DIESEL DADDY

by Naomi West

  I lift weights for an hour or so, feeling the familiar tear in my muscles. I’m dangerously close to feeling useless so I leave the apartment and climb on my bike. Even with the patch of my leather jacket picked off, I can still ride. I ride around the city, enjoying the feeling of the engine beneath me, and then stop at a shopping mall. I walk around, idly looking in store windows, for the first time in my life without something pressing to do. Before I would always be running away from my dad, and then I’d be running for the club, and then I’d be surviving in the slammer, and finally I’d be burning for Grimace. But now I can just walk around, bored. It’s such a strange thing, to be allowed to be bored.

  I feel the wad of cash in my pocket just to make sure it’s there. I really need to get a proper job, a pay-into-the-bank job. If I’m going to be with Willa, I need to reenter society. I don’t want to admit it, even to myself, but the thought scares the shit out of me. I’ve never done any of the stuff society expects you to do. I never finished school and the idea of college was a joke. I never had a mortgage, a bank account that I used more than once a month, anything. The fear that’s hounded me since Chino died and Grimace left returns to me now. What if Willa changes her mind? What if she decides she doesn’t want to be with me anymore?

  As I walk around the mall, hands in my pocket, listening to the pop music playing dimly through the muffled speakers, I can’t shake the thought. I need to make our connection permanent. I need to show her how much I want this to last. Because if I’ve never been this free, I’ve also never been this scared of losing that freedom. All my hopes are pinned on Willa and the kid now. They’re everything to me.

  I linger outside the jewelry stop for a long time, staring into the glass. I’ve never been in a fancy store like this. The door is made of pristine glass, shining in the yellow mall lights, and inside I spot a man in a business suit standing behind the counter. For a kid who’s lived on the streets, walking into this store should be unthinkable. The girls I rolled with before Willa didn’t expect stuff this fancy. But Willa deserves it, I tell myself. And if I really want to be with her for the rest of my life, I shouldn’t do any of this half-measures shit.

  The man in the business suit emerges from the store, smiling at me warily. He’s smiling at me like he thinks I’m gonna smash the glass and steal the jewels. I think about toying with him a little, asking him when the store closes or how often they get deliveries, but that’s the sort of stuff old Diesel would’ve enjoyed. I have no taste for it. It’d just seem cruel. Instead, I offer him my best normal-person smile and ask, “Can you show me your collection of engagement rings, please?”

  The man’s wary smile shifts to an accommodating one when I take out my wallet.

  Twenty minutes later, I’m climbing on my bike, more nervous than I was when that cop and I were holed up in the bathroom. As I ride back to the apartment, I can’t tell if it’s the bike’s engine or my heartbeat which are making my chest tremble so badly. I return to the apartment, hiding the ring box under the pillow and pacing up and down, no clue what to do. This isn’t right. A man my age shouldn’t be hanging around at home with no plan for the day.

  I slump on the couch and turn on the TV. That’s when I notice it, resting on the coffee table under the coaster (Willa bought the coasters, as well as arranging for the place to be repaired after my rampage). It’s a flyer advertising recruitment for the fire service, with three firefighters holding a hose and looking menacingly at the camera. Make a Difference! the caption reads. I pick it up, wondering if a man like me could really do this, tame fires instead of start them. Or maybe she was joking when she left it here. Maybe the idea is ridiculous and I’m completely misjudging the situation. Dammit, I wish I’d spent more time learning people and less time hurting them back in the day. Life’d be much simpler now.

  I make myself a coffee, staring at the flyer all the while. There’s a number at the bottom. I drink one and a half mugs of coffee, trying to convince myself that I can call the number, that no harm will come from me calling the number. I keep expecting my dad or Grimace to pop up from behind the couch, laughing meanly. “You’re not serious,” they’d say. “A man like you? Do you really think you’ve changed?”

  Today is a day of nerves, ’cause when I dial the number my goddamn hands are shaking. I feel like a little kid again, waiting at the stop of the stairs and wondering if my bedroom door is going to be strong enough to stop Dad from breaking through.

  The lady who answers has a friendly, chirpy voice.

  “So, would you like to come to an assessment day?” she asks after about two minutes of chitchat.

  “Shit, really?” I curse myself in my head. It’s going to be hard to forget I’m not around bikers. “I mean, um, sure, sure. It’s just …” It’s just I’ve burned down several buildings and I feel strange about this, even though I really want it and it’d sure as hell beat pointlessly hanging around the apartment. And maybe it’d make up for all the bad I’ve done, eventually.

  “Sir?” she prompts, when I don’t finish.

  “Nothing,” I say. “It’s nothing. Yes, I’d like to come to an assessment day.”

  “Fantastic. Let me get your details.”

  “Damon Holmes,” I tell her. The first thing I’ll do when Willa gets home is tell her I lied about legally changing my name to Diesel. I meant to sooner but it slipped my mind.

  “How’s Sherlock?” the woman asks, giggling.

  I make myself return the laugh. I guess I’ll have to get used to that joke.

