by April Lust
The boys filed back out of the bar, much more slowly than how they’d marched in. Some of them were heavily bruised, some were limping a little, but most were okay, just tired and sweaty. Olivia was heading back over to Ezra’s bike when Xander cornered her and pulled her aside. Oh, great. Here it comes.
“Why the hell did you do that?” he said in a harsh whisper.
“What? Break up the fight?” Olivia asked innocently.
“Yeah, getting in the middle like that. I told you to stay out of my shit. Why couldn’t you just listen to me?” Xander wasn’t raising his voice, but Olivia wasn’t sure she’d ever seen him this pissed-off before. His face was deep red. Was he…embarrassed?
Okay, time for a mea culpa, even if I don’t mean it, Olivia figured. “I’m sorry I interfered with your authority. I know you would have stopped it eventually, but I figured I’d speed up the process…you know, save everybody some unnecessary bruises.”
“It was really fucking stupid,” Xander said. “Really, really fucking stupid.”
“Hey, everything turned out okay,” she reasoned, gesturing to the front of the bar as if it was evidence. “See, no more broken windows. You got the drugs. Why are you so upset?”
“Because!” Xander said, raising his voice a little higher than before. “Because you walked right in the middle of a goddamned biker brawl and you could have gotten seriously hurt. You think those fuckers care that you have a vagina? No! They’ll gladly fuck you up if you get in the way. You were lucky as shit.”
For a second, Olivia felt her anger rise to his level, and she opened her mouth, ready to yell back at him before realization hit her right in the head. Oh. Oh, that’s what this is about, she thought. “You didn’t want me to get hurt,” she said. It was a statement rather than a question.
“Well, yeah, duh!” Xander responded. “It wouldn’t exactly make my day any easier if you got fucked up by a couple of huge bikers, Olivia.”
She both loved and hated hearing her name come out of his mouth. It felt a little bit like she was in elementary school again, being scolded by a pissed-off teacher. But at the same time, there was this closeness to it, like he’d known her for longer than a week. She felt closer to him than all her other clients, and it wasn’t just because of the fucking. “I’m sorry, okay?” she repeated, this time much more sincerely. “I didn’t mean to worry you. But, look, I’m not just some girl your uncle picked up off the street here, okay? I know a little bit about how people work, how your kind of people work. Not a lot, but some. And I used what I know today to get the best results. That’s basically my job description. I’m sorry if I scared you, but it worked, right? It worked.”
There was a long pause where Xander didn’t say anything, his foot kicking up a little dirt on the ground like a little boy does when he’s nervous. “You handled it okay,” Xander finally said begrudgingly.
“Okay?” Olivia parroted incredulously. “I fucking dominated in there.”
A small smile spread across Xander’s lips, and Olivia felt like cheering. “You did pretty good,” he conceded.
It wasn’t exactly glowing praise, but Olivia would take it, knowing it meant a lot coming from him. “Thank you,” she said, her voice coming out lower and softer than intended.
Xander reached in and pushed a strand of hair away from Olivia’s face. “Come on. We got places to be.”
“Should I ride with Ezra?” she asked quietly, fearing the sting of rejection.
Xander shook his head and offered Olivia his hand. “No. You’re riding with me.”
***
It went like that for weeks. Xander would take Olivia into more and more hostile territory, and Olivia would have to sit through the verbal squabbles and the physical fights. Sometimes she’d hold back to the corners, and sometimes she’d step in and try to break it up, all depending on her mood. After she meddled in club affairs, Xander would always say to her, “You’re gettin’ a little big for your britches there, missy,” but he couldn’t ever seem to keep the teasing tone out of his voice no matter how hard he tried. Every time he took her on a particularly serious mission, she found a way to make it lighter, to make him even have fun at it. He was starting to run out of ideas to scare her off.
But then one day, about three weeks in, it hit him. The women. Olivia would have a problem with it, maybe a big enough problem that she would finally see the club for what it was. She’d finally see Xander for who he was, and she’d be so disgusted he’d never see her again. His chest hurt a little at the idea, but it was what he wanted, right? Olivia out of his life. That was the goal, even if he had to keep reminding himself.
“We’re going to the ladies’ club today,” he announced to the boys once he stepped outside that afternoon, Olivia following in his footsteps.
Xander could see Eric’s confused face even out of the corner of his eye. “Really? What for? Aren’t they all there already?”
“We’re doing a check-up,” Xander said back, hardening his voice so the boys would get the message to shut up already. He didn’t want to warn Olivia at all of what she was about to see. She needed to be shocked. She needed to be scared.
At the same time, Xander felt a sick tightening in the bottom of his stomach, like a snake had coiled up around his intestines. What was Olivia going to say? What was she going to do? Will she even be able to look at me after? He shook the thoughts out of his head as Olivia slipped on the bike behind him and he revved the engine into action.
