So, the second time I saw him was a surprise for me but not him because he didn’t see me.
I had left the building by the back door so I could escape the grasping, groping hand of the man who wouldn’t watch the movie. I didn’t miss anything. It was the fourth showing of the day and my third day in a row to go there, but the rain had finally cleared. The weather breaking outside meant I didn’t have to stay inside, and so I didn’t.
Bones had backed his motorcycle into a parking space meant for parallel positioning. While he wasn’t positioned parallel to the curb, his motorcycle was entirely in the space, so I supposed it was nearly the same thing. Because if the lines were simply there to create divisions and boundaries for narrow-minded people and not to define the thing parked within them as a rectangle of this precise size or that specific orientation, then that was fine. Just like I wasn’t defined by where I lived or what I wore. I was just me.
It would be like Bones being defined by the lines and divisions and boundaries on his skin, and that was so ludicrous I laughed aloud. Something I hadn’t done in so long the sound itself frightened me. Before he could look to see where the hideous sound was coming from, I had left, turning the corner and walking away from Bones.
Away from where he was supposed to be, but still bound by the man he had made for others. Which meant he wasn’t the him I wanted to see.
The third and fourth times were equally random, his placement within the city correlating for a few moments with mine as we crossed paths. Those came with words and smiles, and I tucked away the memories created with him. Letting my brain pull them out at night when cold wind battered at the sides of my place, allowing Bones to warm me from the inside out.
Then came meeting number five and seasons passed between so it was true chance and not design. Because if I had designed a meeting, it would have been very different and not included me tripping and falling in front of a bus. Wouldn’t have required me being dragged out of the way of the unslowing vehicle. Unslowing because it would be easier for the driver to hit me and fill out one report than to crash the bus while avoiding me and fill out a dozen reports.
On my hands and knees, I froze as the huge metal box bore down on me, and while there weren’t any scenes from my past that performed a parade for me, I could see how it might happen for people who had long moments in which they realized they are going to die so their brain tried impossibly hard to remind them how much they wanted to live and they needed to move in order for that to happen. But I didn’t have anything to live for—no family, no friends, no pets, and no possessions which owned me. Patience Pilgrim’s wisdom didn’t apply at that moment because I would have given my next breath for anything to have mattered to me enough that it called me back from the brink.
Not that I’d fallen on purpose, not at all. This wasn’t a seeking on my part, but an avoidance because I’d seen a group of men, boys really. I’d seen the way they worked hard to posture and pose, strutting for each other to make themselves older and stronger and meaner than they really were. I had learned long ago to avoid those encounters at all costs, but never thought the cost would be my life. Cut short by thugs and a twisted ankle in the middle of the street.
Then a voice I knew—would never forget, could gladly hear in my dreams for the rest of my life—and for the briefest of moments, I wondered if this voice was the sole thing my brain felt was worth living for, but then a hand grasped the waistband of my jeans and jerked me sideways. We slid between the bumpers of two parked cars as the bus plowed past. A plow without a blade, but it would still have scooped me up and tossed me aside like fallen snow. The shiny chrome on the car reflected the surface of the man behind me, the one who saved me not once but twice, and I didn’t know then, but he would save me many more times, even times he didn’t know he saved me, but he did. This was time number two, and I would take it and be grateful.
“Thank you.” Gratitude offered, I expected his grip to loosen and leave, but it tightened instead.
“That was close. Too close, beauty,” Bones murmured with fear in his voice and the next breath I took carried joy into my chest; it must have because my heart reacted violently, trying to leap from my throat.
“You saved me.” Those words didn’t seem like enough. I needed him to know I wanted to be saved and his efforts wouldn’t be thrown away at the next opportunity. It was crucial he understand, because I’d seen how the firemen could be beaten down, helpless with the knowledge that the one they cut from the rafters in time today would be leaping from a bridge the next. Even if they knew the lifeless body fished from the river would finally bear a peaceful expression, that helpless feeling would beat at them all their lives, so I wanted to spare Bones that. “I wanted to be saved.”