  She gives me the details and we hang up the phone. I check the clock. It’s only one o’clock in the afternoon. I’ve never been much of a biblical man, but idle hands and devils come to mind. I work out again, this time doing my legs and my back, and then take a shower. I watch TV, and then somehow end up at the local library, picking out three books which don’t look too difficult to read. I used to like reading as a very little kid, before I was too scared to lose myself in a book just in case someone snuck up on me. I lose myself now, though, and soon the front door is opening.

  I get Willa a glass of juice and myself a beer, and we sit on the couch. When I tell her about my legal name not being Diesel, she leans across and slaps me playfully on the arm. “So all this time you were a dirty, filthy liar.” She pouts at me. “How are you going to make it up to me, then?”

  “Hang on.” I go into the bedroom and take my matches from the pocket of my leather. I quit smoking without really thinking about it after Willa threw my cigarette to the curb all those months ago, but I still have the matches for some reason. Then I go into the kitchen and find the candles Willa bought a couple of days ago. I bring the lighted candle into the living room, laying it on the table. “I can honestly say I’ve never lit a candle for a lady before. You ought to consider yourself lucky.”

  “Are you going to make me dinner, too?” She laughs.

  There’s a challenge in that laugh, I reflect. She doesn’t think, in a million years, I’d make her dinner. “Yes!” I snap, making for the door.

  “Where are you going?” she asks, following me.

  “The store.”

  She hurries after me. “Please let me come. I don’t want you returning with a pineapple and a can of tomatoes or something.”

  We end up returning with a can of pasta sauce, some pasta, and some vegetables which will apparently go wonderfully with it. Willa does the cooking in the end, but I help by watching her do the cooking. We talk about everything and nothing, about football and how Willa has never really enjoyed it, about an idea for a novel she’s got about an arsonist cowboy and a nun.

  “It’ll be a Western,” she says.

  “And I’m the cowboy, but do you really reckon you’re a nun, Willa?”

  I want to tell her about the assessment day, but once again the fear of being laughed at stops me. It stops me for the next fifteen minutes, until dinner is almost ready. But then, in the middle of the conversation, Willa remarks, “You know, whe
n I was a girl I always thought it’d be awesome to married to a guy in uniform. I remember in school once this policeman came in and talked to the class. But I wasn’t interested in him. I was interested in his wife standing behind him. She looked so proud. I don’t know. Maybe it’s silly. It was after Mom and Dad died, you know, so maybe it has something to do with that.”

  “I …”

  She’s standing at the stove, pasta sauce bubbling. “Hmm?” She tilts her head at me.

  “I …” Dammit, I’m not a kid. “I called the fire people, on that flyer you left.” I blurt out the rest, telling her that I’ll be attending an assessment day. “And then we’ll take it from there.”

  She skips across the kitchen, throws her arms around me, kisses me on the cheek. It feels real. It feels like I’m a real man and here’s a real woman and this is a real life. That’s what it feels like and Grimace and Dad are nowhere to be seen. I feel like I’m floating as I walk to the bedroom, to the pillow. I put the ring box in my pocket and stand in the kitchen as Willa drains the pasta. Maybe doing it while she’s draining the pasta isn’t the most romantic setting. Maybe flowers and chariot rides and all that lovey dovey stuff’d be better. But this is real. Her braided hair has come a little loose; she looks a tiny bit flustered. She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on.

  “I wish I had some speech,” I say. “I should’ve written a speech, maybe.”

  She places the strainer down in the sink, watching me closely. She’s watching my hand, which is in my pocket, clutched around the ring. Her lips start to tremble. I think she knows what’s happening. Her brown-flecked blue eyes are already going wide.

  “But by the looks of you, little lady,” I say, dropping onto one knee, “I don’t need a fancy speech.” I take the ring out of my pocket and open it, showing her the glittering diamond. “Willa Holloway, will you marry me?”

  She whispers, “Yes,” in my ear, and then moans, “Yes,” in the bedroom. When we’re lying next to each other, naked, with the pasta bubbling loudly from the kitchen, the room smelling of sex, she leaps into my lap and kisses me over and over again on the nose. “Yes, yes, yes!” she cries.

  As I watch her walk naked into the living room to turn off the stove, I think to myself: This is easily the happiest moment of my life. I know it’s not going to be easy. I know there are going to be obstacles along the way. But for the first time in all my days, I feel like I have a chance at something better. And that’s worth fighting for, I reckon.

  Epilogue

  Willa

  Driving from the station to the suburbs takes longer than driving from the station to an inner-city apartment, but since I never had a car anyway and had to ride the bus, I don’t really notice the difference. I was given the car I’m driving now a year ago, when I was made assistant to Sofia Silva, with the understanding that one of these days I might become head of the station. I look down at my wedding and engagement ring, smiling to myself even though I’m stuck in awful LA traffic.

  The wedding was held at The Princess, something we brought up as a joke at first. Diesel—he’ll always be Diesel to me—said, “Imagine if we had it at that bar, the one where we first met.” He was trying to tease me but the idea grew and grew and grew, until I didn’t find it remotely funny anymore. The more I thought about it, the more perfect it became. So I stood in that dive bar in my dress, and Diesel stood there in his suit, and we kissed each other and promised never to let each other go. And we haven’t. For five years, we haven’t.

