Priest (A Standalone Bad Boy Romance Love Story)

by Claire Adams

  “Cheer up,” he says. “You made a mistake, now you’ve got to take responsibility for that mistake. Once that’s over and done with, you’re free to make the changes you need to make to ensure you don’t end up where you are right now again.” He waits a moment, I can only assume to confirm I’ve had time to process what he’s telling me. “This isn’t something that’ll ruin your life unless you go right back out there and let it,” he says.

  We finally pull up to the jail and the officer pulls into a long garage.

  He stops the car and gets out, opening my door and saying, “Watch your head on the way out.”

  I keep my head down and he helps me out of the backseat. There’s no reason not to cooperate.

  “We’re going to get you processed in and then maybe you can take a look at bail,” the officer says. “You know, see if you can get out of here today. You’ll still have to show up for court and it’s probably going to cost a pretty penny, but this doesn’t have to be the last thing you do today.”

  He’s being really nice. I recognize that. The fact of the matter is, though, that I work a job that doesn’t pay me. What money I do have is handed down by the parents as allowance, and I doubt my bail is going to be that low.

  The officer takes me into the back of the jail, and everything—floors, walls, ceiling, seating—is concrete and metal.

  We reach a long, rectangular island with a counter along the edges and multiple officers stationed at it, looking through computers and processing people in and out of the jail.

  The officer leaves me there, but he unlocks and removes the handcuffs before he goes.

  I’m rubbing my wrists as another officer calls me over, saying, “Name?”

  We go through all of my personal information, right down to political and sexual preferences—though my personal favorite is when they ask me if I have to register any part of my body as a deadly weapon. I really, really don’t, but it’s a great question anyway.

  While I’m waiting on a slab of metal bolted into a slab of concrete, I try to think how I’m going to get out of this without Mom or Dad ever finding out. I have a feeling I wouldn’t have a car very much longer, and that’s a bit of a problem for me.

  “Chavez!” one of the officers calls. I get up and walk over to him.

  “Give me your right hand,” he says.

  I do and he goes through, pressing my thumbs and fingers onto a touch pad which captures and stores my fingerprints. I’m actually starting to feel a little bad ass when the officer tells me to go stand against one wall.

  It’s a wall with a lot of horizontal lines, and there are numbers relating to height off to the side. Fingerprints are one thing, but they’re actually taking a mugshot of me.

  I’m not going to lie: I’m more than a little scared right now.

  They flash a picture of me facing forward, then one of me facing to the side and then the officer tells me to go back and wait on the bench again.

  On my way, I ask him if he knows how much my bail is going to be.

  “I’ll have to check,” he says, “but I don’t think it’s going to be all that much. You weren’t racing anyone and you didn’t hit anything. You know what would have been even less expensive, though?”

  I could do without the condescension. I’ll get plenty of that if I have to call my parents to bail me out of here.

  “Not speeding and getting arrested in the first place?” I ask.

  “That’s right,” the officer says and heads up to the counter. He’s talking with another officer for a moment and then he comes back, saying, “$1,000 cash or bond. You’ve got a charge for reckless driving, one for speeding, one for improper lane change, one for an illegal display of your vehicle’s power, one for—”

  “Hold on,” I tell him. “I was speeding and nobody got hurt. I understand you’ve got to charge me, and I understand that you had to arrest me. Why, though, are you reading a list of charges longer than what they had on John Gotti?”

  “If it makes you feel any better,” the officer says, “I’m pretty sure his charges would have been a lot more severe.” He cackles like a hyena and walks off.

  $1,000. I know in the grand scheme of things, it’s not a prohibitive amount of money, but it’s a lot more than I have on me.

  I just sit here on this bench, but after a little while, they decide it’s somehow important for them to move me into a holding cell where I sit on a similar bench, only I’m now alone in the locked cell.

  Maybe I’m not cut out for this stuff. I still think pulling over was the smart thing for me in that moment, but in the end, I’m not sure how great a difference that actually made.

  I know I’m just feeling sorry for myself, but this is the way it always goes with me. Everyone else does something and gets away with it. Then I give it a shot and I’m immediately busted.

  Obviously, I wasn’t keeping my eyes open the way Eli told me to, but what are the chances I’d get picked up so soon?

  The metal door to my holding cell buzzes loudly and unlatches. The door opens.

  “Chavez, you made bail,” a blonde officer tells me.

  “What?”

  “Come on,” she says. “You’re outta here. Watch your speed and show up for court.”

  I nod and get to my feet, rubbing my arms from the pervasive cold of the building. The adrenaline’s doing a better job, though.

  The only people I know who’d be connected enough to know I’m in here are Mom and Dad. Every election cycle, they hold at least one fundraiser for the mayor. There’s no other way.

  I follow the blonde officer out of the cell and down a hallway. We get to a big metal door and she hold up her id badge to it, unlocking it.

  We’re in a little airlock-like space and she opens the next door, saying, “I hope you learned something. Get out of here.”

