by Hazel Parker
“I’m out of here,” he reassured. “I’ll be back in another two weeks.”
“See you, buddy,” Flip said, reaching out to pat him on the shoulder. Before he could turn the doorknob of the abandoned office, though, Vance remembered something that he couldn’t believe that he’d allowed himself to get distracted enough to forget.
“Oh, before I do, I wanted to tell you,” he began, “Melly stopped by the bar.” John, who hadn’t been around for long enough to have known Vance’s ex-girlfriend or to have even heard the stories about her leaving and joining another club, frowned.
“Who’s Melly?” he asked, mostly drowned out by Flip cursing.
“What the hell did she want?” he demanded venomously. Vance shrugged.
“Just catching up,” he said noncommittally. “Wanted to tell me that the Disciples think we invaded their turf or something. I told her it was bullshit.” Flip laughed.
“You told her that?” he verified, laughing even harder when Vance nodded.
“Why? Is it not true?”
“Of course not,” he laughed. “We’re closing in on them, Murphy. They killed one of ours, so we’re going to choke them out at the source.” Vance blanched.
“You’re not planning on hurting anybody, are you?” he asked. The first rule that they lived by was that they were never the first to attack, that they never acted violently but out of self-defense. However, everyone had taken Tank’s death personally. For many of them, they took that as a strike against their whole group, and it could be argued that killing one of theirs wasn’t just an eye for an eye, but an act of self-protection.
“You know that’s not how we work,” Flip chastised. Vance felt himself relax a bit at the reassurance that they weren’t going to retaliate, at least not right this moment. He trusted his brothers, of course, to keep a good moral compass, but there were some things that were just impossible to forgive, and he knew that they hated the Devil’s Disciples enough that they could potentially make a deadly mistake if they encountered one of their members.
“I know,” Vance admitted. “Just making sure.”
“I get it,” Flip replied. “We’re not gonna hurt anybody, not unless they deserve it. The plan is to inch in closer and closer to the center of their territory until they don’t have enough buyers to sustain their group. We’ve got more product and more customers, so we can offer a lower price, anyway, so it shouldn’t be hard.”
Vance frowned. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” he asked. “They’ve already showed us what they’re willing to do if we test them.”
“It’s dog eat dog,” Flip shrugged, “and we’re hungry for blood. I’ll be damned if we let those bastards win.”
Vance nodded. He felt much the same way, of course, about doing whatever they had to in order to make sure that they didn’t lose another Rebel King. However, he also believed strongly in nonviolence, and though not every club shared his pacifistic nature, the Kings were good guys.
“Alright,” he finally said, knowing that if he wasted much more time here, that the trip back would be dangerous, “I’m going.”
“Be safe, brother,” John said as he hopped on his motorcycle and put his helmet on.
“See you in two weeks,” Flip waved. He started up his bike and mentally prepared himself for the drive back to the bar with all the cash in his pockets and the weight of the fate of the whole club on his shoulders.
Chapter 9: Nina
Nina didn’t see or hear from Adam again for several days. He became impossible to reach, never seeming to have his phone on him to talk to her or even checking his messages to show her that he’d received them. Honestly, she’d have been worried that something bad had happened to him if it weren’t for his friends tagging him in social media posts, which he did seem to have the time to reply to. They’d only just had an argument a few days ago about her own work schedule, so why was he so absent, now?
After almost a week, Nina decided that enough was enough and shot him a long, somewhat rambling text about how much she wished that he’d check in with her and let her know that everything was okay. That, he did reply to with a short message telling her that he was fine, that he’d just gotten caught up in work stuff and that he’d call her when he could.
It wouldn’t bother her so much if she knew that he was, in fact, busy with work. However, the fact that he wasn’t even seeming to make an effort to hide the fact that that was not the case was upsetting to Nina. The pictures that Adam was being tagged in every night were of him out and about, in various bars in the city, at parties at his coworkers’ houses, and eating at diners with a small group of cops late at night after long nights patrolling. She wanted him to have fun and she knew that his job was stressful, but these were the kinds of things that, when he’d been doing them in the academy, she’d always been invited to. He would take her to the house parties of his coworkers and sometimes he even threw his own; he’d invite her to the bars that they were drinking at and sit next to her as he and his friends decompressed from the day; he’d swing by her place to pick her up on the way to grab a bite to eat with the guys.
She told herself that he probably assumed she was too busy, and that was true. It would still be nice to be asked, though. Surely, she could spare an hour or two here and there if he asked her, right? She didn’t think that she’d been that unavailable. Honestly, it was beginning to seem like Adam was avoiding her. The evasive maneuvers he was using to get out of talking to her during the day combined with the fact that he was lying about where he was struck her as more than a little suspicious.
When, after several hours of texting, her boyfriend was still only giving one or two word responses, Nina decided to call him instead. Predictably, he didn’t pick up, so she left a message.
