14. Chapter 14
BLUE
It was disorientating to live two lives simultaneously that were so wildly different. One heaven and the other hell. My time with the Raiders at the Furry Creek farm and my time with Aaron and at work with Lin and Eugene, The Fallen men and Old Ladies coming in for appointments and beers respectively as if they wanted to get to know me just as much as Aaron did.
Well, maybe not just as much.
When we weren’t together, which wasn’t nearly as much as either of us would’ve liked, we were texting.
Bones: I miss your mouth.
Bones: And your pussy.
Bones: I want to put my tongue inside’a you.
Blue: My mouth or my pussy?
Bones: Don’t make me choose.
Bones: No, wait, pussy.
Blue: Are you always this horny?
Bones: You can blame yourself for that. It’s gotten so bad I pop a boner when I just see the colour blue.
Two weeks passed in perfect, terrifying balance.
I loved going to work. Helping other women feel beautiful might have seemed trivial to some, but it filled my heart with joy. Confidence was so hard won in a society that told us we had to be perfect in all ways and all things, especially as women. So seeing the look of awed gratitude and self-love on the faces of my clients was incredibly rewarding. To my surprise, I even loved serving at Eugene’s, and not just because it kept me too busy to spend much time at the Raiders’ farmhouse. The clientele was an eclectic bunch from bikers to Entrance locals to those passing by on the way to or from the north looking for a cold beer to combat the hot June air. I met someone new and fascinating almost every day and squirrelled away the cash tips in my back room locker to keep Rooster from claiming them as well as most of my paycheck.
Rooster was busier than usual, too, working on securing funding from that unknown ‘sponsor’ who wanted to see The Fallen ended. But there was chatter about issues back in Alberta. Apparently, Hazard had forcibly taken over a small independent club in Lethbridge that resulted in serious casualties on both sides.
I was happy to hear it because it meant my husband, in name only, would not return for another few weeks.
Which gave Lion, the lawyer he introduced me to, Mr. White, and me enough time to file the paperwork.
Apparently, I could be legally unwed in as little as three weeks.
I hadn’t told Aaron yet. Mostly because I was terrified something would happen and the uncontested divorce either wouldn’t work or wouldn’t even matter in the end. But also because I was a closet romantic and the idea of handing him my divorce papers as a gift was too good a dream to give up on.
In the meantime, I was having a secret love affair with the best man I had ever known.
If you had told me a few months ago I’d be falling in love with an outlaw biker, I would have laughed you out of the room, but it happened so naturally. From the very first moment I’d seen him swaggering into the gas station looking like a bad boy wet dream, he’d been leaving little pieces of himself inside me and stealing sections of my soul for himself.
And that was before he’d put on the full-court press of the past two weeks.
He spent time at Eugene’s every single shift I worked, even if it was only for an hour just to flirt with me when I passed by on my rounds and steal a make-out session in the break room. He came into Lin’s for a haircut so I could get my fingers in that gorgeous head of dark hair, trimming the sides close and leaving the top long enough to flop over his forehead without product or push back from his face like a modern-day James Dean. That day, it was me dragging him into the parking lot for a quick tussle in the back seat of my Mazda.
The best part, though, were the signs.
He left them all over town at places he knew I’d go.
The night after we fucked in the store room, there was one hung up against the same wall we’d made out against, red lights curved into the shape of a voluptuous woman, the kind of thing you might see at a strip club.
But I knew it was modelled after me by the plush form and the short, wavy hair.
There was “I licked it so it’s mine” hanging up over the server’s station in Eugene’s one day, “You are exactly where you are meant to be” at Lin’s another, and “Miss me yet?” glowing pink inside the door of Revved & Ready clothing store when I went on Lila’s recommendation to pick up some new clothes for work.
My favourite appeared in Honey Bear Café & Bakery where Mei had asked me to meet her for coffee so I could meet her best friend and Axe-Man’s daughter, Cleo. They were sitting beneath it, one word repeated three times from dark to light shades of blue. Baby, baby, baby .
