by Sophia Gray
“Hey, stranger,” Titan’s voice rumbled. “Where you been at?”
There was a chorus of heys and hellos in the wake of Titan’s greeting. Finn nodded in greeting.
“Aww, you know where homeboy’s been at. You know. He’s been following my old buddy, my old friend, that sweet pretty thing with the red hair.” Speed bounced up out of his seat and gave Finn a slap on the back. A few eyes turned in their direction.
Titan smirked and brought a beer to his lips. A few inches disappeared down his throat. “That true?”
Finn didn’t answer at first. Instead he walked around the bar and used the toe of his cowboy boot to tug open one of the mini-fridges tucked between an ice bin and a wash sink. Seven brands of beer stared back at him, and not a damn one of them sounded tasty. He popped the door closed again and turned toward the bottles of liquor lined up on the wall. With a growl, he pulled down the Tennessee whiskey and poured himself a couple of fingers.
“Yeah,” Titan said when Finn started to pour himself another glass. “Definitely been sniffing at that Anderson girl.”
Finn snorted, in part because Titan had hit the nail on the head, and in part because he could just imagine how Cora would feel about being called “that Anderson girl.” He knocked back his second glass of whiskey—fourth if you counted what he drank while he was still at home—and then grabbed a beer from the mini-fridge and dragged a chair over to the table so he could see the television, too.
“Cora Anderson?” One of the girls sitting at the table spoke up for the first time. She was pretty, Finn had to admit. She had hair as black as his own and the kind of curvy body meant for bathing suits and leotards. “I heard she was back in town.”
“You know her?” Finn found himself asking even though he didn’t really want to.
“Tch, yeah. I went to school with her. Me and Speed both did. Speed was her friend, though I wasn’t. That bitch didn’t like female friends. Never has. Bet she’s one of those woman haters.”
Finn couldn’t find it in himself to agree with that. Yeah, he was mad at her, but Cora didn’t seem to hate women. She’d spent most of the barbecue talking with Misty, and there was no one in the world who was more of a woman than Misty.
“She told me to get lost.”
“Shit, man,” Speed said with a squeal of laughter before patting Finn on the back. “Man, what did you do?”
“Yeah, how’d you fuck it up?” Titan asked, turning his dark head in Finn’s direction. “Rumor had it y’all went to some big family barbecue tonight.”
“Jesus.” Finn popped his beer open on the side of the table. Maybe Cora wasn’t completely wrong. Apparently, everyone was related in this damn town. Related enough, at least, that they were yammering about a relationship that wasn’t anyone’s damn business. “I didn’t fuck it up, man. I didn’t do a damn thing wrong. Her mom got involved.”
“Sam Anderson is a piece of work,” Titan said, shaking his head until the short braids on either side of his head clinked against one another.
“Yeah,” Speed popped in. “But she fucks good.”
Finn nearly spit out his beer. “What?”
Speed shrugged his skinny shoulders. “Least she did a few years back. I was in the trailer park, visiting my mom when she comes out. It was summer and she was wearing this tiny little bikini thing and just sunning herself. Just flat out asks me if I want some. I wasn’t seeing anyone so I didn’t see an issue with it.”
Finn snorted. He had no right to talk. He’d slept with plenty of married women in his time, but Sam Anderson wasn’t one of them.
“Surprised you came out of that alive.”
Speed laughed. “Yeah, but I came, though. A lot.” There was a general titter of amusement between the club and the joke. Encouraged, Speed went on to say, “But she got more.”
The girl sitting with Titan and Finn laughed the loudest and bumped her shoulder against Speed’s. He gave her a grin and waggled his eyes suggestively at her. Finn watched as she leaned over and whispered something in his ear. Speed’s grin widened and he tossed back the rest of his drink.
“If you all will excuse us,” he said, slipping out of the booth and taking the woman’s hand. She giggled and followed.
Finn shook his head and rolled his eyes before taking the spot the pair of them had vacated. “Well, at least someone is happy.” He glanced around at the group of bikers. Most of them were wearing their kuttes. Some were done in leather, some in denim, but all of them sported the large white tiger with its head tilted back in a frozen roar. The Violent Spawn of Carson, Nevada, a small club when all things were said and done, but a good group of guys. Even Speed.
There was Moose, and yes, that was his given name. The man was nearly seven feet tall and weighed in at just under three hundred pounds, and nearly all of it was muscle. He volunteered at the youth club after school to make sure kids whose parents couldn’t afford daycare still had someplace to go.
There was Ken, a scrawny little dude who used to be an addict until Boss picked him up and helped him to quit the habit. He rode a hell of a bike and played a mean guitar now that his hands didn’t shake so much.
Cora was wrong. These men weren’t criminals; they were rebels. They stood for something. They wanted the freedom America promised but buried with its rules and laws. Rules, he thought, that were enforced by the assholes in blue who didn’t practice what they preached.
“You gonna listen?” Titan asked, interrupting Finn’s train of thought.
