.

“Yeah, we all saw his face. He walked through the door, saw her coming, and cringed. Like he wanted to run the fuck the other way and hide.”

More laughter—shrill and sharp.

Run? Hide? But…he’d always been so nice to her, going out of his way to talk to her at club parties, barbecues, and even in town when they ran into each other. He’d never seemed like he was in a hurry to get away, to run and hide.

But apparently…she was blind. The sickness swirling in her gut became like acid, eating away at her insides, pouring bitter hurt into the pit of her soul.

“And that is some serious shit, because that man is a beast, so the fact that Cilla literally made him want to run tells you exactly how disgusted and annoyed he is by her.”

Disgusted. Annoyed.

By her.

How had she not seen it?

She dropped her chin to her chest and glared down at what she was wearing.

It was the tightest, shortest thing she’d ever put on. All her life, she’d been big. Since hitting puberty, there hadn’t been a year when she wasn’t over a size 12. Last time she went shopping for jeans, she barely got a size 16 over her ass and hips, and the waist gaped in the front. They never made jeans for bigger, awkwardly built bodies like hers, so she just bought what was affordable and would fit her at the time.

How she ever thought that putting on the plum-colored dress that dipped low in the front, barely covered her ass in the back, and left nothing to the imagination was a good idea, she had no idea. Every lump, bump, jiggle, and roll were exposed.

No. She knew why she’d put the dress on. She’d been a fool. A romantic, hopeless, idiotic fool. Stephie had been on her about “using her assets”—her ass and her tits—to get Patriot to give her a second glance. And she hated to admit that, those times it was just the two of them, her and Patriot, were some of the best in her life. Running into him at the pizza place and sitting in the booth, chatting over a large meat-lovers, or the days when he came into the diner where she worked and chatted with her as she waited tables and he ate his breakfast, and that time at the club BBQ when he’d spent over an hour with her, talking about everything and nothing—and he’d actually listened to her. Like…actually listened. Asked her questions. Engaged with her.

And he’d never made her feel like she’d been wasting his time, like he would’ve rather been getting frisky with Jaime.

Patriot was massive, tattooed biker with the most beautiful smile she’d ever seen. He’d earned his road name because of his nearly fifteen years in the military. He was a literal patriot. And, though he was close to twenty years older than her, she couldn’t care about that. When they were sitting, talking, just being together, age hadn’t mattered. And it didn’t hurt that the man was freaking gorgeous.

He was several inches taller than her 5’7” at 6’2”, with broad shoulders, a waist that tapered into well-worn jeans that perfectly hugged his sculpted ass and thighs. His biceps were huge, his forearms were like vein porn, and he had two full sleeves of tatts—from chest to shoulder to wrist. She’d only known how far up his tatts went because of that one time she’d seem him shirtless—sweaty and glistening—after a pickup football game at one of the club BBQs. A man who loved ink, apparently, he also had several tattoos on his chest, abs, sides, and one behind his ear on his neck. She couldn’t count the number of times she wanted to lean into him, lick that tattoo, and whisper dirty, dirty things in his ear. But she wasn’t like type of woman, never would be. That kind of confidence had been killed inside her over the years. But Patriot, he was a man of confidence, and it helped that he was so freaking sexy. He had dark brown hair that swept down to the middle of his back, and a dark beard he kept perfectly trimmed. But what really made her breath catch were his eyes—a deep green that changed with his mood. And when those intense, gorgeous eyes were settled on her she felt…seen. Like she mattered. Like she meant something to him, because there was never a moment when he looked bored or frustrated or annoyed.

All the time she’d spent with him, thinking he appreciated her quirks, her larger body, her lack of social skills…that he actually liked her.

And just a few hours ago, after a lifetime of thinking she was too fat and ugly to ever pull off a slinky dress and stabby heels, she’d stood in front of her mirror and actually believed she looked…pretty. That Patriot would see her and would realize that he wanted more with her.

Her shoulder length brown hair had been styled in loose curls, and she’d spent hours trying to get the smokey eye right. She’d even spent time in the Ulta Beauty yesterday discussing the right color palette for her weird eyes. She had central heterochromia, which meant that the center of her iris was a totally different color than the outer edge of her iris. The part closest to her pupil was a fir tree green, and the outer edge was a muddy brown with gold flecks, though some could consider it hazel.

Despite the weird eyes, the multiple smokey eye fails, and the debilitating self-deprecation from years of fat shaming, she’d looked at her reflection and grinned.

She’d even thought to herself, “He’s going to look twice. He’s finally going to see me.”

Looking at herself now, coiled into a fat meat ball on a clubhouse toilet…. God, she’d been a fool. No wonder Patriot had looked ready to run when she’d approached him—not that she’d even noticed how much he didn’t want to speak with her.

She’d thought that the look on his face, the glimmer in his eyes, was actually appreciation. Happiness.

An ugly, fat, blind fool.

He’d seen her alright…and he’d been disgusted.

“Why does she even come to these parties? She has to know that no one wants her here.”

Sasha snidely informed, “She’s friends with that hang-around, Stephie, who Horde is fucking. She follows Stephie around like a needy little puppy, coming to these parties, probably hoping the brothers get shit-faced enough to not care that they’re fucking a fat dog.”

“Damn, I look hot,” Kiki blurted, her words slurring. “Let’s get out of here. I’m ready to get my party on. Locust is here, and tonight is my night. He’s gonna take me to his bed and fuck me soooo gooooood.”

The women giggled, the sound grating on Cilla’s nerves like glass shards over violin strings.

After another few minutes of them straightening their clothes, applying their makeup, and making small talk, the women left the bathroom.

And the silence remaining in their wake was filled with the muted sounds of heart-rending sobs.