“Hey, Adam,” she began, trying to keep her tone neutral, “I think we need to talk. I don’t know if I did something to make you mad or whatever, but I feel like you’re avoiding me, and it’s getting old. Can you call me back, or maybe come over after work?” She hesitated. “I love you,” she decided to say despite her anger and hurt. “Call me. Bye.”
Nina hung up the phone and decided to make herself busy while she waited to quell her anxious thoughts. The bathtubs in one of the rooms needed to be caulked again, and she’d been putting it off for a while since she never sold all the rooms and hadn’t had anyone stay in there in weeks. However, it would do her some good to use her hands right now. She knew that she had a caulk gun in the shed behind the motel building, but the idea of going in there made her a little nervous. She had intentionally been avoiding it both because of the clutter (and probably spiders) and because it still held a lot of her dad’s old things, and with them, feelings that she didn’t want to deal with yet. Still, she’d have to be a big girl and swallow the discomfort some time, and now was as good a time as any to do so. She wrestled the step ladder out the door of her office, knowing that even if there were ladders in the shed, they were likely way too tall and covered in cobwebs.
“Red,” Vance’s voice greeted as she walked by. “Or do you still not want me to call you that?”
Nina rolled her eyes. “It’s fine,” she dismissed. It had been a few days since she’d really talked to Vance outside of passing conversations, and she couldn’t fight the smile that seeing him brought to her face. “What have you been up to? Staying out of trouble?”
Vance laughed. “Oh, trouble seems to find me,” he replied, “but I’m fine.” He stood to take the ladder from her hands and she gladly allowed him to. “Where’s this going?”
“Around to the back,” she replied. “Thank you. I need to get something from the shed.” He followed her around the motel, carrying the ladder for her even though she hadn’t asked him to.
“You know, I could have gotten it,” she reminded him. Vance smirked a little and shrugged.
“I know you could,” he replied, “but then you wouldn’t get to watch me carry it, and I wouldn’t get to watch you walk in fro
nt of me in that skirt.” Nina reached out and swatted him for the comment, but she didn’t shift to walk beside him. She had to admit that he hadn’t been far off on his self-compliment, either, even if it was a bit narcissistic. The way the muscles in his arms flexed to hold the ladder, unshielded by his short sleeves, wasn’t anything that she was going to complain about. She might be taken, but there was no harm in looking, right? She was sure Adam did that all the time. There were a number of cute girls around their age that worked with him; she saw them tagged in his photos all the time, and that didn’t bother her. Still, she wasn’t an animal, so she only allowed herself to admire Vance’s body for a few (hopefully) subtle moments before dragging her eyes back to her task and unlocking the shed door.
She choked a bit on the dust when she threw the door open, waving her hand in front of her face to clear the air, and sighed. The interior, predictably, was a mess, just how her dad had always kept it.
“I knew it was a long shot to have hoped he’d clean it out while I was at college,” she lamented.
“Who?” Vance asked. “Your old man?”
Nina nodded as Vance handed her the step stool so she could place it where she wanted it. The caulk gun was high up on a shelf, so far up that she was pretty sure there was no way either of them could reach it from the step stool.
“Yeah, he never liked to throw anything away, so he always just crammed the outdated motel crap in this shed,” she explained. “Always said it was going to be worth money someday, so he wanted to keep it all. Even though I told him that was ridiculous.”
“Is it?” Vance asked, sitting on the top rung of the step ladder as Nina began to look for a larger one.
“Of course it is,” she replied. “If you’re not using something, throw it out; that’s what I always say.”
Vance shrugged. “I dunno,” he disagreed. “I obviously need to travel light, so I can’t keep much on me. But I can kind of see the appeal of keeping everything, you know? It’s a lot of memories.”
It was strange to hear Vance talk like that—she’d almost say wistfully, if he weren’t so gruff about it. He always surprised her with his ability to step into another person’s shoes and understand them, even if what he was talking about was so far outside the realm of anything he’d ever want for himself. Nina couldn’t imagine giving up things like a steady home and her own warm bed the way Vance had.
“Well,” she said, dragging the dusty ladder she’d found up to the shelf she needed, “I guess that’s one way to look at it.”
“Careful, Red,’ Vance warned. He stood up and moved to the base of the ladder to spot her, putting his hand on the small of her back to keep her steady as she reached up for the supplies she needed. She’d never liked heights, but having Vance there to catch her if she fell made it seem a lot more bearable.
“Thanks,” she said again. He took the box of caulk and the gun from her hands and set it on the shelf so he could continue to keep his hands on her back and butt as she climbed down the ladder and she didn’t scold him for the unnecessary contact. She’d just have to work extra hard, now, to distract herself from all the thoughts that she didn’t want to be dwelling on for very different reasons.
Adam showed up at her door that night unannounced. She’d managed to actually drag herself back up to the house tonight, which was a miracle in itself, and dress herself in comfortable pajamas instead of sleeping in the ratty sweatpants and t-shirt she kept in her office for nights that she chose not to leave. The look on Adam’s face was anything but casual and friendly. In fact, Nina had never seen him look so urgent and serious. It scared her a little.
“Hi, Adam,” she greeted, because he didn’t speak first. “It’s kind of late.”
