by Tia Siren
“Get on outta here,” Susan said. The man grinned and turned his attention to Vanessa. She had been looking over at the corner, where Tank and his friends sat. There were four of them altogether, and they had certainly noticed the Yellowjackets come into the bar.
“Why don’t you get us the beers, you sweet little thing,” the man said to Vanessa. “Then come on over to our table. I’d love to see how you feel on my lap.”
“Get lost,” Vanessa said, but the man just laughed and reached across the bar for her. Vanessa yelled out and tried to twist away, but he was too fast, and he got his fingers curled around her arm.
“Come on, babe,” the man said. Vanessa opened her mouth to say something, but she never had the chance. Tank came out of nowhere, slamming into the man. And just like that, the fight was on.
There were a handful of patrons other than the men in the two clubs, but they stayed out of it. The three Yellowjackets took on the four Pythons. Punches were thrown, kicks were taken to the stomach, and then one of the Yellowjackets pulled out a knife and went after Big Tim, the oldest of the Pythons present. The blade sliced through the side of his neck, and blood sprayed in a crimson arc across the bar. Vanessa screamed, and Big Tim went down.
Susan was quick, on the phone with the cops. Earl, a big man who cooked three days a week, came out from the kitchen and kneeled next to Big Tim, pressing dishrags to his wound. Big Tim was screaming and, incredulously, trying to push Earl out of the way so he could get back to the fight.
Vanessa couldn’t take her eyes off Tank. She wanted to go to him, to help him, to tell him to forget it and run, that the fight had taken a horrible turn and she was scared for his safety, but she couldn’t. Her man fought with ferocity, his fists landing again and again on the knife man’s face, the blade dropped and forgotten on the floor after it was accidentally kicked under a table.
It was only forgotten for a moment, though. Another Yellowjacket found it, and he advanced on Tank, coming up behind him. He raised the blade, and Vanessa was sure she was about to see the man she was growing to love be killed. She grabbed the first thing she could, a beer bottle from under the bar, and threw it.
The glass bottle shattered when it slammed into the back of the man’s head, and he crumpled to the floor, knocked out cold. Vanessa felt sick watching that man fall to the ground. She didn’t know if minutes had passed or hours, but without warning red and blue lights flashed through the front windows as three cop cars came flying into the parking lot, icing up dust and gravel. The cops came into the bar with guns drawn, and the fight was over. Tank and the other bikers were arrested and carted off separately as more cop cars came to the scene. Big Tim was taken to the hospital and the bar closed. Vanessa went home, frightened and worried, wanting to hear from Tank.
Instead, when the phone rang just after four in the morning, it was Susan. “Big Tim is dead,” the woman said, and then she started crying. It was only then that Vanessa remembered Susan had mentioned dating Big Tim once, years ago. She hung up after trying to console the woman and found herself wondering if she would cry if any of her exes died. She wasn't sure she would. And then she wondered if she would be crying if Tank had died. She was pretty confident she would be. She really did care for the man. He had a heart underneath it all, one he was just starting to show her.
The other week he had opened up about his family. His father had left when he was a kid, and he lost his mother to cancer when he was fifteen. She told him about losing her own parents. They had something in common. He had kissed her then before he left her apartment, and it was soft and sweet and lingering.
The next morning she did get a call from Tank. He sounded tired, almost bored.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Yeah. Can you come get me?” he said.
“What’s happening to you? They’re letting you out?”
Tank laughed. “Come pick me up and I’ll tell you.”
“I’ll be there in a minute.” Vanessa hung up and then splashed water on her face and got dressed, pulling on jeans and a T-shirt. She hurried out to her car, and within twenty minutes she was parked beside the county jail, rushing to the front door. She was let into a small room with white linoleum floor tiles and bright lights that buzzed audibly overhead. She signed a clipboard and told a grumpy looking man who sat behind a glass window who she was there to pick up. She waited for ten minutes, sitting on an uncomfortable chair and tapping her foot impatiently on the linoleum. Finally, there was a buzz and a heavy door swung open next to the glass with the grumpy man behind it. Tank was led into the room by a large man of about fifty in an ill-fitting guard’s uniform. She went to stand with her him while he was passed his belongings through a slit under the glass by the grumpy man. It was just his wallet, a pocket knife, and a pack of gum. Then he turned and smiled and swept Vanessa up into his arms.
