by Lucas, Helen
It was only that evening when I got home, looked at my phone, and saw that I had six missed calls and as many voicemails. They told me what had happened, told me that he had been recovered, that his remains were being flown back that weekend, and told me how I could receive them at the airport. They told me how to arrange his funeral, how to request the handsome young marines with rifles to come and perform a salute over his grave.
But they didn’t tell me how to move on. They didn’t tell me how to live after Fred.
They didn’t tell me how to love again, when that was what I really needed.
I was crying now. This wouldn’t do. This wasn’t helpful. I had to think of the mission. The operation. The job. The whatever-the-fuck.
If not for me, then for Winston. For Fred. Hell, even for Fang, on the off chance that his story was true—that he actually did want to get out of the life, that this really was his only chance.
I wasn’t opposed to second chances. Either for Fang, or for me.
A second chance. Could it really be?
No. Maybe, in life, for Fang, if he really did get out of the Damned, if he were able to go into witness protection and live out the rest of his natural life, working out in the Pacific West or somewhere even further from Florida, further from this world, this life he had been leading—from the people who would kill him if he ever returned.
But not for me. I didn’t feel any redemption, any hope at a second chance for love. I had forgotten how. All I could do was fumble and tease like a little girl, the inept imitation of love.
I was broken. Fred’s death had broken me. And like a broken toy whose springs haven’t yet broken, I walked in a circle, playing my drum, going through my motions, but eliciting no joy—only sadness.
Only pain.
FANG
I wake up early. It’s a habit I acquired while an addict. Well, not exactly a habit. You see, every morning, I wake up with my body craving heroin. Craving the opioid-induced flood of endorphins that my own organs had forgotten how to make for themselves—not that they ever knew how to deliver it with the same overwhelming suddenness and brash surge that heroin did. But it was still there, a trace, a piece of knowledge that my body could never forget.
Once it had tasted the drug, it wanted more, and it would never let me forget what was possible either.
I woke up, the morning after Claire arrived, feeling horrific, like usual. I staggered to the pull up bar in my kitchen doorway. One of those devices that they sell on TV. They work, except that they’ll tear up your door frame. So maybe don’t put one in if you like where you live.
Fortunately, I didn’t give a shit, so I had no problem reaching up, grasping onto the pull up bar, and heaving myself up into the air. I knocked out an easy set of ten fast ones, gliding through the motions, letting my arms extend all the way before rocking back up, almost hitting my forehead on the doorframe.
With my body warmed up, I felt a little less like dying and a little more like a human. I staggered into the kitchen and began making coffee. I supposed I would have to make breakfast for Claire. She didn’t seem like the type to make me breakfast.
But maybe that would be a good lesson for her. See, if she were going to fit in with the Damned, she’d have to start living the role. The role of one of the club’s women—a kind of second-class member, serving her man and doing whatever he asked for, whether it was in the kitchen or the bedroom.
I couldn’t expect her to fulfill the second part of that equation, but the first part might work.
I found her still asleep. Goddamn, but she was gorgeous—that little angel face of hers, pouting in her slumber, made my heart go pitter-patter. I wanted to watch her, to enjoy the way she looked as she slept.
But I knew I shouldn’t. She was Fred’s wife, for Christ’s sake.
That didn’t stop me wanting her. That didn’t stop me savoring the scent she brought into my apartment, the way she warmed things, lit things up. That didn’t stop my eyes wandering to her clothes sitting in a pile on the floor.
And it didn’t stop me wondering what it would feel like to tear the covers off the bed and leap on top of her, holding her down as I took her hard, savoring her groans and moans.
She would writhe and try to hold me off and first, but then she would melt into my embrace, wrapping herself around me, begging to me to do her harder, to make her scream…
That’s how they always went. That’s how I broke them. How I conquered them and made them mine. What can I say? I’m just that good.
It’s not cocky if you can back it up.
But this wasn’t something I could fuck up. Not only was it Fred’s wife, but Claire was looking to be my ticket out of the Damned, out of this fucked up life I had been leading. It was my fault I had started down this path, and it would be my fault if I shit all over it now.
“Hey,” I said. She didn’t wake. I kicked the bed and she still didn’t wake. Finally, I tore the covers from her sleeping body, revealing her naked breasts, each dotted with a pink, perky nipple. I felt my animal instincts demanding that I fuck the shit out of her right then and there, demanding that I leap onto her and into her, that I wrap my fingers around her throat to keep her still.
I slapped her thigh. Damn, but her skin felt good under my hand. It felt smooth. It reacted deliciously to my touch and I slapped her thigh again, this time leaving a vicious red hand print.
“Hey, babe, wake the fuck up and make me breakfast.”
