by AJ Downey
I wiped at my face again, added another tissue to the pile. A carton of ice cream sat warming on the table next to the pile of tissues. I hadn’t opened it, but I hadn’t put it back, either. I stared at the ice cream and it stared back at me.
It was two am.
Being with Gabriel I’d tried to keep my issues in check, not stress-eat and freak out over little stuff; it had still happened, but not as much and I’d been getting better. The better I got, the better I felt. It had been something I’d done. He’d been the reason, not the mechanism.
I’d also looked up Gabriel’s right-hand tattoo; another bible verse, this time from Corinthians. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I reasoned as a child. When I became a man I put aside the love of childish things.
I picked up the ice cream and put it back in the freezer.
I rooted around in my kitchen until I found an empty jar, and set it on my desk. The change from my purse and pockets went into it along with a few crumpled bills I didn’t know had been in there. My junk food budget officially had a new home. Next I opened my laptop, fired up Mozilla and typed “HARLEY-DAVIDSON DEALERSHIPS SEATTLE” into the search bar. I wanted to know how much I needed to save.
Somewhere in Montana
June 2015
“I have to say, that’s a sweet bike,” said the clerk as I set a bottle of water on his counter. He was somewhere in his twenties, a tanned, rope-muscled young cowboy.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Who lets you ride it?”
“I do.” I handed him my money.
“Huh?”
I grinned. “She’s mine.”
“Oh.”
“Have a nice day,” I told him, walking away before he could say anything. I could tell he wanted to flirt, but I wasn’t having any. First he’d used the round mirrors to stare at my butt; strike one. Then he’d stared at my breasts when I’d been at the register; strike two. Then he’d assumed Scarlet belonged to a guy; strike three.
You’re out. Thanks for playing.
I cracked the bottle of water, leaning on Scarlet’s seat. She was a 2012 Dyna Glide Sport, the bike Jax Teller had ridden in Sons of Anarchy except a different year and blood red instead of black, but with the same T-bars. I’d done the bars myself, six months back; it had been my first real bit of wrenching. Working in the office for a motorcycle shop wasn’t exactly the best use for a psychology degree, but I’d picked up a fair bit on how to do modifications, plus I got an employee discount. Motorcycles were more expensive than a drug habit. Certainly more expensive than the junk food I’d quit.
I had been a size 15 in college; I was a size 12 at present. The weight loss was just a byproduct of learning to only eat when I was hungry. When I was stressed or depressed, I got on my bike and rode; something about the cocoon of wind and noise and the focus I needed to have to prevent a crash calmed me down. Being smaller didn’t matter so much but beating an addiction did. I still had the urge, I just didn’t let it rule me.
As I finished my water my phone chimed. I dug it out of my pocket; sure enough, it was a text from mom. U OKAY?? I sighed.
Yes mom I’m fine, I typed.
My mother had yet to let up on me about riding, and I was pretty sure she never would. “You’ll kill yourself on that thing,” she’d said, every holiday I’d gone home for.
Alright just checking you be carefull!!!
Always am, mom. I cleared the text screen. My background was a picture I cherished; me and Gabriel, the day I’d first ridden. I kept it for luck, and for the memories. It had taken me three years to save up Scarlet’s down payment, another two to pay off the loan. I’d worked two part-time jobs to do it; juggling that plus keeping my grades okay had taken up all my time. It had been a good way to get over him. I still missed what we’d shared, but it was no longer in a way that hurt. I was still single, but that didn’t hurt, either.
I had a standard, set by the one man who’d loved me back. It was a simple standard. A guy had to make me feel like somebody, or I wasn’t interested. Thank you, I thought at the picture. Thanks for everything.
It had been almost seven years since I’d last seen Gabriel. Not for the first time, I wondered where he was, how he was. He’d been thirty two when I’d met him, and would be nearing forty. I’d done the occasional Internet search, checking for obituaries, arrests. The one-percenter life was a risky life. I never found anything though, and I wasn’t surprised; Gabriel Stark was a guy who knew how to take care of himself.
