16. Julie
sixteen
Julie
“The club is tracking down your mother’s whereabouts right now,” Bram said.
“I’ve got a feeling that wherever she is, she’s making someone miserable.”
Bram laughed and then grabbed at his side. “You don’t seem too worried about her.”
He’d not spent 27 years with her. She was a bulldog that most men, except Rusty, were afraid of. “He won’t hurt my mother. If he has her, it’s because he thinks it’s leverage. He thinks we’ll swoop in and try to rescue her.”
“You don’t want to do that,” Bram said.
“No, because that’s what she wants.” I took a sip of the whiskey he’d brought me. “Let this ride for a bit. I guaran-fucking-tee you she’ll show up with a necklace full of ears and teeth.”
I didn’t tell Bram, but I was ready to set fire to all of Barstow.
Just burn the motherfucker down, and then there’d be no more bullshit.
Rusty had stormed out of the club as soon as he knew Emma was okay.
Though none of us were okay and never would be until my father was dead.
I didn’t just want to punch him in the throat; I wanted to put a bullet through his head.
“I need to get out,” I said. My voice sounded wrong, even to me—gravelly and hollowed out.
Bram flicked his gaze over me, a slow vertical scan that stuck for a second on my arms, which I’d knotted tight across my ribs like I was bracing for a punch. “Where to?” he asked, not soft but not hard either.
I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter. Just—out.”
He stared, contemplating his next move. He was always contemplating, and I assumed that’s how he stayed ahead of all the dumpster fires. After a while, he leaned forward, exhaling smoke like he was pushing it through a cheese grater. “Get your shit,” he said, standing up. “Back gate in five.”
He didn’t look at me when he walked past, just put out his cigarette, finished his beer, and disappeared into the dark toward the row of bikes. I listened to the first four seconds of nothing before my nerves started clawing at each other.
I grabbed my phone. Thought about a gun but decided against it.
If tonight went south, nothing I could carry would matter.
Outside, I found Bram crouched by his bike, a matte-black ’72 Shovelhead with no chrome and a solo seat that looked like it’d been patched up by a medieval leather worker. Men loved their old bikes.
He jerked his chin at me. “Helmet.” He had a spare, the dings and streaks of white paint still visible under fresh flat black.
I took it. He threw a leg over the bike and waited for me to climb on, then kicked it to life with a rumble so low it sounded like the aftershock of something much bigger.
He rolled us out slow, never looking back at the compound or the horizon, just aiming us into the nothing like that was the only thing that made sense.
Out on the service road, the Mojave was flat and endless, the sky a velvet sheet hammered full of cheap diamonds.
There was no moon. The only light was from our headlamp, and even that was more suggestion than illumination, sweeping the asphalt ahead with a faint halo the color of cigarette ash.
I wrapped my arms around Bram’s middle, palms splayed over his ribs, and felt the constant tremor of the engine radiating through the frame, up my legs, into my teeth.
He didn’t say a word and neither did I. What was there to say?
The road peeled out ahead, twin stripes of nothing bracketed by lower-than-low scrub and gravelly wasteland.
The air was warm and dry and tasted like minerals and burnt rubber and the memory of rain.
At first, I was stiff—shoulders jacked, hands locked in place, chin tucked to his back so hard I could feel the friction of my jawbone on his kutte.
The seat was nowhere near big enough, but we managed.
The farther we got from the compound, the more that tension started to bleed out.
After ten miles I could unclench my hands.
After twenty, I stopped watching the odometer.
Somewhere around the outskirts of nowhere, he let off the gas and coasted us to a slow roll. The engine dropped from a snarl to a murmur. I felt him glance down at the tank, then over his shoulder. He pulled to the side of the road and killed the engine.
“Hop off,” he said.
“What?”
“You heard me. Hop off.”
His eyes never veered from mine. He was fucking serious. I climbed off the bike and watched him scoot back, his ass barely on the seat. He patted the seat in front of him.
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” I said.
“I got you.”
“Who has us when I lay this big bitch down on the road going sixty?”
“Get on, Julie.”
There was no asking in his voice. It was a direct order with only one option.
“Shit, this is a bad idea.” Then I did what he asked, sitting in front of him, his thighs bracketed around mine, his chest flush against my back.
He reached around me to grab the bars, his forearms a cage, his chin just above my temple.
I could feel the scratch of his beard on my hair and the steady thump of his heart against my back.
He twisted the throttle and the bike lurched forward, our bodies moving in tandem, a single animal.
I don’t know what it was about this man, but every time he was around, my pussy was wet and needy. Even years ago, when he’d come to my office about the Colonel, no matter how angry he was, I felt myself dripping around him. Back then, it was easier to fight this feeling.
For a while, that was all there was: the road, the wind, the two of us pressed together in the center of the world.
I forgot about the club, about the job, about the reason the universe brought us together. I just let the night stretch out, empty and infinite, and let myself be carried forward by someone who never needed to explain anything twice. At least for now, he’d pushed the world away, and it was only us.
With the wind pushing me into Bram’s chest and the desert stretched open like a throat in front of us, the rest of the world peeled away.
I focused on the one square inch of denim at my waistband, the slow rise and fall of his ribs against my back, the way the road vibrated through my thighs and up into the soft meat under my breastbone.
If I turned my head just so, I could catch the phantom of his beard scraping the edge of my ear, the faintest electrical charge of skin on skin.
If I listened, really listened, I could almost feel the blood moving under the surface of his arms where they boxed me in.
We rode like that for ten, maybe fifteen miles.
It was enough that the other lights died off, that the noise of the town shrank behind us to a pinprick, and that the dark itself became a thing I could taste on my tongue.