“You all right?” he asked, and Vanessa laughed.
“Are you okay?” she countered. “You’re the one who spent the night in jail.”
“Old shit,” Tank said with a shrug. “Let’s go.”
She led him out to her car and laughed as she watched the man squirm uncomfortably while she drove to the bar so he could get his bike. He really wasn’t at home on four wheels, only on two it seemed. She asked him a few questions, but he didn’t really seem to want to talk, so she fell silent. She wondered if he was upset about Big Tim.
When they pulled into the lot, parking at the front of the Devil Dog, next to his bike, she had to ask.
“Are you thinking about Big Tim?”
Tank smiled softly and looked at her. He seemed to want to say something, but his lips remained touching for a long time. Finally, he shrugged and opened the door, swinging his foot out. She reached out and took him by the arm before he could get away.
“Talk to me,” the young woman said.
Tank looked over at her. “Thanks for the ride,” he said, and she pulled her hand away from his arm and he got out. She waited until he was atop his bike and had roared out of the parking lot without even glancing back at her before she put her car in drive and headed home.
The next few days were strange between the two young lovers. Big Tim was buried, and Vanessa went, although she went with Susan and not Tank. He rode his roaring bike, along with the rest of the Pythons. Seeing all the members of the club in one spot was a bit of an eye-opener for Vanessa. There were well over a hundred of them. The most she had seen at one time in the bar was twenty or so. They rode in a long, slow progression through town, up a winding, dusty, two-lane highway until they got to the cemetery, a green oasis that stood out against the Utah brown and orange. A priest was there, one like Vanessa had never seen before. He wore the collar, had the robe on, but he also had a tattoo on his neck, a spider that crept out past the collar. He said a few words, though Vanessa wasn’t listening. She was looking at Tank.
He didn’t weep, though a few men did openly, which surprised the young woman. She figured these guys would bottle up their emotions, would try to be tough, but they all seemed genuinely devastated. It turned out that Big Tim had a couple of kids, two boys, one fifteen and one in college. Vanessa felt for them. She knew how hard it was to lose a parent. Their mother was there, so she took solace in the fact that they at least had her.
After the burial there was a wake back in town. The Devil Dog was too small to hold everyone, so the back door was thrown open and the wake spilled out into the lot. It wasn’t a wake as much as a party, where the bikers drank and laughed and remembered their dead friend. Vanessa had to work, so she didn’t get a chance to speak with Tank.
The next morning she went to see him. He lived in a trailer just outside town, in a small mobile home park that was at least eighty percent Python. She knocked on his door, and it took him a few moments to answer. When he saw her, he sighed.
“What?” he said.
Vanessa felt defensive. “I’m worried about you,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn’t be?”
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“Yeah, you shouldn’t be. I’m a big boy, Vanessa.”
“Fine,” the young woman said, anger boiling up inside her. That anger was quickly replaced by pure rage when she heard another voice, a feminine one, from inside Tank’s trailer.
“What is it, Tank? Come to bed.”
The woman who had spoken came into view. She was wearing nothing but a pair of panties, her big breasts fake and covered in dried cum from the night before. She was blond and wore too much makeup, and her lipstick was smeared.
“What the fuck, Tank?” Vanessa said, and then, without a warning to him, and without being able to stop herself, she hauled back and hit him. She always thought if she ever struck a man it would be a slap. Maybe it was the influence Tank had had on her the last few months, but she didn’t slap Tank. She hit him. Punched him. With her fist. She curled her fingers inward and drove her fist forward, right into his nose.