By the look of smug pride on Mei’s face when I gaped at her, I knew she and Boner had orchestrated it together.
“He made me one,” Cleo had confessed in that soft, almost muted voice of hers. “Because I have…issues sleeping in the dark.”
“What’s it say?” I asked, without probing about what trauma had left her with awkwardly chopped hair and a gaunt face with haunted, sunken eyes.
A flicker of a smile around a sullen mouth. “Fuck the monsters.”
I’d laughed gently, falling more in love with him for taking care of this girl who clearly needed all the gentle attention she could get.
It gave me the courage to ask, “Have you ever thought about doing something with all that pretty hair, Cleo? I’d love to get my hands on it.”
She’d blinked at me, subconsciously leaning closer to Mei, who put an arm around her shoulders. I watched patiently as she chewed her lower lip and then confessed, “I told Mei once I thought about maybe dyeing it pink.”
“Like Chibiusa,” Mei added with a little grin for her friend before explaining to me. “From Sailor Moon.”
I didn’t know the reference, but I nodded because Cleo’s flawless pale skin and sage green eyes would look stunning with pale pink hair.
“When you’re ready, I’m your girl, okay?” I offered. “And speaking from experience, having fun-coloured hair automatically makes every day a little happier.”
“Yeah?” she’d asked, her gaze peeling back my layers with nimble fingers. “If you say so.”
And she said it like she believed me.
She didn’t make an appointment or anything, but I couldn’t say I was shocked when she showed up at Lin’s and asked if I could trim her unruly bob into something a little sleeker.
And I couldn’t say we both didn’t tear up when we looked at her stylish, tousled bob in the mirror, and she’d asked me through a tight throat if I had time to do her makeup too.
Without hesitation, I’d pushed back my next client and painted Cleo’s beautiful, tragic face in soft colours that made her eyes pop and the bruises beneath disappear. When Kodiak, one of Aaron’s brothers whom I didn’t know well because he barely spoke, came into Lin’s to pick her up, he’d hesitated for a full second with his foot raised mid-step before he recovered.
When I told Aaron about it later that night at Eugene’s, he just shook his head, curled an arm around my waist, and murmured, “Not everyone’s as reckless as me, baby Blue. I saw you and knew in my bones I had to have you no matter what ’cause I knew I’d be good for you if you just let me in. The Bear doesn’t think he’s good for anyone and definitely not for Cleo after everythin’ she’s been through.”
“What’s she been through?” I whispered, almost afraid to ask.
It was late enough that the bar was almost empty, and I was the last server in the place. Eugene had entrusted me with my first closing shift with the kind of ceremony I’d come to expect from him.
“You’re closing tonight,” he’d said, sliding a set of keys along the bar top so they hit my hand where I was making paper napkin rollups with cutlery. “Don’t fuck it up.”
And of course, Aaron was waiting it out with me, nursing an IPA as he sketched out a new design for a client at the garage who wanted a pickle riding a motorcycle on the side of his gas tank. Curtains, King, and Cressida had kept him company for a long time, but King and Cress had a baby at home, and Curtains seemed a little awkward around me, so he’d left when they had. I knew it bothered Aaron that his best friend was the only member of The Fallen family who seemed to have an issue with me, but I figured I should leave them to hash it out.
Honestly, even though I wanted the red-headed hacker to like me, he was the least of my problems.
“I’ll tell ya when you kick the stranglers out,” Aaron said, pulling me back to the present.
He wore that somber face, brows pinched, stubble-shadowed jaw tight with strain.
I knew it wouldn’t be a good story.
But when I finally closed and locked the front doors behind Bruce, one of our local, friendly drunks, and went to sit on Aaron’s lap at the table, I realized nothing could’ve prepared me for the truth about Cleo’s history with The Prophet serial killer.
When he finished speaking, I sat mutely in his lap, eyes fixed unseeing on a neon sign over his shoulder that depicted a cupid with devil’s horns and a forked tail.
“She went through hell,” I murmured, finally, heartbroken for the sweet, brittle girl I hardly knew.
