by Ivy Black
At first, I wasn’t entirely sure how to respond. Tess was aware of the distance between us, and as much as I needed that distance, it didn’t make me feel any better that she might be feeling hurt by it. If only I could reach out for her hand. If only there wasn’t the need for me to get to Caid or Luther’s impending threat.
“Okay. I’ll go.”
She nodded. “Good. I’ll be in the living room. Just come out when you’re ready. Take your time.” With that, she was out of the room.
I dropped my head to my hands. Maybe coming to Hoppa had been a huge mistake, after all. Any way I looked at it, I knew that I’d overestimated my ability to resist Tess. Dr. Marteau’s words skidded across my brain and ran down my left arm in a chill. She probably wouldn’t think twice about the scarring. It was an excuse.
Crickets rhythmically called out in chorus just outside the bedroom window, and I used the sound as a cycle to breathe with—deep breaths in and deep breaths out. More likely than not, I was just overthinking things. More than one person had accused me of possessing that trait, and for as much as I tried to convince myself and others that it was a good thing, at the end of the day, I often lost a lot of the world as I sat in one place, trying to calculate all of the possible outcomes for any situation I found myself in. Tess gave me a feeling of freedom that I typically only felt when I was on a bike. It was time to give in to that feeling. Just a little bit, just enough.
“Come on, Lockjaw.”
I stood up off the bed, and Lockjaw quickly hopped up and jumped down to follow after me. Tess was sitting in the living room exactly where she said she would be when I entered, and when she noticed me, she looked up and smiled.
“Ready?” I asked.
“Yeah. Let’s go.”
It had only been a week since I had last been on my bike, but it felt like years. The chilled air rushed against my face, and my whole form got lighter. For the entire two-hour ride, I disconnected from my reality and enjoyed the feeling of the pavement beneath me and the colorful blur of cars as I raced by. I kept Tess’ bike in my sights while she led the way, and after what felt like too little time for me to have fully enjoyed the sensation of being back on my bike, she pulled off the main road and onto a plot of empty, desert expanse.
Apart from a chain-link fence wrapped around the area and a single building in the far distance, the place was entirely evacuated. Animal footprints in the dirt indicated that a few critters had made the property their home, but that aside, it looked undisturbed.
Tess pulled her bike to one side and turned it off, and I followed suit. We’d left Lockjaw at home for the trip, a decision I was grateful for when I saw the flurry of small rodents and birds skittering around. Trained or not, he’d likely be chomping at the bit to get out and chase them, and I highly doubted that we’d be able to catch him if he broke loose.
The lock on the fence gate rattled as Tess stuck a key in and undid the massive padlock on the front, then I helped her grab one of the big gate doors and pull it enough to the side that we could walk in.
“Pretty cool, huh?” Tess asked.
I led the way through doors, and Tess followed, shutting and locking the gate behind her. “My dad bought it forever ago. We pay reduced land fees because he promised not to build anything permanent on the property, and so it is considered protected land in Arizona.” She pointed toward the single building on the land, a white barn with a black, slatted roof toward the back. “The barn was here when he bought it, but we flipped the inside and made it a clubhouse. I made him keep the loft in the top, though. I love it. Come on. I’ll show you.”
As we made our way toward the barn, we did a careful sweep of the open land. There were divots in the sand where booths and other temporary structures had stood in the past, but the fact that there were also little lizards rushing around was proof enough that the land had been undisturbed enough that creatures could live without issue. They’d be in for a hell of a party in a few weeks, but then they could go back to their usual routines.
When we reached the clubhouse, Tess used a different key on the same ring as the front gate key to unlock it. A beeping started immediately, and Tess reached to the right of the front door and entered a code into a security system hanging there, after which, the lights all cut on automatically. There was a thick layer of dust, but aside from that, the inside of the barn had a sleek, simple, modern look. A small kitchen nook had a fridge, stovetop, and a few units of cabinets and countertops, and a bunch of small sofas and chairs were scattered around, with a big white wooden pool table sitting in front of a fireplace. The pool table’s legs were decorated, one with each of the Steel Knights, the Blazing Rebels, and the Raging Vipers’ sigils, and the fourth had MiD painted on it.
To the right of the small kitchen nook was an open door that looked like it led into a bathroom, and next to that, another door was shut and was marked with an Authorized Personnel Only sign. Tess walked over to the shut door and used a third key to unlock it, then she opened it. I remained standing in the main room while she walked into the room that she had to unlock, but her head poked back out after a few seconds.
“What are you doing?”
I pointed at the sign on the door. “I’m not authorized personnel.”
“Yeah, you are. Nick specifically wanted you to come and help me check things out. He knows you’ll be in here, so just don’t go snooping.”
