Chapter 9
9
Scorpio
We left the cabin with the sunrise. What I didn’t tell her was that I almost left on my own before dawn, while she was sleeping peacefully. I had everything packed, was dressed, really fucking wanted a drink. I fought both the urges as I watched her sleep, unable to take my eyes off her. Not sure how I’m ever gonna be able to do that.
But the goodbye is still coming. Swiftly. We’ve been on the road for over twelve hours now and I’m starting to hallucinate. None of those hallucinations are showing me anything good.
The thing is, she’s riding to get back to Grim and I’m riding to play my part in the revenge plot that’s been years in the making and will more than likely lead to my death. Neither of those things is something I want to be thinking about. But long bike rides will get you thinking. It’s why I always break them up with sex and booze pit stops. Whatever stop we make on this ride will only lead to talking about all those things I don’t want to think about. So I haven’t been stopping.
Even if I had a future, even if after the revenge, I somehow remain alive, it still leaves me nowhere with Karma. She belongs to another man. I’m under no delusions that the warning to stay away from her didn’t come from both of her guys, even though it was Reaper who delivered it.
I’m not looking for a relationship. Especially not with a woman and a man. Just thinking in that direction is making the monsters hiding in the darkness on either side of this empty stretch of road start to lash out at me. Those monsters have been growing more and more hideous as my tiredness grows heavier. Usually, the steady rumble of my bike beneath me and the hum of the tires against the road are enough to lull me into a state of Zen that I never find anywhere else. Except maybe when Karma’s sleeping in my arms, the scent of our lovemaking still clinging to her skin. But now, the pool of light cast by my headlight seems to be shrinking in the onslaught of those darkness-born monsters.
A pink and green neon blur materializes into a sign for a roadside motel and I signal, then make a turn before I think it through. But it’s time to let the monsters have the road. I’m hoping we’re both too tired to speak anyway. I think I might even be too tired to fuck.
“Finally,” Karma says as she pulls up beside me. “I was about ready to fall asleep. Do you mind getting the room and I’ll wait here?”
“Sure,” I say and walk to the office, where a middle-aged guy with his pants undone is lounging on a ratty sofa, watching an infomercial for some sort of magical soap.
He doesn’t ask many questions, I pay cash and am again standing next to Karma in under five minutes, kinda wishing I had that guy’s boring life instead of the one I have. But if I had his life, I’d never get a woman as beautiful as Karma for the night, let alone a whole week.
This place is neither here nor there as far as towns go, which is probably why we’re the only guests, going by the lack of other cars in the lot. I lead the way to our room—number 13.
“Empty motels always give me the creeps,” Karma says as she closes the blinds on the room’s single window and pulls the moth-eaten curtains closed for good measure. “If I was here alone, I probably wouldn’t sleep a wink.”
She starts unpacking our food on the rickety table for two under the window.
“I spent a lot of my childhood in places like this,” I say, no idea why. “The emptier the place was, the better, as far as I was concerned. Though they rarely were. Mostly they were all filled with junkies and hookers and other types you never want to meet.”
She stops what she’s doing and is looking at me with this weird mixture of pity and shock. I should’ve kept quiet, but Honey’s been on my mind a lot again today. She’s been dead for a long time, but her stories are still very much alive. I wonder if we’d be on the brink of getting our revenge against Devil’s Nightmare MC if it weren’t for her stories of the good old day. Possibly not.
“Did she… did she bring her johns home to the room?” she asks, holding a pack of jerky in her hand like she’d forgotten what she was doing.
“No, she didn’t, but the guys she called her ‘boyfriends’ weren’t much better.” I take the jerky from her hand and sit down. “Honey had the worst taste in men.”
“My mom wasn’t much better,” she says and sits down too.
“Hooking up with a guy who sold you… I’d say she was worse.”
She looks very sad again and I could just punch myself for making it happen.
“My mom was dead a year before that happened,” she says. “It never would’ve if she was still alive.”
“I guess that’s one thing we have in common,” I say. “Useless moms and mom wannabes.”
She takes my hand in both of hers, squeezing tight. “Will you come to LA with me? I don’t want to say goodbye to you.”
I take a huge bite of the jerky so I’m actually physically unable to answer her. Not just mentally.
