Biker Chicks: Volume 2 Read online

  Jake’s eyes widened. “Whoa.”

  I smiled as I stuck the dagger in my back pocket. “You are hooking up with a card shark,” I said.

  “Any more surprises?”

  “No,” I whispered into his neck, planting kisses on warm flesh. “Now I’m unarmed.”

  “We’re still in public,” he said, fingers playing at my hair.

  “I’d rather not be.”

  I let him up. It was fifteen quick steps to the bedroom, thirty seconds of hot glances and quick touches. Once inside, I caught clutter and a twin bed before he hit the lights but I didn’t care; there was a bed and that was what counted.

  I slid my hands up under Jake’s tuxedo shirt, resisting the urge to tear it open because he’d need it for work. Beneath it he was lean and ripped, rangy frame corded with muscles. My blood boiled at the play of them under his skin as he pulled my tank top over my head, his mouth brushing my neck. I pulled his shirt off likewise, reveling in the feeling of flesh on flesh when he embraced me and pushed me onto his bed. His hands wandered to the front of my leathers, unbuckling my concho belt then drifting left and right, searching for how to open them.

  “They’re custom,” I whispered while one foot pushed the other foot’s boot off. “Allow me.”

  “Okay,” he said, hands sliding up my chest to stroke my breasts. “I feel less stupid now.”

  “We biker chicks can be a pain,” I said while I got my leathers undone, shucking my other boot in the process.

  “It’s rough,” Jake whispered, “but somehow I’ll soldier on.” He hooked his fingers into my belt loops and peeled my pants over my legs, tossing them aside.

  His mouth traced a line of fire up one thigh then down the other, first skipping my pussy then lingering on it, planting kisses on the outer lips while my teeth gritted and my spine locked into an arc. Jesus fuck I want gimme now was all I could think as three fingers parted me and his tongue flicked against my clit, my hips pressing against his face, shifting this way and that, trying to keep his tongue on the right spot. He somehow knew that, because he didn’t shift positions when I did, letting me show him where I wanted him to be. My hands twisted in his sheets as the flick of his tongue drove me over the edge, the world vanishing in a shower of golden sparks behind my eyes.

  I returned to a body soaked in sweat, shuddering with sweet release. I glanced down and found Jake’s pale blue eyes staring back at me, full of mischief and want. He wasn’t the only one. I pulled him into the bed with a grin, pushing him into the sheets and running my tongue across his chest, down along his abs, fingers stroking the length of his cock. He moaned when my lips joined in, first brushing the head and then wrapping around it. I slid all the way the base, hair ticking my nose as my tongue worked against his balls. All he could do was gasp, hands clenching in the sheets until his knuckles turned white while I did the best I knew how to, my right hand working his cock while my left stayed between my thighs, playing with my clit so I stayed on the wave he’d started.

  “Rubbers?” I said when I took my mouth off him.

  “Nightstand,” he gasped out.

  “Gimme,” I growled.

  “I’ll do better,” he said in the same tone, grabbing my shoulders and pushing me into the sheets. A handful of heartbeats later he had a rubber on; up and back went my thighs as he shoved them onto his shoulders, arms braced to either side of my head. He made to tease me, cock playing around my inner lips, but I grabbed him by both ass cheeks and pulled him inside me with a guttural moan.

  “Goddamn,” he whispered into my hair, moving against me.

  “Harder,” I snarled.

  He did, his long sure strokes making me yelp with each breath, my nails raking at his hips, urging him on to–

  -Wallet chain clinks on pavement grit in palms face sticky blood taste on tongue-

  Oh goddamn it no. I swallowed back the sudden bile at my throat, tried to force the fear away-

  -Rough voice mutters ‘my turn’ smell of cigarettes and cologne he’s the last thank God almost over hope they don’t kill me hope this wasn’t all for nothing-

  “Hey,” Jake’s voice, laden with concern.

  I blinked, heart hammering, my ribs a straitjacket for what little air was in my lungs. My mind was a sun-addled scorpion, stabbing poison into itself to kill half-remembered pain...

  “You okay?”

