by Lucas, Helen
“You’ll get used to it. The endorphins will start and you’ll feel great.”
“I think I’ve had enough of pain-induced endorphins for one week,” she sighed.
“How are you feeling this morning?”
“I mean, like I’ve had half my skin pierced with millions of tiny holes.”
“Sounds accurate. After you finished with breakfast, you’ll need to shower and clean all the tattoos. And then, you’ll need to put ointment on.”
“I know, I know, I know.”
“And use hot water.”
“That sounds awful.”
“It’s what you need to do. To keep them from getting infected.”
“Fine… Fine…”
We chatted while she finished up breakfast. I couldn’t help but enjoy the way she ate—the focus that she brought to everything carried over to eating breakfast too, not surprisingly. She was somehow able to focus on eating so precisely and asking me incredibly probing questions about my own tattoo history.
“So, you’re supposed to teach me something about the Damned’s customs and culture, aren’t you?” she said, finally, as she finished up.
“I sure am. But I think you should shower and get cleaned up. We’ll have plenty of time to go over the club while you heal up. You can’t just waltz into the club house looking like you just got your ink done yesterday. Even though that’s exactly what you did.”
“Fine, fine. I can tell you just want to get me naked.”
“Caught me. I’ll be in the kitchen if you need anything.”
As I stood to leave, I noticed Claire’s mouth open, as if about to ask me something.
“What’s up?”
“I remember… There was something I wanted to ask you about. Something from last night. I can’t remember what it is.”
She looked especially pensive, her face darkening.
“Well, if you think about it…”
“Jesus, it felt important but I can’t remember what it was.”
She shrugged.
“It’ll come to me. Get out of here, before I start getting naked.”
“What, I don’t get to watch? You’re my old lady now.”
“I guess you’re right,” she said with a shrug. This surprised the hell out of me.
She pulled her shirt over her head, revealing her body naked from the waist up. Those gorgeous, perky tits, each dotted with a cute little nipple. I felt like I was about to pass out.
“You should probably name them.”
“Who?”
“My boobs. For the clubhouse, I mean. That’s the kind of shit men who pretend they own women like to do, right?” she said, with a grin, holding her right breast. I wanted to leap onto the bed and fuck her stupid right then and there.
Instead, I acted as if I had already been fucked stupid.
“Uh, yeah, sure… I guess…”
My cock was like hardened steel in my pants as she eased herself out of bed and lowered her athletic shorts—a t-shirt and shorts had been her only pajamas the night before—revealing her plump ass and a hint of something more between her legs.
“There. You’ve seen everything,” she said triumphantly. “I’m going to shower.”
“You… You go do that.”
She glided off into the bathroom and I retreated to the kitchen.
Fuck, what was that? My cock was digging into my jeans uncomfortably, driving me wild, but not as wild as she had.
Did she want me to come into the bathroom, to catch her there in the shower and fuck her brains out?
Maybe that’s what she wanted. But no. I couldn’t do that.
Not just because of the operation, though that was definitely a big fucking part of it. But because…
Jesus, she was Fred’s woman. His wife. I couldn’t fuck her. Even if he were dead. Even if she were basically throwing herself at me and we had to pretend to be fucking for the sake of the operation. For the sake of our own goddamned survival.
But I still… Just couldn’t.
I filled a glass of cold tap water. I poured it over my head, biting my tongue to keep from yelling out as the cold water washed over me.
There. I could fucking control myself. Look. Look at the addict who’s controlling his impulses. Look at me.
CLAIRE
I gasped in slight agony as the hot water hit my tortured, torn skin.
“Goddamn, he was right that this would hurt…” I muttered, closing my eyes and trying to relax, trying to ease into the pain. It felt like I was sunburnt all over, but like I had suffered the worst of sunburns, like my skin had been torched off. This would be rough.
The soap didn’t make it any better.
Fortunately, the pain wasn’t the main thing on my mind. What I had just done… Teasing Fang, almost seducing him—that dominated my thoughts. What if he stormed into the bathroom, ready to slam me up against the wall, spread my legs, and fuck me senseless?
Truth me told, I was asking for it. I’d let him.
My hand dropped down to the hot juncture between my legs. I was wet and ready. I wanted it. God, I was like a slut around him but he was the bad boy I needed in my life and between my legs.
I whimpered as I touched myself, imagining him touching me, imagining the way he’d do me, the ways he’d love me, the ways he’d make me his. I wanted him to storm into the bathroom right then and there, burst into the shower, hot water washing over his gorgeous, tattooed flesh, streaming down his muscles, down his abs, and then force me up against the wall, groans of pleasure and agony streaming out of my lips as his cock penetrated me, sliding deep into the well of my pleasure…
In that moment, I forgot about the operation. I forgot about my agony, my pains, my traumas and sorrows. I even forgot about Fred.