She’s just sitting there, her eyes huge and very watery. Like the lake when there’s no moon and no stars. I really don’t like seeing her sad. I guess that means I probably already made up my mind. But saying it… that’s a whole different thing. Especially with the future I’m facing. Which is actually no future at all. Giving her false hope… that’s bound to make her even sadder in the end. Taking her with me where I’m headed… that’s unthinkable.
“Say something,” she whispers, still clutching my hand.
“Grim’s not gonna like me tagging along.”
She shakes her head. “He doesn’t factor into this the way he used to. He’s the one who broke up with me.”
“And now he’s trying to get you back,” I say, biting off some more jerky.
“Have you been reading my texts?” she asks, a faint red color rising in her cheeks and her eyes losing some of that watery blackness to anger.
I shake my head. “I’ve watched you reading them for the past two days. Told me all I needed to know. Despite everything, I’d say you two have a good thing going. You don’t wanna throw it all away for me.”
I stuff the rest of the jerky in my mouth, pull my hand from her grip and walk to the bed. I shouldn’t have stopped here, I should’ve just kept riding. This is exactly the conversation I didn’t want to have. Not at the cabin, not here, not ever. It was so easy by the lake. So natural. Now we’re trying to make sense of something that makes no sense in the real world.
I sit on the edge of the bed and pull off my boots. It’s all I’m taking off tonight.
“You really just want it to be over?” she asks.
She doesn’t just look sad now, she looks confused, and angry and really fucking disappointed.
“Joker needs me in north Cali,” I say. “We’re joining a war. And it could very well be the last thing we do. So you really don’t wanna mess up a good thing with Grim for nothing.”
I lie down on top of the covers. It’s her sad eyes. They make me say more than I want to.
“What are you talking about? What war?”
My eyes are closed and I’m using my arms to cover them, but I can still see her rising from her chair. And still see her outraged, sad eyes.
“I can’t talk about it,” I say, not opening my eyes.
It’s the truth. Us taking revenge on the Devils is a closely held secret. Our hatred for them not so much. But Karma’s MC is out of the loop on that stuff.
“Are you talking about this war with Devil’s Nightmare MC?” she asks, proving me wrong. And showing me just how little I know about her. “Are you finally joining it?”
Funny she should say that. In a lot of ways, it was Joker who started the war in the first place. He’s still fuming that the other MCs now fighting the Devils pushed us to the sidelines after he gave them the idea to band together and go after them. But we’re about the have the last laugh. Or die trying. Probably both.
“It was always our war too,” I tell her.
“How so?” she asks.
“I’m too tired to talk about it.” I don’t have Joker’s gift for telling people only parts of the truth so I better shut up.
The bed rocks as she sits down beside me. “So I’ll fight it with you.”
Karma can take my breath away in a lot of ways. This is another.
“It’s a personal vendetta type of thing,” I say instead of telling her no straight out. I can barely watch her be sad. Getting her killed… I can’t even finish that thought in my head.
She grabs my arms and pulls them off my face. Not gently at all.
“You want to just pretend what we had meant nothing once we get to Cali?” she asks, her eyes shooting lightning now, shining as bright as they ever get. With anger. Good. It’s way better than sadness.
“Who’s pretending?” I ask. “It wasn’t nothing. It was a whole lot of fun. And I had a really good time. But it wasn’t ever gonna be for a long time.”
She’s trying to catch her breath, her short nails digging into my forearms, which she’s gripping like her life depended on it.
“Why are you saying these things?” Her voice is so soft I barely hear her. I wish I didn’t. I wish we’d just gone straight to kissing and undressing when the door of this room closed behind us. I wish I didn’t still want to do that more than I’ve wanted to do anything in a good long while. I wish she’d just drop the whole thing so I didn’t have to lie to her.
“Come on, let’s not complicate this,” I say and pull my arms from her grasp, her nails tugging on my skin. I’ll have marks tomorrow and they’ll be a good reminder of her.
She scoffs and lays down, facing away from me. I put my arms back over my eyes to shield them from the light. If I get up to turn it off, I’ll just walk all the way to my bike, get my bourbon and drink until I remember none of this. And I don’t want that.
I want to remember every single thing about the time I have left with Karma.