by Cox, Paula
“He’s been with us since before I was born,” I point out. “Why would he wait so long?”
“Either he’s a fuckin’ coward, or he’s a fuckin’ genius.” Slick takes off his leather and hands it to me. “Put this on. Don’t won’t you gettin’ hurt. And this.” He reaches under the bike and takes a helmet from the storage compartment.
“What about you?” I ask, taking the leather.
He just looks at me. Even in the darkness, his sky-blue eyes are full of life. I put on the jacket and the helmet, and then climb onto the bike behind Slick. He is wearing a thin-fabric long-sleeve shirt. I can feel his abs through it, well-defined. I squeeze onto them, so glad to feel them that I don’t care if I’m being too forward, don’t care if Heather and Grizzly and the whole world thinks this is wrong. How can riding with the father of my child be wrong? How can any of this be wrong when it feels so natural, so true, so right?
Slick rides us out of the city, toward the mountains, framed by starlight, some of the jutting areas looking like forefingers, crooked, beckoning. It feels good to ride, even if I’m not the one riding. I haven’t ridden much since staying with Heather. I’ve had Charlotte with me; I don’t think it’s good practice to chuck a helmet on a toddler and throw her on the back of a bike, and I can’t afford a sidecar. I lay the helmet against Slick’s back, hugging into him, enjoying the thrum of the engine beneath me and the wind whipping at my legs. After a while, I see where Slick is taking us. I laugh to myself. We wind down passageways, between valleys, down secret hidden places which Slick has to slow down to navigate.
“You’re taking us to our old dirt bike course,” I call to him, once he’s slowed down enough to be able to hear me.
“You’re a smart lady,” he calls back.
When he was sixteen and I was nine, he used to bring me down here on his dirt bike. Somehow, he’d found a kid’s dirt bike which he kept in a makeshift hut he’d built himself out of old sheets of metal. He would bring me up here, and then, after making sure I was in all the safety gear, let me ride up and down the muddy ramps, around the course. I always looked forward to coming here more than I looked forward to anything else. These were in the days before I realized how much I wanted Slick. These were the days when he was just my older friend, my protector. When I became older, I often fantasized, when we came here, that one of these days he would tackle me into the rutted area of the ramps, the deep crevices, and ravage me, kiss me, take me. But he never did; he never would. That wasn’t Slick.
He brings the bike to a stop and we both climb off. Taking the helmet and the jacket off, I breathe in the fresh night air. When I make to hand the jacket back to Slick, he shakes his head. “Don’t know if I have the right to wear that anymore, Brat,” he says. “Don’t know if Grizzly’n all would take too kindly to it now.”
“What happened?” I ask.
He tells me about breaking out, about threatening the men, about stealing the bike.
He’s right; it’s a terrible situation.
Dropping the jacket, I jump across to him. “Let’s not think about that now!” I exclaim, putting my hands on his shoulders. “Tonight is about reunion. Tonight is about saying, ‘Screw the world. We want what we want, and they can go to hell. Right?’”
He grins, and takes my hand. “Right. Follow me, then.”
Gripping his hand in mine tightly, afraid that if I don’t this will really all turn out to be a dream after all, I walk with him around the edge of the track. Back when we were kids, Slick used to maintain the track with a shovel, shaping it, making sure it didn’t build up packs of dirt or crumble in the wrong places. Now, the track is half-wrecked, some of the muddy ramps still in place, others crumbled to dust. When I see it, still standing, I let go of his hand and run toward it. Behind me, Slick chuckles.
“What the hell ?” I approach the hut, as rickety-looking as ever, catching the starlight on its metallic surface. I turn to Slick. “Seriously, what the hell? How is this still here?”
“A courier has to be a Jack of all trades,” he says.
“You came by here recently and rebuilt it, didn’t you?”
He grins, and then shakes his head. “No faith, Brat, no faith. Come inside. I wanna show you something.”
When we’re inside, I don’t see anything at first. It takes my eyes a while to adjust to the darkness, even if starlight seeps through gaps in the metal. Then the dim outline of a dirt bike reveals itself, and then the dirt bike in its entirety. I remember it being green, but now it just looks grey. I run over to it, squealing with excitement. A rush of memories hit me when I see it. This was the first proper bike I ever rode. Back then, I thought I was a real dirt biker, a proper Ricky Carmichael. I remember the first time I fell off, how Slick quickly cleaned and patched me up. I remember when some boys around Slick’s age found the spot and started teasing me, calling me, a “widdle girl,” and laughing. I also remember how Slick bloodied their noses and sent them running.
“Brat, there’s something else.”
I turn to see Slick standing with a small metal box in his hand.
“That’s not what I think it is, is it?” I ask, fidgeting with excitement. I can’t believe he’s done this. He must’ve done it soon after he came back, and left it like this, waiting for the time he could bring me here. And then life got in the way. Or maybe it really has stayed standing all this time, a permanent emblem of our shared childhood.