  The traffic relents and I’m able to drive the rest of the way home. I’m nervous as I pull into the driveway. Diesel won’t be home for another hour yet, but when he gets here, I have something to tell him. Something which has made focusing today almost impossible.

  I climb from the car, lift some groceries off the passenger seat, and walk toward our house. Mine and Diesel’s slice of suburbia, a four-bedroom with a well-kept green lawn and rows of houses stretching out in either direction. I pause for a moment on the doorstep, savoring this feeling, the feeling of having a home, a life. It’s one I haven’t really known since Mom and Dad.

  The door opens before I can touch the handle, Frankie standing at the threshold in her little firefighter’s outfit. Diesel got it for her last week and she hasn’t been able to take it off. She grins up at me. “Mommy!” she calls, leaping up and down. “There was a fire in the kitchen and I saved the day!”

  “A fire in the kitchen?” I ask Tammy, the babysitter.

  She rolls her eyes, smiling kindly. “I lit a candle over the sink for her,” she says, “so she could put it out with a glass of water.”

  I laugh. Tammy is easily the best babysitter we’ve had. “How much do I owe you?”

  Once Tammy is paid and in her car, I carry Frankie through into the living room and sit her down in front of the bookshelf. She whines that she wants to watch TV, but I stand firm. I never got around to writing my novel. Maybe one day Frankie will write a novel of her own. Or do anything else she wants.

  I put away the groceries and then join Frankie, picking up The Hobbit from the top of the shelf and continuing from where we left off. Diesel walks through the door in his firefighter’s uniform just as Bilbo is trying to rescue the dwarves from prison. Frankie leaps on him, and Diesel lifts her up and kisses her on the forehead. He smiles at me over the top of her head. Frankie has my hair and build, but Diesel’s dark green eyes. It always breaks my heart a little to see them together like this. Sometimes I can’t believe it’s real.

  He puts her down and goes upstairs to take a shower. When he comes downstairs, I’m in the kitchen preparing dinner and Frankie is in the living room, finally allowed to watch TV. I need her attention elsewhere for what I’m about to reveal to Diesel. I catch him in the kitchen, wrapping my arms around him and looking up into his face. He’s grown his beard out several times since we first met, but he’s never had it this long before. He looks like a real man, a wild man.

  “Is something wrong?” he asks.

  “Not wrong, exactly,” I say. “Just … something.”

  He kisses me on the nose. “Don’t keep me in suspense.”

  I swallow, and then come out and say it. “I’m pregnant.”

  He doesn’t hesitate for even a moment. His smile is instant. For a moment the world seems brighter. He hugs me tightly to him, kissing my cheek over and over. “Why do you look so worried?” he asks, laughing. “This is the best news I’ve heard all year. Come here, you silly woman.”

  He lifts me off my feet and I squeal. Then Frankie comes running in, pretend hose in hand, screaming, “I’m here to the rescue! I’m here to the rescue!”

  THE END

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  THE DEVIL’S BABY: The Smoking Vipers MC

  By Naomi West

  I SWORE I’D PUT MY BABY IN HIS DAUGHTER’S BELLY.

  She thinks I’m the devil, but that won’t stop me.

  When her father sees what I’ve done with his girl, he’ll beg for my mercy.

  But I won’t rest until she’s wearing my ring…

  And bearing my baby.

  I’m gonna end this war once and for all…

  By hurting Snake Lafayette in the most permanent way possible.

  His daughter already thought her life was hell…

  But then she met me.

  And I’ve got big plans for this little princess.

  She’s gonna bend where I tell her.

  Beg when I command her.

  And once I drag her to the altar, she’ll be mine forever.

  Whether she likes it or not.

  Chapter One

  Spike

  “I’m going t
o kill every damn one of ’em!” Knuckles roars, charging into the clubhouse and kicking a table so hard that it collapses in on itself. He’s a tall, wide, fat man who makes the whole building tremble.

  I follow behind the men silently. My anger is more of a seething, boiling anger, the kind of anger which takes a while to blow over the top. My anger is the sort of anger which causes men to turn up slit from ear to ear. I drop into a chair and wave at one on the pledges to bring me a whiskey. It’s evening, but it’s summer, and it’s Sunnyside, California, so an orange glow fills the room, bouncing off photographs of the MC, the old decommissioned WWII rifle above the bar, a pile of old motorbike tires in the corner which Red-Eyes says he’s going to fix one day. I sip my whiskey as my men gather around me.

  Justin Herveux, my vice president, leans his elbows on his knees. He’s a good man, a couple of years younger than me, ginger, with freckles all around his nose. He’s the only one here who’s finished college. Business, I think. “I understand Dwayne’s anger,” he says. Justin is the only one who calls Knuckles ‘Dwayne.’ “But what are we supposed to do, boss? Can we afford to put security on our bars twenty-four hours a day?”