  My pulse is thick in my veins as I take a step forward and then another. When I come up far enough to see Eli waiting for me, I run over to him, throwing my arms around his neck and repeating the words, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  He embraces me, one hand cradling the back of my head. He says, “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  Chapter Ten

  Dynamics of Power

  Eli

  “Hey, could you pass me that flathead?” Mick asks, holding his hand out from under the hood of my Galaxie we’re trying to get running again.

  I hand him the screwdriver and lean against the car, saying, “I still can’t believe you lost your first race.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you I don’t want to talk about it?”

  “I’d imagine quite a few,” I answer. “Did you even place?”

  “I came in second, thank you very much,” Mick says. “Could you pass me the wrench?”

  I pass him a crescent wrench and continue, saying, “How far off the lead car?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he says. “Why are you even here right now? You’re not scheduled.”

  “I thought I’d come in and mock you while also being helpful around the shop,” I tell him. “So, are we talking you got beat by a few car lengths, or is it more like you may as well have stopped halfway through because they’d already finished?”

  “I don’t know, man,” he says, his voice sharpening. “It was probably somewhere in between.”

  “That’s embarrassing.”

  “Pass me the aluminum cylinder, would you?”

  I walk over to the shop’s mini-fridge and pull out a soda, then hand it to Mick.

  He takes a long drink of it and hands it back. “Thanks,” he says. “Seriously,” he says, “why are you here? If you were actually helping out, that’d be one thing, but-”

  “Hey, I got you a screwdriver, a wrench, and a soda,” I interrupt. “Tell me those are things you wanted to do yourself and I’ll take off right now.”

  One thing I can always count on is Mick’s insatiable laziness.

  “You know, you wouldn’t be ta
lking so much crap if it was you up against Jax in the first race,” Mick says.

  I cock my head to the side. “I didn’t know he was in the tournament,” I say. “Why would he offer a big prize and then try to win it himself? If he didn’t hold the tournament, he could have just kept all the money and saved himself a lot of time.”

  “How else is he going to pay for it?”

  “What are you talking about?” I ask. “He’s just losing money.”

  “I seriously doubt that,” he says. “You’ve got to think with those two new cars of his, he’s already pretty close to funding the big prize as it is.”

  “What two new cars? What would that have to do with anything?”

  “Third and fourth places lose their pink slips to Jax,” he says. “Did that not happen with you?”

  “No,” I tell him. “Nobody said anything about pink slips.”

  “Ah,” Mick says. “He’s probably just doing that in his races. I don’t know. The guy’s kind of a freak.”

  “Oh, hey, Jax,” I say and I laugh my ass off as Mick’s head creates a surprisingly loud metal clang as it jerks upward against the open hood of the car.

  Mick’s looking around behind him, frantically. He throws his wrench at me, saying, “That hurt so bad, dude.”

  “So, Jax is out there collecting pink slips,” I say. “I was wondering how he was going to profit off of this whole thing.”

  “You had to know he had some kind of angle, though,” Mick says.

  “Yeah,” I tell him. “You’ve still got your ZL1, though, right?”

  “Yeah,” Mick says. “It was only the slower half of the pack that had to give it up, but I got a little worried there for a little bit. I was being outgunned by this unmodified Koenigsegg, but luckily he went over a fire hydrant about a block from the finish line.”

  I wince a little.

  “So,” Mick asks yet again, “what are you doing here?”

  “I’m taking Kate out to learn how to double-clutch,” I tell him.

  He’s laughing.

  “You’re not taking her in the Chevelle, are you?”

  “It’s the only manual I’ve got,” I tell him.

  “All right,” he says. “Just pull it on into the shop after you’re done and we’ll see if we can repair whatever murder she puts your transmission through.”

  I shake my head, saying, “She’s actually a really good learner.”

  “That’s right; I am,” Kate’s voice comes from one of the open bay doors. “Hey, Mick, how are you doing today?”

  “Isn’t there something you can do about this boyfriend of yours?” he asks. “Here I am trying to work and all he wants to do is distract me.”

  “Sorry, bud,” she says. “He’s his own man. That’s kind of what I like about him.”

  I hope she likes more than that, but I’m happy enough with the answer.

  “You ready?” I ask.

  “I think so,” she says. “I’m a little nervous getting in the driver’s seat of that thing, though.”

  “I know,” I tell her. “If you want, I can make some calls and see if someone would be willing to let us borrow-”

  “I’m nervous,” she says. “That doesn’t mean I’m chickening out.”

  Now I’m nervous.

  Kate and I make our way out of the shop, Mick gracing us with his prediction of how much repairing my car is going to cost as we go, though I think $10,000 is a bit high.

  “Where’s the flatbed?” Kate asks.

  “Oh, Maye’s got it right now. She’s off picking up some jackass that decided to park his car in his neighbor’s empty swimming pool,” I tell her. “I don’t know how the flatbed’s going to do any good, but oh well.”

  “You mean we’re just taking it out?” she asks.

  I slow my pace a little and grab her hand, saying, “If you don’t want to do this right now, or if you’d like to see if I can get our hands on another car, that’s cool.”

  She scoffs and pulls her hand away, saying, “I guess I just thought I’d have a little bit more time to practice shifting before we got out in the open.”