After a while I stopped thinking and just let the engine noise override the memory loop in my skull.
Even my knuckles, white and aching from the first stretch, learned to let go.
And then Bram’s right hand left the throttle. He didn’t hesitate, didn’t slow. Just reached down, worked the brass button on my fly, and slid his large hand inside.
For a split second I stiffened. Years of being watched, judged, followed—my body had a whole archive of flinches and recoils.
But the bike didn’t swerve. He kept his left hand steady on the grip, and his right moved like he’d done this before, like there was nothing unnatural about fingering me through their soaked panties at sixty miles an hour.
He pushed inside me, his two fingers warm and a little rough, and I bit down on the inside of my cheek so hard I tasted blood.
I could hear my own heartbeat over the wind.
My hands slapped the tank, palms flat, and I leaned forward, arched, trying to keep balance and keep from coming apart in public, even if our “public” was now just the two of us and a strip of abandoned road.
My cunt pulsed and ached for more and I pressed down against his fingers, urging him, fucking him, my brain beginning to swim, my body so relaxed that I feared I might fall off the bike. But what a fucking way to die.
“That’s it, baby,” he whispered into my ear. “I’m gonna make you come at sixty miles an hour.”
“Fuck, Bram.” I leaned my head back against his shoulder and looked up at the stars, the moon, and a universe that had finally brought me comfort. The world was finally right, even if just for a moment.
He worked me slow. Not gentle, but deliberate, with a rhythm that was almost cruel in its patience.
I bucked back against him, couldn’t help it, and he clamped his thighs tighter to hold me steady.
I looked down at the battered speedometer and saw the needle holding steady at 64, the numbers blurring as my vision tunneled.
“I’m gonna…”
He cut me off with his teeth against my neck, his fingers splayed inside me, the soft cushiony spot pulsing against the intrusion.
“Yes,” I said.
“No, not yet,” he growled. “Not yet.” Though I couldn’t see the grin, I knew it was there, devilish, demanding, a grin that said I own you and your cunt. Don’t you dare think otherwise for one fucking second.
I gripped the tank until my fingers went numb, until the rawness started in the center of my spine and radiated out.
He kept going, didn’t speed up, didn’t back off.
Just stayed with me, his chin ghosting the top of my shoulder, his breath falling into a pattern I started to match without thinking.
The engine roared under us, the wind clawed at my jacket, and for a second, I thought I might fly apart like a cigarette ground out on concrete.
“Do it,” he said, lips against my ear, fingers greedy and insistent. “Come right now, Julie. Come, baby.”
“Fuck you, Bram!”
And then I came, hard and loud, the sound whipped away by the slipstream before it could embarrass me.
I jerked so hard my helmet banged the base of Bram’s jaw, and he just held me there, arm locked, palm pressed between my legs until the shudders went all the way through.
When I finally caught my breath, I realized my cheeks were wet—not tears, just the reaction of my dumb lizard brain to a flood it hadn’t prepared for.
He pulled his hand back, zipped me up, and put it right back on the throttle.
He kept us moving for another half mile, then signaled with a squeeze on my knee.
He steered us onto the shoulder, then down a rutted side road lined with barrel cactus and the skeletons of old telephone poles.
At the end was a wide gravel turnout and, beyond that, a bluff overlooking the empty valley.
There was a rusted oil drum at the edge of the pad and a couple of busted beer cans stacked like a shrine.
Bram rolled us to a stop and killed the engine.
For a second neither of us moved. The silence was so thick I could hear the settling of the engine as it cooled, the tick and ping of metal losing heat. My legs shook a little. I forced them steady, swung a leg over the seat, and turned to face him.
He watched me, the way animals watch each other in the half second before they decide whether to fuck or fight.
He still hadn’t spoken, and I didn’t plan to break the streak.
I just settled onto the seat with my knees spread, boots planted in the dirt on either side of his.
I looked down at his hands, the calluses on his knuckles, the patch of dark where he’d wiped his fingers on his jeans.
My chest was still heaving, my voice shot.
I reached for him. He didn’t stop me, didn’t flinch, just sat there while I undid the buckle of his belt and the top button of his fly.
I dragged down his zipper and then reached in and pulled him out, hot and thick and already hard.
He stared at me, jaw tight, eyes narrowed, like he was daring me to go soft.
I spat in my hand and wrapped it around him, working him slow at first, just the way he’d done for me.
“It’s my turn,” I said and gently pressed my forehead to his.
“Nobody’s stopping you,” he said, daring me.
His breath came harder, but he kept his hands on the bars, knuckles bone white against the chrome.
I got a little rough with it, twisted my wrist, and he exhaled through his nose, the sound as tight as a gunshot in a closed room.
I watched his face the whole time, the way his mouth pinched at the edges, the way his eyes never left mine.
When he was close, he tipped his head back and let out a sound that wasn’t quite a groan but wasn’t nothing either.
He came in a hot burst, splattering both me and the seat. For a moment, he just stayed like that, head tipped back, breath slowing to normal. I wiped my hand on his jeans, zipped him back in, and then leaned forward until my forehead pressed against the notch of his throat.
When the silence had done its work, Bram reached for the key and started the engine. I got back on, this time not behind him but wedged between his arms, my back to his chest, his chin over my shoulder.
We rode home without a word. No one needed to explain anything to anyone.
When we hit the back gate, he killed the lights and rolled the bike behind the outbuilding, out of sight from anyone inside.
I peeled off the helmet and didn’t wait for him to say goodnight.
Instead, I turned, found his face in the dark, and kissed him, teeth clacking together.
Then I went inside, fingers still trembling, and let the night keep its secrets.