TRIGGER: A Motorcycle Club Romance Novel (7 page)

I heard her smother the phone, the muffled sound of
her calling Jennie to the phone. I took the moment to breathe deeply, gather
myself as best I could. When Jennie’s excitable little voice came on the line,
though, it was all I could do hold myself together.

She’d been confused, first, her querulous “but when
are you coming home” repeated over and over as I answered, “I don’t know, I
don’t know.”

“They’re
gonna
take such
good care of you, Jennie. You know Jackie and Gloria love you. You’re
gonna
have fun with them, you can hang out with Rufus and
the fishes…”

“I don’t
want
Rufus
and the fishes,” she said, petulant.

“I’m going to see you soon, Jennie, and I’m going to
call all the time. Okay? Be a big brave girl for me, now, okay? Please? I love
you. I love you more than anything,” I said, closing my eyes, one hand wrapped
around telephone wire while the other clutched in a fist against my chest, my
ribs aching to contain my heart as it swelled and swelled with love for her,
and pain for all the moments I would miss out on, all the love I would never be
able to give her in the form of kisses and hugs and bedtime stories.

I thought of her hair, lovely and long as I ran a
brush through it, and brought the fist up to my mouth, biting hard on the
knuckle to stop myself sobbing.

“You wouldn’t leave me here if you loved me,” Jennie
said on the other end of the line, her voice suddenly a million times older
than I’d ever heard it before. It cut me right through to the quick, and I
nearly dropped the receiver in my shock. When did my sister leap forward in
time to being 17 and
angsty
?

Probably
when you abandoned her to the devices of a pair of well-meaning lesbians so you
can gallivant around New England with a murderous biker,
I thought,
though I knew that wasn’t entirely fair to myself. Somehow, the combination of
her surly tone and that diminishing self-assessment jolted me into a completely
different frame of mind, and I found myself speaking as though I hadn’t been
too sad to speak a moment earlier.

“Listen, Jennie,” I spat, “I’m doing what’s best for
you. I don’t expect you to understand it, but you have to understand that this
is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, and it’s the hardest thing I’ll ever
have to do. And if you ever –
ever
–
dare to think that I didn’t do it because I love you more than anything on this
planet, you’re ungrateful. Do you understand? Don’t you ever question my love
again. Ever.”

The silence on the line spoke volumes; I could almost
see her, eyes wide, tears vanquished for the moment by utter surprise, trying
to take in what her beloved, idolized older sister had just told her. She was
too young to understand how you might have to do the thing you hate most
because it’s the best thing for the ones you love, but this would be her first
lesson, and dammit if I wasn’t going to drive it home. The thought of leaving
her was one thing. The thought of her thinking I’d left her because I didn’t
love her was another thing entirely.

Just when I thought that maybe I
had
been a bit too harsh, she exhaled, a squeaking sound.

“Okay,” she said, sniffling. “I love you too,
Dee-Dee.”

“Be strong for me, baby girl,” I said, all the wind
leaving my chest, the emotional bravado going with it. “I’ll see you soon,
okay?”

As we lingered over our goodbyes, I watched Trigger
walk out of the KFC where he’d been buying our dinner and trot to the car,
looking around him manically. I winced. This had been hard – but it wasn’t
about to get easier. When I finally hung up the phone, he had already pulled
the car around.

I pulled open the door and was immediately assaulted
by the smell of fried chicken and macaroni and cheese. Before I knew what was
happening, I was on my hands and knees, retching on the pavement. Trigger
shouted an expletive and came around to my side, holding me by the waist as I
expelled what little I had to expel from my stomach.

For the rest of my life, that smell would conjure up
the same sickness, the same nausea, the same need to get rid of everything
inside myself.

As though that were the only way to rid myself of the
memories I could never, ever escape.

Trigger

She was screaming again. My feet hit the floor before
my eyes even opened, and moments later I had folded myself in close to her,
burying my nose in her hair, which smelled vaguely of shampoo and gasoline.
Clutching her tight to me, I felt her heart, a frantic sparrow, beating harder
and faster than seemed humanly possible.

“
Shhh
, Cass,
shhhh
,” I murmured against her, until finally she calmed
down, her breath evening out to a slow, steady draw. It was only then that our
bodies relaxed against each other, and I slipped back to sleep, my job done.

When I woke up, I would feel the round curve of her
against my crotch, would have to groan myself out of our position, our bodies
stuck together like two parts of a yin-yang. More often than not, I was hard as
a rock in the mornings, and could only thank God that I rose before her so she
wouldn’t feel it. I can’t tell you how hard it was to peel myself away from her
warmth and feminine curves, but I did it faithfully.

We’d been living in the trailer together for three
months. It was a two bedroom, and we each had our separate beds, but three or
four times a week
Cass’
nightmares would break the
silent and still night and I’d be compelled to calm her the only way I’d
figured out how.