Her explanation was enough for me, and I walked over and entered the room. It reminded me of the meeting space in the warehouse back at Hoppa’s Taphouse. A single round table sat in the middle of the room with a dozen or so chairs placed around it. The table itself was divided into three colored sections that I assumed correlated with each of the clubs. The Steel Knights’ section was silver, the Blazing Rebels’ was orange, and the Raging Vipers’ was red. There was another fridge in this room, but there were no windows or additional doors, and there were a few tall filing cabinets stacked against one wall.
Tess started to creep along the walls, feeling her hand on the surface and carefully checking it for anything strange, so I dropped to the ground and crawled under the table. When I was still with the Unchained Dogs, stealth was my forte. Not only was I skilled in getting in and out of a place without being seen, but I also had to know the best spots to hide weapons and cameras for any covert missions. My paranoia tried to convince me that Nick somehow knew that, but the conversations we’d had thus far were an indicator that he didn’t. He just trusted me, something I was both happy and sad for.
I ran my hand over the wood of the table and all the nooks and crannies, and when I was confident that there was nothing hidden under the table, I moved over to the filing cabinets and slid them aside to make sure there was nothing strange behind them, and then I did the fridge.
“Do you have the keys to the cabinets?” I asked Tess. “Not snooping, just if I was trying to hide something in an inconspicuous place, that’s where it would be.”
Tess didn’t respond verbally, but she walked over to the cabinets and used yet another key on the ring of keys she had. She opened the drawers one by one, and I kept a safe distance so as not to seem like I was trying to see anything as Tess thumbed through the files and felt her hands under them to make sure there was nothing unusual.
When she finally shut the final drawer, she turned and looked at me. Sweat drenched the edge of her hairline, but her eyes still had a calm stillness to them. “Looks like we might be okay.”
“Yeah.” We walked back out of the office and then did a careful sweep of the main room, but I didn’t see anything that seemed like it would lead upward. “Didn’t you say there was a loft?”
Tess’ eyes widened, and a smile shot across her face. “Yeah.” She passed by me and walked out the front door. I followed her out, and she walked around to the back of the building, where there was another door. She used the last of the keys on her ring to unlock it and opened it, revealing a white ladder leading up. “After you.”
Tess crawled past me and over to the bed and threw herself down onto it. She stretched out, and even though I fully expected some sort of pass, she turned away from me and looked out the window. The sun was setting and was perfectly framed in the window like a work of art, rivaled only by Tess haloed in its glow.
“Pretty cool, huh?” She didn’t look back when she asked.
I did my best to commit her visage to memory. “It’s beautiful.”
She kicked the wall that separated the loft from the rest of the clubhouse. “I wanted the whole upper level, but my dad said we needed the space. I was still a teenager when he remodeled it, so he didn’t consider that I’d grow eventually, but I kind of like how cramped it is. Makes it cozy.” She pointed out the window. “It faces the festival, so after I’ve done my rounds, I get some food and crawl up here and stay here for the rest of the night. I watch the music and partying and…” She sighed. “It’s my favorite.”
Shit.
The kid that had been trying to claw his way out of me and go after his childhood love was getting dangerously close to the surface. Being alone with Tess was getting harder and harder with each passing day. The resolve I had when I told myself it was best to keep my distance was thinning, and it was just a matter of time before I decided that being with her was worth any risk. I could say I was in love, but in truth, I never really fell out of love. They say that you’d eventually realize that the people you thought you were in love with as kids were just crushes—puppy love.
Not Tess.
The way I felt about Tess was freeing, enlightening, calming. Emotions I rarely ever felt. It was as if she carried a part of me with her, and the fractured piece that was still inside me was pulling toward her peace like a high-grade magnet. I didn’t want to deny it anymore.
My heart started to beat a little faster. “Um.”
“We should go.” The bed rustled as Tess climbed off of it and crawled past me again.
She tossed me a quick smile before kicking her legs into the opening and bracing herself on the ladder before starting her descent. Disappointed wasn’t a good enough word to describe how I felt, but I followed her. I climbed down the ladder and backed out of the door, and Tess shut it again and locked it. Then we walked around to the front of the building again so that she could arm the alarm and lock those doors.
We made our way back to the front gates and out to our bikes, where Tess finally stopped and turned to face me again. “Thanks for coming. I think my dad will feel good knowing we did such a thorough job.”
“Of course.” For whatever reason, I reached up and lightly punched Tess’ arm. “Anytime.”
She snickered. “Oh, are you gonna call me Sport next?”
Yeah. I couldn’t blame her for that response. “No. I don’t know why I did that.” The desert venue was vast, but I could only imagine how chaotic and congested things would become in the coming weeks as the event approached. “You know, I was thinking. If I was really trying to pull one over, I’d be more likely to come when all the stalls and stuff were getting set up. The risk of someone bugging the place will probably go up as the event gets closer.”
“That’s a good point,” Tess replied. “I’ll talk to Nick about it. See what he wants to do.”
She turned and was getting ready to get on her bike when I suddenly said, “I’d be willing to come back every day and do a sweep.”
Tess stopped short and looked over her shoulder at me. “What?”