The blond bimbo screamed and rushed forward, and this time Vanessa had time to think. Why the hell not? is what flashed through her mind as she punched the bimbo too. She left them then, Tank silently standing there wide eyed with blood pouring from a broken nose, the girl crying on the floor with an angry welt already growing on her eye.
4
Tank didn’t even try to call that day, and that hurt Vanessa. She sat at home and cried and called off work that evening. The next morning, or at least morning for Tank—it was just after noon—he called.
“I don’t have anything to say to you,” Vanessa said when she answered, recognizing his number on her cell screen.
“Then why did you answer?” he asked.
The young woman sighed. “What do you want?”
“Look, Big Tim…it fucked me up, all right? I was close with him. He took me under his wing when I first joined up.”
Vanessa snorted in derision. “So you fucked some slut because your fake dad died? Grow up, asshole.” And then, before he could respond, she hung up.
She worked that night, and she expected him to come in, but he didn’t. For the next week he seemed to stay away from the place, and that suited Vanessa just fine. Her anger began to fade, and she was fairly certain she didn’t need or want him in her life.
That changed on one of her off days. Her period was over a week late. She hadn’t thought about it until the day before, but since it dawned on her, it was all Vanessa could think about. She went to the local drugstore and bought a pregnancy test. When she got home, she didn’t take it right away. It sat on her kitchen counter, and she ignored it. She ate lunch; she watched TV; she worked on a book she was trying to write.
Finally, as the sky grew dark outside her windows, she couldn’t ignore it any longer. She took the box into her bathroom. Inside was a white plastic stick, and she sat on the toilet and held it between her legs. Afterward she sat it on the edge of the bathroom sink and waited. Slowly, two blue lines formed. She was pregnant.
Vanessa immediately ran out to the drugstore and bought three more tests. She took them all, one after the other. All three told her she was pregnant. She sat on her toilet and cried. She was off the next day too, and she didn’t leave her apartment. She considered calling off the next night, but she went in. She pulled Susan aside when she got there and told her everything—about Tank, about the baby. The older woman hugged her.
“It will be okay,” Susan said. “These things have a way of working out. Are you going to tell Tank?”
Vanessa sighed. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I haven’t seen him or talked to him. I might not have to decide just yet.”
Of course, things did have a way of working out, and Tank came walking through the door that night. He looked over at Vanessa, but he thought better of approaching her. He sat at a table while Dipstick, who he had come in with, went to grab them a bucket of beers.
Vanessa tried to keep herself busy so she wouldn’t have to think about the baby and the fact that she was pretty sure she hated Tank now, even if he was the father, and for most of the night she managed pretty well.
Her luck ran out, however, shortly after two in the morning. The bar was mostly dead, and she was crouched behind the bar, counting bottles of liquor. When she straightened up, she found she was face to face with Tank, who was sitting on one of the rickety barstools.
“Talk to me,” he said. He was almost pleading; his eyes looked softer than she had ever seen them.
“I think I need to,” she said with a sigh, setting the pad of paper she was using to take inventory on the bar top. She took a deep breath, and then it all came spilling out. “I’m pregnant.”
Tank’s eyes widened. “Is it mine?” he asked.
Anger flared within Vanessa. “Yes, it’s yours. I’m not a cheating asshole, remember?”
Tank sighed. “I was just asking. I mean, I don’t know what you do all the time. So what? You want money?”
Vanessa was furious. This conversation wasn’t going anywhere near how she had hoped. She snapped at the man who had so recently been her boyfriend.
“I don’t want anything from you,” she said, and then she turned her back on him.
Once again he gave her space, not coming to the Devil Dog. Susan became someone to lean on, and as the days turned to weeks and then months, she was the one who went with her to her doctor appointments, the one who was with her when she found out she was having a boy. By then Vanessa had a bit of a stomach, and her emotions changed as often as the breeze. As Susan drove her back home, she cried, fat, silent tears rolling down her cheeks. The older woman hugged her and then drove off, and Vanessa went in.