At first, I’d just woken her up, but the sight of her
crying, her apologizing, each time I did so was unnerving. Then, I’d gotten
into the habit of sitting beside her and stroking her hair, which worked
slightly but not very well. It had taken, mostly, my inability to stay awake
one night, to figure out exactly what would calm her best. She knew, and
thanked me every time, blushing. The thanks were unnecessary. The blush was an
added bonus.

I knew what the nightmares about. Boys are pretty
dense, but not that dense. They were about her
father,
the hell he’d put her through. They were about Jennie, who she talked to every
week – and about whom she talked incessantly. They were about Steel, his hands
on her virgin skin. She’d told me that, at some point, in the first week we’d
spent together after it all went down. I’d gotten her a little drunk on red
wine, thinking it might help her. I don’t know if it helped or not, but it
helped her open up to me, and me to her.

We’d liked each other on those school afternoons spent
poring over the rise and fall of the USSR, but now that we only had each other,
we’d gotten to know each other a hell of a lot better. So much so that I
trusted her implicitly with things I’d never told anyone. Her eyes, so smart
and deep, wells of compassion, soaked up all my sadness and reflected it back
to me in brilliant blue. Still, I guess, there were some secrets that I did
keep, after all. For her own good.

She’d gotten a job as a gas station attendant in the
little New Hampshire hamlet we’d finally settled on. The rent was cheap, but
that was good because the pay was dirt. Me, I’d found a job fixing cars at an
auto shop the next town over – one of the only classes I’d aced at our school
was shop.

The car I’d driven to New England – an ancient
Cadillac – was one of the many that the club kept for emergencies, parked
behind the strip club we used as a front, and it was most assuredly stolen. But
we’d somehow managed to cross state lines without being pulled over. I’d lifted
a pair of clean plates, and in the nearly lawless New Hampshire countryside,
there was little chance of being pulled over on my drive to work. Still, I
spent most of that drive back and forth with white knuckles.

Cass hated her job, I knew, but she put on a brave
face. She said she didn’t mind because the walk there took her right past the
library, and she’d come home with an armful of books to keep the idle hours
filled. She even got me reading some of them. I took a real shine to Joseph
Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, anyone who put a good dose of humor in their stories.
And
Bukowski
, of course. What kind of 19-year-old low
life can resist
Bukowski
?

The guys at my shop were good to me, but I never
really felt at home there, either. They were good old fashioned Christian men,
for the most part. I didn’t ever doubt that their opinion of me would change
mighty quick if they knew what I’d been doing with my life before coming to
them. I was always on guard, couldn’t really join in on story time when
business was slow. All my stories were dirty. I mean, they loved a dirty story,
but not
my
kind of dirty. My kind of
dirty was successfully framing another man for murder.

Cass’
father had
written; the letter had been forwarded to us by the broads who were taking care
of Jennie, the only people who knew our current whereabouts (at least, for the
time being.) He’d apologized, fed her a whole lot of bullshit about how he
deserved punishment, how he knew he was no good, but didn’t she think he’d
served enough and shouldn’t she come forward with the truth? He was her old
man, after all. I had left the decision up to her.

She’d spit on that letter and put it right down the
trash compactor.

That, for the record, is the moment I knew I could
love this girl.

If, that was, I ever felt like loving anyone ever
again.

Which I didn’t foresee happening anytime soon.

See, the total and honest truth was, I wasn’t doing
much better than Cass. Except I didn’t have bad dreams. I had a bad reality.
Cass, she could bury herself in her books and her thoughts and writing in her journal
– me being too dumb for all that, I just had to deal with my thoughts…my
memories…just
deal with them.

And I was used to dealing with them with drugs, with
MDMA and booze and coke. But outside of some beers with Cass after we got out
of work, or the occasional night at the bar with the guys from the shop, there
wasn’t exactly a rave scene for me to get lost in. Hell, I hadn’t even been
able to find a dealer for weed, and I didn’t reckon Cass would appreciate
seeing me all fucked up on drugs, anyway.

It didn’t help that I’d been celibate since we moved
in together, though I never wanted to hold that against her. She didn’t owe me
anything, not her body or her heart or any part of her. Still, it was enough to
drive me up a wall, living with her and wanting her and knowing she’d never
take me.

Why would she, anyway? She deserved someone who could
keep up a good conversation, and I could barely stand my own thoughts those
days. I kept thinking of my brother, of my parents running off on us, leaving him
to raise me. I kept thinking of Steel, too, and the way my finger had curled
around that trigger and changed everything in that one big bang…

I tried to hide it from her. She had her own worries
without having to add mine into it. But I felt a little bit like I was breaking
apart, like every day a little piece of me chipped off and floated away off
into the ether. I was starting to shake in the mornings, found myself messing
up at work, snapping at customers over nothing. And then it started happening at
home, too. And that was the worst.