“Listen? To what?”
“To Cora. You gonna get lost or are you gonna keep going after her?”
Finn shook his head. “Neither. I’m here, and I’m going to be here. I’m going to help her with Oliver and…shit, man, I told her I’d be available once she gets her head out of her ass.”
Titan whistled. “Use those exact words?”
“Close enough.”
Titan’s teeth shone white as pearls against the darkness of his lips. “I thought you were a ladies’ man, Lieutenant.”
“Ladies, sure. But Cora is something else altogether. She’s this…force. You know? You ever met a woman who just gets up in your life and by the very act of being there turns everything upside down?”
Titan gave him a long look with those liquid dark eyes of his. He didn’t say anything at first; he just watched. Finn let him. Titan was a quiet man, prone to long introspection. Finn brought his nearly half-gone beer up and took a long swallow.
“Hey, Finn,” a woman said. A soft hand with bright red nails settled itself on his shoulder. The grip was familiar. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Hey, Candy.”
Candy was a dark-haired Barbie brought to life. Her long legs were displayed beneath a short fringe of skirt, and she’d forgotten to button the top two buttons of her blouse. The edges of a lacy black bra were visible in the flare of open fabric. She had a nice rack, Finn knew from firsthand experience, but she didn’t have much else going for her.
She sidled up next to him, letting her fingers scratch the back of his neck ever so lightly. She was wearing a perfume that was strong on the vanilla. Not the good, warm kind that went with baked goods or expensive candles, but the cheap, overly sweet kind.
“I’m really glad you’re here.”
She brushed her magnificent rack against his shoulder, and he waited to feel the arousal he was sure should accompany that. He waited and waited as she leaned closer, her mint-gum breath blowing ever so lightly against his neck. Nothing happened, just a sick feeling in his stomach like he was doing something wrong. It took him a moment to realize he was feeling guilt. He, Finn Marks, who never felt guilt at the touch of a woman, was getting sick at the thought of taking Candy home.
He gave her a friendly pat on the hip but shook his head. “Thanks, hon, but not tonight.”
She pouted but didn’t push. With a sigh, she slid herself back up onto her stilts and gave Titan a questioning look. Titan shook his head. Finn realiz
ed he’d never seen Titan take a woman home from the pool hall, or from anywhere now that he was thinking about it.
“You in love with someone?” Finn asked suddenly.
Titan raised a dark brow. “What?”
“I was just thinking that I’ve never seen you pick up a woman, but I’ve seen plenty hit on you.” Finn eyed him. “Was wondering if you’re in love with someone.”
Titan went very quiet. “Been in and out of love a few times, Lieutenant. None of them were fun.”
There was something about the way he said it that kept Finn from asking anything else. A thought niggled at the back of his mind. He didn’t say it, but he started to wonder if Titan just didn’t like women for personal company. Finn wouldn’t have cared one way or the other, but he knew not everyone in the club would feel the same.
“Fair enough,” Finn said. “What’s everyone gathered up for?”
“Boss is coming back.”
Finn blinked and plunked his drink on the table. “It’s about damn time. When?”
“Tomorrow, maybe the day after if they stop up north and gamble away some of their share. Got the call around midnight. Tried calling you but…” Titan shrugged one massive shoulder.
Midnight. That was when he’d been arguing with Cora. Had he just not heard the call? Had he been that mad? Probably. He was still mad. It wasn’t as hot and bitter as it had been, but he could feel it like water on a low boil.
“That’s about the time Cora was telling me to fuck off.”
Titan took a deep breath and wrapped both hands around his drink, his fingers interlacing over the label. “You love this woman.” It wasn’t a question; it was a statement. Finn had been thinking something along the same lines, but he found himself wondering why Titan, who Finn hadn’t been spending too much time with the past few days, had come to the same conclusion. “It’s easy to see. Not just because you sent Candy off, or because you came in here looking like someone had run over your favorite pair of boots. It’s the way she makes you mad.”
“You lost me.”
“Do you ever get mad if the Anaheim Ducks lose the Stanley Cup?”
“No. Why would I?” Finn responded, his thumb beginning to scrape away the ring of paper on the neck of his beer.
“Exactly. I mean, it’s pretty obvious when you think about it. You haven’t much cared when other women turned you down. Or tell you they aren’t interested. You just move on. Didn’t happen here, did it?”
The ring of paper fell on the table in small strips. “No, it didn’t.”
“Well, that’s because it matters. It matters a lot, doesn’t it? It matters what she thinks about you and why she thinks it. It matters not just because she turned you down to start off with. It matters because you legitimately care what she thinks. Her opinion is one that you value and respect. That’s love, man.”
Finn shook his head and started working on the label of his beer, letting those glue-caked strips join the first as he thought about what Titan was saying. “What about all the fire? The passion?”