  He’d pulled out of me and sat crouched at the foot of the bed, face a mask of confused concern. My chest was still too tight to speak. I held up a hand and nodded while the misplaced terror faded. Shit, shit, shit.

  “I’m okay,” I managed to get out after half a minute.

  “I do something wrong?”

  “No,” I whispered. “You didn’t. What happened?”

  “Should ask you the same thing,” he said. “You...got all stiff. It was like you went somewhere else or something.” The concern and bafflement on his face got guilt added to it and I winced. This was the last thing I’d wanted for the evening. That he’d noticed and stopped and wasn’t angry only made it all worse. The terror vanished as quickly as it had arrived, and all that was left was embarrassment.

  “Just some old bullshit,” I said. “Sorry it got in the way.”

  “You sure?” I could tell he wanted to ask, see how he struggled not to.

  “Yeah,” I said, leaning forward to kiss him. Please believe me, I put into the kiss. Please just let it go. Please.

  “We can take a break if you want,” he whispered when I broke away.

  “Didn’t want to stop.” I pushed him into the sheets and hooked a leg over him. “Still don’t.” I slid my hands between my thighs and guided his still-rigid cock inside me. “Now,” I said with my best wicked grin, “where were we?”

  His eyes screwed shut as I rolled my hips on his, bending to nibble at his ear, muscles bearing down on his cock with each thrust. It was my best move, and Jake’s willpower crumbled within two pleasurable minutes, his face going taut, then slack with a familiar look of wonder, a soft groan falling from his mouth. I bent over and kissed him, working my mouth against his, keeping his cock inside me until it stopped twitching. I loved the feel of it, how each twitch added a ripple to the warmth flickering up and down my thighs, aftershocks to the quake he’d started.

  Several minutes later I lay next to him, his fingers drifting up and down my bare back in a lazy rhythm while I toyed with his chest hair. The moment was warm, peaceful. It was almost enough to make me forget about the ugly interlude.

  Almost.

  “You sure everything’s cool?” Jake’s voice broke into my thoughts.

  “Trust me,” I said, “you were better than great.”

  “Okay.”

  “You tired?”

  “Ten hour shift, three beers plus some damn good exercise,” he said. “I’m wrecked.”

  I kissed him. “Permission granted to roll over and fall asleep.” I noticed something when my lips found his cheek; a stippling of scar tissue.

  He hadn’t been kidding. Less than thirty seconds after we disengaged, his breathing slowed into the pace of sleep. I tucked the blankets around him and slipped out of the bed. I wanted a cigarette.

  I also needed to sort my head out.

  III: I Will Not Be Broken

  I leaned against the doorframe on Jake’s patio. The rain beat against the pavement in a soft patter, impatient fingers tapping the street. I drew on my smoke, studied its coal, listened to the water argue with the ground while I did the same with the demons of my past. The life I’d led demanded the occasional moment of solitude. It was far from anything resembling ‘normal’.

  What I’d told Jake was true; my mother had been a hippie, someone born in the wrong decade...or maybe on the wrong planet. She’d been fourteen when she’d had me, knocked up by a boy who’d split the moment he’d heard the news. When her parents had pressured her for an abortion, she’d packed a bag and climbed out her bedroom window. I’d come into the world in a midwife’
s garage.

  “God gave you to me,” she’d told me once. “I’ll never let them take you away.” Thirty years later I still didn’t know how to feel about her words.

  My mother had been afraid her parents would sic the State on her. Somehow, she’d convinced the midwife not to file a birth certificate. No birth record meant I had no Social Security number. I’d never been arrested, so my fingerprints weren’t on file anywhere. I’d never been to school, never paid taxes – hell, getting my shots done had required jumping through a large set of illegal hoops.

  In the eyes of the world, Kestrel Callahan wasn’t a person. I disagreed with that assessment.

  My earliest memories were of the road; strapped in the back seat of a battered T-top Camaro with my mom and her boyfriend singing along to the radio, their voices swallowed by the wind as we barreled down the highway. By the time I was fifteen I’d lived in six different states, slept in a dozen different beds and called as many different guys ‘dad’. One was Frank, a gentle, bearded man in his thirties with skin tanned as brown as the leathers I wore. He’d owned a farm; I’d chased chickens between his outbuildings and learned to shoot with his old .22 rifle, Frank giving me a piece of candy every time I’d knocked a can off a fence post.