“Yeah.” Something in Aaron’s voice, a graveness I’d never heard before, drew my gaze to his. Those dark eyes seemed to be filled with the ink I needed to write out to the feelings battling inside my chest.
“Not one of you is without scars, are you?” I asked.
“No,” he agreed. “Curtains’s mum was killed on Christmas morning when he was eighteen. A serial killer murdered Bat’s wife, brutalized Cleo, and stalked Bea. Loulou’s fought and beat cancer twice, and she’s only twenty-three. Zeus’s been to jail twice, both times with two young kids at home, once for savin’ an innocent kid and the other ’cause he was set up by a corrupt cop. Cress’s been nailed to a chair and lived through believin’ her husband was dead for months just like the rest’a us. Lila’s dad killed her mum in front’a her when she was fuckin’ six years old. Wrath’s woman was killed by her father, and Harleigh Rose stabbed Lion in the fuckin’ chest to save his own life. There’s no shortage’a sad stories amongst The Fallen.”
“I guess it bonds you.” I thought about my brother Red, a total stranger to me now and even back then. Rooster’s differing forms of neglect and abuse had merely formed a wedge between us. If I saw him now, I wondered if I’d even recognize him.
“You could say that. All’a us have felt broken at some point in our lives, maybe even wondered if it’s worth it to go on. We’ve been disillusioned and lost, and the club gives people a purpose to tether them and a long lead to give them the slack they need to recover on their own terms. No one here has to be any one way or one kinda person. The lines are blurred ’cause we all learned the hard way that life’s painted in shades’a grey instead’a black and white.”
I hummed my agreement as I processed his biker wisdom, stroking the owl on the strong column of his throat like a touchstone. So I was still a little lost in my thoughts when he jostled me in his lap to straddle him, his big hands palming either side of my face.
“I think it’s how we all know deep in our bones when we fall for the right person,” he murmured, eyes dark and intent on mine, expression almost harsh with sincerity. “They add colour back to our greyscale lives. Just like you added the colour blue to mine.”
“Bones,” I whispered because transforming his nickname felt as right as the taste of it on the back of my tongue. As right as the feeling he alchemized in my skin, blood, and bones. “I don’t understand how I got so lucky to have you in my life. I know being together in secret isn’t enough, but it’s better than anything I ever had before.”
“It’s enough,” he swore like an oath signed in his own blood. “It’s more than enough to spend any minute with you. We’ll get to it one day, the ever-after shit without the obstacles between us, but ’til then, Blue, I’m more than fuckin’ happy with what I got right now.”
There was a gasp of hot air between our mouths, and then he kissed me, and that felt like a promise too. Like a solemn pledge to love me and take me however I came for as long as I wanted to give myself to him. I ate it off his tongue and fed it back to him with all the near violent lust and yearning in my heart. My nails scratched the short hair at the back of his neck, then reached up to tangle in the long, silken strands so I could pin him to my voracious mouth. He matched my hunger with a fierce growl that rumbled between my teeth as he stood suddenly, my weight perched in his arms, to stalk over to the pool table.
He lay me down slowly, the muscles in his torso and arms flexing around me like iron. It did something to me, knowing that all that strength was being used for tenderness and not violence. Under other circumstances, I might have cried, knowing that this outlaw, this man who had no doubt killed and beaten and potentially maimed, would never lift a hand to me. Even more than that, he would use that Olympian strength and street-smart strategy to protect me against anything that came.
I tore my lips from his, suddenly overcome by the need to show him just how alive and fearless he made me feel.
“Sit down,” I murmured against his lips as he tried to kiss me again.
“Kinda have other plans goin’ right now, Blue.” His mouth moved to my ear, teeth nipping at my lobe, then down to the sensitive skin of my neck where he placed luscious, open-mouthed kisses.
I shivered, trying to hold on to my slippery willpower. “Trust me, you’ll like this. Just sit down for me.”
In the past, my orders had no weight in the bedroom with my husband. It was an authoritarian space with Hazard as the master and I the lowly servant.
