In other words, this was not normal for me. Nothing about being with Zane, in any respect, was normal for me. He was the complete opposite of my perception of normalcy. I worked in a flower shop and dated guys that spent more time thinking about the luxury trap of civilization than sex. And that had been fine until now.
Was this what addiction felt like? I still held him tightly, weaving through traffic and sailing past willow-cloaked houses, and I already missed him. I could never tell him that. Like any drug, the effects would wear off before long. If they didn’t, I’d be in trouble. But that was a problem for later.
Like I’d asked him to, Zane pulled up quietly in front of my house. The little rancher with the yellowing lawn was all lights out, but that didn’t mean Mom wasn’t still up. Her car was in the driveway, though it wasn’t like she drove it much, other than for work. The cancer was in remission, but she still liked the quiet life. I think that was one of the things she’d missed most when the treatments had started bogging her down—enjoying the quiet. Plagued by endless flashes of hot and cold, nausea that would last for days, and an aching deep in her bones, my mom’s cancer had turned even reading a book into torture. And she loved reading books. She loved watching soaps too, even though I made fun of her for it. She wasn’t sedentary because she loathed activity, but nothing gave her quite as much joy as curling up in a good chair, covered in blankets, and reading one of the classics, or one of the mysteries she’d picked up in the fast reads section of the library. And I certainly wasn’t going to deny her overindulgence in her favorite activities now that the cancer was seemingly idle. If it ever came back, something I feared every day, I knew she’d use these moments of happiness to draw strength from. That was the most important thing in the world.
I took my helmet off and slipped it onto Zane’s formerly unprotected head. It was just a skull cap, so I didn’t miss the amused expression he shot me as I swung off the bike. Adjusting the helmet, he looked over at my house. I could tell he had expected more. I wrinkled my nose, wanting to stand in front of him and block his view and his judgment. It was small, but it was home. It was all we needed. Cancer treatment was expensive, and it was lucky we’d even managed to get this place so cheap.
“Do you live alone?” he asked.
He wasn’t asking because he intended to come inside. I think he was worried about me. I cast a glance back toward the peeling yellow paint job of the house, allowing myself to slip into the frame of mind of a person who was seeing it all for the first time. It did look like a bit of a shithole, but it was our shithole. And really it was perfect for what we needed. It was our little slice of heaven.
Since my dad had died, when I was a kid, my mom had done everything she could to take care of me. But she’d needed so much taking care of herself. In the end, we’d ended up taking care of each other. We were like two columns that leaned against each other for support, both a little too broken to lift the ceiling ourselves.
“I live with my mom,” I said. “And I can assure you that my house is perfectly safe and acceptable.” I was tickled that he asked.
“I wasn’t—”
I shot him a look.
He laughed. “Alright, alright. It’s safe.”
This was the part of the date where I thought he was supposed to ask to see me again. Or ask for my number or something. But Zane didn’t say anything. I supposed it had also been a bit of an odd date. I hoped that my crappy house wasn’t putting him off, though since he owned a biker club, it hardly seemed fair for him to judge me on my lower class status.
Leaning in over the handlebars, I kissed him; one last desperate plea for him to make his intentions clear to me. Please want me, the kiss said. I couldn’t say it myself because I had too much self-respect, but maybe he’d taste it on my lips.
Zane’s kiss was chaste, gentle, and sweet. It was done way too quickly, and he was already firing his bike up again. I just had to put my faith in this one, I decided. There was no point getting upset about not seeing him again before I’d even stopped seeing him the first time.
Insecurity never looked good on anyone. I always tried to keep it clear and away from my business.
“Thanks for the drinks,” I said.
He smiled at me. “Thanks for the night.”
I watched his taillights fade into the distance, only turning my resigned gaze to the door of my house once I couldn’t see him any longer. There was a loneliness to him being gone, and I shuffled quickly to my front door in an attempt to ease it.
In the living room, I found my mom asleep in the big plush chair she kept in front of the TV. Many people would’ve seen that and roused her, gotten her off to bed, but I knew how much she loved sleeping there. When she’d been undergoing treatment, Mom had never been comfortable enough to sleep anywhere that wasn’t a bed. Even that had been tricky without the weed. But now she was free to fall asleep anywhere she saw fit, and it was great.
I ascended the stairs, deep in thought. You know, I wasn’t even mad that I probably wouldn’t see Zane again. He’d been my first one night stand, and it was worth the experience more than anything else. It was worth knowing that I could have one-night stands. I’d always thought of myself as being far too emotional and introspective to connect with someone like that for only one night, but I talked myself down from insecurity and unhappiness into a state of acceptance and amusement at my antics. By the time I reached my bed, I was happy as a clam about the way the night had gone.
