Tainted Romance

by Steele, Carter

  “And nothing’s happened since then,” Zane said.

  “Yeah, cuz they plannin’ somethin’ much worse,” Parker said. “I dunno what the fuck has gotten into Vulture over there, but he seems to be gettin’ more audacious by the second.”

  That was the only name in the world that instantly infuriated me and made me go into a blood-lust rage. After all, it was the name of the person who had murdered my father.

  “We aren’t going to fucking allow this to go any further,” I said. “We need to destroy the Anarchists. If that takes casualties, then so be it.”

  “Brock…”

  Landon’s voice trailed off. He knew that the name had triggered an ugly reaction in me. After all, it was his father that had been murdered too.

  But I had always been much closer with our father than Landon had. Landon and my dad had a good relationship, but it was never as close and intense as ours was. We had the type of dynamic where we could talk motorcycles and friendship and brotherhood from dawn to the next dawn. Landon had the kind of relationship where he would say hello, goodbye, love you, and good morning, but he didn’t have the same interest in bikes and the club as I did.

  I knew Landon wasn’t thrilled about it. But if there was ever a silver lining to the lack of a strong relationship with my father, it was the ability to stay detached.

  “No, I’m fucking serious,” I said. “We need to fucking crush those assholes. They have fucked me over so many times.”

  I thought of Heather and how, because of fear of retaliation from her uncle when he found out about our relationship, I’d had to abandon her.

  “I am not going to fucking take it!” I yelled with a slam of my fist.

  The room went deathly silent. I tried to steady my breathing, but I wanted to ram my fucking fist through the fucking wall. The Anarchists… Heather… why did my world seem to suddenly be taking a turn for the shitter all at once? Why did everything seem to be collapsing on itself?

  “What the hell has gotten into ya, man?” Parker said. “Some lady break your heart?”

  “That’s neither here nor there.”

  “Was it the gal ya brought last Thursday?” Parker said. “She looked familiar. I couldn’t say for sure, was drunk off my Texan ass, but she looked like someone I knew.”

  “Goddamnit!” I yelled.

  But I realized that reaction had just proved Parker right. I was letting my relationship—or now, lack thereof—with Heather destroy me. It was distracting me and making handling the club a virtual impossibility. So long as she remained in my mind, I couldn’t handle things properly.

  “Sorry,” I said. “She did not break my heart. But she is causing me some trouble.”

  “Gee, ya don’t say,” Parker said.

  “Let’s close this meeting,” Petey suggested. “We all have our bad days. Parker, don’t act like you’ve never been crushed by a woman.”

  “I don’t get my ass near whores.”

  I turned around, ready to kick his ass, but Landon stood up and held me back, while Petey grabbed Parker and slammed him against the back of the wall.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Petey growled. “You want to deal with your issues, you deal with them on your own. You got it?”

  Petey let Parker go. Landon let me go. I glared at Parker but didn’t say anything else. My beef was not with him. The person I needed to see to help figure out shit in my head wasn’t here.

  “Meeting’s closed,” I said. “For now, be on alert for anything with the Anarchists. Let’s be prepared for anything, though. If so much as a knife gets pulled out from the Anarchists, we immediately group together and plan our attack.”

  I walked out of the room, grabbed my phone, and went outside. I pulled up my text conversation with Heather, which had had no new updates since I’d gone into the meeting. I thought of calling her, but clearly, what felt like a hundred ignored phone calls were not going to suddenly change into an answered one on the one hundred and first attempt.

  “You all right, bro?”

  Landon came up behind me, putting his hand on my shoulder.

  “No,” I said. “No. I don’t like being told no. I don’t like having something good come in my life, only for it to fall apart.”

  “Hmm.”

  He didn’t get it. He’d never liked someone like I had liked Heather Richards. Maybe I was acting crazy. Maybe I just needed a good party tonight.

  But I had a feeling that wouldn’t do it. I’d had really good, really passionate sex with Heather, sex unlike anything else I’d had since I last dated her. And more than that, I’d taken her on a date and reignited what we once had. I couldn’t hit the accelerator on us and then just assume with a single tap of the break I’d go back to zero instantly without any whiplash.

  “Just let me handle it,” I said.

  I stepped away from Landon, leaving him to return to the clubhouse. I worded my next message as carefully as I could.

  “Heather,” I wrote. “I know you’re ignoring me because you don’t want to see me again. You think this is the best thing for you because of our past and you’re worried about getting hurt again. I don’t blame you for that, I really don’t. But I would appreciate it if we could discuss this face to face. We can do so over any setting you want if you don’t want to drink.”

  No, that’s not bold enough. She loves boldness.

  But that’s when she wants a reason to like you and when she wants a reason to go further with you. Right now…

  “Please let me know when you’d like to meet.”

  I added that line at the end and sent the message without proofreading it. It wasn’t my style, anyways.

  I stood outside, staring at my phone, waiting for her to reply. I waited a minute. Then five minutes. Then ten minutes.

