The Handler (Noir et Bleu Motorcycle Club #2)

by D. R. Graham

  “I should be able to arrange that,” I said and braced myself for the shriek that I knew was coming.

  She screamed, and I heard her shoot up as if she was rushing to tell our grandparents. “Really?”

  It was so nice to hear her sound happy. I got choked up again, and I had to take a few breaths to pull it together. “Yeah.”

  “Oh my God, that is so awesome. Thank you.”

  “No problem. Be good, and I’ll see you soon.”

  “Okay. You be good, too. Grandma, guess what,” she shouted.

  “Bye.” I chuckled as I hung up, but then I pulled out the picture of Liv that was tucked between the pages of my book, and the good feelings faded. I sighed and dialed her number.

  It took her a long time to answer. When she did, she didn’t say hello. She said, “I told you I didn’t want to do this anymore. Why are you calling?”

  I sat up and rested my elbows on my knees, not sure if I knew the answer. “You don’t want to fight anymore, or you don’t want to be together anymore?”

  “Both.”

  “That’s it? Don’t you think breaking up is something we should talk about?”

  “What is there to say? You don’t want to be here, and I don’t want to waste any more time waiting around for you.”

  Before I had a chance to respond, Lincoln knocked on my door and shouted, “Um, Cain, we have a problem.”

  “Is that her?” Liv asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you staying with her?”

  “No. We’re on the same bus, but it’s totally separate sleeping quarters.”

  “Fuck you, Jamie. I can’t believe I’ve been waiting around for you like an idiot.”

  “From what I heard, you haven’t been waiting around.” My tone was steady and controlled, but the words must have hit her hard, because her breath sucked in.

  It took a second before she recovered and said, “You haven’t been here. What did you expect?”

  Lincoln knocked again. “Cain. I’m sorry to interrupt, but it’s kind of an emergency.”

  Liv chuckled, unimpressed. “Sounds like you’ve got your hands full. I think we’ve talked about it enough. Don’t bother calling anymore,” she said and then hung up.

  Still trying to absorb what had just happened, I lunged over and opened the door. Lincoln stood in the hall, panicked. Her forehead was scarlet and the letters were just as dark as ever. “Jesus. What did you do?”

  “I was trying to rub it off, and now I’m almost bleeding.”

  “Maybe you just need a different kind of soap.” I followed her into the bathroom.

  “I tried every type of soap and tonic and cream I have. Hal’s going to murder you.”

  “Me?” I laughed. “What about you?”

  “He can’t murder me, dummy.”

  I helped Lincoln try sunscreen and olive oil, but neither helped. She came up with the idea of trying nail polish remover, and we tested it on the edge of the O. It worked for taking the marker off, but burned her where it was already raw.

  Standing that close to Lincoln in the cramped bathroom made me realize having a girlfriend had been a safety barrier between Lincoln and me. Without it, I was in trouble. I stepped out of the bathroom and stood in the corridor with my back against the wall.

  Lincoln’s expression transitioned from panic into concern when she saw the look on my face. “Are you okay?”

  I couldn’t tell her that Liv and I broke up—it would make everything a million times more complicated. “I have a headache.” It was true, so I didn’t technically lie, but she seemed to know there was more to it.

  She stepped into the hall and massaged my temples. “My voice coach taught me pressure points for headaches.” She switched and massaged the tension between my eyebrows and then on the fleshy part between my thumb and first finger on each hand. She tilted her head back and her eyes met mine. “Good?”

  I swallowed hard, and although the headache felt better, the warmth of her touch wasn’t helping with the problem that rattled me in the first place. “Yeah. It feels better. Thanks.”

  She smiled and returned to trial and error elimination of products that might remove the felt pen.

  The bus stopped, and she was still trying things when Jill and Katee boarded. They saw Lincoln’s forehead and they both screamed. “What the hell did you do, Cain?” Jill gasped.

  I pointed at my Ron Jeremy stache. “She started it.”

