“Jesus.”
I nodded, blinking hard. “One day, um, I was driving Isaac home. He lived a long way outside town, so you had to drive through a whole bunch of nothing, just endless cornfields. No traffic, no neighbors, no gas stations, just the highway and the corn. Well, I got rear-ended. Lost control, ended up in the corn. Hit my head and passed out. When I came to, Isaac…uh—shit. Isaac had been—they’d dragged him out of my car and beat him…beat him so badly he…”
I couldn’t keep going, and Zane sat holding my hand, waiting.
I cleared my throat. “A semi saw the headlights in the field and stopped. Radioed for help. But by the time the cops came, Isaac was gone.”
“Jesus fuck. What happened to the kids who did it?”
I laughed bitterly. “Not a damn thing. I never saw them…nobody saw anything. I mean, never mind the paint on the back of my car where they’d hit me, or the fact that everyone knew exactly who it was that hated Isaac so much. But yeah, there wasn’t even a real investigation. A sort of cursory, ‘Oh no, this kid nobody liked died, how sad, guess it was an accident. Someone from out of town, probably.’ And that was it. His parents moved, and I wanted to quit school. Mom wouldn’t let me, and so—I finished, got my diploma, and joined the Army.”
“Goddamn, Mara.”
I shrugged. “Yeah. It was…it was bad. What really gets me is that the bullying only got that much worse when we started dating. I know—I know it’s not directly my fault, but I’m still partially responsible. I mean, they did it, they killed him. But they hated him even worse for daring to date me…I’d been pretty popular, you know? In the inner circle of the cool kids. So when I started dating Isaac, they looked at it as Isaac stealing me from them, tainting me, somehow.”
The movie was starting, but neither of us was paying attention, and neither was the teenage couple, so our conversation wasn’t disturbing anyone.
I hesitated, and then let out another sigh. “So, that’s Isaac. What else is relevant and important? Um…I was date raped while I was in the Army. He drugged me and I woke up naked and sore in an alleyway. That was fun. Of course, in that case the guy that did it failed to realize how close we were in the medical unit. My entire unit found the guy, and…uh, curb-stomped him, I guess you could call it. Shitty part of that was it wasn’t the first date I’d gone on with that guy either. I’d been seeing him sort of casually for like a month. We’d even slept together once. And then he put GHB in my drink and raped me. Sort of soured me on guys, you might say. Sort of hard to trust anyone, you know? After Isaac, and then Chad, yeah…dating seemed stupid and dangerous and pointless, so I stopped doing it.”
Zane was quiet for a while, staring at the screen but obviously not watching. “I don’t know what to say.”
I took his hand. “You wanted to know, and I told you. That’s all part of what makes me tick.” I squeezed his hand. “Nothing you need to say. You’re listening, and that’s what’s important.”
“I’m sorry you went through all that, Mara.”
“Me too. I mean, I can’t change it, and it made me stronger, but it’s why I’m having a hard time getting myself to open up to you.” I sat in silence half-watching the movie for a few minutes, sitting beside Zane, and yet there was only one thing on my mind. Or…one person. “You want to hear about my dad?”
Zane twisted in his seat to look at me. “Of course, but only if you want to talk about him.”
I lifted a shoulder. “I mean, I’ve told you about Isaac, and I told you about Chad, so I might as well tell you about Dad.” I nodded my head at the red-lit exit sign. “Want to get out of here? I’m not really feeling the movie.”
Zane stood up and led me out of the theater without hesitation. We found a nearby bar, slid into a corner booth, and ordered some drinks. When we were settled in, Zane sitting beside me, I began peeling the label off my light beer.
“Uh oh,” Zane said. “You’re peeling the label. That’s not good.”
I shook my head. “Nothing like what happened with Isaac or Chad. It’s just…complicated.” I spent a moment or two thinking. “My dad was a normal guy, a normal dad. He worked a nine-to-five job selling insurance, went to all my piano recitals and theater productions, played with me in the backyard. Drank Budweiser sitting on the front porch after work, watched wrestling and NASCAR, kissed my mother when he left in the morning. He was just…Dad. But then, when I was twelve, he bought a Harley, sold his insurance agency, and left.”