  It got to twenty minutes before I finally gave up. I went into the clubhouse, threw my phone in the container outside of our meeting, and went to the bar.

  “Let’s get the party started early,” I said. “Invite all the girls you can. Let’s make this a fucking good one.”

  I saw some nervous smiles cross their faces. I didn’t know why they were nervous. It wasn’t like I didn’t know how tonight would go.

  * * *

  When I woke up at 10 a.m. the next day, I realized I didn’t remember anything after about 8 p.m. It had all just turned into one giant blur. I had a couple of girls next to me who were naked, and I was naked too.

  I suppose I had gotten exactly what I wanted. I had gotten laid with someone besides Heather Richards, and in some ways, maybe they were better. There was no emotional bullshit with this threesome. They had bigger breasts than Heather did. And they were probably better in bed, too.

  That all sounded great. I also knew it was full of shit.

  These girls might have known my name, but I didn’t know theirs. It was just a continuation of a pattern that was awesome when I was a new president of the club, pretty good in the years after, and by now boring. Getting my dick sucked? Sure, it felt good, but it wasn’t like it meant anything.

  If anything, waking up with this pounding headache and blackout made me realize just how much I missed Heather.

  Heather…

  I bolted out of bed, only pausing to throw on my boxers, before hurrying to find my phone. It was nowhere on the floor and not in my jeans. I looked in the bathroom—it wasn’t there either.

  Only when I walked outside and saw the place look like it had gotten ransacked by the cops did I realize that I had put it in the bin just outside our meeting hall. I guess that was my way of putting Heather to the side.

  Imagine the disappointment I had for myself, then, when I realized that not only had Heather actually responded to me, she had done so just barely after our meeting. Now I was the one to look like a jackass.

  “I can do Sunday afternoon. 4 p.m. City Brew Coffee.”

  It wasn’t much of a message. It wasn’t very personal. It didn’t have any emojis. But it did give me something I didn�
��t have before.

  An opening. An opportunity.

  “Sounds great.”

  Now, I just had to find a way to kill a little over 48 hours worth of time without causing any trouble between us or between the Anarchists.

  4

  Heather

  This is a mistake.

  I really couldn’t help but think that agreeing to meet Brock, even on a Sunday afternoon, even at a place without alcohol, even in a context in which I’d ideally be too exhausted from class prep and grading to care, was going to come back to haunt me. It wasn’t like my feelings for him had subsided at all. I’d gotten better at compartmentalizing a bit, but when I entered that coffee shop and knew that I had nothing else to distract me, I knew that all the walls I’d erected in my mind would come crumbling down.

  And then I heard the motorcycle, just out of sight, rumbling. The putt-putt-putt lasted a little longer than expected, as if Brock—if it was, indeed, Brock—needed a moment to gather himself. But then he cut the engine, the ambient music of the coffeehouse resumed, and I took a deep breath.

  I saw him cross in front of the store, and I immediately felt my stomach flip.

  Not surprisingly, he was still the same handsome man that I’d slept with a week ago. Has it really been a whole week? Holy shit. But I was somewhat disappointed and relieved at the same time to know that when I looked at him… I was able to say no.

  Well, for now. That was just at a distance. We’d see how things went when he got up close to me.

  He saw me the moment he entered, and his eyes locked on mine like homing beacons. He did not smile, and he did not change his expression otherwise. Seeing him like this—not the flirtatious, coy Brock but the dark, brooding Brock—had a surprising effect on me.

  I felt like I was seeing him at his most masculine, at his most determined. He was hurt, yes, but the hurt in his eyes suggested that it drove him in ways that I could not anticipate. He didn’t see or hear anything else—not even Nikki, the barista, asking him if he wanted anything—and sat down right before me. His eyes never left mine as he folded his hands on the table, leaned forward, and swallowed.

  “So?”

  I shrugged.

  “So… what?”

  Well, this is off to a roaring start.

  “So why did you do it?” he said.

  I expanded my cheeks and blew air out. The longer this conversation went on, the easier it was going to be for Brock to charm me and get what he wanted. I told myself to stay strong and stick to why I had ended things in the first place.

  “Because, Brock, you are who you are and I am who I am,” I said. “I’m someone who needs to know everything that’s going on. Well, maybe not everything, but if something bothers you, I want to know about it. If something saddens or angers you, I want to know about it. And you’re someone who keeps a strict boundary between what happens in your work life and your personal life. It’s impossible to breach.”

  “Heather—”

  “No, please, just, please let me finish.”

  Otherwise, you start talking, and it’s going to go very badly for me.

  “That night last week, when you went to bed concerned, you didn’t tell me anything. Even now, I still don’t know what it was about. Unless you want to tell me?”

  Finally, Brock broke his gaze, staring down at the table.

  “Unfortunately, that’s exactly what I feared.”

  Brock shook his head.

  “Sometimes, not knowing is what’s good for you,” he said. “Whoever said ‘ignorance is bliss’ didn’t say it just because it sounded nice.”