  “She has to be on stage in two hours. I can’t cover something like that up. Jesus Christ. Give me the pen so I can see what’s in it.” Jill grabbed the marker and searched for ingredients, but they weren’t listed.

  “Maybe I could just wear my wig with the bangs for the entire show,” Lincoln suggested.

  “Yeah, we could do that,” Katee said as she dug through a case that had wigs in it. She pulled out a bright blue one with a thick fringe of bangs.

  “And I won’t wear the bikini top costume,” Lincoln added.

  “What? Why?” Jill looked over her shoulder. Lincoln lifted her top to show her abdomen, and Jill gasped again. She turned as if she was going to get violent and pointed at me. “You need to grow up, Cain. She can’t perform looking like this. Hal’s going to have a damn stroke.” She stomped down the hall. “Google better know how to remove felt pen from skin.” Lincoln and I exchanged sheepish grins. Katee laughed and started pulling Lincoln’s hair back so she could wear the wig.

  “Hairspray,” Jill said as she slammed her phone down and pulled out a bottle. She sprayed it all over Lincoln’s forehead and nothing happened except it started to run down into her eyes.

  “Ow. Ow. It’s burning.” Lincoln shot up and bolted to the kitchen sink to wash the hairspray out of her eyes. When she stood up, her eyes were as red as her forehead, but the felt pen was still there. She looked like someone had roasted her face with a blowtorch.

  “Oh God,” Katee mumbled. “Hal’s going to have a complete conniption.” Right as she said that, we heard his voice outside the open door of the bus. I lunged over to the stairs and pressed the button to close the door.

  “Hey! Open up, I need to talk to Linny.”

  “She can’t talk right now,” I shouted through the glass.

  “Why?”

  I glanced over at the three of them, hoping for some good excuse, but they all just stood there staring at me. The kitchen filled up with smoke billowing out of the oven. I pointed and said, “Jailbait, take the chicken out of the oven. It’s burning.” She turned and flapped her arms as she jumped up and down whimpering. The smoke detector started beeping in a tone that was not intended for human ears. My phone rang and it was Cisco, so I answered it, “Hold on one second.”

  “What’s going on in there?” Hal shouted. “Why is the smoke detector going off?”

  I held my phone against my chest. “It’s just something in the oven. I’ll handle it.”

  “Open the door. I need to talk to Linny.”

  The only thing I could come up with to say to Hal was an excuse that I’d heard Liv use with her dad once. “Um, she’s having some feminine troubles. Katee and Jill are taking care of it.”

  Hal didn’t say anything for a while. I hoped he was feeling as uncomfortable as Liv’s dad had looked when she said it. “Okay. Tell her to call me when she can.”

  I held my phone to my ear. “Sorry, Cisco, I’ll be with you in a second. I’ve got a situation going on here.” I lunged over to help Lincoln. She was wearing oven mitts and working up the courage to open the door, but she kept squealing. I reached over to turn the oven off and the exhaust fan on, then I took the mitts from her and pulled the dish out. “Didn’t the timer ring?”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t know what to do, so I just turned it off.”

  I shook my head in mock disappointment, which made her cry. “I’m just kidding.” I hugged her. “It’s fine. I think it’s still edible even.”

  “I’m an idiot.”

  “No you’re not. Y
ou just need to practice. Nobody does it perfect the first time.” I waved the dishtowel near the smoke detector to silence it.

  “Are you really going to eat it?” Lincoln asked me.

  “Yeah, it looks good.”

  Katee and Jill were both watching us and smiling. “What?” Lincoln asked.

  They both raised their eyebrows and mumbled, “Nothing.”

  Jill searched her phone some more and found another solution. She made Lincoln sit back down as she dabbed cotton balls drenched in rubbing alcohol on her forehead. The ink slowly started to transfer to the cotton balls.

  I stepped into my room and closed the door. “Hey Cisco, sorry about that. What’s up?”

  “Digger wants you to keep him updated on where you’re going to be.”

  “Why? Was there a confirmed threat?”

  He hung up without answering.

