CHAPTER FOUR
Vaughn
I felt ridiculous riding into the restaurant lot. Dinner on a Sunday, this was a family place. There was some birthday party or something and a swarm of Mexican kids were screaming and chasing each other around with balloons. They didn’t toss me a single fuck and I had to brake hard to keep from flattening a couple into tortillas.
The moms came running at the squeal of tires, but despite the flickering irritation, I had nothing to unleash at them. The natural swears that came to me all had to do with their tan skin not their being shitty parents. If I let that out now, who knew what else would come out tonight?
I got off the bike and wound towards the door. The restaurant glowed with clean white light, every booth inside packed with all types of people chowing down on big platters of food. I didn’t feel much hungry, but that’s not why I was here anyway.
What I was here for, I wasn’t exactly sure. My hands had been shaking when I picked up the phone with the familiar number flashing on screen. I was like a junkie going through withdrawal.
All she had promised was a conversation. About what, only she knew. Maybe she just wanted to tell me what scum I was. Maybe I wanted to hear it. Or maybe I’d just take the chance to hear anything come out of those lush lips again.
I searched the seats for the bob of her sleek dark hair, the sight of her smooth dark face, but she wasn’t seated on this side.
I wanted her in my arms – I wasn’t gonna deny that. The ache had done nothing to diminish by being away from her. That didn’t mean I was going to apologize for who I was inside or out. I’d done nothing but right by her, and if that wasn’t enough-
I found her. She was pressed into a corner booth, face half-hid behind a plastic menu. She had on a blue and yellow college hoodie and jeans. I could just see one half of her, tightly wound and serious, as if the food had offended her. She flipped the plastic and gave me a glimpse of the full extent of her. Her lips were berry purple. Her skin looked like a velvet lake and her hair shone like dark glass. I could almost taste how fresh she must smell.
Fuck, I hoped doing right by her counted for enough.
I pushed through the door and sidled up. Her menu was down and she looked side to side. She had her arms locked confidently on the table, but her feet tapped nervously underneath.
A thousand bold lines ran through my head as I got closer and closer, but then our eyes met. All I could do was tip my head and say, “This seat taken?”
She took a moment to answer, as if she were still not sure about this. “No,” she said. “Go on.”
I crumpled into the other end of the round booth. We weren’t quite face to face, and that somehow made it more intimate. It felt like we were hands of a clock destined to wind up point the same way sooner or later. Assuming the clock wasn’t broken.
“You look good,” I said.
“Thanks,” she said. “But it’s only been like three days.”
“And the time has treated you kindly.”
Her lips pulled up for a second before she tugged them back flat. “What do you want?” she asked, sliding over the menu. “I’m buying.”
That threw me off. “I don’t follow.”
“There’s nothing to follow. I asked you to come to dinner, so I owe you a dinner right?”
“Darlin, I’m a lot of things, but I’m not sure where you got the idea that included being a charity case.”
“I didn’t say you were. You can buy if you want. I’m just trying to be cordial.”
“Cordial?” I chuckled and eased into my seat. The girl was more confused than me. “I don’t remember cordiality being in short supply between us. But I get it. You want to keep me at arm’s length, show me you don’t need me. Message received.”
She made a face like I’d exhaled garlic. “I don’t need you.”
“You need something. Why else we here?”
She nodded thoughtfully, then pulled a tablet from her purse. “You’re right. I need answers.”
I was blooming more with questions, but our waitress picked that moment to pop up all perky for orders. I would have loved a couple fingers of whiskey going into this, but got the opposite instead. Coffee, black with buckshot, and some random breakfast platter. Meagan ordered chicken strips and some fruit juice and our waitress bounced away.
“What sort of answers are you looking for?” I said.
“I want to know who exactly I gave two weeks of my life to. And why.”
Her eyes fell to her screen and the air felt colder. This looked to be less a conversation and more an interrogation.
“And what exactly am I getting out of this?” I asked.
“A voice,” she said. “Isn’t that what guys like you want anyway? For someone to listen to your views?”
“Did you notice me voicing them while we were together?”
She shrugged. “Not in front of me, no, but that would be stupid. You’re not stupid.”
“Glad you can see that, at least.” I rapped the table. “So you want to know whether I was screwing you and preaching against blacks when we were apart? The answer is no.”
“No?” She snapped up. “What do you mean no?”
“I don’t walk around in white robes during the day. I’ve never been about that.”
She looked from me to the screen, genuinely bewildered. If I’d tripped her up already, this meeting might not be as set in stone as it appeared. The drinks appeared and I inhaled a hot wash of sweet, dark caffeine.
“So what do you do during the day then?” she finally asked.
“Various things.” I wanted to cut off there, but it wouldn’t be enough for her. “Club business mostly. The Soldiers are a motorcycle club first and foremost. We’ve got to make money and preaching hatred ain’t exactly a source of income.”
“So how do you make money?”
“We, uh, move certain merchandise from one place to another.” I saw her brow furrow up and added. “Not drugs, but not cotton candy either.”
She sipped her tumbler of juice. Her dark eyes were unreadable, but at least they were fixed on me. “So you guys don’t directly do any race stuff?”