Fang was all I wanted. All I needed.
I gasped as I finished, biting my lip to keep from screaming. But maybe if I screamed, he’d hear and he’d know how badly I needed him…
With that taken care of, I was able to continue washing my torn flesh, whimpering as soap worked its way into my tattoos. Just look at me now, mom!
With lust no longer clouding my mind (or, at least, not as thickly), I was able to take a step back and reflect on things. It was not a good idea for me to sleep with Fang. This I knew. No matter how badly I wanted it. No matter how badly I wanted to feel him deep inside of me.
God, Claire, stop it. Keep it in your pants! I wasn’t even wearing pants, but that was beside the point.
The weird thing was, I didn’t totally feel like I was betraying Fred by thinking about Fang. Since Fred’s death—since that terrible day—every time I thought about another man, I felt like I was cheating.
Weirdly, when Fred was alive, I fantasized about other guys all the time, like any woman would, like any human being would.
But with him dead… Everything had taken on a whole new significance and importance. I couldn’t speak ill of him. I couldn’t remember anything but the best things, the best parts of our relationship and our marriage. And I couldn’t fantasize about any men besides Fred, my poor, poor Fred.
The thoughts that accompanied my lust for Fang, though, were not the concerns of a housewife but the worries of a professional. But maybe if we both survived this job… Maybe if the operation were a success…
No. Fang would go into witness protection. I’d start getting laser tattoo removal and move onto different operations. This was our last dance.
In that case… Maybe it actually didn’t matter? How would sleeping together compromise the operation, really? As long as we were both adults about it?
But could Fang be an adult? Could he keep it casual? Or would he be a bad boy about it?
And wasn’t that what I really wanted?
I had to stop dwelling on this stuff, I decided, finally. I needed to focus on the job at hand and I needed to get educated on the history and culture of this motorcycle club I was supposedly going to be infiltrating.
With some difficulty, I
finally finished showering and began to towel off delicately, dabbing at my new tattoos painfully. I applied the ointment Joel had given me, leaving a shiny, greasy sheen of wax on each tattooed site. And then, and only then, I wrapped the towel around my body and stepped out of the bathroom, grabbed a few articles of clothing, and pulled them on.
Even though I was totally naked and vulnerable, right there in the middle of his apartment, Fang wasn’t around to take advantage of me. I saw him out on his back stairs having a cigarette. He didn’t know what he was missing.
Finally, I stepped out onto the back fire escape with him and nudged him, holding out my hand for a cigarette.
“These things’ll kill you,” he warned as he flicked one out of the pack. He smoked American Spirits, which seemed to make sense for a biker.
“I can handle it,” I shot back as he lit it for me. I had smoked in high school, during the rebellious phase that all kids seemed to go through. I hadn’t smoked since, but it was fun to try it again, to play at being a rebel, when in fact, as we all knew, I was a Federal Agent.
“So, tell me about the Damned,” I said, as we both looked out at the dismal southern Florida urban street scene in front of us. A few kids played basketball across the street in the brutal, unrelenting sun. Their hoop didn’t have a net, and the rim was bent at an almost ninety degree angle, forcing some truly strange acrobatic maneuvers in order for them to shoot. Behind then, in the distance, the highway roared, an artery that pumped life and oil into Miami and returned the detritus of modern America back out into the suburbs, transporting waste away from the heart.
“Well, do you know how biker gangs started?”
“I can’t say I do—do we really have to go back that far?”
Fang shrugged. He wore a tight white t-shirt and his hair was slicked back, making him look all the more like an old school greaser from a movie, especially with the cigarette hanging out of his mouth, balanced precariously on his lower lip.
“It’s part of the story,” he said simply. Now it was my turn to shrug.
“After World War II, you had a lot of GI’s coming back who all got jobs, had families, put down roots, became productive members of society. They had seen the worst of humanity—the concentration camps, the death marches in the Pacific, the bombings—and then they were supposed to come back, go to college, get a job, buy a house, pop out two-point-five kids and watch I Love Lucy with the wife.”
“American dream.”
“That’s right. Only, some of them, a lot of them, couldn’t handle it. You see things in war, it changes you. They used motorcycles in the service, and some guys missed them. And maybe they missed just going fast and shit, but what they really missed, I think, was being about to get away from it all. From family life. A motorcycle isn’t a Cadillac. You can’t fit a family on the back.”
“So, it just started as a bunch of guys wanting to get away from their bratty kids?”
“And their wives.”
“Can’t forget the wives.”