They pulled up to the place about a half an hour later, rolling into the parking lot of the broken-down shack on the edge of the desert road. There was nothing around for miles. That was intentional. To the outside world, it looked like an abandoned building.
“What are we—?” Olivia whispered behind him as Xander shut the engine off and climbed off the bike.
“You’ll see,” he said shortly, offering her his hand so she could swing off the bike with ease. He figured he’d do one nice thing for her before destroying everything. Xander could feel her heart pounding through the skin of her wrist. She was nervous. He wanted to squeeze her hand reassuringly, do something to get her to calm down a little, but what was the point? She had a right to be nervous. She had no idea what she was about to witness.
Xander knocked on the rickety front door of the shack, tapping in a pattern he had to memorize years ago. Three knocks, two knocks, four knocks, then one. “Code?” the guard inside demanded in a gruff voice on the other side of the door.
“Cucumber sandwich,” Xander said in a flat tone.
Olivia giggled behind him, probably at the ridiculousness of the phrase. He thought, with a shot of pain to his chest, that it might be the last time he would ever hear that noise from her.
The door swung open, and the stuffy smell of the inside immediately hit Xander’s nostrils. It didn’t stink, exactly, but it was apparent the door was only ever opened for a few seconds at a time, and there were no windows here.
Xander gathered up his courage, as much of it as he could muster, and stepped inside. He nodded in salutation to the guard, the big guy holding the huge gun, and kept walking, opening the door just inside the entrance. Olivia was still right behind him. He felt her hand come up to touch his shoulder, fingers digging into his skin. He felt the nervousness coming off her. He wished he could comfort her, but it would only get worse from here.
As soon as they stepped through the inner door, Xander saw three girls get up from their beds, turning their backs to him to ruffle up the blankets into some semblance of order. The other girls were still under the blankets, lifting their heads as they heard the boys filter into the room.
Xander heard Olivia quickly inhale, then deeply exhale in realization.
There were twenty, maybe twenty-five girls squished into the room, each of them assigned a single cot, with a communal bathroom in the far corner and a single set of dressers in the center of the room.
One by one, the remaining girls sat up in their beds, rubbing
their eyes and blinking to adjust to the light from outside. “They sleep during the day, you know,” Xander murmured. “Because they’re working at night.” Xander knew he wouldn’t have to specify the type of work.
“For you?” Olivia asked in a soft voice.
“For the club,” Xander answered.
“For you,” Olivia said. This time her voice was far from soft. “It’s the same thing. You’re a part of the club. One of the leaders of the club. So they work for you.” She was silent a moment. Xander turned to look at her, seeing her staring down at the girls who just looked across the room to stare back at her. “Do they get paid?” Olivia finally asked after the long pause.
“Yeah, they get paid,” Xander said. “But not much.”
“Did they…are they here willingly?” Olivia asked. She wasn’t looking at him, still.
Xander nodded before he realized she couldn’t see him. She probably didn’t even want to see him right now. He wouldn’t blame her for running out. “Yeah. They can leave whenever they want.”
“Do they know that? Do they even speak English?”
Xander felt weirdly defensive, even though the club had no excuse for this. He still felt like explaining himself. “They have a translator. And they came over knowing what they would have to do.”
“So they have to do it?” Olivia shot back, finally turning to look at him.
He had never seen her look so angry. Somehow, even when he pictured this confrontation in his head, he never thought what she would look like, the disappointment and the fury and the sadness all wrapped up in her eyes. “No, no, I didn’t mean it like that, but…They’re not here legally. There are only so many ways to make money.”
Olivia nodded and turned back to the girls. “So they’re fucked. You say they have a choice, but what other option do they have, really? Starve on the side of the road?”
Xander felt himself nodding, like his brain and his body were completely detached from each other. “You’re right. You’re right. They don’t have a choice. Not really.”
“Right. So they basically get up and go to get raped every night, because what other choice do they have?”
Xander didn’t say anything. One of the girls, a short brunette with bruises on her arms, was staring up at him with fear in her wide dark eyes. Olivia was right. They didn’t have a choice.
Olivia cleared her throat and spoke out so the whole room could hear her. “Who here speaks English?”
One of the girls on the far side of the room raised her hand slowly, like she was afraid of what the consequences would be.
“You deserve better,” Olivia said before turning and walking out of the room.
Xander quickly pulled Eric aside and told him to talk to the guard and to the girl who responded to Olivia, see what they had to say about the state of affairs for the girls, before following Olivia outside.
“Take me back to the club,” Olivia ordered him as soon as he exited the building.
“Yeah,” Xander said, a little surprised she didn’t insist on being dropped off at her apartment, or place of work, or anywhere unrelated to the Immortal Souls.