“Yeah.” My hands went into the pockets of my jeans, a nervous tick of mine. “It’s not a long drive, and I love being on my bike. I could come by every day and make sure things were good.”
“Are you…” Tess started, but then stopped. She opened and closed her mouth a few times and then just smiled. “Okay. I think my dad would like that. I would, too.”
I smiled back at her. “Let’s plan on that, then.”
“Yes.” Tess’ smile got even bigger. “Let’s plan on that.”
Chapter Ten
Tess
It was probably a good thing that motorcycles were best ridden with helmets and at high speeds because it meant that Colin couldn’t see me smiling like an idiot as we rode back into Hoppa. I wasn’t sure what had done it, but something changed. After a week of talking about how he couldn’t stay in one place for too long and how he had to get out of Hoppa as soon as he could, he was suddenly committing himself to stay at least through MiD. For all of my considering that it might be best to pull back and stay professional with Colin, he’d sucked me back in again in just a few words. Call it love or stupidity, but I wanted to be with Colin, and if he was going to be staying in Hoppa and if my dad liked him so much, why couldn’t I be?
We went right to Hoppa’s Taphouse once we were back in the city because I knew that my dad would want to hear about how the trip had gone, and I honestly needed a drink to try to even out all of my excited energy. Colin parked his bike next to mine, and we powered them down and climbed off at the same time. He motioned toward the door, and I walked past him. As I did, his eyes quickly traveled down and up my form. When his eyes locked back on mine, he gave me a wink, and I thought I may pass out. If I thought he was handsome before, with him seemingly lowering his guard and opening up a little bit, he was downright irresistible.
“Hey, Val!” my dad called over from the pool table when I passed through the front door. “Hey, CJ.”
“Hey, Nick,” I greeted.
“Hi,” Colin added on.
My dad waved us off. “Go ahead and take a seat and a drink. I’m gonna finish up this game, and then I’ll head over.”
Colin found a table about halfway between the bar and the pool table and sat down, and when I had to decide between the chair directly next to him or the one on the other side of the table, I decided to experiment. I picked the chair next to him. To my extreme delight, Colin’s smile grew a little larger, and my heart skipped.
What the hell had changed?
“Hey, Val.” One of the waitresses, Cara, had made her way over and was standing at our table. “Want a drink?”
“Just a beer.” My mind was already wandering toward trying to make a move on Colin again, given his new attitude, so something muted was probably best. That way, I could keep my wits about me and not do anything stupid.
Cara nodded, then looked to Colin. Her stance changed a little bit, and she kicked out one of her hips. “What about you, gorgeous?”
“A beer, please.” Colin only made what contact was necessary, then turned his attention to me. “Do you regularly leave Lockjaw at home?”
“Not often. He’s probably pissed,” I said with a chuckle. “He’ll survive.”
“You’re the new guy, right?” Colin and I looked over to one of the high-bar tables directly behind Colin, and a few of the women who frequented the bar were all sitting together with their eyes on Colin. One of them asked, “What’s your name?”
“CJ.” Immediately after he said it, he turned back around. It was borderline rude. Colin was a quiet person in general, and even more so in mixed company. He didn’t like to waste words, but even this was odd for
him. “Is he bad when you leave him at home? Does he chew up your stuff?” he asked, resuming our conversation as if he hadn’t been distracted at all.
Cara came back and set our drinks down on the table, and I took a sip of my beer before continuing. “No. He’s really well trained. Although one time—”
“Hey.” It was the same table of women beckoning to him. Colin looked back, even if his gaze thinned a little bit. “I’m Maxine,” the one speaking, a blonde with a large bust in a Bikers 4 Lyfe shirt, said.
Colin nodded, saying, “Cool,” then turned back to me. “Sorry, you were saying?”
“One time—”
“Okay.” My dad slammed himself down at the table, and I was beginning to think he was interfering with us on purpose. “Made short work of those idiots. Do we need to take this in back?”
Colin and I locked eyes, and then I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Wasn’t super eventful.” That wasn’t entirely true, but it wasn’t as if I could tell my dad, “I might get laid tonight,” so as far as he was concerned, nothing eventful. “We checked everything out, a thorough check, too. I think we’re good.”
“Excellent.” My dad lifted one of his large hands and slapped it on Colin’s back. “Thanks for going.”
“No problem. Actually.” Colin gave me a brief look, but I nodded, so he turned his attention back to my dad. “I told Val that if it would be helpful, I’d be willing to go out there every day. Just to make sure no one settles in between now and MiD.”
My dad’s eyes widened, and the grin that sewed across his face was one of the largest I’d seen in a while. “You sure? That’s a long drive back and forth.”
“I gotta start earning my keep sometime,” Colin replied.
My dad pounded on the table and smiled at me. “He’s good.”
I nodded, locking eyes with Colin. “Yeah, he is.”
“Well, I ain’t about to turn down a deal like that!” My dad suddenly swatted my arm. “You go, too.”