His breath was faster now, and I didn’t expect his next words to expose so much. I couldn’t read his expression in the reflection, and when I tried to turn, his arm slipped around my waist, and I was anchored in time, in space, and definitely in place. “I wanted to save you.”
No one had ever wanted anything with me.
My mother had left before I held any memories of her, erased so completely from our lives that my father never spoke of her. No pictures, no mementos, no tottering around in shoes I would one day long to fill. Mother’s Day was a void in our world, a day sucked empty with angry silence and holes in the walls that were fixed before the next Sunday came with visitors who wanted to see how he was getting on with the little one. There weren’t any Brother’s Days, which was a shame, because I had memories of him.
My father had been the person those firemen saved. Each time meant I had to stay with strangers for no less than three days, sometimes more. One of my first real memories was of his feet kicking wildly in midair, toes tracing the edges of the upended chair, curling and stabbing and trying to pull it back into place. The back of the chair had smashed me to the floor as it tipped over, and my vision blurred with red that splashed onto the rug, and it scared me. Seeping liquid had darkened his socks and dripped to the floor. That smelly mess made before my screams called the neighbors.
Our neighbor had circled my father’s hips with his arms, shouting for help and had stood there holding my father until the firemen came.
Picked up and placed against the wall by the neighbor’s wife, I’d been told to stay out of the way, so I had. It was a fireman who’d seen me and shouted down the house in his anger because there I was, wanting to live, and there my father was, throwing it away.
I was six when he succeeded. I told Bones some of this, because it was a profound truth and part of who I was. “My second memory is of my father’s attempted suicide. I want you to know I wanted to be saved.”
His arms tightened, not painfully and not in a frightening way, just a better anchoring than before, and he told me a truth, too. “I saw you fall, beauty. I saw your face. I could not bear to see the world without you in it. It would be so bleak without your presence. You needed saving. So”—a squeeze, and I liked the squeeze nearly as much as I liked him calling me beauty—“I saved you.”
I liked everything he’d called me, like beauty and little one, and preciosa, but he needed to know I had a name. I didn’t require one loaned out by him, one that could be taken back at any time, returned like a book to the library, the idea of it in your hands and mind the only thing remaining. The shape of it defined by memories, subject to warping and changing with time. So, I told him mine, because then he had an always thing to call me, even if it had been nearly a year and a half of days since I’d last heard it spoken on the air. Four hundred and eighty-nine, but I wasn’t counting, and today the count started over, anyway, and I liked the idea of that.
“I’m Ester.” And that was what made meeting number five so memorable, because I had all of him and I knew it, from the very first time he’d gripped my hand I had him firmly fixed in my mind. And with those five letters, I fixed the idea of me there, too.
Things of value
Bones
Dios, he thought, head bent over her knee, dabbing gently at the bloody scrape with antiseptic. Listening for her hiss of pain, he leaned in, blowing a stream of air gently across the stinging flesh. His nameless beauty, nameless no more. Ester.
She sat on the edge of a picnic table, arms wrapped around her knee, pulling her leg tight to her chest. He was working on her injury through a fresh rip in her jeans, and from this angle, he could see another rip high on the inside of one thigh, fabric gaping to expose her bush, pretty pink pussy lips peeking out of the dark hair. Dios. His cock fattened, trying to uncoil in his jeans, pushing against the fabric. Right here. She is right here. He pushed down the feeling, needing to possess her more than anything he’d ever felt. I cannot.
With the rain, he had known better than to look for her in a park, seeking her instead at her favorite indoor activities, finding her by description at the third theater he’d checked. The manager had looked at Bones sympathetically, shaking his head as he commiserated, “I got a crazy sister, too. Good luck, man.” Amused at the man’s mistake, Bones had paused a moment to consider if his mystery woman had a family. From her stories, disjointed as they could at times be, he didn’t think so. It sounded like she had landed in the foster care system at a young age, and he was yet unclear if she had escaped by aging out of the system, or simply escaping.