But here, in the middle of a biker bar, Aaron proved that my voice would always matter to him.
Slowly, coiling that hard, lean body back from mine with infinite care, he stepped away from the pool table until his knees hit the chair behind him. Without tearing his heated gaze from me, he pulled it out and sat down.
Even in the dimmed lights, I could see the thick wedge of his erection tenting his jeans.
Power soared through me, lightening my bones until I felt like I could fly. A bird freed at least momentarily from its cage, all I wanted to do was preen my feathers and show off exactly who I was to the only man who had ever deserved it.
I tugged my phone out of my back pocket and secured it to the Bluetooth speakers in the bar. A moment later, “Caged Bird” by Myles Cameron spilled through the room. It was a song I listened to every day on my way to work because it reminded me so much of me, of us, and I’d been meaning to share it with him.
It was just sexy enough, the beat rich and erotic, to use it now to strip off the last of my shields.
Aaron watched with lowered brows, tongue touching the edge of his mouth as I sat on my knees, sliding on the felt until they were as wide as I could comfortably spread them. My hands found my breasts through my yellow floral sundress, plumping them in the structured cups so that they spilled dangerously over the fabric. The stained glass light above the pool table cast me in golden light, every inch illuminated so there was nothing to hide. Not the soft thickness of my spread thighs as I slowly teased the hem of my dress up over the pale skin or the swell of my hips and the slope of my trembling belly. There wasn’t a hard surface on me, all exaggerated curves and the slight dip of my waist between them.
But all the ugly voices that had taken residence in my head in the tone of my father, his brothers, my soon-to-be ex-husband were all crushed under the sheer intensity of Boner’s lust-filled, reverent gaze on every inch of my body.
“So fuckin’ gorgeous,” he said like words were pulled from me, an exorcism of deeply buried belief. “I could never get tired’a lookin’ all the beauty that’s you.”
His praise stoked the fire in my gut even higher and fanned the flames of my confidence until I felt like a goddess on that black felt.
I lifted the dress over my head and threw it at him.
He caught it in one hand, brought it to his face to inhale the scent of me, and then dropped it on the table without taking his gaze from me for a second.
Clad only in my simple blue bra and panties, I tipped forward onto my hands to show him the heavy sway of my breasts as I rocked to the throbbing beat, circling my hips and tossing my hair.
“Fuuuuck,” he cursed softly, squeezing his cock through the denim. “You’re killin’ me.”
Good , I thought gleefully, sliding my leg through my hands and then flipping over to face away from him, ass bared for his regard. I twerked my curves, jiggling my ass in a way I knew looked sexy because it even turned me on when I caught sight of it in the mirror over the bar.
I looked shameless and sensual, a temptress winding a spell around a man who was helpless to resist it.
Tossing my hair over my shoulder, I saw Aaron sprawled in the wooden chair, thighs splayed, hand still clenched hard over his erection.
“Touch yourself for me,” I told him in a voice a barely recognized, deep with lust and power. “Pull that thick cock out and show me how much I turn you on.”
Aaron slouched deeper in the chair as he slowly undid the big silver buckle of his belt and then dragged the zipper of his jeans down tooth by tooth. I was almost panting as I moved sinuously to the music, gaze hooked by his steady, intentional movements.
“You see what you do to me?” he rasped as one hand dipped into his boxers and pulled out that huge dick, thick and heavily veined, the head already plump and plum purple with blood.
I wanted to fall to my knees and lave it with my tongue.
But this was my show, and Aaron was the one who would end up on his knees for me.
I sat back on my heels, my ass plumped by the pose. Facing away from him still, I undid the hook of my bra and let it slide down one arm, then the other before dangling it off my fingers and letting it drop to the floor. I knee stepped to the side so I was in profile to him and arched my back, breasts proudly displayed, an s-shaped presentation of every one of my curves.