A buzz at her door woke her from an afternoon nap—someone down on the street wanting to come up. There were only two apartments up the stairs, hers over the hardware store and one across the hall that sat over a diner. An old man lived there, and sometimes he forgot his key, so that was who Vanessa assumed it was. She went to the small panel beside her door and pressed the button. Down the hall and the stairs, the door buzzed, and she heard someone pull it open. She was in the kitchen, filling a glass with water at the sink, when she heard a knock on her door. She opened it and found herself face to face with Tank.
“I can be a better man,” he said to her.
“I don’t need you to be anything,” she snapped.
“I want to be something. I want to be a father.”
“You think I’ll take you back?” Vanessa asked.
“No. I don’t need to be with you to be a father. I want to be a father. I love that baby. And I love you too; I realized that, but that’s not why I’m here. My dad…he left. I might have turned out differently if he had stayed, not been arrested five times, not spent a year of my life in jail when I was nineteen. Things could have been different. I love my club, and I love my bike, but I love this kid more. Girl or boy, I don’t know, but I want to be a dad.”
“It’s a boy,” Vanessa said softly.
Tank clapped his hands together and smiled. “Are you kidding?”
“No.”
“I have to go shopping. Do you want to go?”
Vanessa smiled, but she shook her head after a moment. “I don’t think so.”
“Okay. I’ll see you later, though, all right? Things are going to be different, all right?”
Vanessa nodded, smiling despite herself. His obvious joy at having a boy was almost infectious. She shut the door as he turned to leave.
Tank showed up again that night, carrying in bags of toys.
“I got him a baseball glove, and a bat,” Tank said as Vanessa watched him dump everything out on her couch.
“He’s going to need diapers before he needs a baseball bat,” she said, not unkindly.
“I know, I know,” Tank said. “Let me have baseball, though, all right?”
“Okay. How did you get all that stuff here on your bike?”
“I didn’t ride the bike; I borrowed Dipstick’s jeep.”
Vanessa gasped, half-jokingly, half seriously. “You didn’t ride your bik
e?”
“I told you, I can change,” Tank said, and they laughed.
The next few weeks were wonderful. Tank took an active role in the baby’s life, such as it was while it was still in her stomach.
One day he was sitting in her apartment, on the couch, while she was modeling the latest in maternity wear.
“I hate my belly,” she said, frowning. She wore a breezy blouse of sorts in a soft pastel floral pattern. Tank leaned forward. As different as he had been lately, he was still Tank. It was what she called him, and it was probably what she would always call him. The young man looked her in the eye and held a hand out. She stepped to him and let him take her hand.
“You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. And I have to say, pregnant, you’re even hotter. You give me some…well, I’m just saying you look amazing.”
Vanessa smiled. “Thank you for saying that,” she said. Tank nodded and then stood up. He was inches from her, still holding her hand.
“I want to kiss you right now,” he said. Before he never would have asked; he would have just done it. Vanessa opened her mouth to tell him that wasn’t a good idea, but instead she said something that surprised her.
“Do it then.”
He did. She closed her eyes and their lips met. She parted hers to his tongue, and their tongues danced together. He pulled her close, mindful not to push against her stomach. His fingers went down, finding the hem of her shirt and tugging it up. She didn’t stop him. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and when the shirt was off and on the floor, he broke the kiss and found one of her nipples with his mouth, which he sucked softly upon. It grew hard against his tongue, and Vanessa felt herself yearning for the man.
“Bedroom,” she groaned, and he took her hand once more and pulled her forward. They kissed once more while his hands cupped her breasts softly. She pulled his shirt off, dragged her nails softly down his chest. She pushed him onto the bed and then pulled his pants off. He was nude, his cock hard and jutting up from his body. She crawled over him after pulling her own pants off and dropping her panties to the floor as well, stepping out of them as she got onto the bed.