I tucked my phone back in my Kevlar riding jacket, “FTW” stitched over the pocket. Our story had an imperfect ending, but I’d made my peace with that as well.
We lived in an imperfect world.
Overhead the sky was crystal clear, the air dry as a bone and just warm enough to make protective gear a little uncomfortable. According to the maps, I was about to hit a patch of interstate where the police didn’t bother with speed limits. It was why I’d come out this way. Gabriel’s deep southern drawl swam out of my memories. Every rider’s got to do it, he’d told me once. Drop the hammer all the way, find out what ‘fast’ really means.
A half-hour down the highway, that’s just what I did.
Seventy, eighty, ninety miles an hour; I thumbed through the gears, bent as low over the tank as I could get, Scarlet’s V-Twin and the roar of the slipstream fighting to drown each other out. More, I thought, twisting the throttle down harder. Riding was a lot like sex; harder, faster, more. In some ways it was better.
I couldn’t have told anyone how fast ‘fast’ was in miles per hour, for at anything over a hundred I had no spare attention for anything but the road in front of me. That was the whole point.
Depression, anxiety and the urge to eat them all away; I still had those problems and I always would. But screaming down the highway on a knife’s edge of danger they fell by the wayside, unable to keep pace with the magical moment where the thrill of speed outran the fear of death.
My grin was a wide one. Try and catch me, I screamed at the world. Catch me if you can.
Born and raised in the San Juan Islands, Eric Plume is a lifelong resident of Washington State. He has worked in a variety of fields ranging from construction to casino security. As the author of Margin Play, he currently divides his time between his job as a timber framer and writing Amber Eckart's next adventure. He lives near Bellingham, Washington with his girlfriend Jacquelyn in a house full of cats and computers. This is his first foray into romance.
Ride With Death
Ryan Kells
1
They say, that when you ride, you ride with Death beside you. The bike screamed down the highway. It didn’t roar, like most motorcycle pipes are described. This one screamed, the engine revving high and hard as the needle of the speedometer pushed toward one hundred miles per hour. So far, no police lights had appeared in the mirrors behind her, and no other cars appeared to be on the two-lane highway at 12:32 in the morning.
The wind whistled past Danielle Greene’s helmet. She’d been riding hard for a while now, hoping to leave her worries and her troubles behind. She dropped the bike hard into the turns, sliding slightly off the road on several occasions, struggling to correct, finding her balance, then screaming down the road again as if nothing had happened while her heart pounded painfully in her chest and adrenaline flowed through her system like a heady drug.
It was probably a good thing, then, that she was never able to see the ethereal sidecar beside her, made entirely from human bones and bolted to the frame of her bike. It was also probably good that she couldn’t see the cloaked and hooded, skeletal figure riding beside her in that sidecar, or the wickedly curved scythe that it held in one bony hand, with a blade sharper than a surgeon’s scalpel.
The figure turned its head, one empty socket barely visible beneath the folds of its ethereal hood and, as it calmly regarded Danielle, a spark of fire could be seen. Green as acid and glowing with a fury unknown to man as headlig
hts eventually became clear in the distance, turning curve after curve as the two vehicles slowly approached each other.
Oblivious to all, anger and tears of frustration obscuring her vision Danielle didn’t see the truck bearing toward her in the opposite lane. The figure beside her stood, cloak moving not a millimeter as one hundred mile-an-hour winds rushed by it. Danielle leaned the big motorcycle hard into a turn, skidding across the lanes directly into the path of the oncoming vehicle.
The figure, standing perfectly balanced on the side car, swung its arms, bringing the infinitely sharp blade of the scythe into contact with the front left tire of the truck. The massive wheel blew and the truck veered sharply to the left, missing Danielle by inches as it tilted precariously and almost flipped onto its side. The truck eventually came to a shuddering halt and the driver climbed shakily from his vehicle to inspect the destroyed tire, unaware of the motorcyclist he’d almost hit.