I could hear his shuddered exhale over the current of the next song and grinned smugly at the results of my lewd display. I’d never done anything like this. I had never before felt empowered by my own sexuality, and in truth, it was both of us turning me on now. Every incredibly gorgeous inch of him and every inch of me, beautiful because I liked myself and so, wonderfully, did he.
Shaking my hair back in a blue swirl, I faced him again, extending my legs one at a time as I shimmied out of my panties so I was naked under the spotlight of the pool table light. I tossed the damp garment at him and watched with cat-like contentment as he snatched the cotton from the air and wrapped it around his erection.
“Fuckin’ stunnin’,” Aaron growled, his fist tight around that straining shaft, the tip wet with precum as it slid through my panties. “Touch yourself for me, baby. Show me how wet you are.”
I shivered as my fingers delved from between my breasts, down my stomach to the slick heat between my thighs. A quick dip inside my aching entrance and then I lifted my fingers to the light to show him how wet I was. His mouth fell open on a ragged gasp as I slid them slowly into my open mouth and sucked.
“Jesus fuck,” he said, his entire body tensing in the chair. “I’ll die if I don’t get my hands on you.”
“Then come here,” I beckoned, leaning back on my elbows as if I did this kind of thing every day.
While inside my chest, my heart thudded like a war drum and my blood ran so hot I thought it would set fire to my skin.
When he stalked across the space and reached for me, I placed my high-heeled left foot against his chest to stop him temporarily.
“I don’t think I’m quite ready to take you,” I drawled, but a little smile played at my mouth because this was fun in a way sex never had been before.
A wicked grin played around Aaron’s full mouth in that short dark beard. I laughed in shock as he growled, tugging me by the hips up into the air slightly so he could bend and fix his mouth to my pussy like a starving man.
I fell to my back on the table, scrambling for purchase against the felt as he feasted on me. The wet, slick sounds of his mouth working over my clit, fucking into my core, sucking at my lips and biting at my inner thighs were sexier than the heavy bass of the song pulsing through the speakers. When I couldn’t find anything to sink my fingers into, I clutched at his shoulders and hair, writhing even as I pulled him closer.
The orgasm that came too quickly almost scared me, barreling toward me like a runaway train. When it hit with one sucking kiss over my clit, I fractured limb by limb, every part of me imploding around the bright hot sensation at my core.
“Bones,” I cried out, shaking apart in his firm hold.
“Yeah, baby,” he encouraged, licking lightly at my clit to pull even more pleasure from me without turning it to agony. “Give me that sweet cum.”
Before I’d even finished, he was fucking into me with two fingers, twisting and rubbing until that place inside me lit up like one of his neon signs. Pleasure throbbed through me in shocking, vibrant waves reducing my thoughts to rubble.
“Bones, Bones, ohmygod, fuck !” I chanted as he took me higher and higher in a slow, steady build this time.
“Gonna make you come ’til you beg me to stop,” he warned me almost viciously. “Can’t get enough’a the way you taste.”
I shivered as he shifted the fingers inside me to press a thumb over my asshole, circling and pressing just enough to bring the nerve endings buzzing to life. It felt as if I was going to come straight out of my skin, sensation stripping me of everything but the feel of Aaron inside me, anchoring me to the world by those clever fingers and smooth tongue. Desperate for something more to keep me from evaporating into nothing, I grabbed his hand from my hip and tugged it to my mouth, clamping my teeth around the pulse beating hard against the thin skin of his wrist.
Aaron swore savagely against my wet folds before flicking my swollen clit and pressing that seeking thumb just inside my tight ass.
My body tensed like a strung bow, arching off the pool table, thighs clutching his head, hand fisted in his hair and the other around his arm so I could bite, bite, bite down on his flesh, the taste of him coalescing with the final blow to my system that shattered me into pieces. I pulsed aground his fingers, legs shaking, voice trembling around a scream that was muffled against his flesh as I came and came and came until I was floating in a white mist of gentle contentment.