As he had stood at the back of the theater, eyes slowly adjusting to the dimness inside the large area, a piercing brilliance had appeared from the exit door near the screen, and he had seen a small form slipping out. Something told him it was his beauty, and he had followed.
Thank God I did, he thought, remembering again the terror that gripped him when she had fallen to the street with a cry. She had crouched there, staring at the twenty tons of metal and captive flesh bearing down on her. He trembled to think if he’d been even a handful of seconds later. The memory of her voice told him she knew how close it had been, too. Even as distracted as she sounded, the sharing of her story impressed on him how much it mattered to her that he knew she had things worth living for. Himself counted among them, it seemed.
“There,” he declared, leaning back slightly so he could look up into her face, “all done.” As it had from the beginning, her unexpected beauty struck him hard. Her hair tangled into an impossible rat’s nest, he still saw the gleaming health so at odds with her life and diet. Sable in color, she had twists of paper and twine braided into the sides. At times, she would catch the whole of it back into a single hank hanging down her back, but even then he had noted she would leave the bright bits in place. Her jaw was strong, too sturdy for traditional beauty, but that jaw supported the width of her lips, which, when stretched into a smile as they were now, carried a loveliness the like he had never seen. Her eyes were unique, a deep green at the outer edges of the iris, fading to a light blue along the inner border around her pupils. Set wide on her face, they were a match to the jaw, balancing perfectly in his opinion. One cheekbone was slightly lower than the other, a minuscule amount, but when paired with the crook of her nose, he knew these features shared a history of damage. Why someone would hurt her, could have hurt her, and he knew this to be true from her stories, boggled the mind. “Does it yet hurt, beauty?”
As always happened when he used that word to refer to her, those eyes widened in pleased surprise. Without thinking, he lifted a hand to stroke her hair, pausing without completing the action when she flinched away, eyes closed tight in preparation for an expected blow. “Beauty, I would never harm you.” Dios, what her life must be like.
Her bottom lip moved side to side, and he knew it was because she gnawed on the inside. She did this a lot when she thought she had displeased him. Eyes still clenched shut, she whispered, “I know.”
The phone in his back pocket rang, and she moved then, clattering across the table and gaining her feet on the opposite side. He had seen this reaction before, but it startled him nonetheless. For someone who spent a significant amount of time in exhibitions, theaters, museums, and anywhere there were free classes or instructions to be had, she feared the technology of telephones and computers with a bone-deep terror.
“Wait,” he called, knowing it was useless, and as always, by the time he had pulled the phone from his back pocket to silence it, she was already on her way. She limped on what must surely be a sprained ankle he hadn’t noticed, too caught up in his glimpse of her hidden beauty to properly care for her. Shit. The call connected, and he spoke into the phone, “Yeah?” A moment later he ignored the caller when Ester turned and shouted at him, hands cupped around her mouth.
“Bones.”
Head up, he watched her, knowing she didn’t need a response from him to understand she held his full attention.
“We keep saving each other.” Ill-tempered buzzing echoed from the phone, but he didn’t care, pulling it away from the side of his head as he nodded at her. “That’s a good thing, right?” He nodded again and she returned the gesture, her hands falling to her sides. Staring at her, his waif in too-large clothes, dirty and torn, so beautiful and at risk from every fool who thought to take her for themselves, Bones realized he was half in love with her. “I wanted to be saved,” she reminded him, her words still audible without the megaphone of her hands. He nodded again, thinking to himself that he wanted to be the one to save her. She turned, and without looking back, limped down the block and turned the corner. Gone.
Lifting the phone again, he cut off the angry words with a single word. “Silence.” Quiet for a moment, and he broke it with, “Begin again.”