  Mom had messed that up, of course. She always had with the guys I’d liked. I puffed on my cigarette, watching the wind carry the smoke above the eaves.

  There had been bad times, plenty of them. At twelve I’d played with secondhand dolls in a living room where greasy men in flashy clothes had talked of shipments and kilos, piles of cash and white powder on the table in front of them, guns in their belts. An argument had broken out between my mom’s boyfriend and a visitor, angry words flying around the room in Spanish. Mom had scooped me up and carried me to a closet, shutting the door and holding me tight.

  “It’s all right, Kessie,” she’d whispered into my hair, arms shaking. “It’s all right.”

  The argument had gotten louder, then ended with a loud bang. We’d stayed in the closet until her boyfriend came to find us an hour later, his face grim. When we’d come back to the living room the other man was gone. There’d been a wet red stain on the carpet near where he’d been sitting, an acrid smell in the air.

  My mother and I had caught a bus the next day, one bag of belongings each. I’d had to leave the dolls behind.

  My sixteenth birthday had found us living with a smack dealer in a Miami apartment, my mother solidly hooked on the needle and me scrounging through trash cans to feed us both. By that point it’d been a toss-up as to who took care of whom; mom had been stoned more than she’d been sober, most days unable to get out of bed. The men hanging around the house had kept staring at me, and I hadn’t liked what I’d seen in their eyes.

  “It’ll be okay,” my mom had slurred at me, eyes yellowed, sores on her cheeks. “I’m just a little sick, that’s all.” A wan, desperate smile. “I’ll be better in a few days, you’ll see.”

  But I hadn’t. In the end I’d done what she had done when her parents had put her in a place she hadn’t wanted to be; I’d packed a bag and climbed out a window while she’d checked a nod at the kitchen table.

  I took a drag from my cigarette and nothing happened; it had gone out. I flicked open my Zippo and lit it again, my lighter’s flame throwing harsh shadows across Jake’s porch.

  “History repeats itself,” I muttered.

  I’d found my mother’s obituary, years later. Anna-Sophia Callahan, dead at thirty-two. I would’ve visited her grave if there was one to visit.

  A year and a half on the streets of Miami had burned out what softness remained. By the time I’d ended up in the Blood Reapers MC’s Pasadena chapter house, I’d been seventeen going on forty and nobody’s idea of a proper lady. Mom had always taught me that sex was normal and natural, that my body was my own, how there was no sin in pleasure. I’d taken that advice and ran with it, screwing my way around the clubhouse without a care. Between the booze and the drugs, a good deal of that period in my life was a blur. After three tabs of molly and a dozen shots of Cuervo Gold I’d been up for anything – and in the biker world, “anything” was a word with weight to it. More than once I’d woken up in a pile of naked bodies and wondered how many of them I’d fucked. Even an abortion and two cases of the clap hadn’t slowed me down.

  Then something did.

  It’d started innocently enough by my standards. An outlaw had taken me off for a head session, but he’d been so bombed he couldn’t come. When he’d finally gotten off my jaw had felt like somebody had taken a tire iron to it. He’d passed out, and I’d noticed how his wallet was almost two inches thick, flush with cash. I’d been wanting to take off; I’d gotten tired of being just another piece of ass, and I’d lifted three hundred dollars off him, calling it asshole tax in a moment of plastered whimsy. I’d figured he wouldn’t notice the loss; there’d been almost five grand in his wallet. I’d found a corner to curl up in, fixing to leave after I’d slept off the booze.

  I’d woken to a hangover and the prod of a boot; One-Eye, the chapter president.

  “Empty your pockets,” he’d told me, face cold and grim. When I’d tried to make an excuse he’d backhanded me to the floor and riffled through my clothing, finding the three hundreds I’d hidden in my sock in less than twenty seconds.

  “Shorty, he’s out three hundred,” One-Eye had snarled. “You got three hundred. Imagine that.”

  He’d grabbed me by the hair and dragged me through the clubhouse like a sack of cement. I’d found myself in the back room of the clubhouse, all fifteen of the Pasadena Blood Reapers giving me the evil eye. I’d been terrified. I’d known what the punishment for stealing was in the MC.