  “That may be, but that’s mostly for things you have no control over. If we’re going to try… this… this relationship again, I can help you with what you’re dealing with. I can comfort you in sadness, soothe you in anger, and excite you when you’re happy. But not if you won’t let me.”

  Brock leaned back in his chair, folding his arms.

  “It’s no secret, I think, that I work in a dangerous world,” he said. “And I don’t mean dangerous like, oh, we need to offer worker’s comp or any of that pussy bullshit. I mean dangerous like people can die. And that’s not just for club members. It’s for anyone associated with the club.”

  I wasn’t surprised by the content of the message. But I was surprised that Brock was finally willing to say something so obvious and so critical to me.

  “So you think that if I stay with you, that I’ll be at risk of getting hurt?” I said.

  Brock nodded.

  “How?”

  He sighed.

  “Does it matter how?” he said. “You’re a fourth-grade teacher, Heather. You’re not an officer for the Romara police. You’re not a former member of the military. With all respect, if a criminal comes to try and take you, you’re not going to fight back.”

  “OK, maybe,” I said. “But do you remember that we went to the shooting range before? Do you remember how accurate a shot I was? Do you remember that my father—”

  “And do you own a gun now?”

  I went silent. I couldn’t argue the point.

  “Exactly,” Brock said. “In this state, anyways, getting a gun is such a convoluted and difficult process that you’re more likely to get marijuana by the boatload than you are a nine millimeter. I can get you one with ease, but the point stands. Most people here have no idea and no means to defend themselves.”

  “This still doesn’t explain why you broke up with me a decade ago,” I said. “You know that’s a huge reason why I’m this way right now.”

  We could go back and forth as much as we wanted on what was fair and right in the here and now, but until that part of our dynamic got addressed, it wasn’t something that I could look past. Even if Brock gave me a gun, even if he taught every form of martial arts, even if I had a security system installed that made me virtually crime-proof, I couldn’t fully feel safe with Brock until he told me the truth.

  “Because…”

  I leaned forward. He bit his lip.

  “Heather, there are dynamics you aren’t aware of that—”

  “Brock, please don’t do this.”

  A long silence came between us. It felt like the silence pushed us further apart with every second. There would soon come a point where we weren’t talking to each other so much as we were at each other.

  “I just need a direct answer. When you broke up with me, it wasn’t even that you broke up with me. It was just like… one day you were there, and the next, you weren’t. There was no warning, other than you being moody about your father’s death. But even then, you got better before you just left. So what happened?”

  Brock shook his head.

  “If I told you, you’d think I was lying,” he said. “If I told you, you’d get mad at me. You just need to know that it was something done with your best interests at heart.”

  I scoffed at that.

  “Don’t give me that bullshit, Brock. You broke my heart. I became a recluse my first year at UCLA because I struggled to figure out why you had done what you did. My dating life sucked for years after that. Really, it still sucks. Part of the reason I fell for you so quickly was because I felt like I was the happy eighteen-year-old again. I wasn’t the girl who was afraid of getting hurt, at least not when you and I were reliving moments of our childhood.”

  Brock smiled briefly at the mention of reliving the past, and I hated him for it. It gave me a surge of excitement in my stomach, and it made me want to reach across the table and kiss him. It made me want to do everything that I absolutely, one hundred percent could not do at that moment.

  It was a real damn shame, too. It was painfully apparent that as good of a match as we were for each other—arguably the best for each other in our respective lives—neither one of us could bend on what we wanted out of the other, and it was insurmountable. I had to know what ailed Brock in certain moments, and he felt it his duty to keep me in the dark on such matters.

  I just didn’t underst
and why he insisted on treating me like a child. I knew his club committed crimes. I knew people had died because of club violence. It wasn’t like I didn’t know the worst of it.

  “Brock, here’s the deal,” I said. “You tell me why you broke my heart ten years ago, and I’ll think about it and how it applies today. If you can do that, you’ll show me that I can trust you to be fully honest about things, and we can try again. But if you’re going to keep that close to the chest, if you’re going to keep it a secret about what happened and why you ended it, then there’s no point. You’re wasting your time.”

  Brock’s eyes showed so much pain in that moment. I’d never seen him look so hurt, so torn. He even opened his mouth to speak, as if he was about to utter the truth, but something deep inside him yanked the words back down his throat. Several times, this played out. My hopes felt like a yo-yo, going up and down, up and down, up and down.

  Finally, he spoke.

  “You don’t deserve this lifestyle,” he said. “It’s closer home to you than you realize. I don’t need to drag you into it. I’m sorry.”

  And so it is.

  “I appreciate you giving me the chance to come here,” Brock said.

  “Sure.”

  But neither of us moved from the table despite the conversation having come to an obvious end.

  “So… there’s no way I can convince you to just trust me, then?”

  “Trust doesn’t come because you ask for it. Trust comes because you give me reason to have it. Not telling me everything is literally the opposite of giving me a reason to have trust.”

  Brock hung his head.

  “Alright,” he said. “Thanks for telling me.”

  He stood up, came over, and leaned forward.