Chapter 17 #2
“She’s the same, grumpy as ever.” The lie came easily. My mother was worse than grumpy. She was a black hole of need and resentment, sucking the life out of everything around her.
“Will she be helping you out during Harvest Week?”
“She says she will.” I smiled. Another lie. Or maybe not. With my mother, it was impossible to tell what was real and what was manipulation.
Harvest Week was the one week out of the year my mother left the house. I couldn’t figure out what drew her to the festival, but every year I took part, she was right beside me. Selling products and talking to everyone who passed by.
It was as though she became someone else completely. Gone was the cranky woman who complained about everything from sunrise to sunset. In her place was the mother I’d wished for growing up. The mother I’d needed. The mother who’d never existed except for seven days a year.
She was friendly, polite, knowledgeable about what I offered. Every year I asked her why Harvest Week was different, and every year she brushed me off, gaslighting me into thinking her behavior was normal. That I was the problem. That I was imagining things.
She avoided other festivals like the plague. She was Ebenezer Scrooge at Christmas. Nothing but a storm cloud during the blueberry and strawberry festivals in the summer.
And spring? Well, she may as well have been a fox hunting the Easter Bunny. Never in my life had I received an Easter basket. There were no pictures posed with someone dressed in a bunny costume, no eggs to color and hunt the next day.
Spring seemed to bring out the worst in her, and despite my best efforts at sleuthing, she gave nothing away. She just sat in her chair and stared at the television like it held the answers to questions I didn’t know how to ask.
“Tell her I look forward to seeing her.” Sue Ann handed me my bread, and I assured her I would pass along the message. Not that my mother would care. I wasn’t even sure she’d remember who Sue Ann was, given she only saw the woman one week out of the year.
Back on the street, I peered down the road in both directions.
My ears strained for the roar of a motorcycle, though I still couldn’t tell if anticipation or dread was souring my stomach.
The bread was warm in my hands, the cotton bag soft against my palms. The sun beat down on my shoulders, sweat gathering at the small of my back.
Whatever caused the churning didn’t matter.
There was only one decision to be made. I climbed into my truck and turned toward home.
My eyes kept straying to the rearview and side mirrors, and I hated to admit I was looking for him.
Searching for any sign of that motorcycle.
Any glimpse of leather and dark hair and the man who’d made me feel wanted for the first time in my life before throwing me away like garbage.
It was all in vain, of course, because if he’d wanted to see me, if he’d wanted to talk to me, he would have stopped in town.
He could have pulled over and walked up to me the way he did at my home, cradled my face and kissed me.
Could have explained why he left. Could have given me something, anything, to hold onto.
Instead, he’d continued on his way as though I were no one special. Just a beautiful woman who caught his eye as she walked down the street. Just another piece of ass he’d sampled and found wanting.
I wasn’t humble enough to think I wasn’t beautiful, or na?ve enough to believe men didn’t notice me. But I wasn’t so full of pride that I expected them to drop to their knees and beg me to come home with them either.
I knew Brock felt an attraction to me. There was no mistaking the very hard bulge he’d ground against me in my kitchen. No question he’d kissed me the way a lover kissed the object of his desire. But attraction didn’t equal love. Wanting someone’s body didn’t mean you wanted their mind, their soul.
It didn’t mean you wanted them.
I needed to remember that Brock was a biker.
He was the vice president of the Gods of Mayhem, and I wasn’t stupid.
I’d seen the women at the club, the ones I knew were there to have sex with the men.
The club whores who draped themselves over the brothers like they owned them.
He wasn’t hurting for company in his bed.
But there was something about the way he called me his queen. Something that felt like more than a line. More than just another pet name.
It felt deeper, more meaningful, as though the word itself was a crown placed on my head. A title given with intention. A brand that wasn’t offered lightly.
Maybe it was my own fantasies, my own desire to belong, that filled my head and heart with the notion that what I’d seen between Cash and Kytten, between Banshee and Aspen, was something I could reach for.
Something I could have. That I could matter to another human being in a way that went beyond transactions and obligations.
Yet once again, someone had tossed me aside. Given me scraps of attention to earn my loyalty, only to leave me feeling discarded, unwanted, and forgotten.
Unloved.
The word echoed in my head as I drove home, the truck rattling over potholes, the bread cooling on the seat beside me.
Unloved. Unwanted. Used. The trifecta of my existence.
The story of my life written in the spaces between other people’s needs and my own desperate hope that maybe, just maybe, this time would be different.
But it never was.
And I was a fool for thinking it could be.