All I would have to do was shake my head. For all her severity, this girl was innocent to the hard ways of the world. The lie would be so much easier than the truth. But Calix was in my head, whispering plans for the rally. The rally which I could not escape even if I wanted to. It was just weeks away.
“Not much,” I said into my coffee.
“How much is not much?”
“We ride with other white MCs now and then. And there’s a rally somewhere in the south once a year or so.”
“A rally?” She sounded more curious than angry. “For what?”
“White nationalism.”
“Ah.”
We sipped at our drinks for a moment. If she were white, then maybe I could be talking her up, trying to convince her that white nationalism was a positive, a way to rise, not kick others to the dirt. But I didn’t want to waste breath if the ship was already sunk.
A little part of me, though, was grateful for not having to come up with a defense. The relief lasted about a second.
“So what’s that all about?” she asked.
I sucked air through my teeth, trying to find the right phrasing for her tender gaze. “It’s about preserving white culture.”
Her eyes popped, and I could see she was holding back shock or a laugh. But it didn’t make me angry or even annoyed. It was the default explanation, but it didn’t really explain much.
“Do you believe white culture is in danger of being lost?”
Her face was calm again, respectful almost. It made the usual platitudes fade from my lips. “Not too much,” I said.
“Ok, what? You’re fighting for a cause you don’t believe in?”
“No, that’s not what I meant. I believe in pieces. Just not the overall message.”
The coffee was a wrong call. My body burned up. I slung off my
jacket. Meagan waited patiently, calm and cuddly in her plush sweatshirt.
“I’m with them, make no mistake,” I offered. “But a lot of it has to do with my family.”
“Your family pushed you into it...”
I hated the false understanding on her face. She was almost smiling with relief. This was worse than a lie – for her to write me off as a child seeking favor. How could I make her understand that it was both? That I believed but not like the others?
“My father and brother went in first,” I said. “But I joined out of my own choosing.”
The smile faded, but it didn’t die out. She just shook her head. “So why then? What made you join?”
“I joined because of my mother’s murder.”
“Oh,” she whispered.
I chewed at my coffee a bit longer and then recounted the whole sordid story. Dolores Black had been out running errands – nothing more, nothing less. Calix had been at school then, and Pop was at work, but I wasn’t fit to be left alone or elsewhere, so I was right along in the car with her, just tied up in the baby seat in the back.
We must have run low on gas at the wrong time, cause she pulled up to that gas station in downtown Atlanta after the sun went down. As she filled up her gas, a black man was just about wrapping up robbing the gas station store. He came out looking to grab a ride and held up my mom for her car. No way she was giving me up to a robber, so she fought back. But there’s not much a body can do to hold against a gun. It barked once and she was gone.
When the cops came, I was bawling in the backseat. The gunshot must have set me crying and the guy had fled on foot, panicking at the thought of adding a kidnapping to his rap sheet.
Meagan’s eyes wobbled with tears when I stopped talking. The food had arrived sometime in between, but neither of us had much appetite. I looked away from her. It wasn’t the effect I wanted to have.
“The guy that killed her,” she said hoarsely. “He was black?”
“He was.”
She sighed. “Figures.”
She leaned in, slumped into her own hand, as if she knew the guy. I almost asked, before slapping the thought out of my head. Of course she didn’t know him. It made seeing her like this all that much worse.
She peeked up. “Vaughn, I’m sorry, but...do you blame me for your mom?”
“Of course not.”
“Why not? We used to be dirt poor. My dad fenced stolen goods.”
“Poor ain’t the issue.”
She smiled sadly. “No, I guess not huh? That’s why you’re with your group. You think it’s a culture thing. That’s what you want – separation from blacks.”
“I-“ I shoved the meat back and forth across my plate. She had me dead to rights. It was the end we were fighting for. “I don’t know.”
She tasted a piece of her food. My throat didn’t seem to be able to swallow. It seemed jammed up with words I couldn’t quite voice. I couldn’t deny my affiliation, but god did I want her to not see it.
“Do I disgust you?” she said after a few bites.
“You know you don’t.”
“I don’t know what’s going on inside that head anymore. You’re with the white nationalists but you’re not the same. You got reasons to want apart from blacks, but you’re with me.”
That about summed it up. I waited for her to reach the conclusion, desperate to see what she had unearthed, but she shook her head.
“All this time,” she said. “I thought it was me. That I was the fool, that I hated myself, but you’re worse off than I am. I’ll tell you something though, Vaughn. I know what I want. Do you?”
I leaned in close to her face, watched those liquid brown eyes shake, as if their movements held the answer. But they simply ducked away.
Meagan began to eat in small delicate bites. Chewing seemed a better option than silence so I matched her. Each of us sat lost in our own tastes and thoughts, eyes flicking occasionally towards each other.
The bill rescued us, and I claimed it. It was the smallest thing in my power to do. It earned me a steady gaze from her eyes, an opening to say something more. But I didn’t have anything right then.
Meagan read the resignation off me and smiled sadly. “I know what I want,” she said again. “Call me when you do, too.”