Only the feeling of Aaron’s heavy cock slapping against my pussy shocked me back to life. I came to with a gasp, eyes wide at the electric sensation as he gently beat my cunt with his steely hard length. His eyes were full black as he kneeled over me at the edge of the pool table. He’d discarded his jeans, boxers, shirt, and cut, so every inch of his naked form glowed golden above me, coiled and ready to spring into action.
A sudden thought had me saying, “Put your cut back on.”
He shuddered but shook it from the tangle of his shirt before tugging it on. The open leather framed his muscle-quilted torso, the silver chains above the tight pecs and the stack ladder of muscles in his abdominals. It drew my gaze down farther to the short copse of black hair at the base of that spectacular cock, thick and heavy as he slapped it in rhythm to the music against my swollen sex.
“Fuck me, Boner,” I begged, arching back, letting my legs fall open even wider.
He splayed a hand on my chest, pinning me to the felt in a way that felt possessive and so right the touch burned straight through to brand my bones.
Something about him at that moment was almost scary. All the good humour and fun-loving charm were stripped from his expression, revealing the strong bones and the eye-squinting brightness of his desire to own me like this.
“You’re mine,” he told me in a rough, biting tone as he lifted my hips onto his thighs and angled his cock to my entrance. “Do you feel it?”
A slight rock of his hips slotted him just inside, but he didn’t rush, swaying back and forth a little deeper every time until I was hypnotized by the oceanic rhythm and the erotic tensing of all that golden-tanned muscle framed by the cut that made him the outlaw, the man , he was.
“Yes,” I hissed as he pressed impossibly deeper and deeper. “I feel you in my fucking bones.”
“Yeah,” he grunted, taking my hand to press it to his chest so I could feel the wild hum of his heartbeat. “Bone deep, Blue.”
“Bone deep,” I agreed on a shocked breath as he tugged me up into his arms so I was impaled on the wide length of him and straddling his knees.
He held me still with one hand on my hip and the other coiled around my hair so he could fuck up into me, slow and slight so every thrust ground the hair at his base against my sensitive clit. When my eyes closed as another orgasm started to curl around my hips, he tugged sharply on my hair.
“Eyes on me while I take this pretty pussy,” he ordered.
Oh yes, I loved this side of him. Dark and dangerous and stripped of that veneer of civility.
“Watch me as I take you apart,” he said as he snapped his hips brutally up into mine so pain edged the pleasure cutting through the ribbons on my sanity until I was only hanging by a thread.
“Keep those fuckin’ gorgeous blues on me while I come deep inside you. Love leavin’ my cum in this gorgeous cunt, knowin’ you’re mine more than anyone else’s.”
“Yes,” I cried as my neck lost tension and my head fell back between my shoulders, my hair tickling my sweaty shoulders. “I love feeling you when you’re gone. Sometimes, before I shower when I get back from work, I use it to touch myself. Fucking your seed back inside me.”
“Fuck yeah,” he growled, dipping his head to nip at my neck. “Such a good girl for me. One day soon, after I come inside you, I’ll eat you out and fuck you again. Love the taste’a me merged with you.”
My head snapped forward, teeth boring into Aaron’s pec as my orgasm electrified my senses, vision whiting out, then folding to black like a power outage. Limbs shaking in the bracket of his strong arms until suddenly they were limp. Pussy spasming, milking him, desperate for that promised cum, and the moment I felt him grunt against my throat and kick inside me, heat flooding my sensitive folds, I called out in triumph.
And even though he held tight in the aftermath, his knees no doubt hurting from the unforgiving felt, our skin too sticky for comfort, I felt freer than I’d ever been. Like Aaron had broken open my glass cage and let me taste a life I might have if I believed in him. One where I’d never have to worry about the monsters under my bed again.
“Bone deep, Blue,” he said into my hair, stroking a big, rough hand down my spine. “Forever.”
“Bone deep,” I echoed because it was the truth.
No matter what happened, this man was a part of me now, as elemental as my blood and marrow.
But I couldn’t give him back his forever because I was still too scared, one foot still deep in the mire of my past, to trust his belief in that a girl like me living the life I did could ever have the “ever-after shit.”