  “You stole,” One-Eye had said, his gravelly baritone etched into my mind. It had been a toss-up as to whether his glass eye or his good one had less life in it. “Now you gotta pull the Reaper train.”

  I’d looked for a friendly face. I hadn’t seen one, just fifteen nasty stares, each as cold as wet stone. So I’d done the only thing I could do; I’d stepped out of my shorts, pulled my tank top over my head and said the words I hoped I never had to say again, ever:

  “Who’s first?”

  Fifteen members in Pasadena chapter. Six had come at me while the other nine had watched. It had taken them the better part of an hour to be done with me. They hadn’t been gentle about it.

  I took a long drag on my smoke. My hand shook, ash falling off the coal to shatter on the ground.

  Eighteen years later, I was more intact than people would’ve believed. I didn’t loathe the touch of men, and I hadn’t stopped wanting sex; I no longer got wasted and was way pickier about who I went to bed with, but those were choices, not damage. I avoided tequila and pills not because I was afraid of them, I just didn’t like dealing with the aftermath of the stupid choices I made while plastered. Sex sometimes set me off but if the guy wasn’t a shit about it the feeling passed quickly, so I tried to pick men who weren’t assholes and avoid doing things which pushed my buttons. However, there was a hitch with that.

  Issues were like muggers; they didn’t play fair. They waited until I wasn’t paying attention, then they jumped me and did their best to wreck my shit. I wanted to stop kicking myself for what had happened between me and Jake, but I couldn’t. I knew that rough sex was a bad idea, but his teasing and talented foreplay had caused me to forget myself. I’d gambled on the moment...and I’d lost. For a card player, I had lousy luck.

  I glanced at the bedroom window, beyond which Jake lay sleeping. I had no idea what most people in my position would have felt, but I knew what I felt...embarrassed, as well as afraid because a private matter had slipped into the open. Part of me wanted to leave before Jake woke up, and I knew why.

  People had always let me down. It was why I didn’t trust them, why I didn’t stay in one place for longer than a week or three. In my experience, feelings and secrets weren’t things to share. They were what people used to screw e
ach other over. Even though I hadn’t told Jake anything, he wasn’t stupid. I was sure he knew the basics of what I’d gone through. Such was why my feet itched to be on the pegs, pavement flying beneath them. It was a tempting urge; I’d been in plenty of places where beating feet was the smart answer.

  Four years ago outside a casino in Atlantic City, I’d come across a thief looking to make off with my bike. We’d fought, and I’d stabbed him, driving my punch-dagger into his kidneys three times. Fleeing that scene had been just as necessary as putting my knife in him.

  I’d also fled a bad marriage at twenty-five, an ill-considered union with a guy named Byrd, yet another outlaw biker. I’d gone the full way with it, even getting “PROPERTY OF BYRD” inked across my back. When I’d gotten away for the last time, I’d promised myself that I’d never again be owned by anyone or anything.

  I flicked more ash off the end of my cigarette. The urge to run this time was just my ghosts talking...and I didn’t plan to listen. I’d learned how to tell when fear tried to masquerade as wisdom.

  The world, it had other ideas about how I should handle myself. It wanted me to hate and fear; to hold my ghosts close to my heart, let them walk in my shadow, whisper in my ear, tell me how to live...to consider myself a victim of circumstance rather than the product of my choices. My response was embroidered into my jacket, tattooed across my shoulders.

  FTW...‘Fuck The World’.

  My life had been defined by hard calls. Leave my mother, or share her fate. Leave my old man with only the clothes on my back, or keep getting beat three nights a week. Shank a guy or lose everything I owned. Step to a six-on-one gang bang, or end up in a dumpster with my throat cut. Choices could get ugly out on the fringe. They were still choices.

  I smiled around the filter between my lips, sucked down the last drag as I made another call, the choice to face the fear. You don’t get to have your way with me this time. I flicked my cigarette into the parking lot. It arced like a shooting star, dying in a blossom of orange sparks. I paid my dues, I took my scars. I turned and walked back inside. We’re done.