They rode back to the club in silence. When they rolled to a stop, Olivia got off the bike, marched through the bar, and climbed the steps up to Xander’s apartment. Xander didn’t know what else to do except follow her.
“So do they fuck the Souls or other guys or both?” she asked as soon as he shut the door of the apartment behind them. Olivia was pacing around the couch, her hands tangled together and pressing against her mouth.
“Both,” Xander said, feeling the hot sensation of shame crawl up his neck.
“And the Souls, do you guys just come and go and fuck whoever you want, whenever you want? Is that why they looked so scared when we walked in today?”
“The guys have to call ahead of time. The guard keeps records of everything so it’s not…They get paid for everything they do.”
“But not much, right?” Olivia asked.
Xander just nodded.
“Say it. Admit it,” she ordered, the volume of her voice climbing.
“Not much, no,” Xander said.
Olivia stopped her pacing. “Whose idea was this? The girls? Have they just always been here since the inception of the club, or what?”
Xander shook his head. “No. Just a few years. It was Old Man Jack’s idea. He’s one of the senior members here. Been here forever.”
“And Jerry let him do it?” Olivia asked.
“They voted on it, and it passed. That’s how the big missions work these days.”
“Oh, so it was a democratic decision,” Olivia said sarcastically.
Not for the first time since he met Olivia, he felt judged. But he knew he deserved it this time. He wouldn’t have brought her to the den in the first place if he hadn’t known it would end like this. He knew she would react this way. This was what he wanted, right?
For over a full minute, they stood in silence.
“We gotta do something to fix this shit,” Olivia said. “We gotta get them into a better place, a cleaner place, and we got to lay down some precautions to make sure they don’t get hurt. I don’t care how. But we’ve gotta do it.”
“We?” Xander asked, but Olivia didn’t seem to hear him.
She just started pacing again, this time circling the whole living room area. “We can’t just send them back home, obviously. They left for a reason. There’s the whole big American Dream thing, you know. They came here for a better life. And we’ve got to give it to them. We gotta teach them English, we gotta give them access to occupational training, you know, stuff to help them transition out of the work if they want to. We’ve got to give them a way to defend themselves if the tricks get violent, or else make sure the guard is always present. That reminds me—we’ve got to check with the girls to make sure the guard is behaving himself. He can’t be trusted to protect them if he’s hurting them when no one is there.”
“He’s not. He’s a good guy. I know him personally,” Xander said, following Olivia’s path with his eyes.
“We’re checking, Xander,” she said in a forceful tone, picking up the pace as she crossed the room back and forth, over and over again.
Xander felt himself smile a little, ducking his head so she wouldn’t see, even though she looked like she was barely paying attention to him. But it felt nice, seeing her in action like this. This had to be the way she was when she was in counselor mode, he realized. This was Olivia the Officer, Olivia the Leader, at work. And he liked it. He actually liked it. It no longer felt like he was being condemned by her mighty authority. Instead it felt like he was being handed a way out, like he had been stranded in the middle of the ocean spitting out water and she was offering him a lifeline.
“We gotta organize resources. We gotta allocate some of the boys to help the women and we probably should bring in some of the working girls at the other clubs, like Hannah and her friends, to help out, if they’re available. I can look into resources to help them learn the language. That’ll be the first hurdle,” Olivia continued, though she finally stopped in her tracks and turned to look at him with determination in her eyes.
“I, um, kind of thought you’d want to call the cops on us,” Xander said. Honestly, it didn’t sound like a terrible idea to him. In a just universe, it would probably happen next. But Olivia scoffed like the idea was preposterous. “Why don’t you?” Xander asked.
Olivia shrugged. “They’d get deported,” she said simply. “I’m assuming you didn’t kidnap them, right?”
Xander shook his head furiously. “No, no, they came over. They wanted to get out and come here,” he rushed to say. At least, he was pretty sure that was true for most of them.
Olivia nodded. “Right. So we’re not deporting them. We’re helping them. That’s what we’re doing. And you’re gonna help me do it.”
Xander felt the corners of his mouth itch, like he wanted to smile again, but he fought it off this time. “Okay.
Okay, I’ll figure it out.”
“I mean it, Xander,” Olivia said, walking toward him until she stood directly in front of him. “I’m not gonna let you get out of this.”
“I know,” he rushed to say, stepping forward a little. Only about a foot separated them now.
Olivia nodded again, probably to herself. “I think you showed me that today because you wanted my help. You didn’t know how to do it yourself, but you don’t have to. I’m here.”
Xander felt his heart start pounding in his chest. “Do you—Do you still…?” Xander trailed off, and he ducked his head again, not wanting to look Olivia directly in the eyes.