***
Bones stood, watching as the door of a dream closed on his friend. He and the Skeptics hadn’t been invited but came anyway, and as was her generous nature, Mica Scott-Rupert hadn’t turned them away from her wedding party. Mason stood to one side, facing away from the dancefloor where a beaming bride swayed in the embrace of her husband, Daniel Rupert. A woman Mason had wanted for himself, or so Bones had thought. He now regretted spewing those ideas and misgivings to their mutual friend, Watcher, vowing to devise a way to retract his words at the soonest opportunity, even if Mason never knew of them.
Another mutual friend walked across the room to stand at Bones’ side, Slate. Andy Jones when Bones first met him, years ago, nearly fresh off the Wyoming prairie, Slate was a man Bones had worked to win for his Skeptics, losing out to the Rebels while still counting it a win because having another good brother for Mason meant more strength at both their backs.
“She’s happy,” Slate remarked, and Bones nodded. “Gonna miss this crew.” That comment surprised Bones, and he must have revealed this without concern, feeling for once that he was surrounded by only friends, not having to guard his every thought. “You didn’t know?” Slate laughed through his words, reached out to grip Bones’ shoulder, fingers digging deep with an emotion he didn’t understand.
“Since I do not know what I do not know, then I am compelled to say I do not know.”
Slate smiled at this and nodded.
“True enough.” A heavy sigh preceded the pronouncement, telling Bones that Slate didn’t know for certain if he wanted this thing to happen, whatever it was. “I’m gonna be taking over Fort Wayne. Bingo needs to pull back, take care of personal business. I’ve found a muddied mess there, and we’ve been sorting shit out.”
“I knew you were out of town, but had no idea there was trouble in the Fort for the Rebels.” This didn’t bode well, because it was a strong chapter for Mason. “The distance is not far. Are you expecting this business to consume all your time?”
“For a while, yeah. We had yellow in the club, had to cut deep to get it out. I’ve been dealing with all kinds of fallout, and…other shit.” Avoidance was second nature to them all, and Bones did not take offense at Slate’s reserve. “Headed back down in a couple hours. Just waitin’ to see if Mica’s little sister is okay.”
“She is ill?” That was not good to hear, because Molly had been dealt a hard hand by life already, her l
ife precariously pitched against the wall of happiness time and again. He liked the sweet girl, most recently working as a round-bellied pregnant waitress in the Rebel bar, Jackson’s. “Is the babe all right?”
“Gonna be entering the world any minute now.” Slate turned and pointed at a convoy of vehicles pulling out of the parking lot and grinned, and Bones found an answering happiness inside him and returned the expression.
“Good luck to be born on such an auspicious day,” Bones murmured, turning back to see Mason still standing across the room from them. “You wouldn’t know it to see his face,” he gestured towards Mason with the point of his chin. “Angry enough to raze this tent.”
“Not angry,” Slate muttered. “Fuck me.” He sighed. “He’s more resigned.”
Mason turned when Mica walked up beside him, her hand on his arm, and Bones and Slate watched as she pulled him to the dance floor, demanding his attention for the span of three minutes. After the dance, when Rupert reclaimed her, Mason turned and walked to them, his step lighter in a way Bones didn’t quite understand. “Mason,” he greeted his friend, “you will let me know how Molly fares, yes?”
“Fuck, yeah,” Mason responded immediately, hand out for a wrist clasp. “Glad to see you found the place.”
“I understand you are losing Slate.” From the way Mason glanced around, Bones decided to curb his curiosity, understanding the reticence of discussing anything in an open venue. “Will you be traveling to Fort Wayne often?”
The expression on Mason’s face changed, becoming sly. “Often enough to figure out what has the man drawn to that town. Thinkin’ it’s DeeDee’s gal, but I’m not sure.” Slate had stepped to the buffet table, and Bones turned in time to see him stare through a woman who was apparently making an approach. “You see that shit? Turnin’ down pussy. Ain’t like him, so I suspect there’s a reason with a rack.”
Bones (Rebel Wayfarers MC Book 10) Page 4