  It wasn’t uncommon for them to keep me in the dark. In fact, it was the norm, but I trusted that Digger knew what he was doing, so I accepted it and did what they told me to do. I texted Cisco the tour stops and then went back into the living area.

  “Cain, use this to get rid of the printing on her stomach. I have to get started on her makeup,” Jill said and handed me the bottle of rubbing alcohol. Lincoln smiled at me as I dabbed her skin with alcohol-soaked cotton balls. Jill also smiled as she tried to cover up the chaffing redness on Lincoln’s forehead. I used up almost the entire bottle of rubbing alcohol on her abs, so I only had enough left to remove my moustache. I had to leave the chest tattoo on, which made Lincoln happy.

  While we stood at the side of the stage waiting for the lights to go out in the stadium, she and Hal did their special handshake. Her hand reached over to hold mine and she pulled me in as the crew surrounded us. She bounced up and down and pumped her fist, then she winked at me and snuck out onto the dark stage.

  Chapter Eleven

  The next three tour stops were in Zurich, Geneva, and Paris. Even though the show was always the same, the issues the crew, Tim’s team, and I had to deal with were different in each venue. The paparazzi caused more breaches and problems than any of the fans ever did. Candid shots of Lincoln were worth a lot of money to the European tabloids, and unfortunately I was in half the shots, too.

  There was no show scheduled on Sunday, so the plan was to stay an extra day in Paris, then leave around midnight and drive through the night to the next stop. When I came out of my room, Lincoln was sitting on the couch playing one of her own songs on the guitar. She smiled when she saw me. “Did I wake you?”

  “No. Were you trying to?”

  “Yes. I want to go exploring, and I want you to come with me.”

  I ran my hands through my bed head hair and poured myself a coffee. “Exploring where?”

  She pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to me. “You choose.”

  I read it. “There are at least twenty different things here. You tell me which ones are the best, and we’ll do those.”

  She hopped up on the barstool and swung her legs like an excited kid. “I don’t know which ones are the best. I’ve never done any of them before.”

  “You must have been to Paris on your other tours.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been here like six times, but I’ve never seen any of the tourist attractions.”

  I studied the list more carefully. “Okay, dress in warm clothes. It’s cold outside.”

  She sprung up and hugged me tightly before bouncing to her bedroom. While she was getting ready, I showered and dressed in a sweater under my leather jacket. I looked up the directions for the places on her list, then put the black baseball hat and sunglasses on.

  She looked like a marshmallow in her white puffy jacket as she waited by the door for me. Her hair was tucked up in a knit hat, and she had rock star sunglasses on. “I made sandwiches to take with us,” she announced proudly.

  “Wow. Hopefully you don’t give us food poisoning.”

  Her smile faded. “Is that possible?”

  “Did you use fish?”

  “No.”

  “Mayonnaise?”

  “No, just peanut butter and jelly.” She pulled the two Ziploc bags out of her backpack and frowned at the sandwiches.

  I laughed. “We should be okay. Did you tell Hal?”

  “No. I don’t want to tell anyone.”

  “Shouldn’t we at least let Tim know?”

  “Nope.”

  “What if they read one of your tweets?”

  “I’m not going to use social media at all. Whatever we do today will be top secret.”

  I laughed. “Sure it will.”

  She tiptoed down the bus stairs and stuck her head out the door. She looked both ways and then stepped down onto the pavement. I closed the door behind me before we snuck around the back of the bus and ran across the parking lot. She was laughing when we ducked behind a building and peeked back at the buses to see if anyone saw us.

  “Okay, looks like we’re free,” I said. “Where do you want to start?”

  She bit her bottom lip and struggled with the decision.

  “God, you’re annoyingly bad at making decisions. Just close your eyes and say the first one that comes to your mind.”

  She closed her eyes and tilted her face up. The winter sun reflected off her skin in a way that would have made a cool picture. She smiled and said, “River boat tour on the Seine.”

  “Good. Okay, we need to get a cab.” I raised my arm and a black taxi pulled over to the curb. Lincoln spoke to the driver in French as we loaded in. He nodded and did a U-turn on the tight cobblestone street. I looked at her, surprised. “Impressive for someone who didn’t even go to high school.”