“Come outside and see.”
We go back outside. Slick places the box on the floor and returns to the bike, calling back, “Don’t peep until I come back, Brat, or there’ll be hell to pay.” I laugh, and wait. Soon, he returns with a flashlight in his hand. We sit down on a grassy patch of dirt, before Slick clicks his fingers and jumps to his feet.
“Are we ever going to take a look?” I ask, pretending I’m furious with him for taking so long.
“Just wait a sec, damn.” He goes to the bike, and then returns with an old oily blanket. “I don’t reckon you mind a bit of grease, Brat?”
“You know me so well,” I reply, my cheeks warm with the moment, the night, with seeing him again.
He lays the blanket on the dirt and we both sit on it with the box between us.
When he puts his arm around me, pulling me into him, I feel like I’m home. Time drifts away and we’re back where we started, Brat and Sky, and all the horrible shit that’s happened to Slick no longer exists. The escape, the ramifications, Dad’s misguided anger and Clint’s scheming . . . all of it is burnt away by the starlight and drifts into nothingness. Slick and I, me and Slick; that’s all.
“You can open it now,” he says.
I tear the box open, and then let out a gleeful scream when I see them there, just how we left them. Slick tips them onto the blanket and shines the flashlight on them. In total, there are around fifty Polaroids, taken over the span of a couple of years. The first one I pick up shows me, thinking I’m super cool and super grownup sitting on the dirt bike with a serious, pensive expression, glaring at the camera.
“You thought you were the shit, Brat,” Slick says, smiling warmly. “You thought you were a real—”
“—Ricky Carmichael.”
“So you remember?”
He used to call me that all the time.
“Of course I remember,” I say.
The next photograph shows Slick, younger, skinnier, with long hair down to his chin and without any tattoos. He’s on his knees working on his bike.
“Look at your hair!” I slap him on the arm, giggling.
He smiles ruefully. “Forgot that one was in there, truth be told. Do you prefer it how it was then, or how it is now?”
“Now, definitely,” I say. “You look like a wannabe rock star.”
“Yeah, well—what about you in this one?” He picks up one of me with my bike on its side, my foot planted proudly on the bike, arms raised in the air like it’s a boxing match and I’ve just toppled my opponent. I’m wearing an oil-staine
d jumpsuit and my hair is cut so close to my head that if it were not for my feminine face, I would look like a boy. “I went out of my way to get you a dirt bike you could ride, and how do you repay me, eh? By nagging me all damn day to take a picture of you with the thing toppled, all damn day, on and on. Sky, Sky, please take this picture. Please, please .”
I nudge him, and then snuggle closer into him. With his arm around me, he coils a long strand of my hair around his finger. “Look where my hand is,” he says, “all the way down here, near your shoulder, and still I get a handful of hair. You would’ve died back then if you could see it now.”
“That’s because I wanted to be like you,” I whisper.
“I had rock star wannabe hair, didn’t I?”
“A grownup, a rider, a junk head, a grease monkey.”
He laughs. “Well, you were all that. Just look at you.”
We go through all of them, coming across only one or two with both of us in shot together. One is too blurry to be able to make anything out, but the other is of me on his shoulders, Slick holding the camera at arm’s length. It’s framed poorly and we can’t see much, but we can see our smiles, both us grinning like fools.
“Damn timer button was broken, remember?”
“I remember,” I say. “Look how happy we were.”
A powerful wave of nostalgia hits me. I wish I could lie face down in the dirt, and then when I stand up, be in that past, just for the night. Just for one night, ride up and down those ramps again like all that exists is this little pocket of mud in the middle of the Rockies. Everything, all oppressive grownup concerns, melting away as my world hones down to the next jump, the next lap.
“Aren’t you that happy now?” Slick asks, once we’ve put the photographs away.
“I’m happy,” I say. “When I’m with Charlotte, I’m happy. And when I’m with you, I’m happy. But it seems the world doesn’t want us to be together.”
“Your dad, you mean,” Slick says. “Grizzly confuses the fuck out of me. He took me in after my father died. He knew I’d never find my mom, knew she was a hooker who ran to hook someplace else after she had me. Knew all this, took me in. Good—damn good of him. And then, when I’ve done more for the club than any man, decides that he can’t have me near his daughter and locks me up.”
“He’s over-protective,” I say. “He’s been like that ever since I hit puberty. Even now I have Charlotte, he seems to think that I’ve never been with a man. He thinks that I’ll break like glass if anybody touches me. It drives me crazy that he doesn’t trust you, of all people. He must know that Charlotte is your daughter. He has to. I don’t get how he could look at her and think anything else. And yet he acts as though the father is a complete mystery. It pisses me the hell off.”
“Me, too.” Slick kisses me on the forehead. “I brought you here for a reason, Brat. I brought you here ’cause I wanted to tell you . . .” He trails off. I hear him swallow, a loud gulp of nerves.
