Chapter 11
Once again life throws me for a loop. Never been on a motorcycle. Didn’t plan on getting on one.
I want that on the record, along with everything else that is going on the record this week.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I tell him, twisting my hands together.
“Nothing to it.”
“That’s what people say when there’s quite a lot to it. They just blow off how hard things really are so people get in over their heads.”
He swings a leg over and settles onto the machine like he was poured into it. When he gets comfortable, he’s got one boot down as he looks at me over his shoulder.
I can’t move. Not a single muscle.
He doesn’t rush me. The man doesn’t say, come on. He just sits there being enormous and weirdly patient. As if sitting in front of a county courthouse while nineteen other men waiting behind him on their bikes is an every-day-occurrence.
This is not my life. Oh god. I have no car. And I am not supposed to go home.
I look around and calculate the odds of getting a cab in Bad River.
Zero. A slow Uber maybe, but cabs never. Besides, I have no money. So there’s that. And then I think about where I’ll go.
A hotel? Then the lawyer’s words echo in my head. So do the words he didn’t explicitly say. My life is in danger.
So I put my hand on his thick shoulder and I get on the bike. My vintage dress hikes up.
It’s a day dress that was built in nineteen fifty-two for a woman who was going to sit in a chair. Instead, I throw my leg over a Harley-Davidson.
It’s not a good look. There is a great deal of my thighs out in the open air of downtown Bad River on a Monday morning.
It should be a workday for me. Instead of going to work, I guess I’m going to hell.
His whole back turns rigid. My hands are on his shoulders so I feel the muscle lift, turning into steel.
He does not turn around, and he does not move. Heck the man doesn’t even breathe.
Well. Marvelous.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “The dress isn’t —”
“Don’t,” he growls loudly.
I blink at the back of his head, at that nice black hair. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t apologize.” His voice has gone down into the basement. “Not for that.”
Wait. What does he mean?
“Feet up on the pegs,” he says.
I find the pegs, it takes a moment, but I understand the general concept. My feet have to be up.
“Knees in against my hips,” he bites out.
Oh lord. I put my knees in tight against his hips and my whole face catches fire.
He rumbles, “Now hold on.”
I put my hands on his sides. Politely. The way you’d hold onto a cake plate.
He looks down at each of my hands.
As I wait in awkward agony, he looks at them for each for a full second. When he’s done, the stranger takes both of my wrists and he pulls my arms all the way around him and flattens my palms out against his stomach.
“No,” he says. “Like this.”
Oh my goodness.
My chest is against his back. The inside of my thighs are locked around his hips. His jeans are rough. My hands are spread out flat on his stomach and there is nothing under that shirt but muscles in rows like a stone wall.
The man is so warm. Putting out enough heat to rival a woodstove in January.
This is the first time I’ve had my arms around a man.
Not a hug at a funeral or a dance at a wedding. In thirty-four years have I never been wrapped around a man, and now I am doing it in public.
This is happening right in front of a courthouse and a bunch of scary-looking bikers are watching as I do it with my prim house-wife dress up around my thighs.
This is the single most erotic thing that has ever happened to me.
“Vera,” he says my name in a husky, vibrating tone.
“Yes?”
“You holding on?”
“Yes,” I reply, confused. He’s the one who put my hands where he wants them.
“You’re not holding on,” he rumbles as his hand moves from the bars and lands on my thigh.
The palm grips bare thigh, where the dress has ridden up. Oh my god. His hand covers the whole span of my leg.
All of it. His fingers wrap around to the inside beneath my leg and his thumb sits high on top as he squeezes. One slow clench of his fingers and all I can think is that’s how a man might test whether a rope will hold his weight.
I make a sound into the back of his vest.
“Tighter,” he says.
Ooookay. I get the point. Doesn’t mean I’m comfortable with it.
I’m breathless when he starts the metal beast. The engine leaps to life under me. A throaty rumble climbs straight through the seat and into my bones. Not to mention a few other places.
Math can’t save me here.
I have made a very serious mistake. I didn’t step outside my box, I fell off the planet. Landed in this new world where I’m acutely aware of everything. Exactly which of my parts are sitting on this machine. And which parts of me are pressed against him.
The others start their bikes. A wave of sound hits the front of the courthouse and comes back off the stone in a continuous roar.
There is a woman across the street holding her ears and next to her is a man filming us on his phone.
We roll as one big mechanical beast. A really noisy one.
“Lean when I lean,” he calls back. “Don’t fight it.”
We zoom around the corner and the whole world tips. Oh my god!
I fight it, for about half a second, and his hand comes down and grips my thigh again, hard this time. He holds it there until I stop.
And then suddenly I go with him, melting against his back.
And it’s…
Oh, my Lord.
The wind wreaks havoc on the last of my hair style, whipping the strands out behind me.
There’s forty-mile-an-hour wind going up under my dress.
I’m laughing.
I don’t even know when it started. I’m laughing into the leather between his shoulder blades like an absolute lunatic.
I can’t hear it over the engines, so it doesn’t count.
He turns his head. Just enough to get the words back to me over his shoulder.
“Most people scream.”
“I might still get to that!”
He’s quiet for about a quarter of a mile.
Then, he says, into the wind, “Do it in my ear.”
Sir.
My face goes so hot I could weld with it, and I have absolutely nothing to say. He knows it, and the bastard puts his hand on my knee and leaves it there.
I should knock it off. Instead, I laugh, turn my face and press it into his shoulder and I smell him.
I’ve got my nose in the seam of his leather vest sniffing like he’s a drug. It’s leather and hot road and warm skin, and underneath all of it, the faint fragrance of clean soap.
He washes with Castile soap and it makes him seem almost human.
I slide my hands up his chest to hold on tighter. My fingers creep under the edge of his leather and bump into a shape.
It’s flat and heavy. I watch movies so I know it’s a shoulder holster under his right arm.
Gulp. I have a felony charge against my name and my arms are around a man with a gun.
And I am still laughing, God help me.