8. Garret
GARRET
The nurse locked the wheelchair at the curb and stepped back like she was done with me, which was fair because I was done with this place too.
Three months of hospital food and fluorescent lights and physical therapists who smiled too much while they bent my leg in directions it didn't want to go was enough to kill a lesser man. And I thought about it often.
The fracture in my hip had healed enough for them to cut me loose, but the orthopedic surgeon made it clear on his way out that I wasn't fixed.
I was just stable enough to be someone else's problem instead of his.
I had a long road of physical therapy ahead of me, which I would be facing on my own from now on. Just like everything else in my life.
Lightning's truck was idling at the curb, a black Silverado with tinted windows and mud on the fenders. He didn't get out to help me, which I expected, and he didn't roll the window down to say hello, which I also expected.
Lightning wasn't the helping type. He was the type who showed up because the president told him to and did the bare minimum to say he'd done it.
"Doesn't your friend want to help you?" the nurse asked quietly before she opened the door. I looked up and saw Lightning staring straight ahead, not bothering to look down at me as I gripped the cane in my right hand and pushed myself out of the wheelchair with my left.
"He's not my friend," I grumbled. The pain hit immediately, a hot, grinding ache that started in my hip and radiated down through my thigh and into my knee.
I clenched my jaw and took the first step, then the second, and by the third I had a rhythm going that was ugly but functional.
The truck was ten feet away and it might as well have been ten miles.
I stood in the open passenger door for a second figuring out the geometry of getting my body into the cab without bending my hip past the angle I knew would be excruciating, but there wasn't a graceful way to do it.
I turned, gripped the handle above the door, and raised myself onto the seat in one slow, controlled drop that sent a bolt of white-hot pain straight through my pelvis.
I sucked air through my teeth and pulled my left leg in with both hands as the nurse put my things in the back seat.
"Everything you need is in that bag, Mr. Strunk." She smiled so softly as she took hold of the door and looked up at me. "If you have any questions, call us right away. And go to the pharmacy to fill your pain prescription. Don't forget your follow-up next week."
I nodded at her and reached for the door and she closed it for me. Thank God that part was over, and now I could move on with my life. God knows I spent enough time lying flat on my back to last my lifetime.
Lightning glanced over at me. "You good?"
"Just drive," I grumbled again.
He pulled away from the curb and merged onto the highway heading south, and for a few minutes neither of us said anything. The radio was off and it made the silence feel charged with tension, but I refused to be the first person to talk.
"So," he said, and I already didn't like where it was going. "Three months is a long time to be off your bike."
"I'm aware."
"Surgeon say when you can ride again?" Fox was the only club member who came to visit me, and this jerk thought he was gonna buddy up to me like we were pals or something.
"Six months. Maybe more." I had the nerve to tell him to shut up, but I knew how obnoxious he could be. I wanted this over with as quickly as possible with as little drama as could be mustered.
He whistled low. "That's rough. You took that curve pretty hard from what I heard. Gravel got you?"
I bit my tongue rather than answering him. I was sure by now the whole town had heard about me taking that curve too fast. I was also certain that he had some reason for pushing my buttons. Lightning was a manipulative bastard. Leave it to him to add salt to a wound.
"Funny timing, though." He adjusted his grip on the wheel, and I could see him choosing his next words carefully, probably to make the biggest impact. "Wasn't that right around when the Ducette girl took off?"
I turned my head and looked at him. "What'd you just say?"
"I'm just making an observation. She leaves town, and a few days later, you lay your bike down on a curve you've ridden a thousand times. Doesn't take a genius to connect those dots."
"Then it's a good thing you're not a genius.
Mind your business." The air inside this truck went from January chill to the temperature in Hell in a split second. He was stickin' his nose where it didn’t belong, but there was nothing I could do about it. In my condition, I couldn’t fend off a chihuahua, let alone the holy terror Lightning was.
"Hey, I'm not judging. Everybody knew you had a thing for her. I'm just saying, if a woman rattled me that bad…" He whistled through his teeth and shook his head while I clenched my jaw again to bite back the nasty comments flying through my brain.
"Nobody rattled me," I told him. "I was riding too fast and the road was loose. That's it."
"If you say so."
I wouldn’t even dignify that with a response.
His only purpose in life was to make other people feel like he was superior to them.
The only member of the club who acted like God's gift to everyone, and he was equally hated across the board.
Sometimes, I felt like Fox should cut him loose.
Other times, I knew the only reason he was still in this club was because Fox was falling apart after losing Mandy.
Her body turned up in a creek bed a few miles outside of town—neck snapped in two.
At least, that's what Fox told me when he came to visit. He just wasn’t the same, either.
I understood the pain of losing a woman, but Sara was still out there somewhere living her best life.
Mandy, on the other hand… Fox had a lot of grieving to do.
I let the silence settle for a mile or two before I spoke again. "What's been going on in town? I've been staring at ceiling tiles for three months. Catch me up."
Tony's expression shifted, and whatever smugness had been there a minute ago disappeared. "It's bad, Crank. Real bad. Somebody killed Mandy."
I sat up straighter despite the pain. "Yeah, that's what Fox said… What's goin' on with that?"
"It's looking like the Locusts. Fox is convinced it was them—some kind of message or retaliation for the territory dispute we've been having with them out on Route Nine."