Further down the road the figure looked back at the truck as Danielle threw the bike into turn after turn on the winding highway, fleeing the accident she had so narrowly avoided.
Death sat back down in its side car and pulled a pocket watch from within the folds of its cloak. It flipped the watch open and glanced at the time within before turning the green fires of its eyes back onto Danielle.
“It isn’t your time,” Death said, its voice as unbelievable as the rest of it. It reached out and almost fondly patted Danielle’s shoulder as the young woman shakily regained control from a wild skid around a corner. “Not yet.”
2
“Son-of-a-bitch,” Danielle swore some minutes after the near miss with the truck. “Where the fuck did that guy even come from?” She hit her turn signal and slowed to turn off the road and into a parking lot. She wasn’t sure exactly where she was, but who gave a fuck? She needed to collect herself before she tried to keep riding. “Goddammit!” she snapped and ripped off her helmet, slamming it down on the bike’s gas tank in front of her.
Raising her trembling hands, she raked her long black hair back from her face and pressed the smooth leather of her gloves against her cheeks, sure she could feel the chill of her skin even through the thick leather.
“If that fucking asshole had kept his dick in his fucking pants I wouldn’t even be out here right now,” she raged and hit the top of the helmet where it rested between her legs. Her feet skidded slightly on the gravel lot and she grabbed for the handlebars, squeezing the brake with one hand so the bike wouldn’t roll while she steadied it. Once she was stable she used the heel of her boot to push down the kickstand and carefully leaned the beast of a motorcycle over until it was resting safely and she could concentrate on her inner turmoil instead of worrying about dropping her baby.
She closed her eyes, leather creaking as her hands balled into tight fists on top of her helmet, and took a deep, steadying breath. When she opened her eyes again she was calmer, but still in turmoil, and her chocolate brown eyes swept the lot, taking in the half a dozen beat-up cars and trucks that dotted the lot before sweeping up to the building at the far end.
“Dead End Saloon,” she read, staring at the sign above the large double doors leading into the structure. She shrugged but threw her leg over the bike and stood, pulling off her gloves with a creaking of leather and the crunching of gravel beneath her boots echoing in her ears. “A beer sounds like just what I need right now,” she muttered and started walking for the door. She didn’t voice the thought that a good fuck would go a long way to making her feel better too but think it she did, and the figure sitting in the sidecar heard every word that flitted through her mind as clearly as if she had whispered them directly to it.
“A good fuck, she says,” it mused to itself. The doors swung shut behind Danielle as she entered the bar and Death sat in the sidecar, checking its watch and thinking for several minutes before coming to a decision.
It stood, bony feet sliding through the sidecar to touch the ground beneath and it walked forward, sliding through that which, moments before, had held it aloft. Death set the scythe against the motorcycle and began to walk toward the bar, ten minutes after Danielle entered and its robes swirled and shifted around it as it slowly changed into something new.
3
“What did you really hope to find in a place like this?” Danielle muttered to herself. She set her beer down and turned her attention back to the single pool table. As she did her eyes swept across the room and she winced, remembering her wish to find someone in there worth fucking to show her cheating asshole of a now ex-boyfriend a thing or two. Two men old enough to be her grandfather sat at the far end of the bar, both of them flirting outrageously with the bartender, who was old enough to be her grandmother. Another woman in her forties sat at a small table nursing a jack and coke and working her way through a large pile of lotto scratchers, her coin making an irritating rasping sound as it slid back and forth across the cards. The last two patrons, other than herself, were a man and a woman in their twenties. They were sitting in a booth toward the back of the building and Danielle was reasonably certain they hadn’t come up for air since she’d walked into the place.