First time it happened, I was already in a shit mood.
I’d done something dumb at work – nothing major, nothing that wasn’t fixed in a
jiff, but still. A mistake I knew better than to make. A mistake that I
couldn’t believe I’d made.

So as I stomped up the stairs to the trailer, all I
could think was how I wanted a shower and a cold beer – and a fucking line of
white lightning. Of course, the shower and the beer were the only realistic
goals. I smacked my boots against the little cement step leading to the front
door, mud season making each step you took a squelching mess, the dirt
hardening around the grooves of your shoes ‘til you were damn near walking on a
platform of muck.

Fuck this
state,
I thought.

Fuck this
door,
I thought as the screen door squealed in protest at my
opening. I oiled that thing once a damn week, I figured. And as I stepped into
the living room, I heard the shower running.

Fuck this
girl,
I thought, blind stupid angry, thinking of how
I
wanted to shower. That last thought
scared me, though, and I knew it wasn’t fair. So I pushed it aside, kicking my
boots off and collapsing onto the ratty yellow sofa in the living room. The
bathroom was next to my room,
Cass’
room on the
opposite end of the trailer. I sighed loudly, as though I could expel all my
bitterness and bad feelings with the right sort of breath.

When the sound of water falling ceased, I could only
offer up a little
thank you
to the
gods of good timing; I wouldn’t have to wait long, after all.
Cass’
clear voice suddenly came through; she was singing,
too softly to be heard over the falling water but loud enough to be heard now
through the thin wooden bathroom door. Janis Joplin.

I smiled expectantly at the door; she didn’t know I
was home. She was always too shy to do things like sing around me; I only ever
heard her singing when she thought I wasn’t home. She’d come out and blush fire
engine red seeing me on the couch. And that was so darn cute that I knew it
would turn my day right around. I leaned forward as the door slid open,
sticking on its rollers the way it always did,
Cass’
song interrupted for a breath moment as she muttered a curse of frustration.
And then she was there.

Naked.

All peach and pink and still shimmering with wetness.
Her blonde hair clung to the sides of her face and neck. Her blue eyes were
bright and clear.

“Holy shit,” I said as she stood staring at me from
the entrance of the living room.

“Oh,” she said, her mouth forming a perfect circle. “I
forgot my…”

As though suddenly realizing that she was totally buck
naked in front of me, she covered herself as best she could with two hands, one
cupping her pussy while the other spread across her generous breasts. The
slightest roll of her stomach, a perfect coffee bean curve over her pale hips.
I was immediately hard, harder than I could ever remember being.

“Trigger! Stop looking!” she squealed, starting to
rush past me across the living room. And I exploded. I don’t know why; I don’t
know what it was. And I guess I was good at hiding just how much I felt like a
volcano erupting, since she didn’t cry immediately.

“What the fuck are you doing prancing around in the
damn nude?” I growled, louder than my speaking voice. There must have been
enough ire in my voice to catch her by surprise, though, because she turned to
me wide-eyed, once more forgetting that her derriere was on display.

“I…I told…”

“Put some fucking clothes on! Jesus Christ!” I
bellowed, lifting myself off the couch and pretty much vaulting into my room. I
could feel rage and – something else – sparring inside me. I knew what the
something else was, of course, though I tried to convince myself it
wasn’t
that.

Just like I tried to convince myself that my morning
wood was just a normal dude thing, and had
nothing
to do with her warm body pressed against mine.

The rage though – that was even less explicable. She
hadn’t done anything wrong. She’d forgotten her
towel,
hadn’t even known I was home…what right did I have to get angry at her?

After pacing my room for another half hour, hard as a
rock, I’d calmed down enough to grab my towel and head into the shower myself.
On the way, I saw her sitting on the couch, hair still wet, now dressed in a
big sweatshirt and leggings. When she heard me approach, she looked at me, eyes
all big and sad gorgeous. If there was any of that anger left inside me, it
dissolved quickly, and I found myself feeling nothing but regret. Those eyes of
hers had a way of making a man feel like an asshole, that’s for sure.

“I’m sorry, Trig,” she said softly. “I didn’t know you
were home, honest…”

“No, Cass, it’s my fault. I just…I had a rough day,
you know? You didn’t do anything wrong. It was me. I should be apologizing to
you,” I said.

She smiled, a thin smile, and nodded, swallowing hard.
It made my heart drop a little lower in my chest.
You’re just like her father,
I suddenly thought, and felt the rage
enter me again; this time, though, it was directed at myself alone.

“I’ll make dinner, huh?” she said, clearly trying to
cheer us both up. “I
wanna
hear about this rough day.
Um…I think all we have is frozen burgers though. I could run down to…”