“Midlife crisis?”
I shook my head. “No, not really. He was only thirty-five. It wasn’t a crisis, and it wasn’t as random as it may have seemed. Then, to me, at twelve, it was the most unexpected and shocking thing in the world. I just came home from school one day and Dad’s F-150 was gone and there was a motorcycle in the driveway. He had a backpack packed, and he was wearing leather chaps and a leather jacket. Mom was screaming at him, and he was just taking it. Which wasn’t Dad, you know? They bickered as much as any married couple, but nothing crazy. Mom never screamed, and Dad never yelled, but he also wasn’t passive. I didn’t understand. He gave me a kiss on the cheek, told me he’d send me letters, and that he’d see me soon, and then he got on his bike and rode away.”
“Just like that?”
I nodded. “Just like that.”
“How is that not random?”
“Well, do that math. He was thirty-five when I was twelve: he was twenty-two when Mom had me. Mom was born in town, but not Dad. He was a drifter, I guess. Blew into town one day on a motorcycle, met Mom at a diner…and then ended up falling in love and staying. Mom had me, and he sold his bike, got a job selling insurance, and ended up owning the agency. Mom thought he was content, he had her, he had me, and he had a good job that paid well. We weren’t the richest people in town, but we were pretty well off. Then, out of the blue, he decided he’d had enough domesticity, and left.”
“You ever hear from him again?” Zane asked.
I nodded. “Yep. But not for a solid year. He didn’t send a letter, didn’t send a birthday card, nothing. He sent Mom cash in an unmarked envelope every month, but that was it. She wrote him off, and so did I. Then, about a month after my fourteenth birthday, right at the beginning of summer break, I was reading a book on the front porch and I heard motorcycles. I knew it was him. He rolled up on his Harley, wearing a vest with a bunch of patches on it, new tattoos on his arms, a big beard—he was different, but it was Dad. And there were about twenty other bikers with him, all in the same club. I didn’t understand it then, of course, I just knew that there was a whole shit load of big scary tough looking guys on motorcycles, with a bunch of hard-looking women behind them, or on their own bikes.”
“He took you?”
I bobbed my head side to side. “Yes, and no. He didn’t kidnap me. He came up and asked if I wanted to spend the summer with him. I was a fourteen-year-old girl and I was still mad at him for leaving, but I also just missed my Dad. And I was curious. Like, what was it that was so much better out there than here at home with me and Mom? So I was like, sure. He told me to pack everything I could fit into a backpack and leave a note for Mom.”
Zane made a face. “You didn’t.”
I nodded. “I did. Stuffed a bunch of jeans, underwear, socks, and T-shirts into my backpack, threw on a hoodie, and left. I wrote Mom a note, that I was spending the summer with Dad and that I loved her, all that kind of thing.”
“I bet that went over well.”
I laughed. “Oh yeah. We made it maybe ten miles outside of town before about six state troopers showed up with lights and sirens going. The whole gang pulled over and the troopers went in guns drawn like I’d been snatched. Not an outlandish assumption to make, especially since that’s what Mom had told them.”
“What happened? Cops versus bikers never goes well, from what I understand.”
“Dad had me talk to them. I told them I was with Dad voluntarily, so there wasn’t anything anyone could say. Mom and Dad ha
d never divorced, so it wasn’t like he was violating a court visitation order.”
“So you spent a summer with your Dad’s biker gang.”
“Yep. It was amazing, honestly. Total freedom. Ride all day, hang out with the guys at night. Dad let me drink, kept an eye on me, and kept the younger guys from sniffing around after me. If it was a nice night, they’d just stop wherever they wanted, pitch some tents, light a fire, and camp on the side of the highway. Or there’d be a motel, somewhere not too ratty but not flashy.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
I shook my head. “It was incredible. He brought me back a week before school started. Just dropped me off, gave me a kiss, and rode away without looking back. And then I didn’t hear from him again until the first week of summer the next year. And guess what?”
“You spent your summers on the back of your Dad’s Harley?”
I let out a breath and nodded. “I sure did. Every year until I joined the Army.”
“How’d your mom take it?”