She shrugged and leaned over the table to line up a shot, just in time to see the double doors directly across from her swing open and a tall dark man walked in. So distracted was she by his arrival, that her arm jerked and she fouled her shot. She cursed, eyes snapping back down to the table and a deep laugh washed over her. She shivered, the sound of his laughter sending a wave of goosebumps across her flesh and a thrill of pleasure ran through her body, seeming to center itself at the juncture between her thighs.
“Sorry if I ruined your shot, I didn’t mean to startle you.” His voice was as deep as his laugh but his tone was soft, his words clear without raising his voice to be heard over the aged jukebox that stood in one corner.
She straightened and took a deep breath before she looked up at him. And she did have to look up. He towered over her by at least a foot, even in her three inch boot heels which put him well over six feet tall. He was wearing a dark pair of slacks that fit him to a distracting degree and a long sleeved dark colored dress shirt with the buttons done but the sleeves rolled back to bare his muscular forearms. He looked like a lawyer or an academic minus the suit jacket and tie but he was built like an athlete. Danielle felt her mouth go a little dry as her eyes roved over him and she cleared her throat, abruptly stepping back and turning to pick up her beer.
“It’s alright,” she said in response to his comment. “I’m not actually playing against anyone so it’s no big loss to mess up one shot.”
He nodded silently and stepped around the pool table to approach the bar without another word or a glance in her direction, so she went back to her game and attempted to banish the image of him from her mind.
Holy shit, he was fucking beautiful. The words floated through her mind all the while she tried to push them back and concentrate on her solo game. Death had to struggle to keep down the laughter that wanted to bubble its way up out of his too human throat when he heard her thoughts echoing inside his mind. That was always the problem with taking on a human form. It was so messy. Involuntary actions like laughter, breathing, coughing, sneezing, watering eyes, and having to remember to do things like eat, drink, and evacuate waste? He never would understand how humans managed like this for their whole lives.
He shook his head ruefully before glancing up at the aged bartender. Ruth Marin, 68 years old, pancreatic cancer metastasized to her liver. She would be dead in six weeks.
As soon as his eyes landed on her the information flitted across his field of vision and he blinked a couple of times to make the words fade from his view and focused on the bottles lined up behind the bar.
“I would like that one please,” he said, his deep voice seeming to wash across the entire bar so that even the couple in the back looked up to see who had spoken before returning to their game of tonsil hockey. Ruth blinked, a little surprised, but turned to look at the bottle
he was indicating and her eyebrows shot to her hairline.
“You want a bottle of raspberry vodka?” she asked incredulously. The bottle had been purchased two years previously and thus far the seal hadn’t even been cracked open. No one wanted anything to do with the off brand booze and it had simply sat collecting dust.
“Yes.” He nodded once, not sure why she was surprised but he didn’t exactly care. “I like the label. I would like that one.” He reached into his pocket and withdrew some money to place on the counter. “How much would you like for it?”
“Son, you can have it if it’ll get that damn bottle out of this place. I’ve been wanting to toss it out for a while now.” She leaned down and picked up the bottle. With a damp rag she wiped away an impressively thick layer of dust revealing the label that had so caught his attention in further detail. It was a simple drawing, pencil sketch style of a pair of footprints left in the sand walking down a beach, and every few steps there would be a raspberry sitting in the sand as if it had fallen from the walkers pocket.
“Thank you. A glass please?” he asked as he accepted the bottle and Ruth reached for a shot glass but he shook his head. “That’s too small. I would like a larger glass please.” Ruth’s eyebrows made the trek toward her hairline again but she gave no other outward sign of her surprise and reached under the bar for a bucket glass and handed it to the muscular young man. He accepted it with a smile but chose not to talk.
Conversing with humans was exhausting! How they managed to do it every day, he would never truly understand. He stepped away and set his bottle and glass down on the table next to Danielle’s beer.
“May I join you?” he asked and she glanced up, her cheeks coloring slightly at the sight of him.
