Greetings from Sugartown (13 page)

“Nice try, K—” I frown and stop. “You know, I have no idea what your real name is.”

“That’s because I haven’t given it to you.”

“Are you going to?” I challenge.

“Nope.”

“Well, alright then. Let’s do this, Mr Mysterious.”

“For someone who’s about to be a hundred bucks short, you sure are keen.”

“And you sure are cocky.”

Kick gives me a crooked smile, and shoots back his drinks.

Twenty minutes later I’m sobbing as Noah and Allie are breaking up for the first time. Kick looks at me with curious, bone-dry eyes. “You don’t think that’s sad?” I wail.

He shrugs. “I don’t know. I mean it’s not like they’re not going to wind up together in the end anyway. It’s kinda obvious that the old lady and the old coot are that younger couple.”

“Well yeah, that’s kinda a given, but the point is they don’t know that—at least, not when they’re young. Haven’t you ever been in love, Kick?”

“Nah, I never met a girl I love more than my bike.”

“That’s what Elijah used to say.”

His mouth turns up in a half-smile. “He’s real happy with you, isn’t he?”

“I don’t know. He’s not here right now, so it’s kind of hard to judge.”

“And you really love him?”

“Yeah, I do. Sometimes I think I love him too much.”

He swallows hard and peels the label off his beer, shredding it to tiny pieces on the floor. “Do you ever think about how you’d cope without him, how your life would be without him?”

“I don’t like to think about it, but I have, of course. I don’t think I’d cope, to be honest.”

“No. I’ve seen the way you are around one another. I don’t think you’d cope, either. First, it’d be hard to breathe, and then you’d feel like your chest was gonna cave in under the weight of the pain, you know?” Kick takes a deep breath, and exhales slowly. Rolling his head toward me, he meets my gaze. “Promise me, if anything ever happens to him, if anything ever goes wrong and he’s backed in a corner, don’t try and save him—just run. Just leave, and let him take the hit.”

“What the hell are you talking about? I’m not promising that,” I say, as I shoot back the shot I just poured. “Also, Ryan Gosling just took his shirt off again, so drink up.”

I watch him as he tosses the liquor back. He doesn’t look at me; his eyes are closed. I study him for a moment. He’s gorgeous. The black hair is a little severe for his colouring—in fact it makes him a little emo, with his gauges and his lip ring—but it brings his startling blue eyes into focus. He’s pretty average height, but he’s built, and tattooed, and I’m not going to lie, running your hands down the length of his hard body to his sandy-blonde happy trail wouldn’t exactly be a chore. There’s something in him that’s inexplicably broken. It’s not on display for all the world to see; it’s buried underneath the quick wit and mischievous smile. But it’s still there, and God help me, do I want to know what caused it.

He opens his eyes, and catches me staring. His pretty baby blues flare with heat, and I feel warmth creep up my neck and flood my face. I shake my head to clear it of these crazy thoughts that are bouncing around within.
What the hell?
I clear my throat and pour us both another shot. Kick takes his, and downs it immediately without speaking. I know he’s wondering what the hell happened between us just now, because he avoids my gaze and settles his own on the movie as if it’s the most interesting thing he’s ever seen. My heart thrums out a staccato rhythm.

“Daniel,” he says without looking at me, and leans back in the recliner. “My name’s Daniel.”

I study him a bit longer, though now it’s for a different reason. “I like it. It’s honest.”

For a second he baulks, and then he snatches up the empty beer bottle, and takes it to the kitchen. “Where are you going? They haven’t even finished this sex scene yet. There’s more drinking to do, I assure you.”

“You want some ice cream?”

“No. It’s not like I can afford for my arse to get any fatter. Not when my competition is a freaking size two.”

“For a start, your arse could get a lot fatter.”

“Thanks,
Daniel
.”

He returns from the kitchen with two giant bowls of ice cream. “Secondly, she’s not your competition. She’s hot in that porn-star kinda way. That shit’s not real, and it gets old quickly.”

“I thought you said you never met a girl you liked more than your bike?”

“There was one girl,” he says, staring down into his ice cream.

“What happened? She run off with Elijah?” I kid.