I shot him a wry grin. “Not well at all. That first time, I was grounded the whole first month of school, and she refused to talk to me. I mean not a damn word. Stopped getting me up for school, stopped making my breakfast, stopped doing my laundry, stopped packing my lunches, stopped driving me to school, stopped giving me allowances.”
“Damn, that’s harsh,” Zane said, chuckling.
“When you’re fourteen, yeah, it’s harsh,” I shot back.
He raised his hands. “Hey now, I was being serious. He’s your dad, and she was making you choose, essentially. I mean, yeah, he probably should have, like, called you or sent postcards now again, but he showed up. He was involved, just…his way. She shouldn’t have guilted you into choosing her over him.”
I felt oddly relieved that he understood. “Exactly. My mom is a world champion at holding grudges, I’ve learned. She doesn’t let go of things. You know how guys will joke about their girlfriends, like ‘she has flowcharts and graphs and flashcards for every single thing I’ve ever done or said’? That’s Mom. She never forgave Dad, and she never got over him, either. Never divorced him, never dated, never took him to court. I mean, why would she? He was gone nine months of the year and he sent her an envelope full of cash once a month, every month, without fail—and looking back, I think he had to have sent her a couple grand every month, easily. And then, for the three months of summer, she got to be completely alone, do whatever she wanted, no kid, no one to look after or clean up after. She got to spend an entire summer single, basically. I said she never dated, but I suspect she spent those summers I was gone dating while I wasn’t around to see. And me, well, she never forgave me, either. She saw it, like you said, as a betrayal. According to her, I should have refused to ever talk to him again, because he’d abandoned us both.
“And yeah, I was always a little angry with him for leaving like he did. I still am, in a way. But he showed up, and he invested in me. The summer trips were a birthday present, too. He’d let me do what ever I wanted, within reason. I learned how to drink around Dad, learned how to throw a mean right hook, how to ride a motorcycle, how to change a tire, how to change oil. I saw the country on the back of a Harley, in the company of my dad and a bunch of other amazing people.” I paused to take a drink of my beer, which had started to go warm. “Mom never forgave me. We established a status quo, but I was taking care of myself from then on. She did the grocery shopping and paid the bills, but I was responsible for myself. I got a job when I was fifteen and bought a car with my own money when I turned seventeen.”
“How are things now?”
I looked down and picked at the label of my bottle. “Well, Mom still lives in Elvira, Indiana, still works for the same dentist she has since I was in high school, still lives in the same house. I don’t see her that much. I refuse to set foot in that town, not after what happened to Isaac, not after the way even the so-called ‘good people’ turned a blind eye to what Jimmy Price, Kevin Lyle, Patrick McKnight, and Reggie Kowalski did. Those are all the sons of city councilmembers, F-Y-I. They’re the ones who killed Isaac and no one says anything. It’s just this dirty little town secret, except it’s not, like, someone’s a secret drug addict or someone got someone else’s wife pregnant. It was premeditated murder of an innocent kid. So yeah, I don’t go back. I buy Mom a plane ticket every December and she spends a month with me in San Francisco.”
“What about your dad?” Zane asked.
I sighed. “Two years ago, he was convicted of grand larceny, money laundering, possession of and intent to distribute schedule one narcotics, and possession of a firearm without a license.”
“Oh.” Zane blinked, processing. “So…he’s behind bars for a while.”
I laughed bitterly. “A while, yeah.”
“So when you were on those trips with him…?”
Another bitter laugh. “Those were his vacations, too. The rest of the year he and his gang were…well, your average gangsters. Drugs, guns, hookers, the whole nine yards, and my dad was one of the ring-leaders. He kept it from me all through high school and while I was in the Army, and then one day, bam, I got a collect call from him. He was behind bars and wouldn’t be getting out for something like twenty years, minimum. Turns out he’d been lying to me the whole time. I mean, I always kind of wondered where he got the money to send Mom, and how he could afford to just scamper off with me for three months and spend money on me like it was no big deal. The last week or so of our summer trips, we’d swing by Indianapolis before he took me home, and we’d go shopping. He’d buy me whatever I wanted and then we’d ship it all to Mom’s house. He’d drop several grand at a time without blinking. Should’ve been a hint, but I was just…”
“A girl being spoiled by her dad.”