"Is there proof?" When Fox visited weeks ago, they had nothing.
All he knew was that whoever had done it was really strong.
Mandy had no defensive wounds or DNA under her fingernails, and other than a snapped neck, it looked like she'd simply fallen asleep.
What sort of monster could do that to a helpless woman? And why?
"Not yet. But Fox doesn't need proof to start a war, and that's exactly where this is headed.
The Locusts deny it, obviously, but when has a guilty man ever admitted to anything?
" Lightning's nonchalant tone was typical of him.
He didn't mind conflict one bit because he was cocky and overconfident.
He really thought he was stronger and better than everyone, and he believed himself infallible.
I stared through the windshield and tried to process what he was telling me. Mandy was a good woman. She kept Fox grounded, and she'd been kind to every brother in the club, myself included. The idea that someone put their hands on her and left her in a creek bed made me want to punch someone.
"I need to be there," I told him. No matter what I felt about Lightning, the club members were my brothers, and Fox was like a father to all of us. I had to be there for him.
"You need to heal up. You can barely walk, Crank. You'll look like a peg-leg pirate." He chuckled as he brushed me off, and it enraged me.
"I don't care. Fox needs bodies around him if this is going where you say it's going."
"And he'll have them. But you on a cane aren't one of them, not yet.
" Lightning looked over at me with a smug expression and turned on the radio, which was my clue that the conversation was over.
I was lucky he'd given me that much without being nasty.
So I bit my tongue and turned to watch the fields pass by.
He dropped me at the trailer park where I got out of the truck the same way I'd gotten in, slowly and painfully, and I stood in the gravel lot watching him drive away before I turned toward my door.
My trailer had been entirely untouched while I was gone.
I unlocked the door and stepped inside, and the stale air hit me along with three months of dust and neglect.
Dishes were still in the sink from the morning of my wreck.
A coffee mug with a dried black ring at the bottom sat on the counter next to my cell phone and keys, which someone had apparently returned at some point.
And the TV still blared the same news channel I'd been watching that morning before I left for the races.
I made my way to the couch and lowered myself down with a grunt, propping the cane against the armrest, and saw a gray hoodie balled up against the far cushion, half buried between the seat and the back of the couch.
I reached for it and held it up and knew immediately that it was Sara's.
She'd left it here the last time she came over, and I'd never gotten around to giving it back.
I laid it on my lap and leaned my head against the back of the couch and closed my eyes, remembering how she looked when she wore it for me. Standing in my kitchen with the zipper half zipped and nothing underneath it, her hair down around her shoulders, and lusty eyes.
I'd pulled the zipper down slowly and watched the fabric part over her breasts, full and soft and warm against my palms when I cupped them.
She'd gasped and arched into me, and I'd lifted her onto the counter and stepped between her thighs while she wrapped her legs around my waist and pulled me in.
I was hard instantly, just thinking about her.
God, I missed her. I didn't know how many times I'd dreamed of her while trying to recuperate. And when nurses asked me why I didn’t have anyone come to visit, Sara was the only one I wished would show up.
Three months in a hospital bed with no privacy and no relief had wound me so tightly that just the memory of her skin was enough to put me over the edge. I undid my jeans and took myself in hand and let the fantasy play out behind my closed eyelids.
I remembered the way she tasted when I kissed down her neck and along her collarbone, and the way her fingers dug into my shoulders when I pushed inside her.
She was always so warm and tight, and every sound she made went straight through me.
I remembered the way her hips rocked against mine when she was close, and the way her head fell back and her lips parted when she finally let go.
God the way she would pull me deeper with her legs locked around me and whisper my name, not Crank, but Garret, like it was something private that only she was allowed to say.
My hand moved faster and my grip tightened.
Images of her played through my mind. Her backside in the air bent over that barrel in the storage shed behind the diner, her tits in my face while I slid in and out of her, and the whimpers she'd make when she was so close. It all had me right on the edge ready to blow in under five minutes.
When I came, it was like Niagara falls exploded on my flannel and all over my jeans.
My body twitched and jerked while my mind replayed dreams I'd had and memories I wanted to relive.
I stroked myself until I'd soaked up every last drop of enjoyment before my dick started to go soft and my chest released the tension that had been building for months.
It took me a hot minute to make it off the couch, but I cleaned myself up with a handful of paper towels from the kitchen and was still standing at the counter when I heard rumbling outside.
The unmistakable thunder of a dozen or more bikes started low and built fast, and I grabbed my cane and made it to the front door and pushed it open just in time to see the Gravehounds crawling past out the trailer park, headed toward town.
Butch was near the back of the pack on his red Softail. He looked up at me as he approached, and I called out to him from the doorway. "What's going on?"
He slowed just enough to shout over his engine. "Locusts showed up at the Anvil harassing Fox. We're rolling to back him up."
Then he opened the throttle and caught up with the rest of the pack, and the sound of them faded down the road until it was gone.
I stood in the doorway of my trailer leaning on a cane, watching my brothers ride off to defend the club without me, and there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it.
It was my own fault for letting any woman get to me. I knew that. And I knew if I'd have kept my head, I wouldn't be in this fix. It was just one more reason I would never let myself get attached again.
Some lessons you had to learn the hard way, and Sara Ducette had helped me learn this one.