“But there’s more. You can ride motorcycles in packs, with other guys who’ve experienced the same things you have. You can go where you want to go, with people who understand you. That’s how motorcycle clubs started.”
“What about the Hell’s Angels and the—young know, one-percenters? The bad guys. The guys like you.”
Fang grinned.
“Well, some guys coming back from war didn’t adapt so well to civilian life. Kept getting into fights, drinking, using drugs. It just so happened that a lot of those guys ended up riding motorcycles too. They found each other and…”
“And biker gangs happened?”
“That’s right.”
“But the Damned haven’t been around all that long. Just… Twenty, twenty-five years, right?”
“That’s right. But, that’s part of our founding mythology. That somehow, we’re the pure ones. We’re going back to the original reasons for founding biker gangs—we’ve got this connection to the old guys who went out, fought the Nazis and the Japanese, came home, didn’t want to fucking settle down with a white picket fence, and just got on a motorcycle with some loose chick and rode off into the sunset. We’re the originals, even if we haven’t been around all that long. Other gangs? Just criminals, thugs, drug addicts. To joined the Damned, you have to have served and you have to have seen combat.”
“Sounds dangerous.”
“There’s no comparison. No comparison between a homegrown domestic gangbanger and someone that Uncle Sam taught to kill. He’s a good teacher, and he makes good killers, no matter what anyone else says.”
“So, you’re all former military. How’d the club start?”
“Fatman. You know him?”
“I know of him,” I answered. “I haven’t met him. Not personally, of course.”
“Right. He came back from Desert Storm and he was not all right, despite what everyone pretended about that war. He saw that high way of death leading out of Baghdad, where our planes had just strafed the caravans of fleeing Iraqis. One long road of corpses and blown out jeeps, stretching for miles and miles in the desert. Like something out of a Dali painting. And in the background? The oil wells smoking. Smog spread out over the sky, so that it’s like night during the day time.”
“Sounds like hell.”
“Exactly. A literal hell. He came back and he was not all right. Not to mention the fact that he’d done some terrible shit—he was part of a task force supposed to seize Saddam’s chemical weapons. In the process, he saw what those weapons did to people, had to look at the experiments Saddam’s scientists had been undertaking. Hell, he summarily executed some of the officers and told the brass that they’d committed suicide when they saw the Americans coming. That’s something you won’t find in the history books.”
“Sounds… rough,” I said lamely, unable to meet Fang’s eyes, unable to say anything else.
“Yeah. Yeah, rough’s one word for it. Anyway, he’d always liked riding. He was supposed to go to college when he came back. Use some of that juicy government cash to go to Florida State and become an accountant. But he never showed up for classes. He started hanging out in biker bars, getting into fights, dealing drugs—the standard shit. But he’s a mean mother fucker and after a few years, he was getting into fewer and fewer fights because no one wanted to fight him—or because he’d already killed anyone who might challenge him.”
“So, it started organically? It’s not like Fatman woke up one day and said ‘I’m going to start an MC called ‘the Damned’ composed entirely of former service men…’”
“Right. Other guys, who liked riding and had been in the service, we were all just sort of drawn to Fatman, since he understood what we’d been through, since he had a real no bull-shit attitude towards things, since he was always the biggest, baddest motherfucker in the room.”
“How’d he get the name? Fatman?”
“His leg was fucked up in the war, and so he’s like half a gimp now. When he was younger, he worked out and worked around it, but after the war, he started to let it go, especially since he had a motorcycle to get him where he needed to go and especially since you don’t have to be in good shape or anything like that to kill people and to be a mean motherfucker. You just have to be sadistic and willing to escalate violence faster than the other guy.”
“So, he’s a loose cannon?”
“I’d like to say so, but I can’t help but feel like everything he does is… Calculated. Like he’s playing this one big game and we’re all just pawns in it.”
Fang took a long, slow drag off his cigarette.
“He went out and bought a fifty-caliber sniper rifle the other day.”
“Jesus Christ, what for? Is he planning on doing some big game hunting?”
“Not exactly. After Bolo went down, he started thinking that he needs to be ready for when the FBI helicopters come after him.”
“Sounds like a tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist…”
&n
bsp; “Yeah, I’d agree with you except…”
Fang lapsed into silence, smoking silently, lost in thought.
“Except that I was the only one he wanted to show it to. It was like… Like it was a warning.”
I felt my face pale.
“Do you think… Do you think he knows?”
Fang shrugged.
“Fuck if I know. I’ve been careful. I’ve kept my mouth shut. I still go and party and drink and drug and smash shit like any good Damned. But he has ways. People are scared of him. People tell him things.”