Claire’s eyes fluttered open. She looked around in a daze. And then her eyes fell on me and then drifted down to her naked tits.
“What the fuck, Fang…” she grumbled, grabbing at the covers and throwing them over her chest. “You couldn’t think of a more professional way to wake me up?”
“Professional ain’t nothing no more,” I replied. “You’re living this life with me, and you want to be part of the Damned? Then you gotta’ act like it.”
She yawned.
“Fine. Whatever. You wanna’ see my tits? You can see them all you want!”
And she flung the covers off. Goddamn, but this bitch knew how to make me crazy.
“I don’t give a shit about your tits. What I give a shit about is how I’ve been up for twenty minutes and you still haven’t made me breakfast.”
“I’m not your fucking servant,” she hissed. “I’m on this case with you but that doesn’t make me your actual wife. Not that you should fucking treat your actual wife like that, you goddamned caveman…”
I approached her, my muscles tensing. There was no Doug here to calm us down now. We could have it out right now.
I grabbed her hard by the hair and forced her to her feet. Fortunately, she was still wearing the cheap, pink little panties she had on the night before. If she were totally naked, I don’t know if I could have controlled myself.
“Listen,” I growled, pulling her face close to mine. “If I bring you to the Damned and you’re not acting like one of the club bitches, it’s going to be both our asses. How about that? Do you want me to get shanked while I’m playing pool and then you get gang raped and tied to a motorcycle and run down the highway until those pretty tits of yours are a bloody mess?”
She scowled.
“No.”
“Then fucking do what I say. And fucking make me some breakfast.”
Her breasts were touching my forearm. Her nipples were tight and hard. It would have been so easy to catch one in my fingers, tease it as I pressed her down into the bed.
“It’s bad enough that I’m not fucking you, but the very least you can do, to make it seem like you’re one of us, is to make me breakfast,” I concluded.
“Fine. What do you want?” she finally muttered, not meeting my eyes.
“Go in the kitchen and figure out what I want.”
She scowled and pulled away from me, yelping as I released her hair. She dug around and put a t-shirt on that she had produced out of her bag. As she stalked out of the bedroom, I slapped her ass.
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“And be fucking cheerful about it.”
“Yes, master,” she said and I could feel her eyes rolling, even though she was turned away from me.
I put on the TV and cracked open a beer, listening to the sounds of her making breakfast. The six AM news had just begun and they were leading with the story about Bolo.
“The Haitian-born gangster known only as Bolo was found dead in his cell today, an apparent suicide…” the anchor was saying as Claire came in with a steaming bowl of oatmeal.
She froze, holding both our breakfasts.
“Come on, sugar tits. Make it snappy,” I barked.
“Bolo killed himself?”
“How do you know Bolo?”
Claire looked at me hard, screwed up her face, and flung my oatmeal at me. The hot cereal seared my skin as I tried to catch it, mess going everywhere.
“Are you fucking crazy?!” I roared at her, ready to knock her across the room.
“I fucking took Bolo down!” Claire screamed, not at me, not at the TV, not at anyone, really. “I fucking arrested him. I read him his fucking rights and that son of a cocksucker went and offed himself before the trial…”
“Congratulations, you drove a man to suicide. You must be pretty fucking proud of yourself,” I scowled, wiping the dripping bits of oatmeal off of me. “And what do you mean you took Bolo down?”
Doug had been elusive about Claire’s previous accomplishments, only telling me that she had been staffed on their case dealing with Bolo’s gang and that she had distinguished herself and I had nothing to worry about regarding her capabilities. Claire glowered hard at me.
“I mean…” she said, her voice slow and deadly. “That I shot him… Put three rounds of forty-caliber Smith and Wesson in his hamstrings and one in his shoulder… And then I chased his bleeding ass through the dockyards… Cornered the son of a bitch… Threw a flash grenade… And then ran into him unloading his Desert Eagle in my general direction until I could plant my foot directly in his tight, about-to-be-prison-raped asshole, slap some handcuffs on him, and read him the fucking rights guaranteed by the Constitution. That’s what I mean.”
I still had some oatmeal left in my bowl. I looked down at it glumly.
“Could I, uh, have a spoon? Please?”
She let out a noise of general frustration and stormed out of the room. A few seconds later, a spoon came flying out of the kitchen in my direction.
I found her sitting at my tiny, rickety kitchen table, staring hard into her oatmeal.
“He killed my partner,” she said, finally. “The sting operation broke down at the last second and he killed Winston.”
I sighed and sat down across from her.
“I’m sorry to hear that. But he knew what he was getting into.”
She wasn’t crying. No, this girl was too hard to cry. She’d already lost her husband in war and now her partner in peace—how could you even make this girl cry?
