4. Chapter 4
On the road again, Jason weighed his options. He’d just been west, wasn’t in the mood to go east, and his ma and the encroaching heat were south.
He pointed his Panhead north toward a bar outside Florence, Ohio, where he usually managed to hustle a few bucks in pool. The ride would be good for shaking off the last two years of dropping in on Maggie on his swings through Nashville or Chattanooga.
Two years. Christ. The only bed he frequented more, besides his own, was Billy’s. Now, there was a name he should’ve squealed in the dark.
He’d just come from Arizona and wasn’t in a hurry to go back after Billy’s dad said he wanted to talk.
Talk.
When the man who ran the dirtiest, most violent motorcycle club Jason had ever seen wanted to exchange words with the guy who’d been shamelessly banging his only daughter for the past three years, Jason wasn’t eager to find out why.
Another reason to go north. There was zero chance of running into a Desert Demon.
Florence, Kentucky, as it happened, was about halfway between Maggie’s trailer in Winchester, Tennessee, and where Jason was headed in Florence, Ohio.
He stopped at a joint in Florence, Kentucky, and dropped a quarter in the jukebox to play his song. Dion’s “The Wanderer,” a 1961 classic, might’ve been written about him and reminded Jason that there were always, always more women waiting.
Today it was a pair of blondes he joined in a game of pool, who knew how to handle a cue and wore shorts almost too short to qualify. They reminded him of the cut-offs Maggie wore yesterday. Legs for days. Ass cheeks peeking out below the fringe.
Eager to put her behind him, Jason didn’t waste any time coming up behind one of the women—Starla, he thought—and pressing his junk into her ass as she lined up a shot. It would either get him slapped or put him one step closer to finishing what Maggie started in Tennessee.
Starla was easy, and he didn’t want to work hard today. They kissed and he came away with a wad of gum.
When he nodded to the bathrooms, she led the way.
Afterward, he bought her a drink, and she slipped him her phone number on a napkin square. He wrote the name of the city and bar and short shorts, decent head, 10 on the napkin for the next time he came through town.
Ten. Not the hottest on a hotness scale—if it was, she’d rate about a 5.5—but ten being the level of effort required.
One was impenetrable. He didn’t waste his time with ones. In the beginning, Billy had been a two.
A well-worth-it two.
Maggie was…an eight, if he remembered. She pretended to be a lot of work.
Ten didn’t get any easier.
The pitstop in Florence, Kentucky, ate up a lot of his time and energy.
He swung around Cincinnati and wound up in Springfield, Ohio, checking in at a cheap motel a stone’s throw from the diner where he knew a waitress named Ann who was always willing to warm his bed.
Jason had just enough time to shower off the day—and Maggie and Starla—before she came knocking.
He opened the door the same way he left Maggie’s trailer.
Naked as the day he was born.