She got up and left me alone in the greasy booth - alone with nothing to face me but my two-timing thoughts.
CHAPTER FIVE
Meagan
The house tinkled with noise as I walked in. Tara was watching the TV down the hall, something with bursts of overproduced laughter. My head hung in such a fog now. I set my purse down and let the sound lure me in like a lighthouse.
Tara lay long on the couch, so I clipped in and dropped face down on the recliner.
She peeked over at me. “Who let your air out, girl?” she asked.
“I did it to myself,” I croaked. I truly had. Why on earth had I thought meeting him would do anything but set me in a mood?
The show was one of my favorite trash reality shows about housewives bitching over little smudges in their high class lives, but now it just ticked me off. One girl was talking about how her husband had gotten them a king suite at some five star hotel in Tokyo but picked a view of the city instead of the ocean.
“It’s like we’ve got nothing in common,” she sulked over the speakers.
“You’re in freaking Tokyo!” I yelled at the screen. “Who cares what you see before you go to sleep?”
Tara frowned over at me. “Easy, Judge Judy.”
“Their life is so freaking petty,” I said. “And she’s fussing over little issues.”
“That’s what they’re on TV for.”
“They should come film me if they want some real drama,” I grumbled.
“Oh, that still going on?”
I shrugged. I hadn’t told her about why we broke up either. It was so embarrassing, and tonight hadn’t really changed that. Being angry at the TV just kept me from being angry at myself.
So his mom had been killed by a black man. That sucked. My dad had wound up with the same fate, and Darryl and I had been worse off than Vaughn ever was. We survived. What was the need to go base your whole life on one bit of history?
Well, wars had been started over less than a murder. Vaughn might have taken a dumb lesson from his past, but he was free to do it far away from me.
Tara and I made faces at the drama queens on screen for an hour or so, and then she went off to bed. Her hours at the bank were pretty rigid. I switched out to my PJs, dimmed the volume and kept going. The term paper lingered over me, but I was in no mood to venture into my head tonight.
Around nine or ten, anger wasn’t enough to cloud my thoughts. I switched to a ghost hunter show. They wandered around a house in night vision for a bit and then, looking at absolutely nothing, one of them said, “Hey, what’s that?”
The other looked around confused and said, “What?”
“That!” the first guy said looking more terrified than ever. The camera started shaking.
Something pounded on my wall.
I yelped off the couch, dizzy and terrified. The pounding came again, from further down the hallway. Oh sweet Jesus, just the front door.
But it was almost eleven. Who would that be?
I tiptoed up to the solid wood frame and looked through the peephole. Vaughn stood ballooned up in the center of the glass.
I flung it open. “Vaughn. What are you doing?”
He still had on full biker regalia. The bulging jacket, the dark jeans, the cocky look. His buzzed head glowed in the moonlight.
“You told me to see you when I know what I want.” He swaggered and smiled. “I know what I want.”
“That wasn’t an invitation to a booty call,” I said, steadying myself against either sill of the door.
“If I read your words right, that’s what you wanted from me,” he said. “Or were you talking about my sharp tongue?”
I became awfully aware that
my breasts were lunging out of my t-shirt, the tips hard and raised.
Just the cold, I told myself, but a traitorous warmth already lit up my core. I crossed my arms against it.
“What did you come here to say, Vaughn?” I asked. “You can’t seriously imagine I was happy with what I heard tonight.”
“Maybe not. But I gave you the truth, just like you asked.”
“Well, gee thanks. Your truth just makes things worse.”
Vaughn edged up, just the tiniest bit. It was enough to raise the temperature a degree or two. “That’s why I came to drop a bit more.”
“What’s that?” I asked, hugging myself tighter.
“All that I told you – that was true. It was who I was. But you should know who I am now.”
A puff of his breath washed over me, thick with whiskey. It put me oddly at ease – good things had always followed that.
“I am messed up,” he said.
I snorted. “You have that right.”
“No, darlin, you’ve got no fucking idea. My head’s a goddamn battlefield. My days used to be smooth and sure. My nights went by hot and cold, but always under my control. Now I spend my days turning over thoughts I’ve never imagined before. My nights I spend waiting for the phone to ring – for you to show up on my screen and call me to dinner.”
His eyes were wild in a way I’d never seen them, just a fractal of blue light, shimmering, energized.
“I’ve been lying to my boys. I’ve been hiding from my folks. I’ve been driving alone endlessly trying to work out what I am.” He chewed at his lip and shook his head. “You know why I’m doing all that?”
“Cause of me,” I murmured.
“Shit, you’re supposed to let me answer.” He chuckled without humor. “But yeah, it’s you.”
He loomed over me now. Had he moved up or had I? I couldn’t tell, but I was looking up at him, a hot wall against the cold world outside.
“That’s quite a speech,” I said.
“I didn’t exactly plan it out.”
“Wow, that’s doubly impressive.”
“Thanks, college girl.” He slumped into the sill. “Look I know my truths don’t sound great. But they used to be fixed in stone. You shook my world into a jumble in just two weeks.”
Grey (Storm's Soldiers MC Book 2) Page 3