Nothing I could do was ever going to break her. There was nothing worth doing.
“He did,” she said softly, her voice losing that hard edge it had maintained all morning. “He did. He knew.”
And then her smoldering eyes caught mine.
“You can fool and fuck around but so help me god, Fang, if you don’t take this seriously, I will execute you myself and tell Doug that Fatman did it. And you won’t be alive to tell your side of the story.”
“Fine,” I said, coldly. “But you need to play your part.”
“Then teach me.”
We ate breakfast, and then, after dressing, went out to the parking lot.
“This is my chopper,” I said, mounting my bike. “You may remember her from such rides as… Last night.”
She cracked a teeny-tiny smile. Good.
“Now, this is how it goes down. Women aren’t allowed to ride the bike—I mean, to drive it. You can ride on the back when I’m there, but otherwise, you’re not supposed to fucking touch it. Those are the rules.”
“Glad to see this is a great, progressive, feminist society you’re bringing me into,” she retorted.
“Well, listen. Rules were made to be broken. Every single guy will deny it, but everyone lets their old ladies ride their bikes when no one else’s looking. That’s just how it is. You get to ride our toys, but we pretend it ain’t happening.”
Claire stared at me dumbfounded.
“That’s the dumbest thing in the world. Why not just change the rule if everyone’s breaking it?”
“Well, bikers aren’t much for philosophizing, honey,” I said with a shrug. “So, get over here, and I’ll teach you to ride.
“All right… Should I grab my helmet?”
“No. Helmets are for pussies. You’d get made fun of if you wore a helmet.”
“But I’m also not allowed to ride the bike in the first place, so who cares if I wear a helmet while I do it?”
I had to admit, she was raising good points. She disappeared upstairs and returned moments later with the helmet.
With me sitting on the back of the bike, practically on the rear fender, Claire mounted it, wrapping her dainty yet well-muscled legs around the steel beast.
“Good,” I whispered, holding her around the waist. I leaned forward and I could smell her—the scent of her hair, of her perfume. God, it would be so easy to run my hand down in between her legs, to bend her over and take her, gripping those perfect little tits as I rode the bitch hard…
“So, what do I do now?”
As we ran through the steps of bringing the chopper to life, how to accelerate, how to brake, how to turn and move with the bike as if you were an extension of it and the bike an extension of you, I found myself savoring her scent and feeling of her pressing against me, her ass practically on my crotch like a stripper, enjoying the way she adjusted her weight and struggled with the bike.
A flush was coming to her cheeks as she worked, as she fought with the beast.
“Don’t fight it,” I whispered in her ear, my lips mere inches from her skin. “Let the bike talk to you. Let it tell you what it wants.”
“I don’t care what it wants,” Claire scowled. “I care about what I want it to do.”
“Well, that’s not the way the bike’s going to respond,” I cautioned, teasing her, running my hands over her arms as I covered her hands with mine on the handles.
“It’s hard,” Claire whispered. And then, after a moment, she added. “Riding, I mean.”
“I know. But it’ll get easier,” I whispered back, my chin resting on her shoulder, almost in the cradle of her neck.
“Will it?”
“If you practice.”
“Will you let me?”
“If you’re good to me.”
“How can I be good to you?” she asked, her voice slow and soft as she shifted her butt against my crotch. My cock was practically ready to explode.
“You can ride the bike to the bodega three blocks away and pick up something for lunch,” I declared, climbing off the back.
“Wait, what? I can barely get around the parking lot here.”
“Well, go slow. Practice.”
I watched her ride unsteadily, swaying from side to side, as she crept out of the parking lot and onto the street. As I turned, I heard a cascade of honks and yelling. But no crash, no sound of bodies hitting the pavement or car hoods, so I didn’t turn around.
Instead, I went upstairs, went straight to the bathroom, dropped my jeans, and jerked off furiously into my hand, imagining her tight little ass wrapped around my cock.
When I had finished, I washed my hands and found myself staring a picture on my bookshelf. It was me and Fred, back in Afghanistan.
“You sure found yourself a firecracker,” I muttered to Fred’s picture. “Good god, man. How’d you ever handle her?”
I stalked back downstairs just in time to meet Claire, returning from the store with bags hanging off of either forearm.
“That was scarier than a shootout,” she said
, shaking her head, her legs trembling as she climbed off the bike. “I practically caused about fourteen car accidents on my way over there.”
“But you didn’t successfully cause any accidents, so you’re still doing better than I did my first time out on a bike,” I announced.
We went upstairs and without my having to say anything, she started on lunch, whipping up a quick, corner-bodega meal of refried beans, cheese, tortillas, scrambled eggs, and chorizo sausage. I picked out a few hot sauces from the fridge and we settled down to eat.