I was a woman who needed no man, a free and independent spirit just like the alter ego I’d discovered in Zane’s arms. He’d given me something that evening that I was going to value for the rest of my life. Well, I’d given it to myself. Peace. It was quite something to know that I could lose myself with someone without actually losing myself in them. I wasn’t sure how and when this would be put into action, if ever, but it was a nice thing to know.
And hell, it had satisfied me. Once the minor addiction had worn off, anyway. I would’ve still given one of my toes to have him in my room right now, pressing me down into the bed with such erotic fire as I’d experienced not long before, but it was beginning to fade. I was feeling profoundly satisfied and delighted with life. And alive. So very, very alive.
I took a quick shower and slipped into my favorite cotton pajama shorts and a loose tank top. I plucked The Golden Bough off my bookshelf—Frazer’s seminal anthropology textbook—and leaned into my pillows to read some of it before bed. I’d already read it of course. Twice. But I liked to commit everything to my memory, and each time I read it, I remembered a little more and understood a helluva lot more.
I had never understood the people in school who scowled at the textbooks and treated them like they were the worst things to happen to them since original sin. I’d always loved learning, soaking it up like a sponge. Objectively, I understood why a person might have problems in school. It couldn’t have been easy if it just wasn't your thing.
There were lots of things that weren’t “my thing.” One of them was shutting my brain off when I was supposed to. That was one of the reasons I had to reread things as often as I did. I’d be halfway through a page before I realized that I’d been thinking about something else, and hadn’t absorbed any of it. It was a pain in the ass like no other. It was like my mind was a firework shooting in ten different directions at once. I’d tried to explain it one time to a friend that way, and she’d looked at me like I was crazy.
I often wondered what it would be like to have a brain that only went in one direction at a time; like a laser pointer. Would I get more done? Less done? Would I be a better reader, or would I turn to be one of those people who hated reading? Maybe I liked reading so much because it opened up a world of dialogue in my head that I wouldn’t have thought of on my own. Like right now I was supposed to be contemplating anthropological theory in line with Frazer’s assertions, but instead, I’d gone off on a tangent about theory in general. It was a strange concept. The idea of something conc
rete that couldn’t be proven. Or, if it could, it lost its status as a theory and became a law that was so permanent that it rooted entire galaxies in place.
I wondered how many times in life a person theorizes - an average person, with an average laser pointer brain? And how many of those theories could be proven into law? Could a theory about the human condition ever be translated into law, or were there too many infinite variables in the universe for that to happen? It was a wonder that anything was transcribed into law and that the whole world wasn’t just one big theory.
I had a theory about Zane. I had lots, really. My firework brain had theories about every question I’d ever asked myself, and I asked a lot of questions. But my main theory was that he hadn’t asked me out again tonight because he didn’t know what to do with me, and I was over his head with me. Not that he was overwhelmed, just in foreign waters with the waves crashing over his face.
Truth be told, I wasn’t in a remarkably different spot regarding him. I sure wished he’d just figure out whether I was worth the sink into the deep or not, though. It was professional curiosity as well as personal, of course.
Then I was back onto the pages of my book again. Six pages from where I’d started. It was strange to me that I remembered my eyes passing over the words, and I’d understood them, but I’d failed to commit them to memory once more. Maybe there were up in there somewhere, sucked into my subconscious like the big sponge Freud and many others supposed it was, and I just didn’t know how to access it. Wouldn’t it be great if we could all just access everything we saw? Some people could. Savant syndrome, I’d been told in my first year, produced people who could draw an entire city from memory after only one helicopter trip over it.
Crap. I’d missed another half a page.
I managed to actually stick to my textbook for the better half of an hour, after clearing my brain of most everything by way of taking a few cleansing breaths. That was something my mom had taught me.
Eventually, weariness crashed into me like a semi. One second I was happily reading Frazer, a delighted smile still perched on my lips, and the next my eyes were threatening to droop down to the floor. My body hurt too. Particularly the muscles of my calves, where I’d pushed myself up onto my toes with sweet abandon in pursuit of more of Zane’s pleasure. I put the book down on the nightstand and rose to turn the light off.
Darkness had always been more calming to me than frightening. Summer nights were the best because often the moon was high and bright and the world wasn’t fully asleep. Tonight wasn’t quite the soulful cacophony of the sleepy summer music that Louisiana seemed to team with, but it was warm enough for me to crack open the window and listen for the buzzing of insects and the rustling of birds in the bushes around my home. It wasn’t long before these sounds, paired with the sweet air that filled my lungs with each breath, lulled me to sleep.
In that half-awake, half-dreaming state that felt like slipping into the comfiest pair of pajamas I owned, my mind cycled through dreams that mirrored the day’s events. The cracking of billiard balls ricocheted through my head, even causing me to jolt at one point. That wasn’t new to me. I jolted all the time when I was falling asleep like it kept catching me by surprise. I was used to it, comforted by it even. It meant that I was only moments away from reaching oblivion, and from a new day with fresh challenges and opportunities.