  “It’s all right,” I tell her. “Double-clutching really isn’t all that difficult once you get the hang of it. It can be a little awkward at first when you’re used to single-clutching, but you shouldn’t have any problems with it.”

  She doesn’t respond.

  We make it through the junkyard and to the Chevelle.

  “There’s just one thing,” she says.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “I’ve never driven a stick,” she says. “When people talk about clutches, my mind goes to purses.”

  And that changes things a little bit.

  “The clutch on the Chevelle is pretty sensitive,” I tell her. “It’s one of the mods I got on it. Are you sure you’re up for this?”

  “I guess that’s really a question for you,” she says. “It’s your car. The question is whether you trust me not to break it or not.”

  “It’s not that I don’t trust you,” I start.

  “Great,” she says and starts untucking the cover from under the frame of the car.

  “Nice try, but that’s a sentence I’m going to need to finish before I give you the keys to the Angel of Death there,” I tell her.

  She raises an eyebrow and looks over at me. “You named your car ‘the Angel of Death?’” she asks.

  That’s right. I was never going to tell her or anyone else that ever.

  Oops.

  “That was more an emphasis thing, really,” I say, though I have no idea what any of that means.

  “It’s your call,” she says. “If you think I’m going to break your car, I won’t be mad. I’ve never driven a stick and I know this isn’t just a car for you. That said, if you do let me take the Chevelle, I have a feeling you’re going to enjoy what I give you in return.”

  Trading my bread and butter, my pride and joy, my sweet, ferocious baby for a “favor” or two doesn’t really seem like a good option, intellectually.

  I’m not sure if she’s trying some kind of psychology on me or if she actually means what she says. Either way, there seems to only be one choice that will do the least amount of damage.

  “All right,” I tell her, “but if you get going over twenty before you’ve got single-clutching down, the lesson’s over, all right?”

  “I know, I know,” she says. “I’m not planning on doing any racing today. I just want to get out there and get the feel for driving stick.”

  What I should be doing right now is looking through the phone book for a car rental place. I should be talking to Mick about letting us take one of his cars for the day or getting in touch with someone else so we’re playing with a bit less power, but I don’t.

  I just get behind the wheel as Kate gets into the newly reinstalled passenger’s seat.

  Today’s going to be a bit rough.

  There’s something in the way Kate talks to me that just automatically shuts down the rational part of my brain and makes me think whatever idea she has is a good one. Well, I still don’t think teaching her how to drive a manual transmission in the Chevelle is a good idea, but I’m still willing to go along with it.

  “We’re going to find an empty parking lot somewhere outside of town,” I tell her. “That way, if anyone stops us while we’re out there, we just say we’re waiting for the flatbed because we can’t legally take this out on the road, okay?”

  Of course, if a cop goes by and recognizes the car, there’s a good chance we get busted anyway. No reason to tell her that, though. If anyone’s going to get in trouble, it’s going to be me, and that’s exactly the way I want it.

  “Okay,” she says.

  So, we go.

  We’re driving for about half an hour before we come across an old church with an empty parking lot. It was in a lot much like this one that I first learned to drive a manual. Of course, that was some POS four-cylinder car that was so boring I don’
t even remember what it was.

  I have a feeling both Kate and I are going to remember this.

  Pulling into the lot, I go to the far end of the pavement before turning the car around to provide the greatest amount of distance.

  I run through normal gear shifting, and then I demonstrate, having her watch my feet as we go. After a few minutes of this basic instruction, though, it’s time to hand the keys over to her.

  I shut the car off and hold up the keys, but before I release them into her hand, there are a few things I’ve got to tell her.

  “Please don’t kill my car,” I tell her, though I could swear I had more prepared.

  She giggles as she snatches the keys from my hands.

  We get out and change places. I’ve never sat on the passenger’s side of this car. It’s weird: it feels like a different vehicle.

  I start, “Push the clutch all the way down before-”

  She turns the key, interrupting me. Only, her foot on the brake and the gas, not on the brake and the clutch and my gorgeous and extremely expensive car has what I can best describe as a seizure and it dies.

  I reach over, turn the key and pull it out of the ignition, saying, “I’m not trying to be a dick here, but if you’re not going to listen to me, we’re done for today.”

  Her bottom lip pushes upward for an instant and she turns to me, saying, “I’m sorry. I got excited and my brain kind of shut off.”

  “Okay,” I tell her. “Remember, the clutch is on the far left, the brake is in the center and the gas, of course is on the right.”

  She shoots me a glance like she’s about to chastise me for being so basic, but I’m shaking my head at her. If she doesn’t listen, she could very easily do serious damage to the car, and I don’t think that would make either one of us very happy.

  “So, clutch and brake?”

  “Yeah,” I answer, handing her back the key.

  Kate slips the key into the ignition and pushes the brake and clutch pedals all the way to the floor. It helps that I repositioned the seat so she wouldn’t have any trouble with the pedals.

  She looks over at me and I nod.

  Kate turns the key in the ignition and the car fires up.

  “Woo!” she cries. “That is so cool!”