I nodded. “Exactly. It was easier to not think about it, not ask any questions.”
“I notice none of the charges he was slapped with are violent offenses.”
I shrugged. “Yeah. I think he had others do that kind of dirty work when it needed doing.”
“Do you ever visit him?”
“Nope. I will, eventually, but I haven’t forgiven him yet. It’s another betrayal, yet another way he abandoned me.”
“Understandable.” We both finished our drinks at the same time, and Zane pointed at mine. “Another?”
I shrugged. “Nah. You want to just…walk around?”
“Sounds good.”
And that’s what we did. Hand in hand, just strolling the boardwalk next to the cruise ships and fishing boats and sailboats, telling stories about our childhoods. Zane did a lot of the talking, which was fine by me; he had an endless stream of hysterical stories about his brothers.
And then things turned to our experiences in the military, and I told him a few of the antics my unit had gotten up, pranking each other mercilessly, and he talked more about his friend. Specifically Marco, the one who’d been killed. I had a feeling he found it cathartic to talk about Campy with me, since I would understand the strangely intense bonds you form with people in your unit, especially if you’ve seen combat, which I had, since I’d been a “Sixty-Eight Whiskey”, a 68W—a line medic, meaning I went with the Joes on hazardous missions to provide trauma care.
We eventually ended up on a bench near the docks, looking out over the water as the sun set behind the mountains, and we were there when the moon rose, still talking.
I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to one person for that long in my life. Even Isaac, we’d only get to see each other for a few hours at a time, and honestly, we didn’t exactly spend a lot of time just talking—we were teenagers, after all. But this? With Zane? I just couldn’t fathom ending the conversation. The thought never even entered my head. We sat, and we talked, and so many hours passed I lost track. And then, when the sky started to go hazy gray with oncoming dawn, he led us to a place called Pioneer Café that was open twenty-four hours on the weekends, and we ordered an early breakfast and talked until the su
n was high.
Eventually, I was yawning and my eyes were burning, and even Zane, conditioned to long hours of being awake, seemed to be dragging.
“I need to sleep,” I said, pushing away my now-empty plate.
Zane wiped yolk off his plate with the last of his toast and stuffed it in his mouth, eyeing me. “I have a suggestion,” he said between chews. “Feel free to call me crazy.”
“All right,” I said, sounding as wary as I felt.
“Come back to my place with me.”
I made a face at him. “Why would that be crazy?”
He quirked an eyebrow at me. “That wasn’t the crazy part.”
“So what is?”
“We go back to my place, we get in my bed…” He trailed off dramatically.
“Yeah…” I prompted. “And?”
He leaned forward, whispering conspiratorially. “And we just sleep.”
I sank back against the booth, blinking at him. “That is crazy.” I ripped up the remnants of my napkin. “Just sleep?”
He nodded. “Just sleep.” His fingertip traced the bumps of my knuckles. “I don’t work until four tomorrow, so we can sleep in. I’ll make you breakfast—well, actually, Xavier will make you breakfast and I’ll take credit.”
I nudged my plate. “Isn’t this breakfast?”
“Nope. Breakfast is whatever meal you eat after you wake up, regardless of what time it is.”
“Oh.”
He tossed a pair of twenties on the table and tilted his head at me. “So, Amarantha. What do you say?”
“I say…I like the way you say my full name, and I also say…let’s go non-euphemistically sleep together.”
Chapter 10
Zane
We walked back to the bar, still talking, this time about our favorite movies and actors.
I’ve never been much of a talker, never was one to stay up with the guys chewing the fat all night. Brock, Xavier, Bax, Cane and Cor, they can all talk till the cows come home. They’ll talk your damn ear off if you let ‘em, especially Bax. But me? I like to listen, like to sit back and watch. I’ll talk when I’ve got something to say, but once I’m done, I just don’t have any more words. But with Mara, there just always seemed to be something else to talk about. I think I told her more about myself and my life and my time as SEAL than I have anyone…maybe even everyone I’ve ever known put together. I told her shit I never even talked to Campy about, and that man was my best friend in the world. She just…brought it out of me.
Badd Ass (Badd Brothers Book 2) Page 14