  “My mom’s French speaking.”

  “So’s mine. She grew up in Montreal.”

  “Really? My mom’s from New Orleans.” She smiled in a melancholy way. “Maybe if they both weren’t in hospitals, they could have been friends.”

  “Maybe.” I said. My tone had changed because thinking about my mom in the hospital always flooded me with a mixture of anger and remorse.

  “Do you think your mom will fully recover?”

  “No. She’s never going to be the same again.” I leaned and tilted my head to peer out the window at the old buildings lining the street. “They have her doing rehab to maintain mobility, but her skin is too scarred to allow her to move properly.”

  Lincoln’s expression was strained and sympathetic as she reached over and rested her gloved hand on top of mine. She kept holding my hand even after the taxi driver dropped us off at a boat tour kiosk, and I let her. There weren’t too many people buying tickets because the weather was cold. We were able to get on the next boat that was leaving.

  The boat tour was a good way to see different parts of the city, but the wind coming off the water was freezing cold. We were both shivering afterward, so we ducked into a Parisian café and ordered hot chocolates. The café was exactly like I imagined Paris to be with hipster-looking people reading books, couples making out, and snooty little poodles wearing designer dog coats prancing by on the sidewalk.

  “I like it here,” I said. “I feel like I’m in a movie or something.”

  “This is way cooler than a movie set.”

  “Oh, yeah. I forgot. Tomcat told me you were an actress, too.”

  She sat back, intrigued. “You and Tomcat talked about me?”

  “Only because he couldn’t believe that I’d never heard of you before.”

  “It is a bit weird that you’d never heard of me. Don’t you take an interest in what your sister’s into?”

  “I knew she was crazy about some pop tart, I just didn’t know it was you.” The waiter topped up the hot chocolates, and we ordered a chocolate crepe to share because we figured that was a Parisian thing to do. “How many movies have you been in?” I asked her after the waiter left.

  “I don’t know. Like twenty kid-friendly musicals and two dramas.”

  “Would I have seen the drama
s?”

  “Probably not. They were teen chick flicks—Tampa Sunset and The Sunshine Coast.” Her eyebrows raised in anticipation as she searched my expression waiting to see if I recognized the titles.

  “I’ve never even heard of those. We’ll have to rent them.”

  “Would you really watch them?” she asked tentatively.

  “Sure.”

  She seemed unsure whether to take me seriously or not. I was serious. I never knew anybody who’d been in a movie before. It seemed surreal. The waiter returned with the giant dinner plate sized crepe hot off the griddle and we dug in.

  “Do you like acting or singing better?” I asked and handed her a linen napkin because she had a little of the warm, gooey chocolate on her lip.

  She pressed the linen to her mouth and glanced at me self-consciously before she answered. “I actually like playing guitar better than anything else, but singing is a close second. Do I still have chocolate on my face?”

  “No. You’re good. Do I?”

  “No.” She shot me a wry smile. “You look good.”

  Our gazes locked for longer than I should have let them since I knew she said it to be flirty. It was a bad idea to encourage her, but I couldn’t help the smile that stretched across my face. With any other girl, I would have flirted back. She wasn’t any other girl, though. She was my employer, so I returned to the polite conversation. “What would you change about your career?”

  Based on the look on her face, she knew that I intended to steer her back into professional relationship territory. She also seemed pleased by the fact that there was something between us that needed to be steered away from. She relaxed in her seat and answered my distraction question, “I don’t like touring. I’d rather just play at a small club somewhere.”

  “You have to admit, it’s pretty cool when a stadium full of people cheers for you.”

  She smiled in acknowledgement. “Yeah, that is pretty cool.”

  After we finished our drinks, we sat quietly and people-watched for a while. Three guys on motorcycles drove past the window. They weren’t wearing colors, but out of habit I checked to see if I recognized their faces. She noticed me doing it, but she didn’t say anything.

  My phone rang. “It’s Hal. Do you want me to answer?”