He nodded. “I know,” he said instead of an apology. “Can I come in?”
Nina took a step away from the doorway and allowed him to enter her house. He rarely came over here, even more rarely than Nina did, but he knew where everything was and beelined for the couch. He sat on one side and patted the cushion next to him as an invitation for her to sit next to him.
“You’re freaking me out a little bit,” she admitted. “You’ve got sort of a weird energy right now. Is everything okay?”
Adam took a deep, steadying breath, the kind that never preceded good news. He forced himself to look her in the eyes and put one hand on her knee.
“Nina, I need to tell you something,” he confessed. “And I want you to let me finish speaking before you react.”
She nodded, though she wasn’t sure that she was planning on keeping that promise, because what could he possibly be telling her that was so shocking that she wasn’t going to let him finish talking?
“You know I love you,” he started. Involuntarily, Nina felt her eyes start to well up with tears, because she could sense the “but” at the end of the phrase.
“Adam,” she started, but he cut her off.
“But you’re always so busy. I always feel like I’d be bothering you if I ask you to spend time with me. And I’ve been so stressed at work lately; it’s unreal. So you know how I’ve been going out with the guys a lot—well, not just the guys.”
She shook her head. “What the hell did you do?” she asked, and he broke the eye contact to stare intently at anything other than Nina’s face.
“Jessica Chapman and I kind of… well, we didn’t exactly fuck, but—”
“Adam!” Nina exclaimed, the tears finally spilling over onto her cheeks. “What the fuck? Why?”
He clenched his fist. “I told you to listen to the whole story,” he reminded her. “I was drinking, so I let her drive me home from the bar. She broke the heel of her shoe getting out of the car, so I invited her up into my apartment so she could fix it, and she just… she leaned in and kissed me. One thing led to another.”
“And you had sex with her?” she asked incredulously. He shrugged at first, then nodded. Nina’s stomach flipped and she suddenly felt nauseated and hot. “When was this?”
He sighed. ‘About a week ago.”
At that, Nina’s jaw dropped. “A week?” she asked. “You waited a whole week to tell me this?”
“I didn’t know how to tell you.”
“Do you… do you like, want to be with her? Do you love her?”
She expected an immediate “no,” for him to scramble in denial and beg for her forgiveness, but that’s not what happened. Instead, he rubbed his hand over his face tiredly.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so,” he admitted without hesitation, as if it weren’t potentially the end of their entire relationship. Wasn’t that her answer, though? If he didn’t know whether or not their love was important enough not to ruin by introducing another person, how could she believe that he loved her at all?
“I think you should go,” she said quietly, sternly. She had covered her eyes with her hands so that he couldn’t see her crying, but it was clear in her voice.
“Nina,” he argued, “we need to talk about this.”
“There’s nothing to talk about!” Nina snapped. “I want you to leave!”
Adam threw up his hands and stood. “I don’t want to be done talking about this,” he insisted. “But I know you need time.”
“It’s not about time, Adam,” Nina bit. “It’s about the fact that you fucking cheated. I don’t want to forgive you.”
She stood and stomped to the door, throwing it open and standing next to it expectantly.
“I’ll call you,” he said.
“Don’t bother.”
“Then you call me,” he argued. “Just—just think on it before you decide whether you’re ready to break this off completely, okay? It was a mistake. It’s not going to happen again.”
She slammed the door on him without another word and rubbed angrily at her eyes, upset at herself for crying. Everything in her wanted to just not care, but it hurt deeper than any fight they’d ever had before. She hated how much she wanted to go back down to the motel and knock on Vance’s do
or to cry on his shoulder, but she knew that she didn’t have the right to do that. He wasn’t her boyfriend, so he had no obligation to hold her while she cried and vented about her love life, right?
She forced herself to crawl into bed and try to sleep, popping a sleeping pill when she found it difficult to even clear her mind enough to close her eyes. Nina forced herself to think about nothing but her work for the next morning, and to focus on happy things. Her motel was still doing better than it had been in a long time, even if she had concerns about its safety. She’d finally gotten to a place in grieving for her dad where it didn’t hurt every minute of every day, and she felt healthier because of it. And, even if she didn’t want to admit to herself that she categorized it as a positive thing, her thoughts were constantly occupied with Vance. If nothing else, he would be a good distraction for the next few days, which she knew would be rough.
Chapter 10: Vance
Another two weeks went by before Vance had to go back to the greenhouse for more money, and this time, he was much more confident about the whole thing. It went smoothly; so much so that he’d far overestimated the amount of time that he’d need to make the trip, so it was barely sunset by the time he got back to the motel. Just as Vance had thought, he’d had no trouble from any police or rival bikers. Sheila and Marcos were still at work, not scheduled to close the bar for another several hours, so Vance decided that it would be a better idea to keep the money in his room until tomorrow morning when he could put it in the safe when he opened instead of trying to smuggle it in and risking one of them asking questions. Besides, he deserved a true day off every now and again, and this was as close as he was likely to get.