“She died.”

The blood drains from my face. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know … How did it happen?”

“You don’t need the details. But she wasn’t sick, and it wasn’t an accident.”

“Oh my God,” I say, and cover my mouth. He pours another shot for us, and tosses his back. I feel terrible.

“Drink up; he just got naked again,” he says, and then he tips his head towards my untouched bowl. “And eat your fucking ice cream. You’re God damn stunning. You look like a woman, Ana, not a waif. Men like a girl with a little bit of meat on her bones.”

“I’m pretty sure you just called me fat.” I protest, and he throws his screwed-up cigarette packet at me.

“Listen to me. He may be a prick sometimes, but he’s not an idiot. He’s not gonna fuck around on you again—”

My head snaps in his direction. “You just said again. Did he talk to you about her?”

“He didn’t have to, Ana. It’s been glaringly obvious since the second I bought her up.” He shakes his head, “Jesus, even I want to junk-punch him.”

“To be fair, we were on a break. We were both hurting, and we both made some very bad decisions.”

He cants his head to the side. “You cheat on him, too?”

“No. Never.” I shake my head and think about our hateful words, the messed up way we were, the party I should never have attended, and the monster I should never have wandered off with. “I just made mistakes. A lot of mistakes.”

“You know, I was in the bar that night you and your girlfriends were dancing. I saw what happened with that guy.”

“I didn’t sleep with him,” I say forcefully.

“Didn’t say you did.”

I stare at the TV, watching, but not really seeing what’s on the screen. The words clamour inside my head, a chant, a cacophony of anger and rage, and despair, until they just tumble out. “He raped me.”

“Motherfucker.”

“Yeah. Elijah went to jail for carving up his face, Scott was put away, and we all lived happily ever after … until they let him out early, and now I have to share a town with the guy who ripped my virginity away from me, and beat me senseless.”

“And Moose didn’t put him down like a fucking dog?”

“Almost.”

“Why is this fucker still walkin’ around?”

“You bikers sure like to ignore the rules, huh? You might be able to off whoever you want behind the protection of the club, but here in the real word, people go to jail for killing others—even rapists.” I stir my ice cream and then set it down on the table, uneaten.

I glance at Kick. His face is indignant. His cheeks are flushed and his eyes are bright with anger. This isn’t an easy subject to deal with. It isn’t something I like to think about, and it certainly isn’t easy to talk to others about it, so a part of me understands why he’s so angry about this, but at the same time it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Unless he knows someone who this same thing happened to. A terrible thought occurs to me. “I don’t need you encouraging him on this. He’s barely keeping his shit together as it is.”

“Can’t say I blame him.”

“Daniel, please don’t mention this conversation to him. He’s already wound too tight. I’m afraid anything could set him off.”

“I won't mention it if you don't tell him what I said before, about Lauren.”

“That’s her name?”

He nods.

“It’s pretty. She was a very lucky girl to have you, Daniel.”

“No.” He wipes his palm over his stubble and stares directly at me. “No, she wasn’t.”

I set my shot glass down. Though the movie is only halfway through, the game is long finished. I don’t feel like drinking anymore. I feel like crying, or running through the cane fields below, screaming at the universe for all the ways it fucks with our lives.

“Promise you won’t tell him?”

“My lips are sealed.” I smile gently. “Though you should consider talking to him sometime. He's surprisingly easy to talk to.”

“Yeah,” he says wistfully. “I remember.”

“What was he like? Before he left the club, I mean?”

He lets out a humourless laugh. “Like a total dickhead. He was a cocky, over-confident, self-assured bastard.”

“So exactly the same then?”

“Exactly.” Daniel smiles. “He's grown up a lot. I doubt you would have been interested in him back then; he used women the way a junkie uses coke.”

I frown. It's hard to picture my Elijah that way. Though I know he was certainly no saint, it kills me to imagine him with other women. It also makes me feel incredibly inferior. Am I enough for him? Do my inexperience, and my baggage from the rape mean I'm a lousy lay? I mean, I have no problems in the sexually satisfied department, but does he?

“What if I’m not enough for him, Daniel?”