Zane’s face flew before mine, alternatively kissing me and whispering sweet nothings. Literally, they were nothing. Perhaps they were words, but it seemed that most of the stuff coming out of Zane’s mouth was just garbled nonsense. In my half-awake state, though, I almost seemed to understand it. Funny how the mind works like that.
Zane slipped away from me just as I felt my consciousness sink. I’d always been good at understanding which stage of sleep I was falling into as I fell. I was getting too deep to dream already. But a flash of something else behind my lids managed to sneak through the crack just in time for me to conveniently forget it. My thesis advisor’s stern face. But something wrong with it. Something wrong with him. But why? What could it mean?
It was gone before I’d even had a chance to pull on the string that might’ve tugged him back.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Zane
Sleeping on the club couch was never a particularly comfortable endeavor. It had its merits, but for one thing, it was way too short for my bulk, and elongated frame. Either I curled up on it like a sleeping dog or I stretched out and dangled my feet off the end.
It was strange how many of my childhood habits crept into the back of my mind and took the journey with me into adulthood. I often wondered if it was the same for everyone. I would be perfectly fine with the position I was sleeping in one minute, and the next I’d have a niggling thought at the back of my head that wondered: what if something came along and bit off my exposed foot while I dangled it into the dark in such a reckless manner.
That same kind of childish thought was what had led me to leave Sasha without so much as a fake promise to call last night. It might not have been fake in her case, but surely even I should have been able to summon up something to leave her with. Instead, the stupid kid in the back of my head was taunting me by saying that I liked her and that we were up in a goddamn tree together.
Drove me fucking crazy sometimes.
I’d been ignoring it and shutting it up more than I’d been trying to brush Sasha off, but the effect had worked for both the voice and the woman I’d just spent an amazing evening with. Not that I’d ever tell a soul about that.
I was only thinking about it because my foot was dangling over the edge of the couch this morning. Funny how the mind wanders. I hadn’t opened my eyes yet, but I already knew that the sun wasn’t very high in the sky. This was another reason I didn’t sleep on the couch very often. I never got a long sleep, and certainly not a restful one.
So why do it? Because I fucking could and sometimes it felt right.
It wasn't like I got in anyone’s way, unless someone else was planning to sleep on the couch. But nobody ever did. Except this morning, as my brain slowly fogged into consciousness, I had the feeling that I wasn’t alone in the room. My heart hadn’t started racing with the knowledge quite yet, though. It could be any one of my guys, and if it was a stranger, then they were more in danger than I was.
I stayed still for a moment, sensing them, trying to figure out where they were standing and if they were looking at me. Maybe someone was just in the room with me, hanging out on the other couch. But no, they weren’t. I could tell by the break in warm light across my body. They were standing on the other side of the couch, between me and the window with its blasting of morning light.
Unless they were idly staring at the window, that meant they were there for me. If it were about club business, whoever was there would’ve just woken me up. So this was something else.
“I’m not in the mood, As.” With my eyes still closed, I tried to will her away with my thoughts as well as my words.
A low snort came from the direction of my stalker. “That’s unusual for you,” she purred. “I remember you almost always being in the mood. Ready to go with just a moment’s notice.”
A scowl crept onto my face. I was grumpy in the mornings. Asa knew that; probably the reason why she had chosen to hover over me. Just to ruin my goddamn day.
“What do you want?” I asked, barely able to keep the snarl out of my voice. Accepting that I wasn’t getting any more sleep, I blearily opened my eyes to take in my tormentor. She was standing with the sun behind her, lighting up her copper hair. Her arms were crossed over her chest, as she regarded me with a sour look. The feeling was mutual, at least.
“I’m pregnant,” she spouted. “It’s yours.”
I scoffed and closed my eyes. “Impossible.” I hadn’t slept with her in years. She was batshit if she had imagined me doing so. Maybe she and Graham used to role-play sick shit like that. Whatever the case, it wasn’t my business.
“I’m ser
ious.” She poked me with a taloned finger, and it took everything in me not to snatch her hand and break it. I was very grumpy in the mornings.
My eyes bolted open, and I regarded her, anger wrinkling my forehead and bringing forth the headache that always followed these interactions we shared. “Congratu-fucking-lations. But you’re crazy if you think it’s mine.” I laughed, rising up from the couch and turning to face her, flexing my arms across my chest. If she didn’t go away from my words, I’d intimidate her with my body. Few felt comfortable enough to needle me after seeing my bulk in all its glory. Crazy ex-girlfriends included.
“You’re crazy if you think I’d make up something this serious,” she simpered.
“As, we haven’t fucked in what, two years now? I highly doubt even my sperm is that virile.”
The corners of her mouth lifted into a smile that looked more like a sneer. They always did with her. “I said I was pregnant and that it was yours,” she cooed, starting to step around the couch. “I never said that I got pregnant from fucking you.”
Devil's Property: The Faithless MC Page 44