“Go on,” I urge, looking up at him, at his serious face, his deep wells of eyes, his clenched jaw. His hair hangs just over his eyes. I brush it away, and then run my hand through his hair, all the way down to his neck. He grins. “You really know how to relax a man, Brat.”
“Tell me,” I say. “You don’t have to be afraid, Slick. You don’t have to be afraid that you’re not good enough for us.”
He flinches, looks away, studying the dirt track. “That’s exactly what I’m scared of,” he mutters. “You said you loved me, a couple of months back—”
“I do,” I say, without a shred of doubt in my voice, “and I always have.”
“I don’t know if you’d love me if you saw me back in Seattle. And the most fucked part is I still don’t wanna talk about it.”
“Let me ask you a couple of questions,” I say, “and then let me decide.”
“Okay . . .” He looks at me questioningly.
“Did you hurt any children?”
“No,” he says, confused.
“Did you hurt any women?”
“No.” Firmer now.
“When you hurt men, was it them or you—if you didn’t fight, would you have been killed?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Did you hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it when it was your choice?”
“No.”
“Did you rape anybody?”
“What the fuck—no.”
“Was there a way out, but instead you chose to hurt people?”
“If there was a way out, I never would’a touched a single goddamn person,” he says fiercely.
“Then whatever you did,” I say, “I don’t care. You’re still my Slick. Where it matters, you’re still the kid from those photographs. So you’ve been roughed up a little around the edges. So what? We all have.”
“Not like me,” Slick mutters. “I was bathed in blood, Brat, fuckin’ bathed in the shit.”
“And you came out on the other side.” I climb to my knees, bring my mouth close to his ear. “You came out the other side. You’re here, with me. This night is all that exists. This moment is all that matters. You’re home, Slick; this track is our home. This—”
“I love you more than I can say,” he interrupts, sounding surprised by the admission. Not surprised that he loves me, but surprised that he’s told me. “I always have, Brat. I loved you since that night we made Charlotte, but even before that, as your friend. I’ve always loved you in one way or another, and you’ll always be the only woman for me. The rest of ’em can go to hell, for all I care. All I need is you and Charlotte. That’s all I want.”
“Do you really mean that?” I realize that tears are sliding down my cheeks, salty on my lips.
“Yes,” he says. “Course I mean it.”
“I’ve always thought you loved me,” I say. “That night we shared—it was special. We were closer than any first-time lovers. It was the best night of my life. And you know I love you; there has never been anybody else for me but you, Slick.”
He turns his face to mine, his breath warm against the coolness of the night, and looks deeply into my eyes. “So we’re in love,” he says, smirking, that old cocky smirk, a smirk that has infuriated me and captivated me in equal measure over the years. “What’re we gonna do about it?”
Before I can reply, he kisses me. It is different to any other time we have kissed. He kisses me softly, so softly that at first I wonder if this is the same Slick. Then it hits me; we are closer now than we have ever been before. His lips brush mine, but then passion takes him, and he grabs my shoulders and kisses me powerfully. I bring my hands to his hair, pulling him closer, hungry for the kiss, losing myself in it. We devour each other, taking in each other’s love, each other’s pain, each other’s longing. For a long time, we kiss, faces flushed, aching. And then I reach down and press my hand against the front of his jeans. He is hard, urgently hard, so hard that when I unbutton his jeans and pull them down below his balls, his cock springs up covered in pre-come. I break off the kiss and look down at it.
“Fuck,” I moan, the length of it, the thickness, driving me wild after two months without it. “Fuck, Slick.”
“Come here,” he says.
He lays me on my back, and then pulls down my pants and my underwear in one quick motion, revealing my naked pussy, my naked legs. The air pricks my skin, but soon Slick is leaning over me, his lips pressed against mine once again. I run my hand all over his body. As we kiss, shift, his cock brushes up against my clit. I gasp, opening my mouth so that our teeth click together. Slick, reading my body like he’s been able to do since the first time we were together, reaches down and guides his cock to my clit, rubbing the helmet against it. There’s something wildly dirty about it, having his cock just pressed against my clit, so close to my hole and yet not inside of me.
“Oh, fuck,” I moan, as the pleasure begins to mount. He rubs my clit quicker, pressing his cock against it harder. I’ve never done this before: never thought to do this. The pleasure
takes me by complete surprise, as he rubs up and down, circles it, and then, finally, pushes down so hard on it that I let my head fall back and moan loudly in euphoria, gazing up at the stars. But the stars are blurred by my vision. All I see is a sheet of distorted light set within blackness. “I’m nearly—” I can hardly believe it. But that’s how powerful my lust is.
He brings his face close to my ear and whispers: “Do it, Brat. Come for me, Brat. Do it. Do it.”
Warm, tickling breaths, cock pressed against my clit, emotions whirring madly in my chest, heightening it all . . .
“I—ah—I—”