“You’re being paranoid. Trust me; he’d be an idiot to fuck this up.”

“People fuck shit up all the time.” I slur. I feel heady and drunk, and my frustration over Elijah working late is making me crazy. I’ve never had a reason to doubt him before—that shit with Nicole is in the past, so why can’t I leave it there?

“You’re right, people do fuck shit up, but when you’ve been where Elijah and I have, you’re smart enough to know a good thing when you’ve got it. You grab onto it, and you hold on for dear fucking life.”

“Is that what Lauren was to you? Your one good thing?”

“Yeah, she was.” He sighs and stands up, picking my legs up from the floor he lays them on the sofa and tucks a pillow under my head. Daniel covers me with a blanket. I hadn’t even noticed I was sinking down. “She was everything, and I fucked it all up.”

He collects his empty beer bottle, and my uneaten bowl of ice cream from the table, and heads towards the kitchen.

“Daniel?” I say, and he turns to face me. “Who won the bet?”

“You did, Ana,” he whispers with tears shining in his eyes. “You won.”

T
HE HOUSE
is mostly dark when I enter. There’s a light on in the kitchen, and the glow from the TV illuminates the room enough for me to pick a path through the furniture towards it without falling over my feet.

I throw my keys on the hall table, and round the corner into the lounge room. Ana’s stretched out on the sofa, sound asleep with a blanket covering her, and Kick is dozing in my armchair. There are two glasses on the coffee table, and a half empty bottle of Blue Label sitting beside it.

“What the fuck?” I say and Kick jumps in his chair … my chair … Ana must have well and truly passed out, because she doesn’t move.

“Hey man, what time is it?”

“After one. What the fuck’s going on here?”

“Ah, she was a little pissed you were working late.”

“So you got her drunk?” I accuse.

“Dude, have you met your woman? Is it possible to make her do anything she doesn’t want to do?”

“Listen to me, you fuck-stick. You listen good and proper so I don’t have to castrate you in your sleep. If you so much as look at her the wrong way—”

“Whoa, hang on a God damn second, brother. I’m not idiot enough to try and ruin what you guys have, or bite the hand that feeds me. She was hurtin’, man. When she found out you were working on that chick’s car from the pizza place, she about went nuts. I just wanted to make sure she was okay. I didn’t touch her, I swear.”

I sigh and step closer to the couch, laying my hand on her shoulder. “Baby, wake up.” I shake her. She shifts away from my hands, but that’s about as much interaction as I get. I bend down, and scoop her up in my arms.

“Don’t eat that pie, it’s a bad pie. Slutty,” she mumbles in her sleep, and nuzzles into me.

“I won’t eat the pie, baby girl.”

She wakes and squints up at me. “You’re home.”

“Hi,” I say, and lay a kiss on her nose. “Sorry I had to work late. It won’t happen again.”

“S’okay. Kick and I played drinking games. He lost, and I won a hundred bucks.”

“Good. Then he can replace my Johnnie Walker.”

She gives me a sleepy little laugh and buries her head in my chest. “Take me to bed, Cade.”

“Already headed that way, baby girl,” I whisper, and press a kiss to her forehead. I turn with Ana in my arms and face Kick. “Lock up before bed.”

“Yes, Sir,” he says, and salutes me with the finger.

For a half second I’m reminded of how we used to be, when we were just two dumb kids following the club’s orders like overeager puppies. Before either one of us knew what we were getting into. But that was another life, and I can’t afford to let my guard down with him.

I shake my head and walk towards the bedroom, kicking the door shut behind us. I lay Ana down on our bed, and stretch out on top of her. She accepts the soft kisses I flutter over her face and neck by tilting her head up towards me. She moans softly, and my cock stiffens. I strip off the soft pale blue cardigan she’s wearing. It’s one of those grandpa ones, oversized, and sitting at the top of her thighs. I reach up and yank hard on the fabric, popping the buttons off and smiling as they land on the bed and floor around us. She’s wearing denim shorts underneath, showing off her tanned legs. While I’ve always loved her in those, I can’t help but think of Kick staring at her all night in this next-to-nothing outfit.