“Pretty sure y’all have that. But that’s not love, Lieutenant. That’s just interest. That big flare of look-at-that you get all messed-up with in the beginning. Right? Love is something else. It’s what happens when you think about the other person when they aren’t there, and not just about what’s in their pants. When you think about what they’re doing, how their day goes, and if they are doing all right. That…that’s love. That’s real caring.”
“Well, she doesn’t feel that for me.” Finn shoved his bottle away. It wavered on its side but didn’t spill.
“I can’t say one way or the other on that. I don’t know her that well. But, well…” Titan trailed off again. Finn found himself leaning in, wondering what the big man was going to finish that sentence with. “Well…here’s the thing. She told you you two weren’t right for each other, right?”
Finn felt the dull boil of his anger go up a few degrees. “Yeah. She did.”
“Well, that means she’s been thinking about a future with you, right? She’s wondering how you fit into her world, and if it would make sense. Now, some women, they might try to make it fit. They’d cut away pieces of you or pieces of themselves in this struggle to finish the puzzle that is their lives. But Cora Anderson? Naw, she’s played that game before. She tried to make herself fit here all of her young life, and it just didn’t happen. So instead of forcing it, she told you to get lost, because after evaluating her life, she said it wasn’t right.”
“And that’s…a good thing?” Maybe it was the liquor, or maybe it was the fact that he couldn’t imagine Cora picturing them together, but Finn wasn’t sure he understood what Titan was getting at.
“Shit, man, that’s the best thing when it comes to a woman like that.”
Finn frowned and dragged a hand through his dark hair. “I don’t think I’m following you, teacher.”
Titan laughed, a great big barrel laugh that burst out of his lips and rumbled across the room. “You can be really dumb for a college graduate, you know that? She wants you to fit, and she respects you enough not to demand that you cut away parts of yourself.”
“Huh,” Finn said, laying his chin on the top of the beer bottle, feeling the lukewarm kiss of glass against his skin. “Guess I hadn’t thought about it like that.”
# # #
When Finn woke up the next morning he decided he wanted to fit into Cora’s life, too. He hadn’t understood everything Titan, the love guru, was saying, but it had all stuck in his head. Cora Anderson wanted someone she could count on, depend on. Fair enough since she hadn’t been able to count on anyone but her own damn self as far as Finn could see. If she needed that in a man, he was going to be that man.
He was at the shop by eight, despite getting to bed at five in the morning. He started looking through money, going through some much-needed inventory. He threw himself into his work and began to understand why Cora found it comforting to turn to business when life was being too difficult to handle. With work, everything was laid out in a nice neat list. Life wasn’t half so easy to handle.
He hadn’t called her, though after a few more beers with Titan he had begun to think it might be a really good idea to do just that. It had been the larger, more levelheaded man who interceded. It was for the best, though Finn hadn’t thought so at the time. He’d been too drunk to sit on his bike. He hadn’t wanted to go home anyway—the couch probably still smelled like her. Instead he had slept it off at the pool hall and walked into work this morning thinking the brisk morning air might clear his liquor-soaked brain. It had. Well, that and two bottles of Gatorade, some Pepto-Bismol, and aspirin.
It had been a very long night, and if the way the phone was already ringing at eight o’clock in the morning was any way to gauge it, it was going to be a very long day, too. Good, Finn needed a long day. His uncle came in at nine thirty and helped out with the fixing, and Rodrigo, a local kid, came in at eleven to take over phone duties.
When the numbers on the screen matched up to the numbers on paper, Finn decided to get some of the real work done. He started with a minivan that belonged to a soccer mom who needed an oil change and new spark plugs, then moved on to a Toyota with shit suspension. Minutes ticked by and his hands got greasy, and Finn’s thoughts started to focus onto a single undeniable truth. He’d be whatever Cora Anderson needed him to be. He worked right through lunch and might have gone through dinner too if Uncle Bill hadn’t waved a six-piece of fried chicken and an order of mashed potatoes under his nose.
“Eat,” he’d been instructed. “And then go work your magic on the computers. I can’t make the order make sense.”
Finn had used the time in between number verifications to check his phone. His heart stopped when he saw a text from Cora. It was a few hours old but said, in that straightforward, no-nonsense way that she had, that Oliver was doing fine and she thought he’d want to know. That was nice, but it wasn’t all that Finn wanted to know. He went throu
gh three attempts at a text before her sent, Good to know, thanks for keeping me updated. You okay?
Then, before he could send her five more texts about nothing in the hopes that she would respond, he turned back to his dinner and the spreadsheet for the body shop. It was going on ten o’clock when everything was finally squared away. Rodrigo and Uncle Bill were long since gone. Finn realized he had put in a fourteen-hour day. Maybe he should head home, take a shower, eat something else because that chicken had done nothing but remind him he was starving. That was the smart thing to do, but he wasn’t going to do it. Finn Marks did not end his day with spreadsheets and ordering layouts.
Oh, management was all fine and dandy, but it did not compare to the glory of getting greasy under the hood of a real classic, and the sapphire blue ’78 Dodge Challenger currently sitting in bay three was definitely that.
